Of course she would choose the cocktail party. The gallery opening, now that she stopped to think about it, was no more than a commercial venture, an enticement to buyers and patrons. It would be fraudulent of her to attend when she’d no intention of buying a picture, and besides, she was drawn to cocktail parties. She was attracted, in fact, to parties of all kinds, adding them as an opportunity to possess, for a few hours at least, a life that was denser, more concentrated and more vigorous than the usual spun-out wastes of time that had to be scratched endlessly for substance. She could still wear her certain velvet skirt, but with a pretty red satin blouse she’d recently acquired.
On Wednesday, strangely, she received a third invitation—and it, too, was for Saturday evening. This time the invitation was handwritten, a rather charming note which she read through quickly three times. She was being invited to a small buffet supper. There would be only a dozen or so guests, it was explained. The author of a new biography would be there, and so would the subject of the biography who was, by chance, also a biographer. A particular balding computer scientist would be in attendance along with his wife, who was celebrated for her anti-nuclear stance and for her involvement in Navajo rugs. There would be a professor of history and also a professor of histology, as well as a person renowned for his love of Black Forest cakes and cheese pastries. There would be a famous character actor whose face was familiar, if not his name, and also the hairdresser who’d invented the Gidget cut and raised razor cuts to their present haute status.
Of course she could not say no. How much more congenial to go to a supper party than to peer at violent works of art and mutter, “Interesting, interesting,” and how much more rewarding than standing about with a drink and a salty canapé and trying to make conversation with a room full of strangers. Her green silk dress would be suitable, if not precisely perfect, and she could gamble safely enough on the fact that no one would have seen it before.
Thursday’s mail brought still another invitation, also unfortunately for Saturday evening. She smiled, remembering how her mother used to say, “It never rains but it pours.” The invitation, which was for a formal dinner party, was printed on fine paper, and there was a handwritten note at the bottom. “We do hope you can make it,” the note said. “Of course we know you by reputation and we’ve been looking forward to meeting you for years.”
It had been some time since she’d attended a formal dinner party, and she was flattered to be sent an invitation with a handwritten note at the bottom. It pleased her to imagine a large, vaulted dining room and parade of courses elegantly served, each with a different wine. The gleam of light through cut glass would sparkle on polished linen and on the faces of the luminaries gathered around the table. Her green silk, with perhaps the double strand of pearls, would be festive enough, but at the same time subdued and formal.
She wasn’t entirely surprised to look into her mailbox on Friday and see that she’d been sent yet another invitation. The paper was a heavy, creamy stock and came enclosed in a thick double envelope. There was to be a reception—a gala it was called—at the top of a large downtown hotel on Saturday evening. The guest of honor, she read, was to be herself.
She felt a lurch of happiness. Such an honor! But a moment later her euphoria gave way to panic, and when she sat down to collect herself, she discovered she was trembling not with excitement but with fear.
On Saturday she surveyed the five invitations which were arranged in a circle on her coffee table. These missives, so richly welcoming, persuading and honoring, had pleased her at first, then puzzled her. And now she felt for the first time directly threatened. Something or someone was conspiring to consume a portion of her life, of herself, in fact—entering her apartment and taking possession of her Saturday evening just as a thief might enter and carry off her stereo equipment or her lovely double rope of pearls or a deep slice of her dorsal flesh.
She decided to stay home instead with a cup of coffee and her adventitiously acquired copy of Mansfield Par. Already it was dark, and she switched on the small reading lamp by her chair. The shade of the lamp was made of a pale, ivory-yellow material, and the light that shone through it had the warm quality of very old gold.
It happened that people passing her window on their way to various parties and public gatherings that night were moved to see her, a woman sitting calmly in an arc of lamplight, turning over—one by one—the soft pages of a thick book. Clearly she was lost in what she was reading, for she never once glanced up. Her look of solitary containment and the oblique angle with which the light struck the left side of her face made her seem piercingly lovely. One of her hands, curved like a comma, lay on her lap; the other, slowly, thoughtfully, turned over the pages.
Those who passed by and saw her were seized by a twist of pain, which was really a kind of nostalgia for their childhood and for a simplified time when they, too, had been bonded to the books they read and to certain golden rooms which they remembered as being complete and as perfect as stage settings. They felt resentment, too, at the cold rain and the buffeting wind and the price of taxis and the hostility of their hosts. They felt embarrassed by their own small, proffered utterances and by the expanded social rubric they had come to inhabit.
As they moved to and fro in large, brightly-lit rooms, so high up in glittering towers that they felt they were clinging to the sides of cliffs, their feet began to ache and exhaustion overcame them. Soon it was past midnight, no longer the same day, but the next and the next. New widths of time clamored to be filled, though something it seemed, some image of possibility, begged to be remembered.
Outside, the wind blew and blew. The sky slipped sideways, turning first yellow, then a mournful, treasonous purple, as though time itself was drowning in a waterfall of shame.
Taking the Train
GWENETH MCGOWAN, the Disraeli scholar, was awarded the Saul Appeldorf Medal at a gala reception. She carried it home and put it in a dresser drawer under a pile of underwear. Her morale was high. Recognition in the academic world seemed assured, her rent was paid up for six months and, in addition, she had a number of good friends, some deserving of her friendship, and some not.
“Dear Gweneth,” came a letter from Calgary, Alberta where one of the deserving friends lived. “So! Now you’re famous! Well, well. Why not treat yourself to a visit—come and see me.”
Within a week Gweneth was on a plane. Northie McCord, her friend and former roommate at school, met her at the airport with a bouquet of daisies. “Ah, daisies,” Gweneth said without amazement. Memory was the first bag they reached into on their infrequent meetings, and Northie’s offering of daisies was meant to dislodge and recover images of her wedding day when bride and bridesmaids, Gweneth included, had worn crowns of daisies on their heads. They also had worn peace buttons pinned to their smooth silk bodices.
“Just who the hell did we think we were?” Northie asked Gweneth later that day when the two of them were settled on canvas chairs in Northie’s untidy backyard. “Who exactly did we think we were performing for?”
She passed Gweneth what was left of a joint. “I don’t know about you, but I think I was trying to say I hadn’t capitulated just because I was marrying a chemical engineer. What I should have said was that I was damn well ready to capitulate.”
“We were tired,” said Gweneth, who had no recollection of being tired, but wasn’t ready yet to talk about Northie’s husband, who had been mauled to death by a grizzly in a provincial park the year before. (According to a news report in an eastern paper, the attack had been “provoked” by the ham sandwich he carried in the pocket of his jacket; such an innocent act, Gweneth had thought at the time, to carry a ham sandwich.)
“A remarkable sky”, she said to Northie, and the two of them fell into a loop of silence that only very old friends can enter easily.
There had been a period of several years when they’d been out of touch. In those years Gweneth was working on a Ph.D. and, for the most part, was withou
t money. Being without money made her wayward, and waywardness permitted her a series of small abdications: letters, phone calls, reunions—they all went by the board. Sometimes, too, she lacked courage. “I don’t have anything to show!” she confessed to an early lover, not sure whether she meant silverware or children or that hard lacquer she thought of as happiness. Later, she came to see happiness as something chancy and unreliable, a flash of light beating at the edge of a human eye or a thin piece of glass to be carried secretly inside her head.
Northie McCord’s fifteen-year-old daughter, also named Gweneth but called Gwen for short, was excited by Gweneth’s visit and insisted on making supper for the three of them. On a card table on the back porch she set out cold sliced beef, potato salad from a carton and glasses of iced tea.
Along with the cold beef there was a ceramic pot of fiery mustard. “Superb,” Gweneth pronounced as her mouth filled with splendid heat. “Whenever did you get such wonderful stuff?”
Northie and her daughter exchanged sly smiles. “It’s our own,” Northie said. “Didn’t you notice those mustard plants in the yard?”
Gweneth helped herself to more beef and mustard. “God forgive me, I thought it was weeds.” She felt for a moment that rare sensation of stepping outside her body and entering a narrative that belonged not to any one of them, but that was shared equally.
After supper, Gwen washed the dishes and Northie led Gweneth over to the cedar fence where there was a double row of mustard plants. There are two types, Northie explained, black and white, and the best mustard in the world is made by combining the two.
“I didn’t know what to do with myself last winter,” Northie said, “but I remembered how you read right through Carthusian-to-Crockroft when you were seventeen. What was it?—volume four of the encyclopedia?”
“Volume five. If I remember, I was troubled by my virginity and looked up coitus one day, and then just buried myself in all those lovely C’s. That’s how I discovered John Clare and that led me to the nineteenth century and that led to Disraeli.”
“I settled down with volume fifteen,” Northie said, “maybe because Gwen was fifteen. Maximinus-to-Naples, that’s what volume fifteen is called. Maximinus, in case you’re wondering, was one of the Roman emperors. About February I got to mustard. According to the encyclopedia, mustard grows plentifully in Montana, and so I thought, well, why not in Alberta? I had a devil of a time getting the right seedlings. You can cook the greens, too, if you rinse them twice, but I thought I’d better not inflict that on you.”
She bent down to pick a leaf for Gweneth, and when she stood up her eyes were filled with tears. “It’s a diversion,” she said. “It’s something to show people when they drop in.”
“You are,” Gweneth said loudly, hugging her, “the most successful mustard farmer I’ve ever met.”
The girl, Gwen, flushed from the heat of the kitchen, carried two cups of coffee into the yard. “For McCord and McGowan,” she said, and dropped a mock curtsy.
“We sound like sweater manufacturers.”
“Or quality chocolates.”
The two women moved the lawn chairs into a last remaining patch of sun and sat talking about the past, about what they had been like as girls of sixteen and seventeen. They’d done this before, but it seemed to Gweneth that they’d never done it so thoroughly—it was as though they were obliged, for the sake of the future, to rescue every moment. She remembered what one of her lovers had said: “What is the point of nostalgia if not to wring memory dry.”
The evening grew chilly. A breeze came up, and Gweneth swore she could smell mustard in the air. Gwen brought them more coffee, a cardigan for her mother and a lacy wool shawl for Gweneth. “She’s playing handmaiden tonight,” Northie said when the girl had gone back into the house to her Bruce Springsteen records. “She’s got very maternal since Mac was killed. She thinks this is what I need, to sit and talk with an old friend.”
Gweneth asked. “And is it what you need?”
“Yes,” Northie said. “But I don’t need to talk about it. You don’t want that, and I can’t quite manage it.”
“It isn’t a question of my wanting it or not wanting it. If you want to talk, well, that’s—”
“That’s what you came for?”
“I was going to say that, but it’s not true, of course. I don’t think comfort is what you and I are able to do for each other. It wasn’t in our syllabus, as the saying goes.”
“The night before Mac left for that hiking trip we sat out here. Just like tonight. Except, the most extraordinary thing happened. There was a display of northern lights—have you ever seen the northern lights?”
Gweneth said no, glad she could say no.
“It’s rather rare just here. Normally, you have to be away from the city because the general illumination interferes. But something was just right with the atmosphere that night, and it was a dazzling show. I hadn’t imagined it would be so precisely outlined as it’s shown in pictures—those folded curtains dragging down from the heavens. Mac said—I remember his exact words—he said all we needed was a celestial choir. Straight out of MGM, corny as hell. You know I’m not one for omens and portents, but it’s given me something to hang on to. Along with Maximinus and mustard. And Gwen, of course.”
“You’re lucky to have a child. That’s something I’m sorry I missed.” Gweneth said this even though it wasn’t true. (The lie bothered her not at all since she knew it did people good to be fulsomely envied.) She had never wished for a child. Once she said to a man she was living with, “The saddest thing in the world is a woman who thinks with her womb.”
“No,” he said, “the saddest thing in the world is an artist whose work speaks to no one.” This man, an abstract painter by profession, was always watering down her observations, and eventually it drove her straight into the arms of a Guggenheim Fellowship.
When her thesis was published, she liked to pat its brown covers and say, “Hi there, baby.” When she was interviewed, shaking, on the BBC—the Third Programme yet—she found herself talking about her research like a mother, and indulging in a mother’s fond praising, defensive and faultfinding by turn. And once she sat in the Reading Room of the British Museum and examined a tiny nineteenth-century book of essays written by an obscure country clergyman. The binding had long since deteriorated, and the pages had been tied together by someone—who?—when?—with a piece of ribbon. Slowly, respectfully, she’d tried to undo the knot, but the ribbon was so stiff with age that it crumbled on the table into a kind of white powder. She had examined the severed pages with more tenderness and sense of privilege than she’d ever felt toward anything in her life, and it occurred to her that perhaps this is what mothers feel for the secret lives of their children. Surely—she glanced at Northie—such moments keep people from flying into pieces.
“I didn’t know you ever wanted children,” Northie said after a while. “I mean, you never said.”
They sat in silence a little longer until they began to shiver with cold.
When they came into the house, they found Gwen sitting on the living-room floor listening to a Bruce Springsteen record, a long moaning song. She held up the record sleeve, which said: “New York City Serenade.”
“It’s coming,” she told the two of them as they stood in the doorway. “The best part is coming.” She shut her eyes and held up a finger, just as the song changed abruptly from gravel-weighted melody to anguished wail and the repeated phrase, “ ‘She won’t take the train, she won’t take the train.’“ Listening, her face went luminous with sorrow and her lips mouthed the tragic words. “ ‘No, she won’t take the train, no, she won’t take the train.’“
Who won’t take the train? Gweneth wanted to demand roughly. Why not? And did it matter? The mystery was that a phrase so rich with denial could enthrall a young girl.
Gweneth felt an impulse to rescue her with logic, with exuberance, but stopped just in time. An image came into her mind, an old, trad
itional image of women who, after a meal, will take a tablecloth, shake it free of crumbs and put it away, each taking a corner, folding it once, then twice, then again. They never hesitate, these women, moving in and out, in and out, as skilled and graceful as dancers. And now, Gweneth thought: here we are, the three of us, holding on to this wailing rag-tag of music for all we’re worth, and to something else that we can’t put a name to, but don’t dare drop.
Home
IT WAS SUMMER, the middle of July, the middle of this century, and in the city of Toronto 100 people were boarding an airplane.
“Right this way,” the lipsticked stewardess cried. “Can I get you a pillow? A blanket?”
It was a fine evening, and they climbed aboard with a lightsome step, even those who were no longer young. The plane was on its way to London, England, and since this was before the era of jet aircraft, a transatlantic flight meant twelve hours in the air. Ed Dover, a man in his mid-fifties who worked for the Post Office, had cashed in his war bonds so that he and his wife, Barbara, could go back to England for a twenty-one-day visit. It was for Barbara’s sake they were going; the doctor had advised it. For two years she had suffered from depression, forever talking about England and the village near Braintree where she had grown up and where her parents still lived. At home in Toronto she sat all day in dark corners of the house, helplessly weeping; there was dust everywhere, and the little back garden where rhubarb and raspberries had thrived was overtaken by weeds.