In the Beauty of the Lilies (29 page)

“Really? I thought we were fighting it because of Pearl Harbor.”

“The Jews could have stopped Pearl Harbor. They wanted the war because it’s good for the banks.”

She was sorry she had moved down to sit next to him. She could feel from far away her mother beginning to worry. The wet brush strokes in the sky were getting thicker and darker. It always made her excited when it rained, as if God was touching her somehow. Essie thought of her little room’s walls covered with stars’ faces and stars’ signatures and a taste came into her mouth of such coppery happiness that she wanted to punch and pinch thick-witted Benjy.

He kept staring toward the blurred horizon of low blue hills way beyond the hardball diamond. There was a round green water tank like a visiting spaceship from Mars, and the underside of the clouds trailed dark travelling wisps. Unexpectedly
Benjy said, “In a couple more years I’ll have to go fight in it and get killed, probably.”

“Oh, Benjy,” she said, sounding a bit in her own ears like Bette Davis being Southern, “of course you won’t. It’ll be all over by that time! Already this year the Germans are surrendering all over the place—Russia, Africa.”

“Yeah, but then there’s the Japanese. They fight to the death, every one. They’re crazy little monkeys.”

“Didn’t MacArthur just k-kick them out of Guadalcanal?”

“MacArthur gives me a pain in the ass. He’s a show-off.”

“Why, Benjy, a person would think you weren’t American!” But still she didn’t move away and begin to walk the nine blocks home. He had folded up the comic book in a brutal way, doubling it like a newspaper, and his thumb against the bright paper looked sallow and strong, delicately carved and grubby in the knuckle. Car grease was in his blood. It was so funny, his being a twin with Loretta, who didn’t look at all like him, and who was much more mature. Benjy’s skull was narrow and his hair, so blond it was almost white, like an albino’s, had been cut close in a crew cut, so she could see the interesting ridge of bone behind his ear. His ear fitted close to his head, as if the top part had been glued. One of the things she didn’t like about herself was her ears—they didn’t stick out, exactly, but they didn’t exactly lie flat, either.

“I’m American enough,” Benjy said. “I’ll go if they call me. I’ll do my duty.”

She giggled at such a grim thought, here at the still center of a landscape so peaceful, so idle. It revealed in him a solitary brooding akin to her own private dreams. She blew lightly on his nice flat ear. “Is that what you do, Benjy—what other people tell you to do?” She saw him for all his delicate physical
beauty as defeated, stuck forever in this town with its stupid prejudices and boring jobs.

He turned with a fury whitening his face, pulling back his lips from his teeth, and said, “Fuck you, Essie Wilmot.”

She was not shocked. The phrase was chalked and gouged into the playground pavilion, and the shed near the school. She had once heard a bunch of soldiers on the trolley car saying it over and over, loud. “I didn’t mean anything mean,” she said.

“Yeah, what do
you
do,” he asked, “except what you’re told to do?”

The parents of the kids who hung out around the bleachers and the playground after hours weren’t quite like hers; they went to bars, and bowling alleys, and had nocturnal shouting matches and brawls that sometimes leaked back into the classroom gossip. Some of the parents weren’t even together—the mothers worked and the fathers had gone off to plants in Ohio or Virginia. The war was like a wind that had stirred up everything not fastened down. It made everybody a little reckless, even Momma coming in in the morning jumpy on coffee after all night in the clangor of the cartridge factory, her hair up under her bandana so she looked like Jean Arthur, if Jean Arthur were getting fat.

“Oh, I do things like this,” Essie said, and edged closer with a tilted head. She pictured Ingrid Bergman in
Casablanca
, the scene where she pulls a gun on him, in the room above Rick’s with the Venetian blinds, and he says in his beautiful white tuxedo jacket,
Go ahead and shoot. You’ll be doing me a favor
, and she can’t, and their profiles merge, her tearstained cheeks shining, her hair rimmed with light and slightly out of focus, her lips numb and thick and a little bit open, as she desperately surrenders herself in a war-torn world. Essie had kissed boys
before, but in childish play, post office at parties and in school cloakrooms while wriggling in protest and whacking them on the ear afterwards. Benjy’s lips were still childish, hard and pressing on hers too hard, so there was a danger of their teeth clicking together, but she liked the strange big feeling of it, this other body pushing at hers and hers pushing back through these two vulnerable moist spots, Benjy’s existence impinging on hers like an invasion from one planet of another. He had a taste, of the Philip Morris he had been smoking and the licorice he had been eating, and behind that of something bland and faintly salty she supposed was simply flesh, or the taste of another soul rising up through his throat. She pictured his lips, how they fitted together, and tried to spread that fit to her own lips, to their lips mixed together. But he was quickly uncomfortable, even though the boys playing basketball weren’t watching, and backed off with a frightened stare, like a white-eyed mechanic sliding out from under a car. There was nothing to say, what had happened had been so strange. But from the hangdog look in his eyes now she knew he would be back for more, and a kind of ashamed churning in her own insides said she would want more. Even now, she wanted a little more; the gray house on Locust Street was calling, but this was more important. She could see, though, that for all the shy beauty in the bones of his skull and thumb Benjy was only a beginning. She began to collect, instead of signed photographs of stars, boys. Each would have a slightly different taste, a different push. They were what the middle of her face needed. God understood. He made us, after all.

Really, it was pathetic and more than a little irritating, how excited Momma was to go down to Dover for the agricultural
fair. They held the fair in the center of the state the fourth week of every September. Momma had been a girl here, south of the Canal, in Sussex County, not Kent, but it was all pretty much the same—big open fields, sleepy rivers, houses way back from the road with pillared verandas and a look of faded old stage sets. Momma used to come up to the Dover Fair with her parents and remembered how grand and gala it had looked to her as a girl. She couldn’t see, what Essie easily could, how wheezy and battered the rides were, how scummy some of the sideshows, and how mournful and repulsive the animals—the poultry, the dairy cattle, the sheep and pigs—brought in from the farms all around to be judged. Essie herself was there to be judged, in the competition for Miss Delaware Peach of 1947. An announcement had come to the school for senior girls and was read in assembly and everybody tittered and looked around for who would be so “stuck-up” and such a “show-off” as to sign up. Just four girls signed up and filled out the questionnaire and did the little essay “What Delaware Offers Her Citizens,” and she was chosen, Essie felt, not so much for her looks or her essay but for having the most enthusiastic mother. Daddy let them have their new parsley-green Studebaker coupe for three days and Grandpa Sifford gave them seventy-five dollars of spending money—a frightening amount that made Momma keep clamping and unclamping her chubby brown pocketbook and hanging on to it everywhere, even taking it with her into the bathroom in case a maid or boy came into the hotel room and snatched it from the bureau while Essie wasn’t looking. The hotel was a six-story old brick cube right in the middle of Dover, called The Duke of York; the lobby still had brass spittoons in corners and its big central carpet had been woven with an image, now threadbare, of the state-capitol building.
All thirty-eight contestants were put up here with their escorts and Essie tried hard not to be embarrassed by her mother, who since returning to housework after the war had put on so much weight that her limp seemed to be from the effort of carrying it all. Catching an unintended glimpse of her naked mother in the bath of the hotel room, and watching her waddle about in her underwear, Essie was amazed and in some moralistic portion of herself offended that the human frame could allow itself to get so loaded with shapeless, wobbly flesh. Emily sensed her daughter’s disapproving gaze upon her; she fluttered her puffy hands on their creased wrists and explained, “It’s those tempting pies your grandmother keeps baking. I
wish
I could get her out of the kitchen and put us all on a sensible modern diet.”

“Well, Momma, you don’t have to take a second helping all the time.”

“I want to show my appreci
a
tion,” she said, with a down-home lilt that Essie didn’t hear when they were back in the house on Locust Street. “She’s wonderful at her age to keep so active in the kitchen—though to be honest if she’d let me do more my weight might come down. Oh,” she went on, seeing Essie still unconvinced, “it’s a weakness, I know, and I hope you never inherit it. You and your father don’t exactly eat like birds, and yet you never show it and he actually has lost weight since I first knew him. His father was a thin man.”

“Momma, did you ever know my Wilmot grandfather?”

“Oh no—he was dead and gone when your daddy’s family came to Basingstoke. Handsome and bright, by all accounts, but he didn’t get much pleasure out of it. A poor soul, really, to hear your father talk. I sometimes wonder if when he died he didn’t take a lot of your father’s heart with him.” Having said this, and thus stumbled into a sore area, she judged it
necessary to go on, clarifying: “I mean, I wonder how much his death left your dad able to love anybody else, ever. Except of course his children.”

“Why, Momma—what a thing to say! He loves
you
.” And even more, Essie thought to herself, he loves
me
.

“Well,” her mother conceded, without yielding her main point, or the serious look on her face, of considered disappointment, “He needed me, for a time—he needed a woman, and I was the least threatening he could find. I daresay he doesn’t dis
like
me, still. But he’s a careful man, your dad. It’s as if after whatever it was that happened he just wants to get through this vale of tears with—what did they used to call it during the war?—minimal damage. It’s as if he won’t give God any satisfaction. Ama and I would talk about it, years ago, trying to puzzle it through, but by now she’s changed Clarence all around in her mind, into a kind of saint, without a blemish or a sorrow.”

In another two hours, at seven this evening, the girls must report to the stadium for the bathing-suit part of the competition, and Essie should be resting, to look fresh. But the whole six-story hotel, from lobby to penthouse suite, was buzzing with the vibrations of excited young women away from home and anxious to prove themselves. It stirred Essie to be rooming with her mother and to hear her talking like a roommate, animated and frank, even seductive. Essie didn’t think of her parents as having any secrets, the way that she, since taking up with boys, had secrets. But Momma was implying the past had mysterious chambers—old passions and failures that still played their part in an ongoing story.

Abruptly Essie asked, “Am, am I l-like him, do you think? My grandfather Wilmot.”

Every thick fabric in the hotel room had been soaked in the
lonely tobacco smoke of travelling men. Momma sat in a hotel armchair, green plush like the chairs in a railroad club car, in her white cotton underwear, red marks on her soft fat leg where the brace fitted and a white hotel towel draped around her shoulders while her hair dried. She appraised her daughter in earnest, woman to woman, her normally round eyes narrowed. “Well, you’re a Wilmot, there’s no denying that. The chin, and the jaw, and the lips. They don’t have very generous mouths, as a tribe. But you’re a Sifford, too. When you were little and so dear in your tap shoes and sailor collar I used to get compliments on the resemblance, back when I still had a shape. What your father used to call my
glow
, in our courting days. But the person I’ve been seeing in your face lately has been my mother, strange to say. I say ‘strange to say’ because she’s spent her whole life hiding from attention, and yet there she is, the way I used to see her as a child, right in your face—the wide cheekbones, and the something—how can I put this in a nice way?—the something
savage
. Exotic and a little dangerous. Your father and me, we are not dangerous people. The Wilmots are not generally dangerous, except maybe for your Uncle Jared—I don’t know, it’s been years since I’ve seen him.”

Essie’s heart raced, as it always did when she was the topic of conversation. She had seen it, too, in the mirror—the childish blobbiness at the middle of her face had been replaced by a Moorish tension, a taut pulling-together of planes that took the shadows edgily as she turned her head this way and that, a fraction of an angle at a time. There was a wistful precision to her lips and her nostrils had a sensuous flare. Turned frontally, her face had a slight flatness that seemed to offer her thoughts and feelings bluntly to the viewer, the dark honey of her gaze served up in her mother’s curved pink lids
and glossy eye-whites. She loved her Sifford grandparents, poking along together in their well-kept greenhouse, but they were earth to her, fragrant and friendly humus; it was the dead, unearthly grandfather she aspired to. In his unreality he held a promise of lifting her up toward the heavenly realm where movie stars flickered and glowed and from which radio shows, with movie stars as guests, emanated. When Essie prayed to God, she felt she was broadcasting a beam of pleading upward to a brown cathedral-shaped radio and her shadowy grandfather was sitting in a chair beside it listening. She would make his sadness up to him. She could not tell her mother this; it was one of her many secrets.

On the stage inside the fairground stadium, where they had country-music bands and hog-calling contests at other hours of the day, Essie stepped into the harsh light and the cool night air dressed only in a powder-blue bathing suit of elastic nylon, with a low zippered back and a small stiffened skirt that still allowed the judges seated under the lip of the stage to see her thighs up to where they became crotch and bottom. The other ends of her legs, with their painted toenails, were in ankle-strapped wedge sandals so high in the cork heel she had to concentrate on not turning an ankle, which would make a bad impression on the judges. Their faces—four men and three women—were vaguely under her, beyond the footlights. They had been introduced at that afternoon’s rehearsal, when everyone was in casual clothes. One of the women was an actress who had had some parts on Broadway ten years ago and one of the men was a du Pont but none of them were what Essie could consider real celebrities. The most interesting person she had met in the afternoon was a blond boy, with fine short whitish hair like Benjy Whaley but altogether more civilized and clever, who was a
photographer for the Philadelphia
Bulletin
but told her (they had been thrown together at the side of the stage during the interminable wait while things got organized for the evening presentation, which went from a windy introduction by the mayor of Dover to a singing group like the Ink Spots, four young Negroes right there joking and milling around with everybody else) that he wanted to be an art photographer, like Dorothea Lange and George Hurrell. Essie had never heard of them but she knew the intonation in which he named them; for him, they were stars. Then she and the thirty-seven others had to go onstage to rehearse the number they were going to sing with some high-school orchestra from Wilmington playing in the old-fashioned big-band style: a medley of “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah,” “Almost Like Being in Love,” “A Fellow Needs a Girl,” and “There’s No Business Like Show Business.” The words were all printed up on sheets you were supposed to memorize. During the rehearsal Essie could tell that the girls on either side of her had never had a minute of voice lessons: their breath came right from the top of their throats and out through their noses. Whereas her voice just poured up out of her, from the diaphragm, as Mrs. Loring had taught her. When they had finished the ragged, tittery daylight run-through, the sounds from the surrounding fairgrounds washed in—the carousel calliope, the clatter of the roller coaster ascending, the mooing of some terrified prize cattle, the oceanic murmur of the midway crowds, the amplified snarls of the sideshow barkers, the ecstatic squeals from the roller coaster descending—and her photographer friend had vanished, and the pageant and its innocent Lower Delaware pomp all suddenly seemed pathetic.