Twice Told Tales Page 10

  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.”

  The Psychopathology of Everyday Life by Sigmund Freud

  a story

  Author’s Note

  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.)

  CAN 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.

  “Under supervision, of course,” the actress said. “This isn’t L.A. Out there all you need is the money for the Yellow Pages ad: QUALIFIED PSYCHOTHERAPIST, MARITAL, SEXUAL AND PERSONALITY PROBLEMS SOLVED SWIFTLY … VISA, MASTERCARD AND AMERICAN EXPRESS.”

  She could joke because she didn’t quite take Katherine’s desperation seriously. No one did. Perhaps that’s why Katherine had to escalate. What do you do after you’ve had crying jags on a P.E.N. Club panel at Carnegie Hall; when you’ve called the same friends at 4:00 A.M. threatening self-destruction one too many times?

  What you do is you forget that you have left your baby in the affectionate care of the hat check people during lunch at the Russian Rendezvous, go on your way to a gallery opening, then run back to the restaurant sweating terror.

  The first parapraxis was checking the book in its Scribner’s shopping bag and forgetting to pick it up. Freud’s book was to be her new primer. Myrna naturally knew nothing of all this when she handed it back to Katherine the next time she was in the restaurant. The writer stared at the book, distracted. But it was nothing to attract Myrna’s attention.

  People forget everything in check rooms, often the things most precious to them. Pianists forget sheet music, dancers forget leg warmers and love letters, singers forget the portfolios of reviews with which they were to dazzle impresarios.

  People also forget gloves, coats, hats, packages of condoms, eyeglasses, wallets both empty and stuffed with money, appointment books with irreplaceable addresses and unlisted phone numbers, the lack of which can harm a career.

  It was doubtful, however, if anyone had ever checked a child before. Later, when it all became an open secret, the Russian Rendezvous Regulars debated the point. The actress and teacher Stella Adler, grand and witty as usual, said the world would be a bette
r place if more mothers had forgotten more children in coat rooms. Her husband, Harold Clurman, claimed to know an actress who had left her baby at Sardi’s, in the days when people still went to Sardi’s, but it was not a forgetting, it was an abandonment. The young woman had been driven insane by bad reviews of her first starring role and blamed the distractions of motherhood for the disaster.

  Some of the regulars from the G.O.P., the Grand Old Period, believed that Myrna had as much to do with the developing events as the distracted mother and the adaptable child. That school of thought held that Myrna, disappointed in the way her life was going, jumped at the chance to raise Tulip in loco parentis. It was a chance to combine all her frustrated yearnings into one: she’d been a schoolteacher in Fargo, North Dakota, had come East to attack the stage, and become engaged to Sheffield, a director who had never directed a play but who made much of the fact that his sperm count was too low for fathering. (Just in case Myrna might press that issue.)

  Mysteriously, Myrna became pregnant and had to take the job at the Russian Rendezvous to pay for the abortion he insisted she have. (During the Grand Old Period abortions were still illegal, dangerous, and expensive.) After she’d thrown him out he often came back to borrow money and to lecture her. Myrna was a soft touch.

  “You’re crazy, arranging study, play, and education of a four-year-old in a restaurant, with or without the mother’s cooperation. You’ll destroy the child and get yourself in hot water. You’re trying to be a teacher, actress and earth mother all in one.” (He’d never gotten to direct a play so he had to use psychology somewhere.)

  But by that time the comedy had begun.

  None of this could have happened without the ironic but careful complicity of K.K. Krasner, actor, and cashier at the Russian Rendezvous.

  Krasner had a simple, fastidious contempt for the ballet of winning and losing that was performed, daily, in that dining room. His ambition was Shakespearian in its size and intensity; he could afford an Olympian gaze at people who tried to beat their friends out for a television commercial assignment with the passion of Richard the Third. You can see the re-runs of Krasner playing Coriolanus and other such sentimental softies on public television at least once every season. But as a famous actor he’s no loftier, no more aristocratic, than he was when elegantly sliding the checks under the register and punching the keys. (Charge cards were less ubiquitous in those days—and Lew allowed personal charge accounts for the old customers, long after it was clear they would never be settled or even substantially reduced.)

  Krasner was so cool you could never have guessed that he was worried. But he was. He was one of the few who knew what trouble the restaurant was getting into.

  Lew and his co-owner, Paul Buchalter, were doing the classic partner act: fights, threats, reconciliations, and more fights. Buchalter was a vanilla business man—married, conservative. Lew was unhappy, lonely, drinking too much, and refusing to think of his restaurant as a business.

  “This is not a Temple of the Arts and it’s not a halfway-house for refugees,” Buchalter began, right in front of the cashier’s cage. It happened to be the first day of Katherine forgetting Tulip, but that was not yet an issue. Krasner watched from behind his silver-rimmed glasses and behind his cage, like a detached deity.

  “Don’t tell me what my place is,” Lew said. “You bought in, you can buy out. This isn’t your life, it’s your investment.”

  All this, you understand, during the last few minutes of the rush lunch hour. (Though the RR was not yet the great success it is today. This scene couldn’t happen quite that way now; there would be a line of people waiting to get a table.)

  “You don’t have the right spirit to run a good restaurant.”

  “You mean I don’t have the soul of a headwaiter.”

  At which Misha, one of the twin headwaiters—the shy one—left for urgent mythical business in the kitchen, an action he performed whenever any difficulty arose in the front.

  Ah, Lew Krale, restaurateur/laureate of our youth in New York; under your bleary eyes passed hundreds of the hopeful—deadbeat actors and writers supported by your willful myopia regarding monthly bills. (“There are no deadbeats, only slowbeats,” Lew said. “It might be ten years, but sooner or later everybody pays.”) Restaurant Management for Poets, Paul called it.

  Tulip, who had been following the argument with interest, spoke up. “Which one,” she asked Myrna, “is the headwaiter?”

  “Oh, my God,” Lew said. “What is that child doing here. This place used to have a liquor license.”

  He reached over the counter into the coat room and hauled Tulip up in his arms, surprising everyone.

  “Who’s mother are you?” he said to Tulip.

  “Katherine Eudemie,” she said.

  “See that,” Lew said. “The kid took my joke, treated me like I was dyslexic, reversed my reversal back, and told me who her mother is.”

  One of the best kept secrets in New York is that Lew Krale was a schoolteacher before he bought out the original owners of the RR. He’d actually published a paper on dyslexia.

  It was that teacher of learning-disabled students—now they call it Special Ed—whose restaurant became the late-night hangout for two decades of playwrights (hit and flop)—produced, unproduced, and never to be produced. Also, the famous of all disciplines: Balanchine, Agnes de Mille, Arthur Miller, Harold Clurman, Eli Wallach, Anne Jackson, Dustin Hoffman, Lenny Bernstein—the semi-famous: Merce Cunningham, Kermit Bloomgarden—the obscure—how compile a list of the authentically obscure? Meade Roberts, the minor playwright, Larry Rosenthal, the minor composer, Sherwood Arthur, the minor director. (It is not enough to be not well known to merit the term obscure—one must have the possibility, the gifts that could have brought fame but by luck, character, or the nature of individual talent never did.)

  The names don’t sing the song; not even the ones you might recognize. (Those change from decade to decade, anyway. Who remembers Louis Spohr? In certain years of the nineteenth century he was as famous as Beethoven.) No! Much more important is the melody of the discourse at 12:45 A.M., fifteen minutes before closing time. Not a salon, exactly—not the Dome or La Coupole in 1945 with Sartre or Camus, but if less than that, more than Sardi’s, more than sexual gossip and the ups and downs of careers. Laughter, literary and theatrical criticism, bad taste, cripple-jokes, philosophical questioning, career-pushing, psychoanalytical reflections, and the persistent borrowing of cash.

  And all presided over, in a half-haze of alcohol, by Lew, the former teacher of the learning-disabled. And who could be more weirdly disabled than these wonderfully gifted loonybirds—winners and losers alike—staying up night after night making the least of their gifts … talking non-stop … laughing …

  “Ah,” Stella Adler said, breathless one night, “we’ll laugh our lives away.” All of it washed with the light colors of youth and hope.

  Jackson Eudemie had been one of them, happily peripheral. Neither obscure nor famous, he was just a young man mad about writing. He’d brought his young wife, Katherine, a refugee from the Wasp Middle West, into the RR circle. Somehow it closed with her inside and Jackson out. That’s how it is with circles, the geometry of luck.

  Lew made his restaurant a home away from home for these walking wounded. And he knew Katherine Eudemie to be the prime sort of gifted nut who helped give the restaurant its special texture. But children—this was another matter.

  “Poor kid,” he murmured over Tulip’s blonde head. He handed her back to Myrna.

  “Myrna,” he said. “We don’t check kids. Only hats and coats.”

  Buchalter didn’t need much to push him over the line. He was a very short man, nervous to a fault. “Okay,” he said. “That does it for me. Count me out.”

  Lew laughed. “One,” he said, “two … three …” By this time his partner was gone through the revolving door.

  Tulip was no dope. She showed how well she could count. “Four,” she said, “five …
six …”

  Krasner didn’t like Lew’s laugh. He needed his cashier’s job to pay bills while he searched out his dramatic destiny. “Are you sure you know what you’re doing?” he asked. He pointed in the direction Buchalter had gone, the great outside world. “He won’t just let it go. He’ll counterattack! You don’t want to lose your restaurant, do you?”

  His bony face had turned pink at the emotional strain of making such a speech. Everyone knew that the cashier/actor could not make a speech longer than a half dozen words, usually short, caustic words; except when acting. What he required was a Shakespearian quotation, behind which he could hide true sentiments otherwise unavailable to his own natural tongue. He was known to be absolutely unwilling to read “cold” auditions. He left his nine-by-twelve glossies and resumes at production offices but never stayed to confront a living producer or casting director—anyone who might engage him in speeches of terrifying unpredictable length and potential sincerity. Whether this was the loftiness of a Coriolanus or Woody Allen shyness none of us knew. It was certainly one of the main reasons behind Krasner’s lagging acting career.

  “Misha,” Lew called out, embarrassed at such passion from the cashier’s cage, “Get a plate of sour cream for the kid and a Scotch for me.”

  “I’ll get the sour cream for the girl but you’ve had enough to drink.”

  “Ah, then you’re not Misha. You’re Morris.”