In the Beauty of the Lilies (32 page)

“You watch,” Danny was going on in her face as she turned to go upstairs. “Iran and Turkey and Greece will be next.”

“Drop dead,” she pronounced. Walter Winchell had invented the phrase and the hep kids at school were using it. She loved the way Frankie Sturgis let his hair grow long; a dark forelock tumbled down and there were little curls at the back of the neck. She tickled them when the movie got boring. She was beginning to see that Linda Darnell and those other heavy-mouthed women such as Lana Turner and Betty Grable, with their sculptured swooping hair that would never hold its shape an hour in real life, were like statues—there was something missing, some nervous spark that was in the air now, and in her, an energy dying to burst out. Not that—she reflected sadly when Frankie brought her home, in his father’s souped-up rebuilt pre-war De Soto Airflow, after a dishevelling side-trip to a petting grove by the Canal that kids knew about—Basingstoke offered many ways out.

It was easy to forget Doug. She was on the cheerleading squad and the girls’ hockey team, and rehearsals were beginning for the senior play in December,
Meet Me in Saint Louis
, in which she played the mother instead of the role Judy Garland had in the movie. Doug’s letter came in a big envelope with a row of three-cent stamps outside and, inside, eight photographs of her there in the hotel courtyard—shiny prints
of her face and shoulders that could have been of a movie star, except the autograph hadn’t been put on yet. She kept studying her own mouth, all the little shadowed ins and outs and shapes of its flesh. Her upper lip seemed a little thin and rabbity and her nose a bit widespread and with that bothersome little bump she inherited from Momma but the honey-brown eyes were quite lovely, gazing daydreamily off at nothing the way he had told her to, the way Ginger Rogers’ eyes stared over Fred Astaire’s shoulder at nothing, while the music surged and her feet began to glide effortlessly after his, matching step for step—eyes shaped like her mother’s, with big clear whites fitted into the lower lids like eggs snug into eggcups, and the lids’ sensitive edges feathery with lashes, eyes that took the world in and then gave the world back. Just as she had had the impulse to kneel and blow Doug she now wanted to lean over and kiss the shiny photographic stock. His letter was on
Bulletin
stationery, written in that kind of very soft dark pencil newspapers have, and said,

As it turned out, it was not so hard to get away. The family was distracted that October, the October when Chuck Yaeger in a Bell X-1 rocket plane broke the sound barrier and a black man, Jackie Robinson, played in the World Series. Jeb Horley was retiring as postmaster in Basingstoke and the kitchen table was animated every suppertime by discussions of whether or not Daddy should be the next postmaster. Jeb said the job was his for the asking, there was no reason it couldn’t be a carrier who got the promotion instead of a clerk, according to regulations he had to live in the delivery district and not be the spouse of a rural carrier, and he did and he wasn’t and all he had to do was post a bond and take an oath and the President himself would appoint him. But Daddy—stubborn, shy Daddy—said he didn’t want to be cooped up day after day with all that paperwork and politicking and making idle conversation with the town loafers and half-crazy gossips; he liked getting out and walking the town. Jeb Horley’s pipe smoke had stunk up the air in there for forty years past and forty years to come. Let Lyle Dresham have the job. Lyle had come back from the South Pacific with a case of malaria and a bellyful of parasites and was delivering on the edges of town in the Willys station wagon that had replaced the Jeep; he had a young family and was ambitious. This seemed to Essie and Danny much too cautious of their father, and rather selfish and unkind to deny them and Momma (though they couldn’t exactly say this) the advantages that would come with a raise in his pay and status; but Ama took her son’s side, saying to them privately, “It keeps him fit, and it’s something he can handle. Your daddy has a certain temperament. They used to say in Missouri, ‘Don’t race a plow horse, and don’t eat a laying chicken.’ ”

Momma had her hands full over at the greenhouse, where
Grandma Sifford was having health problems. With no appetite and constant pain, she was shrivelling and looking ever darker, ever more of a Moor from North Africa. Doc Hedger’s successor, handsome young Dr. Jessup, had her worked up at the Wilmington General Hospital on South Broom Street and the X-rays found a tumor, in fact several little tumors. Only Essie knew where the cancer had come from: those poisons, like nicotine tea, with which her grandmother had combatted all the bugs and spots and wilts that had thrived in the hothouse atmosphere. Poor Momma limped back and forth all the time, diagonally across Locust Street in the rainy fall weather, taking on the cooking and housekeeping for her father, mothering the elusive mother at the root of her own maimed life.

So it was relatively easy for Essie to announce that she had to go up to Philadelphia next Saturday and have some more photographs taken by Doug Germaine, and would be back by six or seven at the latest. “Be sure you are” was all Momma said. She looked weary and cross. “That boy was pushy.”

“Momma, it’s his job. You saw the photographs—weren’t they striking?”

Momma brushed a piece of hair back from her rounded white forehead and said aloofly, “He sees you in a way a mother can’t,” a touch of permission and release tucked into the cold remark.

“If you get the chance,” Daddy said, “be sure to look in at the Curtis Building. There’s a fantastic thing in there, a big mural made all out of glass. Believe me, it’s out of this world.”

Doug lived on Pine Street in two rooms three floors up; the front room was his studio, with an old velvet couch he had hung a mottled sheet behind, to make a background. He had a female friend with him, which Essie had not expected,
a slightly tough and hefty bleached blonde somewhere in her twenties called Gloria. Essie couldn’t tell much about their relationship because as soon as they had her in the studio all their focus was on her. Gloria showed Essie how to use a lip brush instead of lipstick and how to apply artificial eyelashes—it made her squeamish, the tickling at the edge of her lids, but Gloria crooned to her, “You have such photogenic eyes,” and Essie relaxed. They oiled her face and shoulders to take the lights more dramatically and fussed with her hair until Essie felt as if her whole scalp was burning. Gloria, whose fingers were deft but not especially gentle, spent what seemed an hour playing with different tints of make-up, including white, to define the line of her nose and to make her cheeks look hollower. “Shadows,” Doug said, much less casual and amusing than he had been in Dover. “We sculpt you with shadows.” He kept moving his lights and asking Gloria to hold a silver-paper reflector as he began to photograph. His camera here was a big box with an accordion on the front and a black sheet behind. He moved it closer and closer until she had to fight blinking her eyes; it was like the false eyelashes, tickling and dangerous. There was a bulb on a white cord he could squeeze to click the lens while he talked to her. “Great.
Great
, Essie. Now let’s try a single spot, to give us some slashing shadows off those cheekbones.” He kept asking her to assume unnatural twisted positions, facing into the spotlight so lashlike strands of glare blinded her, while from the darkness beyond the lights Gloria’s voice would reassure her, “You look heavenly, darling,” or Doug’s, constipated-sounding with the intensity of his focus, would say, “Don’t
pose
. Keep your face very quiet. Let us
in
. Give us your
dreams
, the girl inside. Don’t think too much; it makes your mouth tense. Puff out the upper lip. Imagine something big and soft
flowing through you, from behind. Good.
Good
. Now look right at the lens. Challenging—get mad. ‘Who is this jerk?’ Yes. Up with the shoulder. Higher. Even higher. ‘Who is this idiotic jerk?’ Oh, yes—nice.” He had her change from that dusty-pink off-the-shoulder Jane Russell sweater into a slinky Joan Crawford kind of dress, satin and tight at the hips and knees, with a long feather boa she was invited to play with, draping it across her shoulders and down her front and for one series of plates pulling it intriguingly across her face so that only her eyes showed. Painted and oiled and every hair lacquered as firm as the fibers in a hat, Essie felt armored in pretense, formless and safe behind her face, like the rich filling of a stiff chocolate. As Doug sweatily worked away, trying to coax some kind of essence from her that she could not picture, she found he seemed most happy with those expressions where she was imagining him as Mr. Bear, a big innocent Mr. Bear with his fur scuffed off at the elbows and muzzle, his camera lens being one of the hollow round eyes with the tiddlywink pupil in it. Mr. Bear had been her first audience. She would scold him and cuddle him and tell him her thoughts on everything. She never stuttered with Mr. Bear and knew she would never stutter in this painted armor of beauty with which she faced the invisible audience gathering behind these remorseless lights.

Doug and Gloria took her out to a cheap chophouse joint at the corner of the next block. The people in Philadelphia seemed loud and forcedly jolly, and there were Negroes mixed up with them, in the booths as well as at the counter, as loud and joshing as the others, and nobody seemed to mind. You never saw brotherly love like that in Basingstoke. After lunch they went back and Doug went into the other room while Gloria asked her if she would mind posing in her
underwear. Essie had put on her best panties and bra, imagining she might have to make love to Doug because he was doing her this enormous favor, but still she hesitated, while Gloria explained that more and more advertisers were switching away from illustration to photographing the models, for items like lingerie and bathing wear. Advertisers liked the real model over the stylized drawing, though of course the newspapers and family magazines were still very cautious.

Essie was cautious herself; she could imagine what Momma would say, and Daddy would silently think, if they could be there. Suddenly Gloria got earnest and spoke straight in her face with what seemed a weight of experience: “In or out, dear: choose. You can’t play coy in this business. The product is you. What privacy you got, you make for yourself in here.” Gloria tapped herself in the chest, between breasts grander than Essie’s but starting to sag and leathery on top from too many suntans. You only had so many years, Gloria’s skin said. Meekly Essie nodded and undressed, down to the nylon panties below her panty girdle, and after a few minutes felt as natural in the little pond of hot light as if she were in a bathing suit on the sunny beach at Woodland. Her lean athletic body was a gift she trusted and never worried about; it had skipped to her from hunter ancestors right through the genes of her doughy parents. When Gloria asked her to take off her bra, for “a few glamour shots, mostly from the back,” she scarcely protested. That was as far as they went. Yet back in Basingstoke, exhausted and gritty from the train and trolley car, Essie felt she had more to hide than if she
had
gone to bed with Doug, as she had intended and as her mother had feared.

“Momma, there was this woman there all along, helping him with the lights and everything. It’s
work
, believe me. Simple honest hard work.”

Her mother was not convinced. Studying her daughter with a moment’s acuteness, before rushing off into the evening dark to attend to the trouble of her parents’ house, Emily said, “You’re not the same. They did something to you.”

“They did nothing to me but take a zillion pictures I bet nobody ever looks at. Really, Mother. Why’d you drag me to all those lessons, if all you wanted was for me to hide under a bushel here in pokey old Basingstoke?”

This Biblical allusion made Momma consider. “Maybe we both,” she said, after considering, “had unreal expectations. Essie, I’m sorry, if I loved you more than was reasonable.”

Momma touched her cheek, and suddenly both women hugged, to seal over the gulf opening before them. Her mother somehow knew that Essie had given up to Doug and his lights a piece of the dark treasure accumulated in the furtive and indecent smother of being loved. What her family and the boys of Basingstoke had clumsily bestowed was now to be taken to market. Not three hours removed from her session, Essie felt her stirred-up nerves craving the tickle of attention, the armoring pressure of self-display.

“Take the plunge,” Aunt Esther advised. “What the hell.” In the desultory scatter of her senior year—a bemused, irritable period of killing time like what Essie imagined pregnancy to be—she found herself, when she could commandeer the family Studebaker, over in Red Lion, visiting Aunt Esther and Uncle Peter. First they had had an apartment, like fugitives; then in the Depression they had flauntingly bought a big old house with formal plantings and noisy plumbing and terrible heating bills; and now they had built a modern house, on two wooded acres, with big picture windows in both the
kitchen and living room, and a redwood deck off the second-floor bedroom, and a fieldstone barbecue in the backyard, and a tennis court where the three boys bopped the ball around with their parents. Essie found this house more cheerful than her own had become. Grandma Sifford’s finally passing on, in December, had taken something out of Ama; she was shrivelling in the face and hunching in the shoulders, and though she tried to be as busy and cheerful in the kitchen as ever, some days dinner just didn’t appear until Momma came back from the greenhouse, where Grandpa Sifford needed her more than ever. It was as if when Daddy declined the postmastership Momma took a new husband, her own father. Some days Essie would come back from school and the house would feel deserted, the front shades pulled down to save the furniture from the sun, and Ama sitting upstairs in her room on her bed in her slip and old-fashioned stockings with seams and rolled tops, gazing at the wallpapered wall as if its entwining, repeating pattern of ivy on bricks held in some shallow third dimension the answer to a riddle. Then Essie would ask her what she might put in the oven or fry up for dinner and Ama in discussing food would come back to life. Danny would be still at school. Too runty to make any team, he had become the manager of the jayvee basketball squad and also was on the debating team and ninth-grade student council—quite the little politician. It was all depressing; the shy gray house set back with its yard from Locust Street had gone stale, the furniture funky and stained and pre-war, like the crackly old fake-walnut Philco cathedral-front radio, and even the cookbooks that Ama told her to look up recipes in were tattered and falling apart and savoring of a tyrannical past where they expected a woman to stand around all day testing roasts and baking pies from scratch on a woodstove.