Memoirs of Hecate County by Edmund Wilson

Author:Edmund Wilson [Wilson, Edmund]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2019-07-25T00:00:00+00:00

But then Imogen was upon me again like some creature of enchantment in a folk tale that appears to the hero three times.

It was the middle of June, and they had gone to the country; but she called me up one Saturday morning. She was in town, and I arranged to have lunch with her, putting off till an afternoon train a weekend I was to spend at Port Washington. At once the old excitement flickered. I walked over to Central Park and all the way down Fifth Avenue. The sky was a pale blue, and the Plaza reminded me of gaieties that I had known there when I was just out of college and the hotel itself still new. “I’ll miss you this summer,” she said. “The people are dull out there.” “What do you do?” “We do just the same things.” I felt that she did find her life empty, and that I had become at last an old friend, one of her so few real intimates to whom she could talk. “I’ve been learning to do flower arrangements, though. You know, the Japanese make an art of it, and I’ve been reading a book about it. You can arrange a single flower so that it looks just like a Japanese print. Dotty Scope and Edna and I have gone in for it in a serious way. We’re going to get them to have a contest of flower arrangements at the flower show this year!” Her intensity increased as she talked: it was so that she spent all her passion, and I suddenly perceived with a pang how unspeakably tragic her life had been, how it had all, like her back, grown crooked. Was she not perhaps the perfect example—such as one rarely met outside fiction—of the “great soul in a small destiny,” and had I not, perhaps, let her down?

We went for a drive in the Park in memory of the spring before, and she looked very pretty in a pink summer dress, and everything was soaked, through our drinks, with an other-worldly softness and color. “What are you going to do with your weekends?” she asked with a shade of slyness. “Take trips to Coney Island—Staten Island—Rockaway Beach.” “Who are you taking to Coney Island?” “Nobody: I’m going alone.” “All alone?”—she was thinking a minute. “Have you ever been to Rockaway?” “No.” “You’ll never go there but once…. You won’t go alone, though. You’ve got a girl.” “What makes you think so?” “I know you have.” “Who do you think she is?” “She’s somebody you don’t want people to meet—so how would I know who she is?” “You’re absolutely wrong about that”—I brushed it off with self-conscious lightness. I was jolted by her guessing so much, and shocked by the fear that she was right in her idea that I was ashamed of Anna.

She took occasion to tell me that Ralph had gone to Old Lyme to spend Sunday with his mother; and I felt that I could perhaps have induced her to stay over in town for dinner.

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