Families and Survivors (2 page)

“Moonlight Serenade.”

Kate and John go right on talking as they dance.

Looking at them, Snubby and Richard giggle. Within their hearing Richard says, “Do you think we should double-break on those people?”

“Oh, heavens, no—why bother?” Snubby has a tinkly little laugh, tinsel on a Christmas tree. She is also more intelligent than most people know. One afternoon, finding themselves alone in the principal’s office, Louisa and Kate look up everyone’s I.Q., and Snubby’s is 135, which is hardly stupid. But she is Southern and smart enough to play it very dumb—a thing that Louisa refuses to do.

The dance is over; people clap.

Since the boys are too young to drive, various parents arrive in cars to take the couples home. There is Louisa’s mother, Caroline, in her Cadillac, to take Louisa home, and Burton and Kate and Richard. Louisa gets in front with her mother, the other three in back.

“Well, darling, how was the dance?” Pained, languid Caroline—it is years before Louisa sees the anguish behind her mother’s mask.

“Pretty much the same.”

“Well, I’m sure you were the two prettiest girls there.” (Can her mother mean this? Is she crazy—her too-tall wide-hipped daughter, whom mean whisperers name “built-for-birth”?)

“They were, Mrs. Calloway. I can assure you of that.” Richard has very Southern manners, even including the faintest irony, which almost no one hears (and which, later in his life, is totally wasted in the C.I.A.).

Separately the boys are let off first—Kate is to spend the night at Louisa’s house. What will she have to tell? Louisa listens in advance, imaginatively, as Kate tells her that she and John have fallen wildly in love, and they plan to elope to South Carolina, where you can get married at
fourteen (or is it Maryland?); that he took her behind the bleachers and kissed her and put his hands on her breasts, and they will go off in the woods and lie down together, in a cave of honeysuckle.

“Well, girls, here we are,” Caroline perfunctorily announces, in the driveway of their house.

Caroline and Jack have been having long after-dinner drinks on the side porch, in the warm leaf-stirred spring night. With Kenneth Mills—Dr. Mills—a family friend and also Jack’s psychiatrist. Now Caroline and the girls go around to the side of the house, to where Jack and Kenneth still are. Kenneth is a lean, withdrawn man, generally considered handsome. He is married to Betsy, whom he often leaves at home. Jack likes Betsy, she is just his type—but in small doses. They all greet each other.

Jack has a refresher of a drink; Kenneth drinks more slowly. Jack is in a rare mood of great affection for both his wife and his daughter. He is a complicated, contradictory man; his ill-understood and violent emotions often seem hurled at his head from space, rather than arriving from within. “Well, my lovely ladies,” he now asks, “how was the dance?”

“Fun,” says Kate, and her dark eyes shine up at him.

“Louisa, you do look pretty,” he says to his daughter. He has never said this before, and perhaps it is too late. “You liked the dance?”

Out of defensive habit she has to put him down. “If you like that sort of thing.” And she shrugs.

Rejected, he is demon-driven to tease her. “Well, I’ll bet that Snubby MacDonald enjoyed herself. When do I get to meet Snubby? She sounds like something more than okay.”

And Kenneth echoes, “Yes, when do we meet Snubby?” He laughs quietly.

Louisa’s heart freezes (as does Caroline’s—ridiculously: a fifteen-year-old girl?). “I have a feeling that this wasn’t exactly Snubby’s favorite evening,” says Louisa very snottily, with a curious look in Kenneth’s direction. (A challenge, but to what?)

“Oh, why not? I wish I’d been there; I’d have cheered her up,” Jack blusters desperately.

At that instant Caroline has a sudden (and accurate) and terrifying premonition: she sees that Louisa and Kenneth will fall in love; sometime, in a few years, Kenneth will make love to Louisa. Her heart turns colder. Yet how can she know this—how can she have this witch knowledge? Is it because she herself has a sort of “crush” on Kenneth? (“Crush,” her word of disdain for her own emotions.) She is frozen, sitting there on her porch, with her husband and daughter and friends, in the warm summer night.

“I guess we’ll go on up to bed,” Louisa tells her parents.

His pleasant mood dissolved (destroyed, and by his daughter!), Jack settles down to getting really drunk, to inveighing against his more abstract scapegoats: the Northern liberal press (
PM
), Mr. Roosevelt and especially Eleanor, the labor unions, Jews.

Caroline and Kenneth both are quiet.

Kate begins to talk as soon as they get up to Louisa’s room. They sit across from each other on the ruffled twin beds, removing shoes and clothing. Louisa is aware of a heavy warning in her stomach.

“You know, that John Jeffreys is really amazing,” says Kate. “I had no idea—”

“He’s cute.” This is a word Louisa almost never uses, and it is not at all right for John.

“Oh, well, cute. But he’s so intelligent. I mean he has a really original mind.”

“Oh, really?” Confused, Louisa realizes that this is not at all what she expected (or wanted) to hear.

“Well, yes. You won’t tell anyone? He was saying that he doesn’t want to go to college at all; he thinks it would be incredibly silly—a real waste of time, all that fraternity stuff.”

At her dressing table Louisa has begun to twist her hair into pin curls that are speared with bobby pins. All the girls at that time go through the ritual every night, and they worry about how it will be when they are married, what with bobby pins and all. “Well?” Louisa asks. She is thinking that so far John doesn’t sound exactly brilliant to her.

“You know what he really wants to do? You won’t tell anyone?”

“No. What?”

“He wants to join the Navy soon. Or maybe the merchant marine, and go all around the world. Don’t you think he looks eighteen?”

“Sure. But suppose we get into the war?”

“John doesn’t think we will.”

“God, I certainly do.” Louisa is rubbing Noxema into her flawless (and unappreciated) skin.

Kate’s magic lotion is Calomine, which gives her the look of a clown. “Well, he’s really fascinating to talk to,” she says.

Having been braced for high romance with glimmerings of sex, Louisa finds this intellectual enthusiasm almost unbearable. God, this is probably the way Kate talks about
her
. Why does she need another friend?

Heedless, Kate goes on: “I don’t see why boys can’t be friends with girls, do you? I mean without all that silly
stuff, sex and all that. John asked me to go for a walk with him tomorrow.”

“Oh, really?”

Kate and John Jeffreys walk all through that spring, through warm pine woods where pink or white dogwood suddenly flowered, past the small waterfall that tumbled over dark smooth rocks with anemones in the crevices—down the stream lined with thick caves of blossoming honeysuckle, down to the swollen creek. They walk and they talk about everything that has ever been in either of their minds: books they have read, music (one of the things that John would like to be is a musician in a band), God, their parents, their friends, school, the future, the meaning of life. They are friends, with none of that silly stuff.

And Louisa and Kate remain good friends, too, except that Kate understands that Louisa does not want to hear much about John. They see each other somewhat less, because of the time that John takes up with Kate. Left more to herself, Louisa writes more poetry; she does small intricate drawings of flowers.

Then, one hot night in May, John and Kate, who have never on purpose touched each other, meet in a kiss, and everything changes. They have been to the movies, and they walk home. The night sky is dark blue, and hung with huge dim clouds, and dim white shrubbery blooms beside the highway, smelling thin and sweet. John and Kate loiter, idly talking. Then, in a grove of flowering quince, at the edge of Kate’s yard, they stop—stop walking and talking, too—and they look at each other. Simultaneously they move toward each other, and their closed mouths softly meet, and they stay together for incredible moments.

Parting, they are speechless, out of breath. Their blood races.

John says, “I don’t want to sound silly or anything, but I like you very much.”

“John, I love you!”

“I love you, too.”

Another kiss. Kate feels her whole being focused in her mouth—nothing else of her exists, only her mouth that is pressed against John’s mouth.

After that they kiss a lot. On their walks they stop in a stand of pines, and kiss. Certain places along their roads become landmarks: here we stopped (and now stop) to kiss. Beside a grapevine swing, near the waterfall—at a blind bend on the road to Morgan’s Bend. (Later, when her heart is broken, Kate will go back to those places by herself, making desperate magic wishes.)

“Louisa, I really should tell you something important: John and I are madly in love with each other.”

“Oh, really?” But Louisa is interested; she sees mad love as a change for the better.

It is another hot night. The two girls are sitting on the edge of Louisa’s pool again, but this time they are wearing their bathing suits (The night they discovered “sex appeal” was the last time they went in without suits—but why?)

“When he kisses me—I just—I don’t know!” Kate exclaims, and she laughs a little breathlessly.

“Is that all you do, just kiss?”

“Well, yes. What do you mean?”

“Don’t you want to—you know—go all the way?” Lacking words, Louisa made this last ironic, and now they both laugh.

“God, I don’t know!” Kate gasps at what is almost a new idea.

Louisa goes away for the summer to a girls’ camp in New Hampshire, while Jack and Caroline take a cruise to Mexico.

The two girls write to each other often.

Kate to Louisa: “It’s been so hot, hot hot and hotter, and the town is empty and dusty, and I miss you! John is at Myrtle Beach with his parents and I have no one to talk to at all, or walk or anything. Damn!”

Louisa to Kate: “Camp is really boring this year. Everyone seems so young, but sailing is really quite a lot of fun.”

Kate: “John is back, thank God! I have been thinking about something you asked me last spring, but you probably don’t remember. And Louisa, yesterday some of the girls and I were talking and we decided to start a Sub-Deb Club. You know, have meetings and give parties and we can invite boys. And we want you to be a member. Guess who won’t be invited to join, you get one guess. Hint hint—her initials are S. MacD.”

Louisa: “Thank God, only two more weeks. Sub-Deb Club? Doesn’t that imply later being a deb? But okay, I’ll join. We’re all so bored here that some of us have put peroxide in our hair. Miss Welch is
furious.
”

Kate’s parents, Jane and Charles Flickinger, are frantically stylish people, originally from Milwaukee. They both have small incomes from sources that they do not care to mention (a brewery, some cornfields in Iowa). From time to time, Charles works as a designer, and Jane collects and refinishes antiques. Charles designed their remodeled house in Hilton, the old Hemenway house. Where there had been a
dank but not very deep cellar, he put in a “game room” that led out to a flagstone terrace. The bar is there, of course, and sometimes Jane and Charles entertain down there, with sophisticated after-dinner drinks made from dark liqueurs.

Kate keeps her record collection in that room, and some of her books. Sometimes on rainy or even unbearably hot afternoons (the game room has kept some of the cellar’s cool), Louisa and Kate spend long hours down there, leafing through Jane Flickinger’s old
New Yorker
s or
Vogue
s.

In the first days of her friendship with John Jeffreys, sometimes they, too, spend hours in that room, talking and listening to records. And after they kiss and fall in love, Kate imagines that they will spend even more time there, alone, dancing together in the private dark, kissing on the broad soft corduroy-covered sofa.

But after dancing for a while, slowly, pressed together (“Mood Indigo”), John pulls away from her, and he says, “Come on, how about a walk? We could go into Bowman’s for Cokes.”

“There’re Cokes upstairs in the icebox.”

“But it’s really pretty out. Come on.”

Then, on an August night when John and Kate had planned to go to the movies, there comes a crashing thunderstorm. Sheets of water flail against the windows, and Kate’s parents call from a party twenty miles away to say that they’re staying overnight.

“You’ll be all right, ducks?”

“Of course. Have a good time.”

John says, “Maybe I’d better go on home, then.”

“In this rain? God, are you crazy? Come on, let’s go down and put on some records.”

“In the Mood.”

“Tuxedo Junction.”

“Little Brown Jug.”

“Flying Home.”

John chooses these records; he puts them on, and they dance their own practiced, graceful jitterbug. Back and forth, toward and away from each other, twirling apart and then together again. But not very close together; the music is too fast for that. They clown around, burlesquing the steps and laughing a lot.

Then, “God!” Kate cries out. “I’m exhausted. Can’t we have something soothing now?” And she flops onto the broad sofa. She throws off her shoes (brown sandals) and draws up bare smooth brown legs beneath her full red-and-white checked skirt.

“Moonlight Serenade.”

John comes and sits beside her.

She lies back on the sofa. When John turns, he sees that her breasts have slipped sideways, so that the hard nipples point out. He leans down to her and they kiss—for the first time horizontal.

The kiss lasts and their bodies press together. Then Kate’s frantic whisper in his ear: “John, let’s take our clothes off and—do everything.”

He pulls back violently, roughly, away from her. “You’re crazy, you don’t know what you’re saying—”

“But I love you!”

“Love—you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

(Of course he is right: how can she know anything about the wild instincts and the stronger repressions in a fifteen-year-old small-town Southern white Protestant boy in 1941? She only knows that his dark brown eyes are beautiful, knows the tender back of his neck as a place to kiss, and her body knows that they want each other.)