And he didn’t: he was the first to speak. “Well, this time we’ve got some dignity here for a change,” he said, and it struck her at once that “dignity” was an uncommonly lovely word. “This lady understands sentences – that’s rare enough – and she knows how to make them work together, which is even more unusual. You get a lot of strength in writing like this, and a lot of grace, and a lot of – well, I already said dignity, but that’s in there too.
“As for the substance of the story, though, I’m not so sure. I mean what do we have? We have this little rich girl who doesn’t like boarding school because the other girls make fun of her all the time, and she doesn’t like going home on vacations either because she’s an only child and her parents are all wrapped up in each other. Then she’s befriended by this unconventional young art-teacher girl who tells her she’s got a natural talent for drawing, and for a minute or two there I thought we might have some kind of lesbian story on our hands, but that was a wrong guess. The teacher helps the girl find self-esteem through art, so in the end the girl comes to realize she can face her life after all.
“And that may be part of the trouble right there: basically it’s what used to be called a come-to-realize story, and that was a commercial formula that went out of business when the big slick fiction magazines folded up after television came in.
“No, but never mind that,” he amended quickly. “That’s secondary, and it may be a cheap line of criticism anyway. I think all I’m trying to say” – and he frowned hard in the effort of choosing the words – “all I’m trying to say is that I’m afraid I got a kind of who-cares feeling out of this. Very strong writing, fine writing; still, the material kept making me think Yeah, yeah, I get it, but who cares?”
And others, up and down the table, seemed to agree with both parts of Mr. Kelly’s opinion. That made it an easy day for Carl Traynor: there was nothing to challenge the timidity of his leadership. There were no conflicts for him to mollify or retreat from, and his summing-up required nothing as brave as an original idea.
But Lucy kept coming back to the New School every week because there was a chance that her second and more ambitious story might be read aloud. She needed to know what George Kelly and Jerome Kaplan and one or two others would have to say about it. And she was obliged to wait through a good many other people’s stories, with their bland or tumultuous critical discussions, but eventually it happened.
“We have another piece by Mrs. Davenport this morning,” Traynor announced. “It’s twenty-one pages, and the title is ‘Summer Stock.’ ”
This time she could hear no mistakes in the pages being read. She was confident that her sentences would again be acclaimed, and that the new material would leave nobody able to ask who cared. Toward the end she even found herself moved by it – there was a faint swelling in her throat – as if it had been written by someone else.
“Well, okay,” George Kelly said when it was over. “Once again I can’t fault the language – this lady controls her language like a pro – and this time the story’s a lot more interesting, too. We have this young divorced woman falling in love with this summer-theater director, and all that part is plausible and well-developed. The sexual episodes are as tastefully done as anything I’ve read along that line, and they’re very strong and convincing too. So the man talks her into taking the most difficult part in an important play, and she knows she’s not ready for it but does it anyway and exhausts herself; then, even before she’s recovered from that, she finds out she’s lost the man to a younger girl – and that’s plausible too because it’s been in the cards from the beginning – so everything’s over. I think it’s very good stuff.
“My only problem” – and here he settled back for the second part of his critique, while Lucy set her bite – “my only problem is that I didn’t know what I was doing in the last three or four pages, or however many it is – the part that comes after the man takes off with the girl. I couldn’t see what there was to find in those pages except more and more words about the woman’s state of mind. There’s this little philosophical essay about betrayal and loneliness, and you can’t work abstract material like that into fiction, or at least I’ve never thought you could. Then we’re supposed to believe she’s afraid she’ll go crazy, like her ex-husband, and that’s boring because we know she won’t; and we even have to follow her into fooling around with ideas of suicide, which is even more of a waste of time because she’s never going to do a thing like that. Oh, there are a few nice moments in this section, like the little girl coming home from school for the peanut-butter sandwich, but there’s no reason why those things couldn’t have been worked in earlier, back in the body of the story. Mostly, all we have in this last part is the woman being sorry for herself in a whole lot of different ways. There’s a word for this kind of thing, and if I had a better vocabulary I’d know it. Wait – ‘maudlin.’ Okay?
“And I hate to bring this up again, Mrs. Davenport, because I didn’t even like having to mention it the last time, but this time I felt you were trying to bend all your good work out of shape just to bring it around into the formula of one more come-to-realize story. You want to tell us the woman finds she’s been ‘strengthened’ by what’s happened to her, and nobody’s going to believe that because it’s nonsense. What’s the deal? Has anybody with any brains ever said unhappiness is beneficial? And I wouldn’t want you to claim she’s been ‘weakened,’ either, because neither one of those terms has any bearing. Neither one is appropriate. Matter of fact, the distinction between strong people and weak people always falls apart under scrutiny anyway, and everybody knows it, and that’s why it’s always been too sentimental an idea for a good writer to trust.
“So, look. What happens to your woman is that she’s let down. We can assume she feels lousy about it, and I guess that’s all we can assume, but that’s plenty. That’s the story. All you have to do, Mrs. Davenport, is cut away practically everything you wrote after the man takes off with the girl, and I think you’ll be in business.”
Mr. Kaplan cleared his throat and said “I liked the suitcases. I thought the suitcases were an excellent touch.” And one of the older women said she’d liked the suitcases too.
“Mr. Kelly?” Lucy said after class that day, cornering him near the drinking fountain in the corridor. “I want to thank you for being so helpful with my stories. Both of them.”
“Well, it’s been a pleasure,” he said. “I’m glad you’re not mad at me. Excuse me.” And he turned away to take a long, gulping drink of water, as if all that classroom talk had left him badly parched.
As he wiped his wet mouth on his sleeve she asked him, in the shy and respectful manner she had learned at the Nelsons’ parties, what he “did.” And it turned out that he didn’t drive a truck; he was an elevator repairman, working mostly in tall buildings.
“That must be very dangerous.”
“Nah, nah. They give us about twenty-seven times as many safety devices as we ever need in those shafts; we might as well be typewriter mechanics, except we’re better paid. Thing is, though, all my life I’ve wanted to work with my brains.”
“Well, it seems to me,” she said, “that you work with your brains very well.”
“Yeah, okay, but I meant for a living, you see. Work with my brains for a living. That’s a little harder to arrange, if you see what I mean.”
She saw what he meant. Then she said “When are we going to have something of yours in the class?”
“Well, that’s not easy to say. Maybe not at all this year. I’m working on this very long novel – too long, I think; it may be out of control – and Carl told me I could take a few excerpts out of it for the class; find episodes or sections in it that might work as stories. Sounded good when he said it, but the trouble is I keep going over it and over it, and I can’t find anything that works like that. It’s all one big – you know – one big story.”
“Well, it may not have been very good advice in the first place,?
?? Lucy said. “I’m afraid I don’t have much confidence in Mr. Traynor.”
“Oh, no.” And George Kelly looked troubled. “No, you don’t want to underestimate Carl Traynor. I’ve read four of his stories in magazines, and he’s good. He’s damn good. I mean, this boy’s the real thing.”
Julie Pierce, Paul Maitland, Tom Nelson, and all the more notable guests at the Nelsons’ parties – how had she come to know so many real-thing people in her life? And what in God’s name did you have to “do” to earn an accolade like that?
George Kelly was taking leave of her now with what seemed an exaggerated proletarian courtesy: he might as well have been holding a cloth cap at his chest with both hands. “Well,” he said, backing away. “Listen. Been very nice talking to you, Mrs. Davenport.”
She spent an hour or two walking around the Village that afternoon, surprised at every turn to discover how much things had changed. And it wasn’t an aimless walk: she was looking for what she had come to think of as “material.”
Far to the west on Perry Street she found the house where she and Michael Davenport had lived long ago, but it was almost a different house now – surely it couldn’t have been as shabby as this in the old days. All the mailbox locks were smashed, and the sparse, carelessly lettered, hastily Scotch-taped names of tenants suggested it had become a place for transients.
Even so, as she lingered in the dirty vestibule, there was enough of the old house left to provide a flood of memories. Bill Brock’s loud voice still echoed here, and she could still see Michael looking so dense he didn’t even seem to know she knew that he was aching for Diana Maitland with every breath. There had always been kissing in this vestibule late at night, because Diana liked to kiss. She would kiss men and girls alike in the same swift, sweet little way that meant nothing beyond goodwill. There, she seemed to say. You’re nice. I like you.
Then Bill Brock would put his arm around her and take her home to his place, “their” place, over across Abingdon Square, and Lucy always knew what a torture it must be for Michael to think of them there together.
Well, yes; there might be a story in those old times – the four young people in their separateness, with their secrets. Bill Brock could be the least important character, if she found him distasteful to write about, or she could change him into someone else – no; better keep him as he was, because much of the irony would arise from the riddle of Diana Maitland’s being in love with such a man. The focus of the story would be on Diana, on how she could flirt around and draw attention to herself for hours in ways that nobody ever minded, because everybody knew what an exceptional girl she was. The protagonist would be the young wife (first-person? third-person?), and the sad young husband, possibly giving intimations even then of emotional wreckage, could serve as a kind of – well, never mind; she could work it all out when she got home.
But the idea had begun to seem thin even before she was back in Tonapac that night, and she sat in her expensive house feeling untalented. Except for George Kelly’s qualified praise, and for an occasional grace-note of approval from Mr. Kaplan, nobody had yet given her any encouragement. Even the “dignity” of her sentences might be only a consequence of her having gone to private schools, and so there was still no reason to suppose she could be a writer at all. She might now spend a month or two at work on this Perry Street story only to find it falling apart on every page, in every paragraph, until she came to realize it amounted to nothing – and how would that be, Mr. Kelly, for the come-to-realize story of the year?
Fretfully, she couldn’t even decide whether or not to go on with the New School course. Now that her two stories had been read and discussed there was no real reason to stay: Traynor could scarcely do much to help her find her “literary voice” in the few remaining sessions. Still, if she dropped out it might be interpreted by the others as a selfish and even a snobbish thing to do.
And so it was the fear of seeming to be a snob that drove her into New York for the following week’s class – and it wasn’t the first time in her life that the fear of seeming to be a snob impelled her, perversely, to become one.
She sat blowing thin, disdainful jets of cigarette smoke all through the reading of that week’s manuscript, and she felt she ought to be congratulated for heroic patience as the critical discussion limped and fumbled its way around the table. She wasn’t sure she’d be able to endure the teacher’s summing-up but it was mercifully brief that day, and the moment his voice stopped she knew it was time for action. Everyone else in the room was still seated, almost as if they were waiting for it – asking for it – when Lucy Davenport shoved back her chair and stood up.
“This class,” she announced, “this class is amateur night in Dixie. I’m sorry, Mr. Traynor, because I know you’re a decent man, but we’ve sat around here accommodating each others’ mediocrity all these weeks; that’s all we’ve done. And I suppose there may be a certain therapeutic benefit in activity like that, for those who need it, but it has nothing to do with writing and it never will. Can anybody really believe a fiction editor would spend three minutes on any of the stories we’ve had here? Any of them?”
She was dizzy, and her mouth was dry. George Kelly looked as embarrassed as if she had broken an important, implicit rule of conduct – as if she had fallen down drunk in his home, in front of his wife and family.
“Well, okay, I’m sorry,” she said, meaning it mostly for George Kelly, though she couldn’t quite raise her eyes from the table to face him. “I’m sorry.” And then she hurried out of the room.
If she’d timed her outburst a few minutes earlier she might have made her escape alone, but now she had to ride down in the elevator with a dead-silent cluster of other women from the class.
Out on the street and free of them all – rid of them; rid of them – she started walking fast. She was almost a block away when she heard “Hey, Mrs. Davenport! Hey, Lucy!?
And there he came, running down the sidewalk with his raincoat flapping around his skinny legs: Carl Traynor.
“Listen,” he said when he’d caught up with her, and as soon as he’d recovered his breath he said “I think I owe you a drink. Don’t you?”
When he’d steered her into a bar – and he looked tentatively pleased at having done even that, as though the first part of a difficult job had now been accomplished – he settled her at a small table near a window that faced Sixth Avenue.
“I’m sorry you were so disappointed in my course,” he said, “but I can understand it completely. That’s the first thing I want you to know, and there’s a couple of other things too. Could we just sort of talk a minute?”
“Sure.”
“Let me make this as clear as I can,” he began, and he was settling down to the serious business of a straight bourbon with a short glass of ice water on the side. She hoped it wouldn’t be the first of many drinks, far into the afternoon, because he looked too thin to absorb much alcohol. “Every time I walk into that classroom I feel lost and scared and I know the people can sense it – you’ve sensed it – so it’s only reasonable to explain why I even try to do it at all. God knows it’s not for the money: this job pays less than a quarter of what I need for my family and myself – I mean I’m divorced, but I have two kids so there’re still quite a few obligations back there. No, the whole point of this is that I need the credentials. The New School is the only university in America that would ever have hired me, you see, because I don’t have a college education. I barely made it through twelfth grade. I still have no idea what a college teacher is supposed to do; I don’t even know what a college teacher is supposed to sound like. There are times when I sit up there and hear myself talking away, droning and droning, and I think Who is this asshole? And all I want to do is go home and blow my brains out. Is this beginning to make any sense?”
“Well,” Lucy said, “I certainly wouldn’t have guessed you hadn’t gone to college.” And his slightly offended look told her at once it had been the wrong thing to sa
y, almost as if she’d told a Negro that he seemed as intelligent as a white man. She tried to make up for it by saying “How did that happen? That you missed college, I mean.”
“Well, it’d take too long to tell,” he said, “and it’s a story that doesn’t reflect very favorably on me. I don’t think I’ve ever really been ashamed of it, but I’ve never been proud of it either. The thing is, though, there are universities all over the country now with graduate-school programs in writing – it’s kind of an academic fad, I guess, but it looks like it’s going to last awhile – and they’re paying real salaries. That’s what I’m after, do you see? I want to qualify for something like that.”
And she was reminded briefly, once again, of Nancy Smith’s brother: in the end they had faked-up the scores and qualified everybody.
“Oh, I don’t suppose it’d be great,” Carl Traynor was saying, “but it’d give me as much security as most other people have, whether I ever learn to do it well or not. And it’d sure beat the hell out of all the garbage I’ve done for a living – still am doing.”
“What kind of garbage is that?”
“Free-lance commercial hackwork,” he told her. “Grubby little writing for hire; picking up a hundred bucks here and fifty bucks there; years and years of it, going all the way back to when I should’ve been in college – and all of it for no other purpose than to buy time. Just to buy time. It’s been very – tiring.”
“Yes, I can imagine,” Lucy said. And he did look tired – that, as well as sadness, was the main thing she’d seen in his face as long as she’d known him. After a moment she said “Mr. Kelly told me you’ve published some excellent stories.”
“Well, that was very kind of Mr. Kelly,” he said, and he finished off his second drink, or possibly his third. “But I’ll tell you something Mr. Kelly doesn’t know. I’ve got a whopper of a book coming out in October.”