Elizabeth Bishop - Prose

Mr. Hearn was a tall, very heavy, handsome woman, about thirty years old, named Rachel, with black horn-rimmed glasses, and a black mole on one cheek. Rachel and I were somewhat cramped in our quarters. She smoked furiously all the time, and I smoked moderately, and we were not allowed to keep our door open because of the poor transient typists, who were not allowed to smoke and might see us and go on strike, or report us to the nearest fire station. What with the rain and fog and snow outside and the smoke inside, we lived in a suffocating, woolly gray isolation, as if in a cocoon. It smelled like a day coach at the end of a long train trip. We worked back to back, but we had swivel chairs and spent quite a bit of our time swung around to each other, with our knees almost bumping, the two cigarettes under each other’s nose, talking.

At first she was horrid to me. Again in my innocence I didn’t realize it was, of course, because of my Vassar stigmata and my literary career, but her manner soon improved and we even got to like each other, moderately. Rachel did most of the talking. She had a great deal to say; she wanted to correct all the mistakes in my education and, as so many people did in those days, she wanted to get me to join the Party. In order to avoid making the trip to headquarters with her, to get my “card,” something we could have done easily during any lunch hour, once I’d put an end to my nonsense and made the decision, I told her I was an anarchist. But it didn’t help much. In spite of my principles, I found myself cornered into defending Berkman’s attempt to assassinate Andrew Carnegie’s partner, Henry Frick, and after that, I spent evenings at the Forty-second Street Library taking out books under “ An, ” in desperate attempts to shut Rachel up. For a while I was in touch with an anarchist organization (they are hard to locate, I found) in New Jersey, and received pamphlets from them, and invitations to meetings, every day in my mail.

Sometimes we went out to lunch together at a mammoth Stewart’s Cafeteria. I liked cafeterias well enough, but they afflict one with indecision: what to eat, what table to sit at, what chair at the table, whether to remove the food from the tray or eat it on the tray, where to put the tray, whether to take off one’s coat or keep it on, whether to abandon everything to one’s fellow diners, and go for the forgotten glass of water, or to lug it all along. But Rachel swept me ahead of her, like a leaf from the enchanter fleeing, toward the sandwich counter. The variety of sandwiches that could be made to order like lightning was staggering, and she always ate three: lox and cream cheese on a bun, corned beef and pickle relish on rye, pastrami and mustard on something-or-other. She shouted her order. It didn’t matter much, I found, after a few days of trying to state my three terms loudly and clearly; the sandwiches all tasted alike. I began settling for large, quite unreal baked apples and coffee. Rachel, with her three sandwiches and three cups of black coffee simultaneously, and I would seat ourselves in our wet raincoats and galoshes, our lunches overlapping between us, and she would harangue me about literature.

She never attempted politics at lunch, I don’t know why. She had read a lot and had what I, the English major, condescendingly considered rather pathetic taste. She liked big books, with lots of ego and emotion in them, and Whitman was her favorite poet. She liked the translations of Merezhkovski, all of Thomas Wolfe that had then appeared, all of Theodore Dreiser, the Studs Lonigan series of James Farrell, and best of all she liked Vardis Fisher. She almost knew by heart his entire works to date. A feeling of nightmare comes over me as I remember those luncheons: the food; the wet, gritty floor under my hot feet; the wet, feeding, roaring crowd of people beneath the neon lights; and Rachel’s inexorable shout across the table, telling me every detail of Vardis Fisher’s endless and harrowing autobiography. She may have worked in some details from her own, I’m not sure; I made up my mind then never to read the books, which she offered to loan me, and I never have. I remember her quoting the line and a half from “Modern Love” from which Fisher had taken three titles in a row: “ In tragic life, God wot, / No villain need be! Passions spin the plot…” and my wondering dazedly in all the hubbub why he had neglected the possibilities of “God wot,” or if he’d still get around to it. I had recently come from a line analysis of The Waste Land, and this bit of literary collage failed to impress me.

“Realism” and only “realism” impressed her. But if I tried to imply, in my old classroom manner, that there was “realism” and “realism,” or ask her what she meant by “realism,” she would glare at me savagely, her eyes glittering under Stewart’s lighting fixtures, and silently stretch her large mouth over the bulging tiers of a sandwich. Her mole moved up and down as she chewed. At first I was afraid of those slap-like glares, but I grew used to them. And when one day, back in our office, she asked me to read one of her sentences to see if the grammar was right, I knew that she had begun to like me in spite of my bourgeois decadence and an ignorance of reality that took refuge in the childishness of anarchism. I also knew she had already sensed something fishy about my alleged political views.

Overbearing, dishonest, unattractive, proud of being “tough,” touchy, insensitive, yet capable of being kind or amused when anything penetrated, Rachel was something new to me. She had one rare trait that kept me interested: she never spoke of herself at all. Her salary was twenty-five dollars a week. Her clothes were shabby, even for Stewart’s in those days, and dirty as well. The only thing I learned about her was that she had a sister in a state tuberculosis sanatorium whom she went to see once a month, but whom she didn’t particularly like; the reason seemed to be because she was sick, and therefore “no good.” Rachel herself had tremendous strength and I soon realized that she inspired fear, almost physical fear, in everyone at the so-called school, including President Black. I also soon realized that she was the entire brains of the place, and afterwards I even suspected that in her power and duplicity perhaps it was she who really owned it, and was using Mr. Black as a front. Probably not, but I never knew the truth about anything that went on there.

Her cigarettes were stolen for her somewhere by a “man” she knew — how, or who the man was, I never discovered. From time to time other objects appeared — a new bag, a fountain pen, a lighter — from the same source or perhaps a different “man,” but she never spoke of love or romance, except Vardis Fisher’s. She should have hated me; my constant gentle acquiescence or hesitant corrections must have been hard to take; but I don’t think she did. I think we felt sorry for each other. I think she felt that I was one of the doomed, enjoying my little grasshopper existence, my “sense of humor,” my “culture,” while I could, and that perhaps at some not very future date, when the chips were down, she might even put in a good word for me if she felt like it. I think that later she may well have become a great business success — probably a shady business, like the writing school, but on a much larger scale. She seemed drawn toward the dark and crooked, as if, since she believed that people were forced into being underhanded by economic circumstances in the first place, it would have been dishonest of her not to be dishonest. “Property is theft” was one of her favorite sayings.

Poor Rachel! I often disliked her; she gave me a frisson, and yet at the same time I liked her, and I certainly couldn’t help listening to every word she said. For several weeks she was my own private Columbus Circle orator. Her lack of a “past,” of any definable setting at all, the impression she gave of power and of something biding its time, even if it was false or silly, fascinated me. Talking with her was like holding a snapshot negative up to the light and wondering how its murks and transparencies were actually going to develop.