Twice Told Tales (17 page)

“Don’t talk like a cop, Kolevitch. It’s not a crime to be seen here.”

“I was just making a point. It’s different. It used to be hangers-on, schleppers. Emigré Russians, out-of-work actors.”

“They’re still here. I’m proud of their loyalty.”

“Where are they?”

“Well—not at lunch so much. More late night.”

A waiter appeared. “Can I get the Captain a drink before lunch?”

“I’m in uniform, schmuck. That means I’m on duty. Get me a water glass with vodka and some ice in it.”

“Captain Kolevitch will have the pelmeny, Pierre,” Lew said. “Make sure it’s hot. And a double Scotch for me.”

“You see,” Kolevitch said.

“See what?”

“What kind of a Russian name is Pierre? Where’s Gregory?”

“HE’S OFF TODAY. MY GOD. And Pierre was in
War and Peace
!”

“That reminds me,” the policeman said. “Now there’s the publishing crowd. Royalty conversations, paperback deals. Very chic, very in. No empty tables.” He tossed back a quick swig of water/vodka.

“Come back on a Monday. What the hell are you nudging me about?”

“We had a tip about the kid in the restaurant, Lew. But that kitten has been out of that bag for some time.”

“What kitten? What bag?”

Lew covered his confusion with Scotch. Kolevitch sipped his on-duty vodka like water.

“Lew,” the policeman said. “Everybody knows about Operation Tulip.”

“What operation?”

“How this kid is living in the restaurant—how you’re taking care of her and she’s taking care of you. You can’t hide such a spectator sport. It’s not good, Lew.”

“It’s not true, either!”

Kolevitch tossed off the rest of his vodka and signaled Pierre for more.

“We have a statement,” he said. “Your hat check girl has a boyfriend. Had. He turned you in. The kid’s name is—” pause to consult small notebook—“Tulip Eudemie.”

“Aha!” Lew said. “Is that a real name? Tulip. A dumb story.”

But he was defeated. He drank two glasses of Scotch before saying another word.

“This place,” Kolevitch said, his mouth full of veal dumplings, “it means a lot to me.”

“Yeah …”

“A shrine to my youthful hopes.”

“You couldn’t write,” Lew said. “Somebody said you looked like Saroyan in your moustache so you wrote plays.”

“Don’t piss on my youth.”

“Don’t threaten my restaurant with anonymous informers.”

“Not anonymous. Name is Sheffield.” Another glass of vodka vanished.

In desperate distraction Lew said, “How’s your poor Helen?”

Kolevitch shook his head, hopeless.

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“She’ll never get straightened out. She sang her song and now she’s lost the tune.”

“Those Laughing Academies are awful,” Lew said, hoping for a reprieve if not a full pardon. “They could kill the song in a nightingale.”

“And you should know what they cost.”

The two middle-aged men lean over the plates of soups and sour cream in the middle of the table, wrung by their separate griefs.

“I’m happy for the turnaround, Lew, and for you,” Kolevitch says. “But it cannot go on. A child cannot live on premises where liquor is sold. Not in my precinct.”

In the kitchen Tulip finally succumbs to the violence of her stomach cramps.

“I’m sick,” she cries out.

Someone scoops her up; someone else runs to find Myrna. Diarrhea no longer waits, like God, in the wings.

In front Captain Kolevitch wobbles to his feet and searches for the headwaiter. Questioning is imminent.

“Kolevitch,” Lew calls out, “I swear I have never done anything illegal in my entire life except maybe adultery. Wrong, yes. Illegal, no! NOBODY LIVES HERE. THIS IS A RESTAURANT.”

Myrna, in her finest role, wearing a borrowed Persian lamb coat, strolls past, hiding a gray-faced Tulip under the fur. It is as close to being pregnant as she has been able to manage in her young life. She revolves through the door. Outside she grabs Tulip by the hand and races for her apartment and the bathroom.

Kolevitch finally corners Misha.

Terrified of Cossacks, Misha tells everything.

Lew Krale still remembers Christmas coming that year in New York blessing everything with snow; remembers the immense snowy sadness hanging over the entire world, able to think of nothing but finding Tulip, and of her mother in Mt. Sinai Hospital. He took to walking the cold streets flirting with his old friend, failure, in its most extreme forms—death by walking in December without an overcoat, death by not looking both ways when crossing 53rd Street. One midnight, in a parking lot on Broadway, he howled to the sky, “Bring her back, God, Myrna, whoever. Don’t do this.” Nobody noticed.

As a gesture of hope or exhaustion he left up the Christmas decorations, the gold streamers and the red balls surrounding the lights in the dining room. I’ll take them down when Tulip is back, he thought.

The long drought was over at the RR; apparently the change was permanent. First lunches, now dinners were up—and stayed up. The same new fancy media types Kolevitch had anatomized in his merciless way were there to stay. And Lew was denied even the pleasures of his long romance with failure. He didn’t need the acerbic style of Krasner to tell him it had all been bullshit, a pose, a parody of his Russian-Jewish grandparents. His muttered What does it all mean? had lost all conviction because it was no longer rhetorical. Now he wanted an answer!

None came. The small band of regulars who had drifted away returned. From New Year’s Eve on they took turns, as if the restaurant was a place of mourning, arriving shortly before closing time: Clurman after writing a theater review, Balanchine after a performance at the City Center; actors who would have gone to Sardi’s for a drink and home to bed sat up, instead with Lew … the comedians who had gone on to better things came back for the bad times … Krasner returned to the scene of his crime and told and retold Operation Tulip … the musicians just back from a tour came for hot tea with preserves in the Russian style … even Paul Buchalter suspended hostilities to sit silently at the mourner’s table … Joe Larrabie came with medical bulletins: Katherine Eudemie’s life was dwindling down in a room at the Guggenheim Pavilion which Jackson Eudemie could not afford.

All through the beginning of the new year they rerehearsed the scene when Kolevitch had come back with a search warrant and two other cops the day after his lunch with Lew. They’d searched. They’d sought out Lew who no longer had to lie in the awful absence of Tulip and Myrna. The next target was the headwaiter, since Misha had spilled everything the day before.

The only problem was Morris was on duty, not his brother. Snotty, sardonic Morris, afraid of nothing and fanatically protective of Lew.

“I never told you anything.”

“Don’t lie to an officer of the law.”

“I never saw you before.”

“You’re under arrest.”

“I’ll sue you blind.”

Kolevitch took Lew aside. “Look,” he said. “I don’t want to arrest anybody. We just don’t want a kid shacking up in a restaurant in this precinct.”

“She’s not. Even if she was before, which she wasn’t.”

“But your headwaiter confessed it all, yesterday. And now he’s lying.”

“He’s not.”

“My eyes are not crazy.”

Krasner descends, slowly, from his cashier’s perch and makes his way through the customers waiting to be seated, those holding numbered checks trying to redeem belongings from a bewildered Sasha and those simply milling around in the excitement of a bust at the RR. Krasner has been in a moody state since the vanishing act. Some think he feels implicated as the author of Operation Tulip; some think he feels bereft but, being Krasner, can not express his feelings about the loss of Tulip because he has no text for it. Everyone watches Krasner take center stage.

He raises his hand; a gaunt messenger in one of the Shakespeare Histories. In seconds the place is hushed. Krasner speaks—rather he sings out—his words ringing with conviction.

“Who prosecutes innocence, persecutes all;

Who nurtures wrong,

Stifles song,

Mocks justice and repeats the Fall.”

Lew Krale and Kolevitch turn towards him, silent mouths open.

“Let no one speak for the child we saw

But caring Mother,

Significant Other,

And least of all, false-caring Law.”

Several people holding coats sit down at the nearest booths even if occupied by equally startled customers in the middle of their lunch. Morris whispers to Lew, “What play is that from?”

“Ssshhh.”

“We serve this world by marrying danger:

Here the child was saved,

Now safety’s waived—

Seek her alive in places stranger.”

“Does he know where she is?” Kolevitch murmurs.

“That’s not what he said,” Lew replies.

“Punishment’s not your rightful role;

Rescue’s nearer the heart and soul.

To love and take is only human.

The secret lies with tormented woman.”

“Oh, my God,” Kolevitch says. “It’s another frustrated-mother babysnatching.”

In the turmoil that follows, Kolevitch and his cops rush out to start a kidnapping alert. Tall, central, calm, an eye in a storm, Krasner greets the man in the Chesterfield coat and homburg who hands him his card.

“You are very good,” Kermit Bloomgarden says. “I’m casting
Henry the Fourth
…”

“Pirandello or Shakespeare?” Krasner asked.

“… Part
I
. You have a big style. You’re going to have a big career.” The producer smiled. “If you don’t call me, I’ll call you. At least I know where to find you—for now.” Krasner is beyond irony for the moment. As if sleepwalking, he recites, “I’ll address your business, my good Lord, hard upon the hour.”

“My good Lord,” Sasha breathes. Krasner has finally done an audition!

Applause rolls from table to table, led by Pierre and the other waiters, who have long since given up on Krasner’s acting career. Bloomgarden makes his exit and Lew thinks mournfully that if his mother was still alive she would come in and handle the cash register until he finds a new cashier.

Krasner bows, dripping sweat, eyes bulging, catatonic; a star!

The disappearance of Myrna and Tulip spoke to everyone differently. It roused Kolevitch to rage; it spoke poignantly as an absence to the many customers who’d grown used to seeing Tulip’s playful education in progress. And it gave Lew a sense of despair so awful, he stopped drinking. As usual, Kolevitch was wrong even though he was right. On arrival at the Eudemie home he was told that Tulip was visiting grandparents in Vancouver. Thus there was no missing child and no one except RR regulars would notice Myrna’s extra-long absence from the front.

Furious, Kolevitch questioned everyone! He asked Balanchine about Russian lessons, Blatas about dancing instruction, and Yevshenkowitz about French studies. Ionesco had already left town. The cop questioned Misha and Morris three times, though it’s not certain that he ever knew he was embroiled in a twin trompe l’oeil. Katherine Eudemie was often in the hospital when he came to call and Jackson’s story was steadfast: his daughter had grown to be the pet of the RR, nothing more. Such things happened in these circles.

Kolevitch would have loved to demand to see the child. But his nerve always collapsed. He was, after all, a failed artist, not an achieved one—thus he was afraid to appear foolish in public. After some mutterings about summonses and subpoenas he subsided. Saroyan would have persisted—would have made a grand drama. The captain made brief comedy; Opera Buffa.

And what of the Opera Seria—Myrna and Tulip’s flight? No one has the full story. Some late tellings of furnished rooms, of temporary waitress jobs and lots of Rooms at the Inn; of midnight sweats, of panicked phone calls and last minute hang-ups, of anxiety attacks re scarlet fever or mumps—which turn out to be only a transitory rash or a day’s swelling—at these we can only guess.

Pretty good guesses!

What do we know?

First, the RR: we know that the front was now a Place of Desolation! Sans Tulip, sans Myrna. And sans Krasner who was up to his cool snout in
Henry The Fourth Part
I
.
The back was a Place Of Exaltation. The Operation Tulip boom was apparently permanent. But full tables could not console Lew. He devoted himself to helping Jackson Eudemie pay for Katherine’s expensive illness. And to the activities of several private investigators, who turned up no leads. Katherine grew thinner and Tulip remained invisible.

Until one day winter broke into spring. Fifty-Seventh Street bloomed, plastered with posters of visiting Midwest Symphony Orchestras and the spring crop of recently escaped Russian and Czech violinists, pianists, and ’cellists. New York in the spring grants freedom to everyone.

On April second, on the eighteenth floor of New York Hospital, Myrna appeared. She tried to bring Tulip up with her but the uniformed security guard said no dice and Myrna had to go up alone. The whole floor smelled overripe, sick-sweet, like spring gone wrong. Listen, spring goes wrong sometimes.

“Hello, Mrs. Eudemie.”

“Yes? Who?”

“It’s me. I’m Myrna Morris.”

“Who?”

“Myrna. From the Russian Rendezvous. Please don’t yell. There’s no need to call for anybody …”

“Oh …”

“Tulip’s downstairs. They said children are a problem on hospital floors.”

“… I wasn’t going to yell. I don’t have the strength. I’m glad to see you, Myrna. Is my baby all right?”

“She’s terrific. We’re reading
Treasure Island
.”

“I knew it. It’s stupid and absurd but I knew it. Jackson wanted to call the police, but I made him admit that we were as much children as Tulip. We never really took charge of her—all screwed up we are. I supposed desperate people shouldn’t have children but everybody has children … and you took charge I told him … you were not the desperate one … you were up to the responsibility. I knew from the way you were in the restaurant how grown-up you were with Tulip—a born mother—I’m rattling on—it’s not just Tulip coming back, though I’m thrilled—it’s the medicine … they’re giving me some kind of cortisone—and it makes you speed … an experimental program … they can’t cure me but I’m supposed to cure the rest of the human race, which is okay with me, though it gives me nosebleeds they can’t stop … I’m speeding but I’m so glad to see you standing here by my bed with Tulip downstairs where she belongs … what made you decide to come back no it doesn’t matter please sit down Myrna …” And for a few moments Katherine speeds toward making some sense of her life, sad but still sense. She tells Myrna of her mismated childhood heroes, Scott Fitzgerald and Saul Bellow, Willa Cather and Lionel Trilling—an innocent from the dry Midwest enchanted with sea-dreams of the East—how she, Katherine Eudemie, came East for all her firsts: first book, first ocean, first love, first big splash—and then drowned in the long, receding wave of reputation.