Twice Told Tales Page 14

  “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 repu
tation.

  Myrna sits, stoned with unwanted information. It has taken all her energy to get to the hospital and she only vaguely knows who these writers are. She expected rage, threats, anything but a literary memoir of regret. She is impatient.

  Katherine slows down. “What I remember most is Fitzgerald’s saying he was a poor caretaker of his talent. Me too. Poor caretaker of everything.”

  Myrna cannot take any more. “Listen,” she says. “I never really had time to read after I finished school. Just plays. Maybe that’s why I thought it was so amazing that it was a writer who was leaving me her child—but I don’t feel educated or qualified to talk or even listen about Fitzgerald and those. But I did love taking care of Tulip. It got out of hand. All of a sudden I felt as if she was my only chance. I didn’t have a part for a year-and-a-half. Nothing! Not even an Equity Library Showcase. Zero! Then Tulip came along. I never understood why. But there she was. I had to tell her a lie when I ran away, that her mother was sick and her father couldn’t take care of her and that I’d been chosen to take care of her …”

  “You were right.”

  “No, I was crazy. But I want to thank you, Mrs. Eudemie.”

  “We have the same child; I think you can call me Katherine.”

  Myrna stumbled on the words, “Katherine—Kath—Katherine,” she said. “It’s stupid to thank somebody when you take something from them—but thanks.”

  Katherine then, turning for some reason to lie on her side, speaks to Myrna sitting behind her, passionately, with all the desperate concern for being understood that a patient brings to the discourse of analysis, at certain moments. “I worked and worked on my new career. I knew how sick I was—so I’ve had a very short career as a lay analyst—about a year. And I’ve really had one patient: myself. One patient and one major symptom—if you think symptoms are the name of the game and I don’t. In spite of that I’ve been working on the parapraxes—the slips, forgetting Tulip over and over again—but especially the beginning when it was still a single slip—before you and the others got involved … and all I could come up with was the old explanations, chewed-over modernist bullshit—the creative spirit turns destructive when it’s blocked … that I was sacrificing my only successful creation in revenge for screwing up as a writer. Oh, none of it matters except that you were right, Myrna.”

  Katherine Eudemie turns back and scares the hell out of Myrna by grabbing her and hugging the young woman to her. She cries out, “You were right, you were chosen to take care of her … take her back … take her back … go downstairs, take her back and finish reading Treasure Island. I trust you …” But while she is telling her to go she is holding on tightly and all Myrna can think of is she has finally gotten her marbles back and brought the kid to her mother who is losing hers.

  To make it worse Katherine Eudemie’s nose starts to bleed. This makes for a shocking sight when Jackson Eudemie walks in. He has come to the hospital to visit his wife and found his missing daughter reading a book by Robert Louis Stevenson in the lobby and excitedly brought her up to the room over the protests of Security. There is blood all over the sheets and the women are holding each other as if in a death-struggle. Jackson Eudemie plunges to the bed even though he is still holding Tulip.

  Myrna was crying out to all of them—and to the nurses who finally heard the uproar and came flying in—“Don’t you want to know why I brought the kid back? All you care about is your own goddamn selves not about her.” They froze in some hideous red-speckled, white-sheeted version of Laocöon’s struggle. “I sent her to the store to get some cartons of milk and cereal, stuff like that, and she got all giant sizes and she was wobbling up the stairs, a walk-up in Dover, New Jersey, and when she saw me she said, ‘Myrna, help, help, Myrna.’ And I grabbed the stuff from her and I almost stopped breathing because I got it, I got so clearly that it was over. She never asked for anything before and now I knew we were in trouble and I knew it was over …”

  But by this time the nurses who represented the Official World of Help had taken over and the Opera Seria was finished.

  Finally it doesn’t matter how you got where you are. It matters where you are and where you’re going. Katherine went to sleep at last two days later. Tulip, having been away from home so long under the cover story of being with her grandparents in Vancouver, actually went to Canada immediately. Finding themselves alone, Myrna and Jackson Eudemie inevitably found each other.

  Eleven months later they were married and Tulip came home.

  Myrna and Jackson already had little lovers’ tricks of word play. One of them was this: he would say, “Everything begins in lust,” and she would reply, as they dozed off, “Everything ends in sleep.” Or she’d say, “Everything begins in curiosity,” and he’d say, “Everything ends in boredom.” It was part of his attempt at a literary corruption of Myrna.

  Before they decided to get married, Jackson accused her of going through with it just to get Tulip after all. What he said was: “Everything begins in planning.” And her denial was: “Everything ends in luck.”

  “I heard you were in love with Lew Krale.”

  “That was more of my own craziness. It would have been nice.

  “It would have been awful. Do you know Lew?”

  “He used to ask my advice. I liked that. But it seems to me I was really in love with Katherine.”

  “Oh.”

  “She came to see me and we walked in the park. Everything about her—even her troubles—dumping a baby day after day—it all seemed glamorous. I was taking part in a fairy tale. I read her book. I loved that she was a writer.”

  “Romanticism. You ended up with the editor.”

  She laughed. “And the child.”

  It had never occurred to Jackson Eudemie that he would marry again after Katherine died. But that was about as unoriginal as most of his ideas. And if Myrna did marry him for his child it didn’t quite work since boarding school, college, and Tulip’s own marriage came it seemed in a matter of minutes. Myrna had been prescient about her childless destiny. She could not conceive. Tulip had been her last chance. What Myrna got was Jackson Eudemie and a small press the two of them operate now, twenty-two years later, from their house in Greenwich, Connecticut.

  And what of Tulip? What was she thinking and feeling during all that tumult of attention, of education of abduction, of being jolted, pulled, and pushed to be this or that emblem for the adults in the RR universe. It’s interesting to speculate and observe because only a few weeks ago, more than two decades after these events, a reporter for Time magazine heard the story at the RR. The intellectual Lindbergh case with a happy ending was how he sold the story to his editors and he cornered the grown-up Tulip, now twenty-four years old and a publicist for the Mark Taper Forum and married to a tax lawyer, Reuben Rosenfeld, who also collected first folio Shakespeare.

  “Oh, yes,” Tulip said. “I remember it all. My mother was agitated and wild, a poet after all. I don’t think I knew then what I’m saying now but I knew, somehow! My father, he was something else again: elegant, eloquent, great style, and full of love. He could have been a great man in publishing but he wouldn’t make the necessary compromises.” (Jackson Eudemie would have been astonished at such notions. He knew he was only a Hack playing Man of Letters. A harmless game, neither noble nor ignoble. Children are strange: you get either hero-worship or rage both usually unfounded in real cause.)

  “But do you recall how you actually felt? The experience of it? Being raised in the hat check room of a restaurant?”

  Tulip Rosenfeld thought a moment. “I was only four,” she said. “I would have liked to have friends. Once a little girl was allowed to stay with me while her parents had tea on a snowbound day, a real blizzard. We sneaked out and threw snowballs at the box office of Carnegie Hall. Her name was Leslie and she had an eye which drifted.”

  “Wouldn’t that be a screen memory? Not something a four-year-old would notice and remember?”

  “Maybe.”


  “And how could you tell the twin headwaiters from each other when no one else could?”

  “It’s a knack. Like recognizing shades of color. You just know.”

  “Weren’t you ever frightened?”

  “Sometimes I’d be a little triste and long for my mother.”

  “You have some French words. Didn’t you study French at the RR with Ionesco?”

  “Short? Bald? Drank a lot?”

  “Yes.”

  “That was the one. Listen, this may not be the best time to interview me about this.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’m pregnant. You get big mood swings when you’re going to have a baby.”

  “Ah …”

  So—here is Tulip, pregnant! Myrna and Jackson call her immediately. Yes, it is true, she says, Reuben and she had been planning to call them with the news. Tulip is as cool and steady as her mother was warm and volatile.

  “Everything begins in rumors and ends in babies,” Myrna jokes.

  “Everything begins in Time magazine and ends in reality,” Jackson Eudemie replies.

  At the cemetery Katherine was waiting. What else was there for her to do?

  “Katherine,” Jackson said, standing at the foot of her grave. “This is hard to believe, but Tulip is having a baby.”

  “God, Jackson, you’re so self-conscious. You could have told me at home.”

  “It seemed more appropriate here.”

  “You were always so damned appropriate.”

  “Listen, I didn’t come out to this God-forsaken part of Long Island to have a post-marital argument. I just wanted to tell you you’re going to be a grandmother.”

  “That’s neat.”

  “Grandmother’s don’t use words like ‘neat.’”

  “This one does. If I still can be one—or anything. It’s not clear you know.”

  “I know. I guess.”

  “How come you never came here before?”

  He was silent.

  “Is Tulip happy? It’s so hard for me to imagine her grown up. And a mother.”

  “It’s hard for me too,” Jackson said. “Living doesn’t solve anything, you know.”