Many Mansions. Isabel Bolton
Did she not carry all the seasons in her breast? All the ages of man were hers; and if she liked to watch the great human comedy with an impersonal yet highly sensitive and inquisitive eye, that was certainly her prerogative. If she was always skipping out of her own skin into the skin of somebody else was it not her way of editing her own experience to which she’d gained at her age a perfect right? Innocent and innocuous she might appear as she sat eating her lunch or her dinner and generally engaged in saying to herself—“Oh, yes, my dear lady, my dear gentleman, you may not be aware of it, but I know practically everything there is to know about you.” It wasn’t that she gave herself up entirely to staring. She enjoyed her food enormously. Her luncheon or her dinner out was the great event around which she planned her entire day. But she hoped and prayed she would never resemble the positively ghoulish old ladies she often observed addressing their plates as though the only passion that still remained to them was the appeasing of their hunger. How their table manners, their bright and greedy eyes betrayed them! She ate, she hoped, with restraint and circumspection. If she sometimes allowed herself a cocktail or a small bottle of wine it was with the belief that it sharpened her perceptions. She liked to lay herself open to every breeze of insight and divination.
The old were in it as well as the young! Plenty of old ladies. They got about in the most gallant fashion—joined up in the macabre procession; birds of a peculiar feather. One saw them everywhere with their permanent waves, their little hats set on their heads at such rakish and ridiculous angles, their coats and shoes and handbags following the prevailing fashion, tottering in and out of shops and restaurants. How avid and excited they appeared as though they wished to let you know they had their own important engagements to meet like anybody else. Life seemed to jostle and push the poor old things around; pretty exposed they somehow were. The family offered them no shelter or asylum. If they had sons or daughters or great-nephews or grandchildren they did not share their homes and even if they had been invited to do so would the independent old things have accepted such an invitation? Where were they housed? How did they manage it all? The restaurants were full of them. What with the vitamins and the excitement, the movies, and the radio, the prevailing atmosphere of carnival and cocktail bar, the buffeting and the exposure didn’t seem to kill them off.
It was, she remembered, under the influence of a dry martini—sipping it alone in the Armenian place on Fourth Avenue that she had picked up poor Adam Stone. There he’d sat buried in his book, his sullen, rather beautiful face looking extremely self-conscious. And why not? For he was, she had discovered, perusing Dante’s Inferno. What a pity, she had thought, that she was not young and charming, for she could read Italian too and this might have been one of those daydreams in which she guessed the young man beguiled his lonely condition come delightfully to life. “I see you’re reading Dante,” she had said; and when he’d taken in the situation—her ancient face together with the dry martini—he’d been quite naturally as rude as possible. However, she’d persisted. She had her ways with young men; she was not without intelligence. They had entered into conversation. Every time they had met they had continued to converse. And now, although he would not for the world admit this was the case, she helped very substantially in mitigating the solitude that overtook him in his all too frequent girl-less intervals.
Poor Adam, she reflected, examining her tray to make sure the breakfast she had now prepared was properly assembled; she’d not seen him for several months—he’d as likely as not found himself another girl and more than probably moved to a new address.
It occurred to her as she carried the tray into the bedroom, seating herself at the desk, that she would not be able to tell Mr. Breckenridge where to get in touch with him in the event of her demise. To think of making a young man her heir whose address she did not even know. Dear me, dear me, the anonymity of people’s lives.
Anonymous was the word for everyone—anonymous. Why, the precious self was shattered, blown to bits a thousand times a day and it was actually the case that there was something of insolence, a kind of effrontery about it if anyone presumed to have an assured assertive self—opinions, a personality of one’s own. It was incumbent on us all to do so many turns and tricks in adapting to thoughts, ideas, events, that if one showed oneself incapable of this agility of heart and mind there was a very real danger of lapsing into indifference, lack of sympathy, imagination, as though the poor battered soul were ready to lie down and say I’m beaten, numbed, dead, finished. Listening to all the assorted information, the nerves supplied with the new, the necessary antennae, the soul destroyed by the vibrations; why, the wholesale, the unprecedented calamities of the world cried out to us, shouted aloud every minute of the day. Yet who among us could endure to listen?
It was too much, too much for anyone she said, thinking as she spoke of her poor Adam. Poor boy, he held out against it all so stubbornly. He was without any knowledge of love; he did not, it seemed to her, understand the meaning of pity. He simply held out against letting it get him down. Such wholesale calamity diminished, dwarfed his little private griefs—the personal grievances and tragedies to which she guessed he clung tenaciously. It was for this reason she imagined he was so obsessed with sex. Out of his curious affairs he got but little joy, unless you could account the strife, the bitter conflict of two egos in their uneasy and anonymous roles attempting to assert their own authority, a kind of cruel self-inflicted pleasure.
Yes, Adam clung to his dwarfed uneasy self. You might say it had burrowed down in him, gone underground and as a witness of this there was that novel she was so sure that he was writing—a queer backhanded method of reasserting, reestablishing his dignity, authority. Goodness, think of all the lonely anonymous men and women there were today attempting to do the same thing; why, the novels came off the presses as fast as leaves in autumn falling from the trees and a novel was no matter what its subject matter as authentic a way of telling the tale of self as any that could be thought out.
Hadn’t she, an old old woman sat down and tried for seven whole years to thrust into novelistic form the story of her life? And why, she’d like to ask herself had she when it was finished locked it up in that desk drawer and never had the nerve to look at it again? And why now did she have this strong desire to place it in the hands of Adam Stone? Vanity was certainly involved. Adam would have to revise many of his notions about her. She’d have to admit that the idea amused her. Moreover he would, she imagined, discover that it had literary merit. She somehow felt it had. He’d take it in all probability to a publisher and after she was gone it would doubtless see the light of day.
But beyond all this there was a deeper reason. Didn’t she long to convey to him more intimately than she’d been able to in conversation something that she had realized in their talks together he’d not only held out against but found completely phony—her capacity for reverence, wonder, of which there was in his own constitution not a trace.
Not a trace, she said, rising with some difficulty to her feet. And was it not about to be extinguished in the human heart? Consternation, though few people would be able to recognize that this was so, standing out as we all somehow did against it, had usurped its place.
We simply stood aghast, she thought, crossing the room to get the morning paper which she must read before settling down with her manuscript (yes she was now firmly resolved to read it from beginning to end). “An excellent day for such a resolution,” she said, opening the door, taking in the Times and returning with it to her desk.
Pouring herself a second cup of coffee she sat down and spread the paper on her lap. The headlines sprang at her—the nightmare world in which we lived—all these chimerical events through which we passed. “Impossible, impossible,” she cried—“it staggers the imagination.” But here in large black letters was the announcement—Truman Orders Hydrogen Bomb Built—a fact at the disposal of everyone capable of reading. Within a few hours it would be lodged in the hearts and minds of most of the inhabitants of earth—hundreds of millions of people would quail before it as she was quailing now.
But who could really comprehend the cryptic data at the core of it? The words were Greek to her as they would be to all but a meager handful of her fellow mortals—concepts of the mind, mathematical measurements, calculations of inconceivable complexity. They affected her in some odd way as though she were reading poetry; the syllables fell so sonorously upon the ear.
“Molecules