Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [111]
An elderly waiter appeared out of the darkness, like a fish rising out of the depths of an aquarium, and offered us champagne from a silver tray. The flutes were green and shaped like the calla lilies.
There was a buzz among the guests, and they parted for a small, slim, elderly woman with imperious features and an aura of energy. She was wearing one of the most extraordinary dresses I had ever seen, a floor-length, skintight, high-necked garment of black velvet, rather like that worn by Jane Avril in Toulouse-Lautrec’s famous poster, around which curled embroidered calla lilies, the stem of one of them curling around her slender neck like a noose. Her complexion was not just pale, it was white, like that of Pierrot, against which she had slashed, with reckless abandon, scarlet lipstick and much eye shadow. This, clearly, was our hostess. My friend introduced himself and explained who I was, at which Hurst fixed her gaze on me intently. Did she understand, she asked, that I was a book publisher? Modestly, I assented. Her voice was penetrating, but despite her curious costume there was nothing particularly formidable about it. If one had heard it on the subway, one would not have thought twice about it. It electrified the other guests, however, who seemed to have been brought back to life by simply hearing Fannie Hurst speak. Hurst put her arm in mine and led me through her living room, introducing me to a few of her friends, who looked very jealous indeed that she had singled me out for contact.
Would I like to see the rest of the apartment? she asked. I was dying to, of course—who could resist the offer? Hurst took me into the dining room, where a lavish buffet was laid out on a rough-hewn table, like that in a monastery. The food was displayed on elegant silver platters, a presentation spoiled only by the presence of a bottle of ketchup. The dining-room chairs looked as if they might have been designed by or for trolls or dwarfs. And indeed, the whole room itself was like something out of The Lord of the Rings: narrow, windowless, and very low ceilinged, the walls covered in dark, carved wainscoting, such illumination as there was coming entirely from candles. At the table sat three elderly women, one of them wearing what appeared to be a velvet, hooded cape. Hurst ignored them and drew me back through the living room to a stairway that was uncommonly narrow and steep and lit by elaborate lanterns clenched in fists at the end of muscular, patinated bronze arms fixed at intervals along the wall. I could not help staring at them. “A present from Mr. Hearst,” she explained, as we ducked through a low doorway into a gloomy passage.
“I’m only showing you this because you’re a publisher,” Hurst said enigmatically. Now that I was alone with her in the dark, I was beginning to feel sorry that I had accepted the house tour. The atmosphere was certainly sepulchral downstairs, but here it was thoroughly eerie. I was to experience much the same feeling of claustrophobia and apprehension many years later when, on a visit to Egypt, I climbed the steep, narrow passageway inside the pyramid of Cheops to visit his burial chamber. Here, Hurst’s presence, pressed up against me in the dark, was strangely disconcerting. Her perfume may have had something to do with it. It carried a certain odor of calla lily—everything in the house did—but it was at the same time sweet and sharp, so that it brought tears to one’s eyes.
We groped our way to the end of the passageway, where Hurst threw open an ironbound oak door that could have held off a determined attack