Lillian on Life (3 page)

She was right. He was wonderful at the piano. He still is. It's just that perfect pitch didn't mean a thing to Mother. There's nothing as perfect as a talented firstborn son who has gone away.

When he went to North Carolina for training, near the end of the war, it felt so far away that he might as well have gone to France. I was twelve. I started knitting argyle socks right away, like we all did. Well, sock. I could never just pick it up and get back to work on it in the evenings. The instructions defied me. If I looked away from my knitting to consult them, I was completely lost when I looked back at it. Eventually I finished the sock, but the war was ending, so I wrapped it up and sent it off to him, just in case he needed one replacement sock or something. The letter that came back was mocking. There was no chimney to hang it on, he said, and it wasn't even Christmas anyway. A woman
would have felt something positive, receiving one handmade sock. A sister would. I never sent gifts in half measures after that, ever.

Professors didn't like half measures either, I learned. They saw inconsistent work as inconsistent effort, which was never the case. There were just days when I'd sit in the library with the perfect pencil and a notebook with lines ruled just the way I like, and they might as well have been a twig and a stone. Nothing would happen. I'd turn in a stilted, hard-won paragraph or two. Professorial eyes would roll. Professorial lower lips would jut. “Lillian,” they'd say, “what happened? You can do so much better.” They ganged up, too. I was walking through Main Building to get back to my room sometime in the middle of that first winter, bundled up and sniffing to keep my nose from dripping, when I turned a corner into a trio of women: Mrs. Wade; a beige woman I didn't know holding an armful of files; and Miss Blanding, the college president. “Is that you, Lillian?” Mrs. Wade said. “How funny, because we were just talking about you.”

“Speak of the devil,” I said, sniffing.

“Not at all,” said Miss Blanding, taking control in her tailored black wool and bold silver choker. Her Kentucky
accent caught me off guard. I'd heard her voice before, but not at such close quarters. I'd been working to minimize my Missouri accent and did pretty well at it until someone from the Midwest or the South stepped into the conversation. “Not the devil at all,” she continued. “Just an intelligent girl trying to make her way in the world, isn't that right?”

“I don't know about intelligent,” I said, fighting the urge to tack “Ma'am” onto the end. “Trying to make her way toward a heat source, anyway.”

The three of them laughed, and I started to relax, and then Mrs. Wade cleared her throat and said, “We were talking about girls who have a . . . shall we say complicated? . . . relationship with concentration.”

“Oh,” I said. Mrs. Wade carried on when I couldn't think of anything else to say.

“We're wondering how to help.” She and the other woman raised their eyebrows to show they were open to suggestions, but Miss Blanding seemed to be assessing me. When I didn't talk, Miss Blanding said, “Do you exercise?”

“I do phys ed, like all the girls,” I answered.

“Exercise does wonders for the mind, you know.”

I nodded.

She stepped back to take me in from boots to hat. “Basketball might be your sport,” she concluded.

“Maybe it is,” I said, twinkling at the eyes, as if I thought Miss Blanding's idea was brilliant. I made to move around them. “It would probably keep me warm,” I said.

“That's the spirit,” said Miss Blanding, sounding as if she felt the meeting had been very successfully concluded, but Mrs. Wade called after me. “Come and see us anytime, Lillian. We're here to help.”

I couldn't bear the idea that I was being talked about. Worried about. Couldn't bear it. I bought a marker pen and highlighted the hours in my study schedule that I was determined to make sacrosanct. But when I tried to study, my brain literally felt like a damp bathing suit, and I was wringing it and wringing it, but the water was distributed too finely through the fibers to come together into droplets. I couldn't drench the page with thoughts, only smudge it. I did fine in high school. I did well. College rocked my confidence. Except with men. I'm so glad I went north to college, for that reason alone, even though I had to leave early. At the evening socials organized with Yale, I met young men older than I was, and taller, but more importantly, young men with a more sophisticated charm, men who didn't squirm in a tweed blazer and who told me I looked beautiful rather than swell.

Professors were frightening. Men
weren't.

C
orky has only had sex with one man in her entire life. But she got to sex so much earlier than I did. One moment we were girls in bobby socks finishing up the school year, the next moment we were at camp in Wisconsin and I was walking down the path to the lake and she was crashing toward me through the bushes. She had her sandals in her hands. Her feet must have been sore from running out of the woods, but she didn't stop to put her sandals on. When she reached me she was grinning, her chest was heaving, her eyes and cheeks were glowing. I fixated on her soft brown curls as she talked. Her hair was extremely soft, like a little child's, but the rest of her was a locomotive, whistle hooting, steam hissing.

“You have
got
to let a fella touch you like that,” she panted as we headed to the lake.

“Like what?”

Corky just kept panting.

“What did he touch?”

“Everything,” she crowed.

We walked a little. She knew I'd ask.

“With what?”

“With everything!”

She said it was “glorious.” The path disappeared into the narrow beach. I took off my shoes and drew circles with my toes in the silt at the edge of the water. Corky tucked her skirt into her panties and walked in up to her knees, splashing water onto her face and thighs with both hands. You'd think she'd grown up on a farm, but her father was dean of physical sciences at the University of Missouri.

Corky was my best friend, but sometimes I felt this was by default. I really wished I were good friends with Mary Cate Myers. She was such an elegant girl, and so nice to everyone. She always did the right thing. I'd watch as she chose a subject for a history paper or answered a question about cosines, and above all when other students talked to her. She was always pleased, or kindly amused, or genuinely concerned. She
knew
. She arranged her face right. Corky got to sex at the right time for Corky, but too early for me. I wasn't ready to hear about it. Mary Cate would have gotten to it at the right time for everybody, so no one would have been shocked.

Mother had been able to see I was anxious as the departure for camp approached. Maybe because I was being such a dodo about it. Mother had never been away to camp, but I
kept asking her what it was like. Finally she asked me if there was someone in my class I especially admired for the way she behaved. Of course I said Mary Cate Myers. “Well,” she said, “when you're unsure of what to do, just behave the way you think that girl would.” So far it had worked a couple of times. I gave new people I met a warm Mary Cate smile, and if it was an adult I shook hands. I didn't wait for them to probe me; I asked them where they were from first. But with close friends it's tough. They're so far under your skin you can't push them back up to the surface and act like an acquaintance. They look at you funny. So I made circles in the silt.

It's so odd to look back on. Sex is so important. In high school and college, it was really important to me not to have it. Now it's just the opposite.

About five years ago George Junior called me at eleven at night to tell me his daughter, Zoë, had just told him she was going to spend the night at her new boyfriend's apartment. She must have been about twenty at the time. He didn't know what to do.

“But it's wonderful!” I told him.

George Junior's wife, Judy, was out of town. Zoë's birthday was coming up, so the next weekend I went out and bought her a pale salmon silk nightgown and a cotton
kimono covered in large pastel flowers. When I gave them to her I told her they were for when she went “visiting” and twinkled my eyes at her. There's a scene in
Rear Window
where Grace Kelly shows up at Jimmy Stewart's ridiculous little apartment with a tiny case, and when she pops the clasp she releases a small cloud of whitest silk and a pair of feathered mules. I could imagine Zoë doing this, changing into something coolly attractive.

Doing it myself took me so long to achieve. People were always interrupting me, taking me by surprise. Women's underwear in the fifties was like armor. I'm sure that men's fantasy of removing it was much sexier than the reality. When a woman went into her room to change into bed wear, she left the man to imagine her slipping out of her dress, stockings, panties and bra, and he could see it however he wanted to. He didn't have to witness the permanent grime on the elastic or struggle with the hooks, which in those days almost always came in a line of three and were designed to stay resolutely put. While he sipped his drink, he could imagine something pale and cupped falling to the ground or being draped on the bed, then she would come out in her beautiful ensemble and he'd look up, and smile, and put down his drink, and come to her.

Except that so often he didn't. I'd open the door and he'd
be standing right by it and there would be no conversation, no toasts, no ceremony, just whiskey lips and five-o'clock shadow and the cold door frame against my spine. He'd be right there clasping me against him and I could watch the ice cubes melting in my drink, right next to his empty glass. Eventually I learned to take the drink into the bedroom or bathroom with me as I changed. If he even let me change. Some men didn't.

I'll admit something, though. When it did happen that I'd come back out in a negligee and peignoir, hair brushed and perfume renewed, and the man would hand me my drink and tell me what he'd been thinking while I was gone, something usually to do with company politics, I'd feel hurt. He acted as if my going away to slip into something more comfortable was simply a matter of my own preference. You'd think I'd come back into the room in a housedress and friendly old slippers. I never, ever understood how professional concerns could trump a blooming female body in silk. Never understood it. Everyone and everything about our society said the reality was otherwise. I thought career obligations were something men met when there was no flesh available for pressing. Once I had come around to sex and even presented myself on its platter, it was a shock to be turned away. Okay, not turned away. That
didn't happen. But postponed. Once I'd heard the whole political story and the decks were cleared, then the man would notice what he had within reach on the couch. I often had the impression that I could see a man's eyes change color when they started to focus on the present, and the fact that I was throbbing in the center of it.

Ted taught me the sweet tension of having a constant sexual connection, work or no work. Even if he was thinking about work when we were alone, or needed to talk about work, he was touching me somehow. It helped him. It helped me. But that was a few decades after Corky came crashing toward me through the Wisconsin woods. Such a funny thing. She married that boy. They got older and he studied architecture and grew a mustache and needed thick glasses. Turned out he was a very fine sculptor, in bronze. Small, heavy bulls. Roaring lionesses. It's no surprise Corky treats each day as another opportunity to run around in shoeless wonderment.

M
aybe I would have had sex with Dave after college back in Columbia, but the first time he hugged me, he squeezed me so hard I passed wind. I've had a lifelong dread of being the first one to fart in a relationship. The fact that Dave went on to propose marriage less than a month later should have put paid to that, but it didn't. George Junior doesn't realize how lucky he is sometimes. Judy thinks gas is hilarious. It annoys him, but he should be glad.

Dave said, “Oh no! I popped you!” and took responsibility for the embarrassing sound I made. Dave was impeccable. He was like the men in early Richard Avedon fashion shoots—as elegant and happy and delicious stepping out of a go-go bar as out of an embassy function.

“No, you didn't,” I said, my face burning, and took his arm and pulled him along the dark sidewalk toward his car, in case there was a smell. “One day I will,” he said quietly, and I laughed because of course I pretended to think he was still talking about me as a windbag when I could tell from his voice that he was speaking sexually.

When he kissed me at the door to my parents' house he breathed in through his nose like you would over a warm pie fresh from the oven, and then he sighed. “I want to meet your parents,” he said.

“Now?” I asked.

“No,” he said evenly.

“When?”

“When you also want me to,” was his answer. I loved this about Dave. He was so fun and easygoing, and then suddenly he'd fix you with an honest stare and say things as straight as they could be said.

My parents wanted me to meet men who wanted to meet them. This was the whole point of all my activities, as far as I could tell. It had been very slim pickings until now, though, and it had taken a Vassar connection to bring David Carter Allen into my life. He was the older brother of a friend of a girl from college, and was at law school in New Haven. He'd come to St. Louis for the summer to intern at Hawk & Mattingly, and had been told to look me up.

It was a two-hour drive to Columbia on a good day, but having met me once he made the trip often. He even had to borrow a car each time. There were pretty girls in St. Louis. Career girls too. Every time I knew he was already on the road to come and see me, I had to talk to myself all over
again about how it could be that he kept making the trip. The answer was problematic. During our first lunch and walk around the university quadrangle I asked him why he'd taken an internship in Missouri rather than New York or Washington. “I've been imagining a simpler life for myself, so I thought I'd come and see what that might be,” he said. I remember nodding, looking at the ground, because St. Louis didn't seem simple at all to me. Crossing all that traffic always got me hot and bothered. But what did I know? And then he started visiting, making the drive on a Sunday, or even a Friday afternoon, and I started thinking that I might be right: Maybe St. Louis wasn't really that simple. Maybe Dave had decided he had to come all the way to Columbia for life to be as quiet as he thought he liked. Every time he was on his way to visit I thought about how he might want me to be cute and compliant, and I thought about how I would rather be interesting and tantalizing, and I didn't know what to do. I knew he was charming, though, and I knew he was handsome, and healthy, so I waited for him to arrive and hoped I could be cute when I was listening to him and interesting when I was doing the talking.

Mother took against him immediately when he came to dinner a few weekends after the fart. It seemed to be
because he wasn't one of “us.” But if she was so devoted to “us,” why was she always insisting on cosmetic improvements? We were constantly upgrading. I imagined that she would be happy to think a well-bred young man like Dave would want an alliance, but after he had had dinner with us and left for the long drive back to the city, Mother started slamming things around in the kitchen. I picked up the cocktail glasses from the living room but hesitated to join her. Poppa was tidying the bar.

“I don't understand,” I whispered to him.

He leaned sideways to whisper back, “I think next time he might consider calling her Ma'am.”

Young men in Missouri were brought up to address their elders as “Ma'am” and “Sir” until invited to do otherwise. They'd expected the same from Dave, who had called them Vivian and George, as he'd been brought up to do in Connecticut. If we got married, he would be invited to call my parents Mother and Dad. Their first names were out of bounds for life, in fact. Dave hadn't thought to ask permission. I hadn't thought to explain to him. It was all new to us. We were so young.

Mother seemed more relaxed the next morning when I came down for breakfast. I stared blindly into the fridge, hoping she'd talk first.

“Well,” she said, putting her cup on the table and sliding onto the bench of the nook, “Dave seems like he's going places.”

“I'm sure he is,” I said, and smiled, ignoring her tone. “He's also very fun, and kind. And he seems to really like Columbia.”

“Uh-huh,” she said, and I pulled out an orange. I stuck my thumbnail into it to start peeling, spraying myself in the eye with stinging skin juice. She said, “It would be kind of him to marry you.”

“I'm sorry?” I said, blinking from the acid in the juice, and in her voice.

She made me wait while she sipped her Sanka. “No, actually, it would be
unkind
of him to marry you.”

Where was Poppa?

“What are you trying to say to me, Mother?” I asked, feeling a prickly blossom of tears in my throat. I still had my thumb in the orange.

“I'm trying to say, Lillian, that you will feel like a fish out of water among his people.”

“Oh, I'm sure they are just as warm as he is,” I said.

She shrugged. “Suit yourself,” she said, getting ready to take another sip. “Just don't come crying to me if he's cooled off a bit today after meeting us last night.”

When we're young, we're unfit to judge whether our parents know what they're talking about. Sometimes we want them to be right, sometimes we want them to be dead wrong, but we can't tell which they are actually being. If we could figure out which instinct guided them, the terrain would be much easier to navigate. I couldn't tell if Mother was speaking from the instinct to protect me, or the instinct to protect herself. It was gruesome.

In any case, Dave hadn't cooled off at all. We went out to visit the Budweiser Clydesdales. Driving over, we had the windows down because the day was so warm and muggy. Dave had to shout to ask me how I thought dinner with my parents had gone. He was smiling and his normally neat and gleaming hair was flapping crazily every which way. I couldn't bring Mother's cutting comments into that sweet car. I squeezed his hand and smiled back. I didn't mind lying, but I didn't want to have to do it at high volume. He took my smile as an answer and went back to concentrating on the road.

We joined a tour. Walking from the ticket office toward the beautiful old stables with my hand in Dave's, lagging a bit behind the group, I experienced a wonderful shiver of anticipation, like the ones you get on the nights before Christmas when you step out of your house or out of a warm
car and the full, sparkling force of the season hits you. I could marry a handsome northern lawyer, I was thinking. An enthusiastic and handsome northern lawyer. The shiver went up my trunk and into the roots of my hair. I squeezed Dave's hand again, really hard, to stop my scalp from popping off the top of my head. He squeezed back, and leaned over to steal a kiss, and we walked from the sun into the thick darkness of the stable.

We reassembled as a group to listen to the guide. As my eyes adjusted to the low light and my nose started to relax after the initial shock of straw, piss, leather and ripe maleness, the guide opened the half door of a stable to our right, motioned us to move back a bit and led a horse out. Dave pulled me around the side of the group to get closer. Clydesdales were originally bred in Scotland. That's all I can remember from the guide's spiel. That's all I remembered even on the day we went, because once the horse stood before us I felt like a child. We only came to his shoulder. The guide, who was quite short, invited volunteers to come forward and stand by the animal to let us all feel the shift in perspective. Dave stepped forward first, looking so pleased, and my sense of childishness intensified. All I wanted was to get back out into the sun and feel tall again. The guide made it possible for us all to touch the patient Clydesdale if
we wished, one by one, and of course I got in line. I'm happy around horses, but when I stood at his head and reached up to place the palm of my hand on his muzzle, the softness between his enormous nostrils suddenly felt deceptive, like it might be quicksand.

We went to see the hitch, and Dave asked questions about how much the reins weighed when held together at one time, and it was a lot. “Wow,” he said, “you'd have to really prepare yourself for that.”

“Imagine lifting weights just to be able to control a team of horses,” I said.

“Preparation is everything,” he said.

We drove back to Columbia and went to lunch at the soda fountain near my house. On the way there I looked at Dave a lot. I studied his hands. They were grown-up hands. Were they elite hands? I thought so. Were they
elitist
hands? It had never crossed my mind. Sitting at the counter with our liverwurst sandwiches and root beer floats, like I had so often in high school, I didn't feel any better. Dave looked happy as a clam, but I felt hokey. The reason the men in Richard Avedon's fashion photos look so gorgeous in the seedy parts of Paris is that they're not from there. They're visiting, or they're leaving, having visited.

That was the summer the chance to work in Munich
came up. I didn't know anything about moving yet. I now know, from moving and moving and moving, that the only way to handle being asked to leave a country you love for another you don't know is to start looking forward immediately. If there's anything you've been meaning to buy, buy it, then pack it, and start imagining it on a new mantel or in a new closet. Start imagining yourself around new landmarks, investigating new supermarkets, tuning your ear to the new language.

I remember waking up on a Saturday morning that summer, not long after Dave's proposal, to the sounds of neighborhood lawn mowers. Suddenly I couldn't bear the idea of more lawn mowers. I didn't know if I could bring Mother around on Dave, and I didn't know how much I wanted to. When he proposed, walking hand in hand with me around the quadrangle for the umpteenth time in our courtship, he'd kept it simple. No dinner, no knee, no ring. He took my face in his hands. I loved that; he was the first to do that, and I've loved it ever since. But I blushed red hot and told him I didn't know. I asked for time. I didn't know if I could handle being in his family but not
of
his family. I also figured Poppa would have defended him if he'd felt Dave was the one for me, and he hadn't. Poppa hadn't said a word.

The opportunity in Munich was a six-week position. A woman Mother's age from the Junior League, with whom I often did hospital visits, had an older brother who was in Munich working on a book, and his typist had come home due to a family emergency. He had a deadline, and he needed to finish. Could I type? Fortunately she didn't ask if I could type
fast
.

Six weeks in Germany. So I lay there, frightened of the unknown but maddened by the eternal lawn mowers of central Missouri, and decided that getting away was exactly what I needed. Getting away by marrying someone your parents mistrust isn't getting away at all. The parental presence is eternal. It's either benevolent or malevolent. You get to choose.

Mother never would have agreed to Munich if she hadn't been so afraid of feeling judged by Dave. She was worried about me, of course, but this time Poppa did step in. He took me with him to the hardware store on an errand one morning and he said to me, “Lillian, you're going to have to make your mother just a little bit happier with your arrangements in Germany, and then it'll all be fine.” The writer, Mr. Jessop, had told his sister that I could take over his typist's room, as she had decided not to come back, but Poppa told me Mother didn't like that I'd be living alone.

“But it was okay for the other girl,” I pouted, and he said, “And it'll be okay for you too. We're just going to have to tell a little fib.”

“What kind of fib?”

“Well, can we not tell Mother that one of your Vassar girls is in Munich as well? And that you'll be able to stay with her?”

So I lied to Mother, and I lied to Dave. I told him it would be great for me to get some experience before coming back and talking about marriage, since I didn't feel I was bringing much to it. “Preparation is everything,” I said.

He shook his beautiful head. Dave was no dummy. “Anyway,” he said, “the fire has gone out of your kiss.”

“Has it?” I said. “Was there fire in my kiss?”

“Not really,” he said, which seemed unkind at the time, but in fact wasn't. Dave was honest and good. I was in for much, much unkinder partings.

God, that was so long ago. I remember crying at the airport, and I remember mixed feelings about everyone, everything. But transitions are so unclear.

I don't remember the last things I said to Dave, but I remember what I packed. I arrived in Munich in September 1956 with one suit. This one was beige, made of good
cotton twill. The jacket had a belt, and the kind of pockets on the hip meant for slipping your fingers into when posing for photos. Change and tissues and train tickets fell out of them. All women's suits had skirts then. The skirts were below the knee, of course. And mine always were, anyway, even in the sixties. My legs are just too long to show that much of them.