Elphinstone felt a retort of a fulminous nature boiling in her breast but she thought it best, in her exhausted state, to repress it, so she switched the subject to their Panamanian parrot, Lorita, having observed that Lorita was not in her indoor cage.
Where have you put Lorita? she demanded as sharply as if she suspected her friend of having wrung the bird’s neck and thrown it into the garbage-disposal unit.
Lorita is on her travels, said Horne briskly.
I don’t think Lorita ought to go on her travels till you have gone to your office, Elphinstone grumbled, since you move around so fast in the morning that you are likely to crush her underfoot.
I move rapidly but not blindly, dear, and anyhow Lorita’s gone to sit in her summer palace.
Lorita’s summer palace was a very spacious and fancy cage that had been set up for her on the little balcony outside the double French doors, and there she was, in it, sitting.
Someday, said Elphinstone darkly, that bird is going to discover that she can fly, and then good-bye, Lorita!
You’re full of dire predictions this morning, said Horne. Old Doc Schreiber is going to catch an earful, I bet!
Both were now sipping their coffee, side by side on the little ivory-satin-covered love seat that faced the television and the balcony and the backs of brownstone buildings on East Sixtieth Street. It was a pleasant view with a great deal more foliage than you usually see in Manhattan outside the park. The TV was on. A public-health official was talking about the increased incidence of poliomyelitis in New York that summer.
When are you going for your polio shots? asked Horne.
Elphinstone declared that she had decided not to have the polio shots this summer.
Are you mad? asked Horne.
No, just over forty, said Elphinstone.
What’s that got to do with it?
I’m out of the danger zone, Elphinstone boasted.
That’s an exploded theory. The man just said there is no real age limit for polio nowadays.
Horne, you will take any shot or pill in existence, Elphinstone said, but for a very odd reason. Not because you are really scared of illness or mortality, but because you have an unconscious death wish and feel so guilty about it that you are constantly trying to convince yourself that you are doing everything possible to improve your health and to prolong your life.
They were talking quietly but did not look at each other as they talked, which was not a good sign for August the Tenth nor for the flowers of friendship.
Yes, that is a “very odd reason,” a very odd one, indeed! Why should I have a death wish?
Their voices had become low and shaky.
Yesterday evening, Horne, you looked out at the city from the balcony and you said. My God, what a lot of big tombstones, a necropolis with brilliant illumination, the biggest tombstones in the world’s biggest necropolis. I repeated this remark to Dr. Schreiber and told him it had upset me terribly. He said, “You are living with, you are sharing your life with, a very sick person. To see great architecture in a great city and call it tombstones in a necropolis is a symptom of a deep psychic disturbance, deeper than yours, and though I know how much you value this companion, I have to warn you that this degree of nihilism and this death wish is not what you should be continually exposing yourself to, during this effort you’re making to climb back out of the shadows. I can only encourage you to go on with this relationship provided that this sick person will take psychotherapy, too. But I doubt that she will do this, since she doesn’t want to climb up, she wants to move in the opposite direction. And this,” he said, “is made very clear by what you’ve told me about her present choice of associates.”
There was a little silence between them, then Horne said; Do you believe that I am an obstacle to your analysis? Because if you do, I want to assure you that the obstacle will remove itself gladly.
Schreiber is chiefly concerned, said Elphinstone, about your new circle of friends because he feels they’re instinctively destructive!
Well, said Horne, he hasn’t met them and I think it’s awfully presumptuous to judge any group of varied personalities without direct personal contact. Of course I have no idea what stories about my friends you may have fed Doc Schreiber.
None, none!—Hardly any…
Then how does he know about them? By some sort of divination?
In deep analysis, said Elphinstone portentously, you have to hold nothing back.
But that doesn’t mean that what you don’t hold back is necessarily true. Does it? Shit, apparently you didn’t mean a word of it when you told me you understood how I need to have my own little circle of friends since I’m not accepted by yours.
Elphinstone replied sorrowfully, I have no circle of friends unless you mean my group of old school chums from Sarah Lawrence whom I have lunch with once a month, and very, very occasionally entertain here for a buffet supper and bridge, occasions to which you’re always invited, in fact urged to come, but you have declined, except for a single occasion.
Oh, yes, said Horne, you said a few days ago that you not only saw nothing wrong in our having our little separate circle of friends, but you said you thought it was psychologically healthy for us both. You said, if you’d try to remember, that it relieved the tensions between us for each to have her own little social circle, and as for my circle being hostile to you, I can only tell you—
Tell me what?
That you did not accept them, you bristled like a hedgehog on the one occasion you honored them with your presence, the single time that you condescended to meet them instead of running out to some dreary get-together of old Sarah Lawrence alumnae.
Another pause occurred in the conversation. Both of them made little noises in their throats and took little sips of coffee and didn’t glance at each other: the warm air trembled between them. Even the parrot Lorita seemed to sense the domestic crisis and was making quiet clucking sounds and little musical whistles from her summer palace, as if to pacify the unhappy ladies.
You say I have a death wish, said Horne, resuming the talk between them. I think you are putting the shoe on the wrong foot, dear. My direction is outward toward widening and enriching my contacts with life, but you are obsessed with the slow death of your mother, as if you envied her for it. You hate what you call “my circle of Village hippies” because they’re intellectually vital, intensely alive, and dedicated to living, in here, and in here, and in here.
(She touched her forehead, her chest, and her abdomen with her three heres.)
Oh, and all this remarkably diversified vitality is about to explode here again tonight, is it, Horne?
The social climate, said Horne, is likely to be somewhat more animated than you’ll find things at Shadow Glade but then the only thing less animated than your mother’s is the social climate at your Sarah Lawrence bashes. Elphinstone, why don’t you skip this weekend at your mother’s and come to my little gathering here tonight and come with a different attitude than you brought to it before, I mean be sweet, natural, friendly, instead of charging the atmosphere with hostility and suspicion, and then I know they would understand you a little better and you would understand the excitement that I feel in contact with a group that has some kind of intellectual vitality going for them, and—
What you’re implying is that Sarah Lawrence graduates are inevitably and exclusively dim-witted?
I wasn’t thinking about Sarah Lawrence graduates, I am nothing to them and they are nothing to me. However, she continued, her voice gathering steam, I do feel it’s somewhat ludicrous to make a religion, a fucking mystique, out of having once attended that snobbish institution of smugness!
Well, Horne, if you must know the truth, said Elphinstone, some of the ladies were a bit disconcerted by your lallocropia.
My what?
Lallocropia is the psychiatric term for a compulsion to use shocking language, even on the least suitable occasions.
Shit, if I shocked the ladies—
r /> Horne stood up on this line, which was left incomplete because her movement was so abrupt that she spilled some coffee on the ivory-satin cover of the love seat.
Horne cried out wildly when this happened, releasing in her outcry an arsenal of tensions which had accumulated during this black beginning of August the Tenth, and, as if projected by the cry, she made like a bullet for the kitchen to grab a dishcloth and wet it at the faucet; then rushed back in to massage the coffee-stained spot on the elegant love seat with the wet cloth.
Oh, said Elphinstone in a tone more sorrowful than rancorous, I see now why this piece of furniture has been destroyed. You rub this ivory-satin cover, made out of my grandmother’s wedding gown, with a wet dishcloth whenever you spill something on it which you do with a very peculiar regularity because of hostility toward—
As a preliminary, yes! said Horne, having heard only the beginning of Elphinstone’s rueful indictment. Then, of course, I go over the spot with Miracle Cleanser.
What is Miracle Cleanser?
Miracle Cleanser, said Horne in several breathless gasps, her respiration disturbed by their tension and its explosion, is a marvelous product advertised by Johnny Carson on his “Tonight Show.”
I see you are mad, said Elphinstone. Well, I am going to send out this sofa to be covered with coffee-colored burlap.
Of course there’s not much I can do to protect my china and glassware from the havoc which I know is impending ce soir! The breakage of my Wedgwood and Haviland is a small price to pay for your cultural regeneration these past few months, if six months is a few! And I can’t see into the future, but if this place isn’t a shambles in—
Why don’t you put your goddamn Wedgwood and your Haviland in storage, who wants or needs your goddamn—
Horne, said Elphinstone with a warning vibration in her voice.
Horne replied with that scatological syllable which she used so often in conversations lately, and Elphinstone repeated her friend’s surname with even more emphasis.
Christ, Elphinstone, but I mean it. We are sharing a little apartment in which nearly all the space is pre-empted by family relics such as your Wedgwood and your crystal and your silver with your mother’s crest on it, everything’s mother’s or mother’s mother’s mother’s around here so that I feel like a squatter in your family plot in the boneyard, and oh, my God, the bookshelves! Imagine my embarrassment when doctors of letters and philosophy go up to check the books on those shelves and see nothing but all this genealogical crap and think it’s my choice of reading matter, Notable Southern Families Volume I, Notable Southern Families Volume II, Notable Southern Bullshit up to the ceiling and down to your Aubusson carpet, shelves and shelves and—
Horne, I believe you know that I am a professional consultant in genealogy and must have my reference books and that I have to work in this room!
Shit, I thought you had it all in your head by this time! Who buggered Governor Dinwiddie in the cranberry bushes, by the Potomac, which tribe scalped Mistress Elphinstone, the Cherokees or the Choctaws, at the—
There’s nothing to be ashamed of in a colonial heritage, Horne!
Well, your colonial heritage, Elphinstone, and your family relics have made this place untenable for me! I am going to check into the Chelsea Hotel for the weekend and you’ll hear from me later about where to contact me for a reimbursement of my half of the rent money on this Elphinstone sanctuary!
She heard Horne slam the door of the master bedroom and, pricking her ears, she could hear her defecting companion being very busy in there. There was much banging about for ten minutes or so before Horne left for her office and then Elphinstone got up off the ruined love seat and went into the master bedroom for a bit of reconnaissance. It was productive of something in the nature of reassurance. Elphinstone discovered that Horne had packed a few things in a helter-skelter fashion in her Val-pac, had broken the zipper on it, and had left out her toilet articles, even her toothbrush, and so Elphinstone was reasonably certain the half-packed Val-pac was only one of Horne’s little childish gestures.
At noon of August the Tenth, Elphinstone phoned the research department of the National journal of Social Commentary which employed Horne and she got Horne on the phone.
Both voices were sad and subdued, so subdued that each had to ask the other to repeat certain things that were said in the long and hesitant phone conversation between them. The conversation was gentle and almost elegiac in tone. Only one controversial topic was brought up, the matter of the polio shots. Elphinstone said. Dear, if it will make you feel better. I’ll go for a polio shot. There was a slight pause and a catch in Horne’s voice when she replied to this offer.
Dear, she said, you know the horror I have of poliomyelitis since it struck my first cousin Alfie who is still in the iron lung, just his head sticking out, wasted like a death’s head, dear, and his lost blue eyes, oh, my God, the look in them when he tries to smile at me, oh, my God, that look!
Both of them started to weep at this point in the conversation and were barely able to utter audible good-byes…
But at four o’clock that hot August afternoon there was a sudden change in Elphinstone’s mood. Having made an afternoon appointment with her analyst, she recounted with marvelous accuracy the whole morning talk with Horne.
When will you learn, he asked sadly, when a thing is washed up?
He rose from his chair behind the couch on which Elphinstone was stretched, holding a wad of Kleenex to her nostrils; he was terminating the session after only twenty-five minutes of it, thus cheating Elphinstone out of half she paid for it.
Gravely he held the door open for Elphinstone to go forth. She went sobbing into the hot afternoon. It was overcast but blazing.
Nothing, nothing, she thought. She meant she had nothing to do. But when she went home, an aggressive impulse seized her. She went into the master bedroom and completed Horne’s packing, very thoroughly, very quickly and neatly, and placed all four pieces of luggage by the bedroom door. Then she went to her own room, packed a zipper bag of weekend things, and cut out to Grand Central Station, taking a train to Shadow Glade where she intended to stay till Horne had taken the radical hint and evacuated the East Sixty-first Street premises for good.
When she arrived at Mama’s, Elphinstone found her suffering again from cardiac asthma, having another crisis with a nurse in attendance. She could feel nothing about it, except the usual shameful speculation about Mama’s last will and testament; would the estate go mostly to the married sister with three children or had Mama been fair about it and realized that Elphinstone was really the one who needed financial protection over the years to come, or would it all go (oh, God) to the Knowledgist Church and its missionary efforts in New Zealand, which had been Mama’s pet interest in recent years. Elphinstone was sickened by this base consideration in her heart, and when Mama’s attack of cardiac asthma subsided and Mama got out of bed and began to talk about the Knowledgist faith again, Elphinstone was relieved, and she suddenly told Mama that she thought she, Elphinstone, had better go back to New York, since she had left without letting Horne know that she was leaving, which was not a kind thing to do to such a nervous person as Horne.
I don’t understand this everlasting business of Horne, Horne, complained Mama. What the devil is Horne? I’ve heard nothing but Horne out of you for ten years running. Doesn’t this Horne have a Christian name to be called by you? Oh, my God, there’s something peculiar about it, I’ve always thought so. What’s it mean? I don’t know what to imagine!
Oh, Mama, there’s nothing for you to imagine, said Elphinstone. We are two unmarried professional women and unmarried professional women address each other by surnames. It’s a professional woman’s practice in Manhattan, that’s all there is to it. Mama.
Oh, said Mama, hmmm, I don’t know, well…
She gave Elphinstone a little darting glance but dropped the subject of Horne and asked the nurse in attendance to help her onto the potty.
/> Well, the old lady had pulled through another very serious attack of cardiac asthma and was now inclined to be comforted by little ministrations and also by the successful cheese soufflé which Elphinstone had prepared for their bedside supper.
Then Mama was further comforted and reassured by the doctor’s dismissal of the nurse in attendance.
The doctor must think I’m better, she observed to her daughter.
Elphinstone said, Yes, Mama, your face was blue when I got here but now it’s almost returned to a normal color.
Blue? said Mama.
Yes, Mama, almost purple. It’s a condition called cyanosis.
Oh, my God, Mama sighed, cyna—what did you call it?
Observing that her use of such clinical terminology had upset Mama again, Elphinstone made a number of more conventional remarks such as how becoming Mama’s little pink bed jacket looked on her now that her face had returned to a normal shade, and she reminded Mama that she had given Mama this bed jacket along with a pair of knitted booties and an embroidered cover for the hot-water bottle on Mama’s eighty-fifth birthday.
After a little silence she could not suppress the spoken recollection that Mama’s other daughter, the married one, Violet, had completely ignored Mama’s birthday, as had the grandchildren Charlie and Clem and Eunice.
But Mama was no longer attentive, her sedation had begun to work on her now, and the slow and comparatively placid rise and fall of her huge old bosom suggested to Elphinstone the swells and lapses of an ocean that was subsiding from the violence of a typhoon.
It’s wonderful how she keeps fighting off Mr. Black, said Elphinstone to herself. (Mr. Black was her private name for The Reaper.)
Lacey, said Elphinstone to her Mama’s housekeeper, has Mama received any visits from her lawyer lately?
The old housekeeper had prepared a toddy of hot buttered rum for Elphinstone and given her the schedule of morning trains to Manhattan.
Sipping the toddy, Elphinstone felt reassured about Mama’s old housekeeper. She’d sometimes suspected Lacey of having a sly intention of surviving Mama and so receiving some portion of Mama’s estate, but now, this midnight, it was clearly apparent to Elphinstone that the ancient housekeeper was really unlikely to last as long as Mama. She had asthma, too, as well as rheumatoid arthritis with calcium deposits in the spine so that she walked bent over like a bow, in fact her physical condition struck Elphinstone as being worse than Mama’s although she, Lacey, continued to work and move around with it, having that sort of animal tenacity to the habit of existence which Elphinstone was not quite certain that she respected either in Mama or in Mama’s old housekeeper.