Twice Told Tales (12 page)

“Yes, I have.”

“Then you do the James.”

Amazement arrives that night. It is the not vodkas and the heavyweight wine which overwhelm her lightweight tuna fish dinner and leave her lightheaded. It is not a phantasm. It is the fact that the only paper on any topic that was worth a damn was Zoe Lee on “Brooksmith.” Passionate, intelligent, infused with an offbeat but central understanding of the tale, even the awful locutions could not destroy it, could not wipe out Celia’s sense of discovering something, someone.

“Brooksmith be spoiled by being only part way into the beautiful world of his master Mister Offard. It can be a curse on you, they let you in part way so you can’t go back and they hate for you to go forward.”

“This is a very good paper.”

“Good,” Zoe Lee said. Ice! But Celia was hot on the trail.

“It’s so much better than the first one. Why?”

“The first was just to talk smart so I could get into the class.”

“What’s your direction, Zoe?”

“What?”

“What do you want to do?”

“A nurse. I have to be a nurse.”

“I see. But still, it’s so unusual to do such a good paper out of the blue. James is not an easy writer.”

“I don’t care about your writers,” Zoe Lee said. “I never heard his damn name before you.” Her eyes burned with the blind intensity that had been scaring the hell out of Celia. “
I am Brooksmith,”
she said.

And it all poured out. She lived with her mother and three sisters in Bedford Stuyvesant. They were all prostitutes. Her sisters thought she was crazy for wanting a different life. Her mother was in a rage against her, hoping she would fail.

“I ain’t going to do it and keep on doin’ it for no man I don’t know and just wants my ass—and get beat up like my sister Adelia so she have a hurt in her kidney all the time after. I am going to be a nurse.”

And she told Celia how she felt spoiled, like Brooksmith. She had no real place any more but she didn’t want to be left behind like him, to die. Astonishing Celia again, she wept. When the white woman tried to touch her hand in confusion and consolation, Zoe Lee stood and towered over her.

“You’ll be able to do it,” Celia said. “Why shouldn’t you?” She could hear the ring of nothingness in her voice. So could Zoe Lee.

“Who the hell are you here,” she said. The contempt that rang in her voice may have been precisely what Celia had feared all along, who knows?

“It’s not your damned class. I can’t hardly do the science class. They the ones I need for the nursing. What the damned shit you know about it!”

“I didn’t say I know …”

“Everything come easy to you …”

“That’s not true.”

Celia is hurt and feels, at the same time, foolishly formal. She takes a breath and can hardly believe what she is confiding.

“I’m having a terrible time and you know nothing about it.”

“I know your man is dead. Whole class knows that …”

Celia is ready to give up. “That’s not your business.” Control returns. “I will try to help you. I want to help.”

“Yeah—” Zoe wipes her eyes with a tissue.

Celia can handle no more of this insane unwarranted intimacy. It’s already more than she’s counted on. She was up to a quick compromise, no more. She feels sweaty, exhausted.

“Then perhaps,” she says, “we understand each other—and we can go on from here.”

But going on is always more difficult than it seems. Celia was determined to do the right thing by this extraordinary young woman. We’ve been spoiled, she thought. We’ve both of us been spoiled. She’d arranged a science tutor for Zoe, had given her a good grade in the literature seminar, and, at the last, lost track of her; as one does, finally, of just about all students, even those who raise questions about one’s own life.

Four years after her first encounter with Zoe, Celia entered the hospital for an operation, nature uncertain. I had called her for reasons of my own; my acting life was drying up to a point I could no longer afford to ignore. I was playing with the idea of teaching drama at a university until a summer stock job came through, and I wanted Celia’s advice.

When the department secretary told me of her illness I went to visit her. We had not been close for a long time. But I still thought about the old days—the perfect evenings—when Michael was alive. Since he’d died, things had not been the same for me either, not only socially but financially. In fact a lawyer and an accountant had helped get me into precisely the kind of mess Michael was so exquisitely adept at keeping me out of. So, as Freud says of dreams, my visit was overdetermined.

I found Celia quite excited. “Listen” she said, “There’s a student of mine here. I just saw her. My God, you can’t imagine …”

“Oh?” The room was empty.

“Across the hall.”

“Is it serious?”

“She’s a nurse.”

And she told me, lying there in her flowered nightgown, the story of Zoe Lee; just the way I’ve told it here. Then she led me on a foray to find her. Zoe was, as advertised, tall, strikingly midnight-black, and austere. She was making some entries on a chart and looked up at us.

“Hello, Zoe,” Celia said.

She looked down at us, coolly. “You know me, Ma’am?” The “Ma’am” must have been an acquired piece of post-nursing-school politesse. “How do you know my name?”

“You were my student.”

“What class was that?”

“English. Your first year. Don’t you remember? You wrote that wonderful paper.” Celia was shaky on my arm; I could feel her rigid, trembling. “It was on a story by Henry James—‘Brooksmith.’ And you told me—” I wanted to stop Celia but there was no way.

“You said—” Celia raised her voice in proud imitation,
“I am Brooksmith!”
The phrase hung in the air for a moment.

At last Zoe Lee allowed herself a small smile. It lit up nothing.

“I remember you. You’re Mrs. Morris.”

“Yes,” Celia said. “I see you’ve done what you set out to do. You’re a nurse.”

Zoe permitted herself a nod. “But I never said anything about any Brooksmith. I don’t know that name.”

“Brooksmith … ?”

“I remember your class. We read James Baldwin. ‘Sonny’s Song,’ some title like that.”

“‘Sonny’s Blues.’”

“That’s right. Well, I have patients to tend.”

And she was gone. Celia was inconsolable. I saw, too, that she was sicker than I’d let myself notice. She was weak, one eye half-closed. In the next half-hour she reviewed everything: Zoe Lee, her lost Michael, their life together, then Zoe all over again, on some endless loop of memory.

“How could she have forgotten?”

“It was only a story assignment to her,” I said stupidly.

“Oh, no,” Celia said. “You don’t understand.”

Celia was stuck in the hospital for a long course of treatment. But she made some phone calls for me and during the next few weeks, with her help, I began to mend my frayed life by working as a substitute teacher of drama. Not being a true academic I found myself with a certain unconventional freedom. And, for some perverse reason, I read “Brooksmith”—the little story which had caused such an upheaval in Celia’s sense of things. And, still more perversely, I assigned it to my class.
Write five hundred words on the central dramatic conflict …

More important, I felt a kind of intimate acquaintance with the taciturn British servant. Being exiled myself from my theatrical past—a past which had shed its glamor long ago, but which I still missed—I could understand him. I suppose I felt spoiled in my own way. I’d had my moments. The
Times
reviewer once said I had a certain grace. And I’d played in Pinter at the Royal Shakespeare a long time ago, and Pinter himself had said I was “strong.” And here I was teaching drama to students whose idea of tragedy was the violent death of rock stars. To push myself on, I plunged into it with a high seriousness, research and all. And made an interesting discovery. I found the buried roots of “Brooksmith.”

EXCERPT FROM THE NOTEBOOKS OF HENRY JAMES

Another little thing was told me the other day about Mrs. Duncan Stewart’s lady’s maid, Past, who was with her for years before her death and whom I often saw there. She had to find a new place of course, on Mrs. S’s death, to relapse into ordinary service. Her sorrow, the way she felt the change and the way she expressed it …

“Ah, yes ma’am, you have lost your mother, and it’s a great grief, but what is your loss to mine? You continue to live with clever, cultivated people; but I fall again into my own class. I shall never see such company—hear such talk—again. She was so good to me that I lived with her, as it were; and nothing will ever make up to me for the loss of her conversation. Common, vulgar people now; that’s my lot for the future.

I read this late one night, wonderfully struck by the possibilities of transformation. So Brooksmith had been something, someone, before becoming a perfect but spoiled butler in the perfect salon. He had been a lady’s maid named Past, with a sensibility above her station. Then why not a Brooklyn black trying to escape the prostitute’s fate? And who could know what he’d be the next time?

I felt oddly excited. I was not too played out, too lost, to be beyond discovering something. I’d unearthed some sort of permanent patron saint of aristocratic nostalgia. The morning couldn’t come soon enough. I was eager to share my find with Celia. But when I got to the hospital I found she’d taken a turn for danger in her illness.

She could not register who was visiting her and her fever was high. I hesitated at the door; an oxygen tent inhaled and exhaled. A black form shook a thermometer, cranked the bed. The next time I came, early the following evening, Zoe Lee was still hovering over Celia, as if she were caring for a mother.

I asked the head nurse at the station about it, as indirectly as I could.

“Ah, Zoe and Mrs. Morris,” she said. “Zoe’s pulling her through. Every day a little more, a little better.”

“Really …”

“Well, they were old friends, it seems,” the head nurse said. “Zoe asked to be put on her case when she heard about Mrs. Morris’s condition. And Zoe is in great demand; everyone has an eye on that young woman. She’s special, Zoe is. Self-educated, too. Extraordinary.”

“Yes,” I said. “So I see.”

In Volume II of the Ernest Jones biography of Sigmund Freud, Jones notes, regarding Freud’s discovery of the pressure on the conscious mind to repress—what the rest of us call forgetting:

The Psychopathology of Everyday Life,
1904. Its main theme—the influence of unconscious processes in interfering with conscious functioning—was sharply criticized at first by psychologists, but has been more widely accepted and generally known than any other of Freud’s teachings. The phenomena in question have since been given the name of “parapraxes.” (Literally False Practice.)

C
AN YOU IMAGINE HOW
it might have turned out if Katherine Eudemie had forgotten her child in the coat room of The Russian Rendezvous in March instead of a glorious, sunny June? Think of the women’s coats soggy with snow—the men’s trench coats soaked with wet—the little girl, Tulip, under a curse of endless sniffles. Impossible to think of raising a child in such an environment.

Also, in June the business slows down, but somebody is always on duty in the coat room for the occasional rainy day, the umbrellas like sentinels in the stand in front of the revolving door. There were two people on duty. Usually one of the Old Guard regulars, round, soft, sixty-five-ish or more—like Sasha, who fled Russia to America via Paris with the Chauve Souris company as a young girl in the twenties. And there was always someone like Myrna.

Myrna was one of the “going-to-be’s” for which the RR was well known. You know, going to be an actress, going to be a writer, going to be a dancer. They were usually young, but perhaps not all that different from the stylish types ordering blini with red caviar, or karsky shashlik, inside the dining room.

“Going-to-be” is a long process. Especially when it comes to writing and music, acting and dancing. In those sacred spheres exactly what and where one has arrived at is uncertain. The dining room of the RR was full of men and women circling each other in the endless dance of confirmation; moths whose success could only be confirmed by direct contact with the flame. Sometimes the main difference between the people caring for the coats and hats and those checking them were the burn marks.

It all began with Katherine Eudemie forgetting a book:
The Psychopathology of Everyday Life
by Sigmund Freud. It was not the kind of book Katherine usually read. But exhausted by the impossible task of getting a second novel published she had secretly decided to become a psychotherapist.

This was after years of ferocious dedication as a patient. Her embarrassment at the status of being a permanent basket-case led her to joke with friends: “When I was a kid in Chicago I never played Doctor. I always knew I’d grow up to be a patient.” But that wore thin after a while: she was getting to be too familiar. To survive in Russian Rendezvous New York you must never be pigeonholed. Once they put you in, it’s almost impossible to fly out again.

You must either constantly succeed or constantly surprise. Katherine had succeeded once, as the beautiful young provincial, a philo-Judaic writer with a “sound” as the reviews put it. But the sound increasingly became a whine. When her suicide attempts no longer attracted the appropriate attention she had a baby.

Everyone took babies seriously!

Her sound changed.

“Having Tulip puts life into perspective,” she told her agent at an RR lunch.

“How old is she now?”

“Four next month.”

“God, where do the years go?”

Where? Eight since Katherine’s first novel was published, six since she’d married the editor-anthologist Jackson Eudemie, and two weeks since she’d decided to become a therapist. A failed actress friend had done it. It didn’t take years to accomplish any more, not like the medical ones. The training at some places was only a matter of months before you were actually handling patients.