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A New Year for Hildy Mercer
by
Harry Buschman
I'm sure
you've heard it said that the first time you fall
in love you set a standard by which you measure all
the loves that may come after. I suspect it may be
true, at least it is in my case .... Hildy was the
first and only woman I shall ever love.
I am not a writer and it is beyond my power to
express the loss I feel sitting here between
Hildy's mother and brother staring at her closed
casket. I can't believe she is in there, a woman of
such talent and promise -- how can it be over?
The three of us sit here, each of us with a
personal and particular grief to bear. We hardly
know each other. We are not able to comfort each
other or give each other support. I look at them
.... her mother and her brother. They are strangers
to me. We loved her in different ways, and each of
us will mourn her differently. But Hildy -- Hildy
herself, is the reason we mourn together.
She just barely reached her potential. Her
startling success as a sculptress at the age of
twenty-five was as outstanding as it was
unexpected. She was undoubtedly the finest sculptor
to come out of the League in a generation, and her
first commission for the American Ballet Theater
would have kept her busy for years. It would have
established her as one of America's outstanding
artists.
She completed only two figures at the time of her
death, one of Andre Eglevsky and another of Irina
Baronova. They stand in the lobby of the State
Theater. I went there to see them again this
morning and it seemed I could see Hildy in her
plaster spotted smock, her fierce blue eyes intent
on the clay .... hear her voice talking to it as
though it were alive .... her strong hands molding
the clay into life. I felt as if I were a spectator
privileged to bear witness to the birth of a living
thing.
Her work began with rough charcoal sketches of the
dancers in rehearsal, from there to the small
plasticene models, and finally to the larger than
life clay original built on a wooden armature. It
was obvious she had studied her subjects well --
like Rodin, there were strange abnormalities of
form -- sometimes a shoulder twisted a bit too far
-- a hand slightly larger than it should have been.
It gave the figures a living quality, as though
they were in a process of development -- would
change if you looked away and be different when you
looked again.
There was no room in her life for personal
attachments. I accepted that gladly just to be with
her. I would break off whatever I was doing and
help her whenever I could. I guess I clung to the
hope that she would need me in time. Love was too
much to hope for, she was too committed to her
work. I could only stand aside and wait for her to
call me. She was resolutely and tirelessly
dedicated to the Ballet Project, it took all her
time, and at the end of the day there was nothing
left of her for me or anyone. She would collapse
exhausted on the little stool that stood by the
side of the clay bin and untie her jet black hair.
Running her fingers through it she would say, "Take
me home, Phil, there's nothing left." I would drive
her home and she would sleep beside me on the way.
It may be difficult for young people to understand.
This was a gentler time, a more romantic time. It
was common for love to last forever. "Making love"
is a phrase you rarely hear today, we back away
from it and call it "having sex," and to people
like me the act is cheapened in the translation.
The verbs are important. The difference between
'making' and 'having' is as wide as the chasm that
separates 'giving' and 'getting.' Perhaps that's
why her death is so painful to me -- I have no one
to give to any more.
Then "Yeasty" McNamara came along.
It wasn't like Hildy to become involved with a
woman like "Yeasty" McNamara. In the four years I
knew Hildy, we had kissed good night exactly three
times. Once after a concert at Carnegie Hall; once
when I arranged for the transfer of her bronzes
from the foundry to the State Theater; and that
final New Year's Eve when she told me about
"Yeasty."
I thought I'd surprise her. I arrived with a bottle
of Piper Heidsick to celebrate the renewal of her
commission with the American Ballet Theater. She
took the bottle from me and came out in the hall
for a moment. Then she told me she was spending the
New Year with "Yeasty."
"Not just New Year's Eve," she smiled, "I mean the
New Year." Then she brushed my cheek with hers and
said, "I never wanted to hurt you, Phil," and she
smiled an almost mischievous smile. "But that's the
way it is, Phil -- that's the way it has to be."
Through the half opened door I could see "Yeasty"
sitting on the sofa in a silk robe -- one I'd seen
Hildy wear before. When Hildy closed the door I
stood looking at it a long time. Then I turned and
walked unsteadily down the stairs to spend New
Year's Eve alone. I expected the break might come
eventually, but I didn't know it would hurt as much
as it did.
I sensed trouble the first night we met "Yeasty" at
Page's Diner. "Yeasty" got a job as a waitress
there after she dropped out of the League. She
studied magazine layout for a year and showed no
apparent talent for graphics. She was a thin,
intense little person with lizard-like eyes that
never seemed to look straight ahead. She kept her
pale blond hair tightly knotted in back like the
tail of a trotting horse. Somewhere in her second
year her teachers advised her to do something else
with her life and because of the friends she had
made at the League, she decided to work for a while
at Page's diner across the campus from the art
school.
Hildy graduated the year before "Yeasty" started,
so they never met at school. If they had, I'm sure
Hildy and I would never have been as close as we
were. All I know is that something very powerful,
very special, passed between them at the diner the
night we stopped there for coffee. It was something
that left me standing in the background like a
spectator without a ticket. It wouldn't have
surprised me if Hildy had asked me to leave. From
then on the excuses began .... "I can't see you
tomorrow, Balanchine wants to see the sketches ....
maybe Sunday. Oh, sorry Phil! Sunday's out too, I'm
taking my mother to Armonk."
When you love someone blindly, you go to extremes,
you do morbid things. I hated myself for the things
I did -- for checking on her. But I didn't care. I
had to know. I would stand in the shadows and wait
for "Yeasty" to come down the street when Hildy was
supposed to be seeing Balanchine or taking her
mother to Armonk. I grew to hate "Yeasty" with a
jealous passion -- hated the sight of her bouncing
ponytail and her lizard eyes. For a time I
seriously considered killing her.
I saw little of Hildy after that evening at the
diner, and the reason I brought the champagne on
New Year's Eve was for the past times and for her
contract renewal, not for the times to come. I
remember standing in the street and looking up at
the yellow lamp in her living room window. As I got
to my car the light went out. It was 11:30, not yet
New Year's Eve. At the time it seemed to be the end
of everything.
There has never been an end to everything ....
I had no idea "Yeasty" McNamara was married. What
had been a lover's rejection for me must have been
an overwhelming blow to her husband. That same New
Year's evening, as I watched from the street below,
he was there contemplating murder. As an infuriated
husband might kill his wife's lover, Peter McNamara
stood in the dark as I did and watched the light go
out in the living room window. After I left, he
climbed the stairs to Hildy's apartment and rang
her doorbell. When she answered the door he shot
and killed her. He left "Yeasty" untouched. Then he
walked to the phone and called the police. They
told me later they found him on the sofa, with his
head in his hands and "Yeasty" trying to console
him. A tragic way, indeed, to begin the new year.
She will be buried tomorrow, with the better part
of her life unlived. Her brother is too young to
realize what she might have achieved and what she
meant to me. To him she was only an older sister.
Her mother saw her as an unmarried daughter, an
unfinished family business. I ask myself how I
feel. To me it is as though the earth has given way
under my feet, and there is nothing to stand on
.... nothing at all. The three of us will always
share the loss of her -- but in different ways.
She will be buried tomorrow, Monday -- and Tuesday
is the first day of the trial. McNamara is offering
no defense, he is instead pleading temporary
insanity, for which the maximum sentence is twenty
years. Who knows? In ten years he could be free
again. I am not sure how I will feel in ten years
-- knowing he is free, but at the moment my mood is
black, and if he were free today he would not live
to see tomorrow.
I thought it best to write the preceding story as
though it was happening in the present, in that way
the reader might better judge me for what follows.
Peter McNamara was convicted and sentenced sixteen
years ago.
Time has moved on. Hildy's mother died of a stroke
three years after her death, and her brother, now
grown and married, works for an investment firm in
Chicago. I'm approaching middle age and by now I
should have gotten on with my life. A reasonable
man would have found closure and moved on to raise
a family of his own. The affair of Hildy Mercer,
tragic as it was, should be a part of my past. But
it isn't. The bronze figures of Eglevsky and
Baranova still stand in the lobby of the State
Theater -- I visit them at the close of every day,
and by looking at them I see her again. Every day I
repeat the promise I made to myself at the
sentencing of Peter McNamara sixteen years ago.
He will be released from Woodbourne Prison
tomorrow. Woodbourne Prison is a minimum
security facility 137 miles north of the city, a
little less than three hours -- I have driven the
route many times in the past sixteen years. I
know exactly where and what time of day the
parolees are released. I've seen prisoners emerge,
blinking in the sun, dressed in their second hand
suits, taking their first steps with the waiting
parole officer and sometimes a member of their
family. McNamara's wife will not be there, their
marriage was annulled years ago. There will only be
the three of us, Peter McNamara, the parole officer
and me.
Some years ago I bought a .38 caliber revolver, a
deadly looking thing in blued steel. I bought it
for the occasion of Peter McNamara's release. It's
not uncommon for an artist's agent to keep a
revolver in his desk, I have a spotless police
record and there was no problem getting a permit. I
loaded it for the first time this morning, I wanted
no mistakes at the last minute. It's lying ready,
next to me on the passenger seat and I've rolled
the passenger window down so nothing will be in the
way. It should be any moment now.
I wait less than ten minutes, the small door opens
and a beefy man steps out into the sun. He's a
parole officer I've seen before. He stuffs a manila
envelope in his brief case then holds the door open
to let Peter McNamara through.
My God! That can't be Peter McNamara. The man is
old enough to be my father. He supports himself
with an aluminum crutch under his arm and he blinks
in the sun as a man might do coming out of a dark
room. A dark gray suit, a world too large for him,
his neck too small for the collar of his shirt. His
tie is crudely knotted and pulled askew. He carries
a woolen cap in his hand and he puts it on hastily
to shield his eyes from the sun. But before he does
so, I can see he has no hair and his ears stick out
from his head like those of an animal. What has
happened to him? I thought he would look the same.
I glance at the gun beside me and I realize it is
useless. The man is already dead -- sixteen years
of prison has killed him.
The two men make their way slowly to a car parked
at the curb. The beefy man opens the door and helps
Peter in. I know my chance has come and gone -- but
I couldn't shoot a dead man. They drive off slowly
in the direction of the city. I follow for a while
until, out of the corner of my eye, I notice the
.38 caliber revolver still resting on the seat
beside me, so I pull over and cut the engine. I
pick up the gun and balance the dark deadly heft of
it in my hand -- it seems to be the answer to
everything. But I'm not sure if I remember what the
question was. Almost reluctantly I unload it and
put it back in the glove compartment.
What was I thinking of? Sixteen years has changed
everything! Neither of us, neither Peter McNamara
nor I are what we used to be. I lay my head back on
the seat and close my eyes, and I think of Hildy
one last time and I say to myself, "It's time Phil,
it's time. The play is over. The cast has all gone
home. It's time to close the book and live what's
left of the rest of your life. Even love has a
final page."
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