Families and Survivors

On the wide edge of a large kidney-shaped swimming pool sit two naked fourteen-year-old girls, Louisa Calloway and Kate Flickinger. It is a heavily hot and humid night in May, in Virginia. Unlit lamps are hung all about the pool; in the dark the water glistens, barely moving, luminous. Around the pool are flowering shrubs, all blurs of white dim blooms, and the air smells indistinctly sweet.

From the house, some distance away from the pool, come the sounds of an adult party at its peak, a full continuous roar in which separate voices are absorbed. Later the noise will become discordant, broken by loud dissonant shouts, a few feminine shrieks.

Louisa Calloway (it is her tobacco-rich father’s pool) stretches her legs out before her, then brings them back, bent, to her right side. She puts her arms behind her, hands flat, and arches her chest. Tiny nipples stand out, and long brown hair swings back. “Sex appeal!” she whispers loudly.

Then she bursts out laughing.

Kate laughs, too—in fact they are both almost hysterical; laughter pushes upward in their throats.

Kate lies down on her side, supporting herself on an elbow; she crosses her feet at the ankles and sticks out her chest. She has hard conical breasts. “Sex appeal!”

It is the funniest thing they have ever done, and they invent posture after posture. They choke on their own wit: the sight of their posed flesh makes them hilarious. Lana Turner! Ann Sheridan! Hedy! “Sex appeal!”

Finally, and funniest of all, from an extreme posture—she is almost doing a split—Louisa topples into the pool, and laughing Kate tumbles in, too, and still laughing they swim about, in the warm moonless dark.

Then Kate says, “Damn! What time do you think it is?”

“I’ll see.” Louisa swims over to where she left her watch, and peers at the dial. “Ten-thirty.”

“Damn! I haven’t done my history. The test tomorrow.”

They both climb out; they dry themselves on large towels that have been draped over the picnic chairs; they sort out their clothes from the pile on the table: bras, shirts, pants, shorts, sneakers.

“I suppose you know it all?” says Kate.

“Not really.”

“You’ll get an A anyway.”

They are walking on a path that winds between huge and ancient boxwood. They pass the stable that houses Jack Calloway’s two mares (Louisa hates to ride) and they come to a large and very manicured gravel parking area. Kate has left her bike beside the Calloway Cadillac. She picks it up and gets on.

“Well, see you tomorrow.”

Kate bikes off on the country clay road to her house, a
half-mile away, and Louisa opens the back door, entering through the kitchen. Since the party was “informal,” the maids have left, but the kitchen is stacked with dishes for their arrival in the morning. Louisa tiptoes (this is unnecessary) upstairs to her room, where, seated at her desk in the lamplight, she writes a poem. Then she draws a tiny illustration. She has done this every night for the past seven months.

Their friendship, Louisa’s and Kate’s, began the preceding fall.

“Some Yankees have moved into the old Hemenway place,” Jack Calloway announces one day at lunch to his wife and daughter. “From Chicago, named Flickinger.” Jack has blue-black Irish hair, blue eyes of steel.

“I believe I heard that rumor at the Altar Guild,” says mild Caroline, his wife, whose coloring is indistinct, she is all pale shades of brown.

“There’s a new girl—” Louisa begins, but she is silenced by her father, who was about to speak.

“Please don’t interrupt,” he says, not looking at his daughter. “Near neighbors—do you think we should pay them a call?” This last is ironic; for irony Jack uses an English accent.

“Do people still do that? Why not phone and ask them for a drink?”

Invited, the Flickingers come for a drink, bringing the daughter whom Louisa has seen in school.

Kate, the new girl, has beautiful dark red hair. She wears odd clothes—or, rather, markedly un-Southern clothes: pleated navy wool skirts, a polo coat. In that mild Southern climate (and because in the prewar period most of the families in town are relatively poor, except Louisa’s
family) the girls wear cotton dresses all winter, and when they do wear wool they choose (their mothers choose) pastels—pale pink or yellow sweaters, light blue spring coats. Louisa is interested in Kate. Although she is Southern (God knows, with those parents), Louisa feels herself an alien there.

“God, what a marvelous room!” says Kate, in her vehement (Yankee) way. “God, all those books! Oh, you’ve got Thomas Wolfe!”

“Yes.” Louisa is in fact so enraptured with Thomas Wolfe that she affects diffidence. “Do you like him?”

“God, he’s fantastic—absolutely marvelous. ‘Lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost—’ Doesn’t that make your skin crawl?”

“He’s very good,” Louisa says judiciously, feeling the cool crawl of those words on her skin as she speaks.

None of the other girls in town have read Thomas Wolfe, and almost on that basis the two girls become friends.

As their parents do; the grownups drink a lot and exchange stories of European travel. Watchful Caroline decides that Jane Flickinger is not at all Jack’s type: Jane is tall and dark, forthright, and Jack likes small, fluffy blondes. Caroline sighs: at last a safe friendship. (She is wrong.)

Kate and Louisa take walks in the woods that surround the town, through bright fall leaves, then over a light sprinkling of snow. “One winter in Illinois it was over six feet deep,” Kate tells her friend. “Oh, really?” This is Louisa’s standard response, but she is secretly impressed, and she passionately tries to imagine such a snow. In the spring they walk beside the swollen brown creek out to Morgan’s Bend, where a hillside has burst into pink, an explosion of rhododendron, among the pines. “God, it’s so beautiful!” Kate says.

Sometimes they talk about the other girls, who are
only interested in boys, and about the boys, who are stupid.

The most popular girl is Snubby MacDonald. She is small, with long blond curls.

“She’s so obvious,” says Kate. “Every time that Richard Trowbridge comes around.”

“Richard Trowbridge is one of the stupidest boys in town,” Louisa says. “I’ve always known that.”

“I
know.
God, sometimes he calls me up.”

“He
does
?”

“Oh, yes, wants to go to a movie or something. I always say I’m busy.”

“Oh, really?” Having regained her calm, Louisa is still impressed; most girls would have told about phone calls from Richard, who may have been stupid (later, when Louisa is in love with him, she finds that he is not stupid at all) but who is very good-looking, blond, with a slow, assured walk—and his parents are almost as rich as Louisa’s are.

Richard Trowbridge is a popular boy, but the most truly desirable boy, for whom best friends among the girls will confess a secret (and shared) yearning, is John Jeffreys. John is a darkly handsome, thin, elusive boy: a basketball star who gets good grades, who plays the piano at parties (sometimes, when he feels like it) and has a fantastic collection of records, but not the ordinary ones—Jimmy Lunceford, the Goodman Quintet, Bobby Hackett; Louis Armstrong (Louis who?). John likes Snubby MacDonald; sometimes he takes her to movies on Sunday afternoons, and the rumor is that they hold hands there. Snubby, like most Southern belles, is cautious rather than “fast.”

A dance. In the school gymnasium, a building of corrugated tin, called the Tin Can. The air is heavy with the smell of gardenias, of the girls’ flowery perfumes (Evening in
Paris is the favorite), and of everyone’s anxious sweat. The room is too hot, but only the chaperones notice that. A record dance: from a mammoth jukebox (Jack Calloway’s gift to the school, which is terribly embarrassing to his daughter—why couldn’t he just have given some books?) comes the trumpet of Artie Shaw. “Oh, when they begin, begin the beguine—.”

Louisa, in a pleated blue taffeta dress that her mother ordered from Best’s, in New York, is dancing with Burton Knowles, a very short boy with a prodigious I.Q., as high as hers. He admires her mind. Louisa admires nothing about Burton, but she laughs wildly at everything he says, in the hope that someone will see and will think she is having a marvelous time and cut in on her. This is a technique that observably works, among Southern girls at dances.

Kate is with Richard Trowbridge, who grins foolishly with joy at his slight possession of her. Kate in scarlet: startling,
vividly
visible everywhere. (What Southern girl would wear red to a dance, expecially a red-haired girl?)

John Jeffreys is too tall for Snubby MacDonald; sometimes her upturned face hits his stomach with her chin. But she is very pretty, in pink tulle. Instead of gardenias, sophisticated John has sent a single white camellia, which she has pinned behind one ear. Snubby always gets a rush; she has never been known to finish a dance with the boy she started out with.

Suddenly something (Richard? This is dubious) makes Kate laugh. In the middle of a fancy jitterbug routine — Richard is a good dancer; she is excellent—she stops and clutches her throat, laughing her full deep laugh. Everyone looks, smiling at her, in her scarlet silk dress. She is incredibly attractive.

Someone has cut in on Snubby, and John is standing alone as she is danced away. He looks at Kate, his eyes smiling and curious, and Louisa sees his look.

“Most people are so superficial, don’t you think?” Looking up to Louisa, jerking about on the dance floor, Burton sighs.

“Oh, really?”

The record ends. “In the Mood.” Really good dancers know, as Kate and Richard know, which coda is the final one. They stop, Kate’s laughter subsiding, and they stand together waiting for whatever comes next.

The Ink Spots: “Java Jive.”

John Jeffreys taps Richard on the shoulder. “Break, please?”

But instead of begining to dance he takes Kate’s hand and slowly leads her over to the bleachers at one side of the gym.

Sam Jackson breaks in on Louisa and Burton—another small bright boy, but at least he is funny. But she can’t see John and Kate any more. Thinking of them Louisa feels a sort of tingling anticipation that is not entirely pleasant.

Glen Miller: “Sunrise Serenade.”

That means that next will be “Moonlight Serenade,” which by tradition means Last Dance: Escort, No Break. That is the rule at these dances.

Toward the end of “Sunrise,” John leads Kate back to the floor. They seem to be having a serious conversation (about what?).

Snubby is dancing with Richard.

Burton cuts in on Louisa, to claim the last dance.