United Nations

The United Nations is a recurring setting and image in Esther Greenwood’s New York experience, first glimpsed from a hotel window and later visited with Constantin. Its importance lies less in institutional detail than in the contrasts it gathers: the glittering city viewed at a distance, an intimate moment of apparent happiness, and the silent, multilingual proceedings that leave Esther measuring herself against other people’s competence.## The United Nations as a city landmark From her hotel room, Esther looks toward downtown and sees the United Nations balanced in the dark like a green honeycomb. Red and white traffic lights move along the drive, and bridges glitter beyond it, though she does not know their names. The view is sharply framed by the room: the windows cannot be opened far enough to lean out, and Esther has to stand at the window’s left side and press her cheek to the woodwork to see the city. The building is present, but not accessible in any meaningful sense; it hangs in the window like part of a flat, glittering picture.

The city’s apparent brightness does not break through Esther’s isolation. She hears none of the noise she knows must be coming from the cars, the people in lit buildings, and the river. She describes the silence as her own, and the United Nations is one element in a view that seems to exist without reaching her. The landmark thus introduces a distance that the later visit will briefly seem to overcome, before the silence returns in a more inward form.## Constantin’s invitation and the visit Esther’s connection to the United Nations begins socially, through Constantin, a simultaneous interpreter who is trying to arrange a meeting. He asks whether she would like to see the United Nations that afternoon. Esther replies that she can already see it, referring to the view from her window, and laughs in a way she calls hysterical. Her answer makes the gap between seeing the building and entering its world explicit; Constantin is briefly nonplussed, but the outing takes place later.

Constantin drives Esther there in an old green convertible with cracked but comfortable brown leather seats and the top down. As they travel through the open sun, he takes her hand and squeezes it. Esther feels happier than she has been since she was about nine, when she ran along hot white beaches with her father, who died when she was young. The encounter gives the trip an intimate, personal charge before the institution itself comes into view. It also makes Esther’s memory of childhood happiness part of the scene: the present moment is measured against a past she experiences as the last time she was purely happy.## Inside the assembly hall In a hushed, plush auditorium at the United Nations, Esther and Constantin sit beside a stern Russian woman interpreter, dressed in a double-breasted gray suit and wearing no makeup. The interpreter rapidly delivers idioms in a language Esther cannot understand. Constantin explains that Russian idioms are especially difficult because they do not correspond to English idioms. The scene places skilled language work in front of Esther as a visible, audible measure of expertise: Constantin can interpret and play tennis, while the interpreter commands a stream of expressions that remain inaccessible to Esther.

Esther wishes she could crawl into the Russian woman’s place and spend her life speaking one idiom after another. She doubts this would make her happier, but imagines that it would provide one more small unit of efficiency among many. The wish is not simply an attraction to languages. In the auditorium, proficiency appears as something she can count and compare, and she begins adding up what she cannot do. She lists cooking, dancing, singing, balancing, riding a horse, skiing, and speaking German, reading Hebrew, or writing Chinese; she also does not know where most of the older, less familiar countries represented by the delegates lie on a map. Some of these absences have material circumstances: horse riding and skiing were the two activities she most wanted to learn, but they cost too much.

The delegates and interpreters then seem to recede. Esther sees their mouths moving without hearing them, as if they are aboard a departing ship and leaving her in a huge silence. The moment transforms the auditorium from a place of international exchange into an image of separation. Esther feels inadequate there, between Constantin’s practiced abilities and the interpreter’s command of language, and concludes that she had been inadequate all along without recognizing it. Her achievements in scholarships and prizes, once a reliable measure of success, now seem to belong to an era that is ending.## Narrative significance The United Nations scene connects Esther’s private crisis to a public spectacle of specialized knowledge. The multilingual assembly, its labeled microphones, and the interpreter’s rapid speech represent forms of competence she can observe but cannot enter. Esther’s response is to convert the scene into a personal inventory of deficiencies; the institution becomes a setting in which comparison intensifies rather than a source of belonging.

That shift is set against the earlier ride with Constantin. His hand in hers briefly restores a happiness tied to childhood and her father, but inside the auditorium the speakers move away and she is left with silence. The sequence therefore does not present the visit as a simple escape from Esther’s isolation: closeness and estrangement occur within the same outing. The United Nations matters in the narrative as the place where the promise of connection—through Constantin, interpretation, and an assembly of people speaking—gives way to Esther’s recognition that her familiar rewards can no longer reassure her.