The Bobby-Soxer (11 page)

Our own furniture, once it had been insinuated, had been lost to further reckoning. A sense of my father remained in the two guest rooms, the larger of which he had had as a young man, the smaller as a boy. My brother had lived in the latter while here—but from boyhood on he has never left much of himself behind. He and my father were always supposed to be coming home soon, but hadn’t yet. Gradually, we were becoming correspondents only, my brother and grandmother in long letters on his part from which she read only the factual bits to us, my father in letters to me, cleverly short on description, sternly determined on love. I could sense there were lines to be read between, but couldn’t decide which they were.

Once a week, Watanabe served the three of us a formal tea in the downstairs sitting room, for whatever exchanges were needed. My grandmother was more polite, as if she had schooled herself to this, now that we were in the house. She went out rarely, though she still looked too powerful for the sitting room’s heart-backed chairs. When Watanabe came downstairs from her rooms with his pastes and his mops, he would exclaim “Ah—ee that fruitwood, and the desk, inlaid, she says, with zebrawood and white holly!”—but reflectively said nothing when he came down with her trays, after what I suspected were the times she talked to him. “What does she say to you?” I said, cornering him in the pantry. He flicked her napkin out of its silver-and-ivory ring. “Nothing she expect me to understand.” But what did she do up there, beyond telephoning her lawyer and financial advisor, or a few town ancients she called her charity-friends—and once every two weeks, my father.

“She has a companion,” he said. “When she wants.” He tapped the side of his head. “Who? How can I say who? Ninety years to choose from, she can afford to change him. But I think it is only one.”

In the upstairs hall my mother called the gallery, my grandfather’s state photograph, silvery clear in the old style, showed a clean-shaven, shrewd-featured man with a mouth pursed like my brother’s—nobody much to inhabit my grandmother’s majestic head. Their wedding picture, when he was over sixty and she on the way to thirty, showed him as shorter and narrower than she. In the nearby picture of him in his office he looked more regal, his staff of men receding behind him in wooden-railed enclosures, each man decreasing in size, like a lesson in perspective.

A bachelor railroader who had gone into land sales and allied brokerages, he had lodged with her family before their marriage, and had continued on so as her husband, in her family homestead. The family had been New Jersey potato farmers, land-rich or land-poor as the times might be, of the breed who had Revolutionary teaspoons in their plain pine coffers and the new white refrigerator pridefully in the front room. Trenton had been their metropolis.

This was what my father had ultimately gone to Yale from, and not on a scholarship. One yard-long picture, taken well before he was to be born, showed the entire family of my great-grandparents’ day ranged in a line on the porch of their almost octagonal hump-windowed farmhouse, always he said painted the yellow with fudge trim then considered a step up from Colonial white. My grandmother’s parents center the line, staples also of their time, the huge farmer and his miniature wife, she soon to go down the birth-drain with a late last-child-to-be. Two spindly boys, my grand-uncles, flank her, one to fall in a war, the other to be the black sheep. Four daughters of the house flank him, all handsome and almost father-size. Two moved West and are lost to history. My grandmother, the middle sister in the picture, by age as well, is standing with her arm around the last-born and already looks to be the head sister. But that might be because I knew her now.

In that picture, my grandfather does not appear. Perhaps he had been still gathering his powers for the marriage, and for the long years ahead as consort in that house—not yet knowing of their eventual move away, to here. That happening had changed my father’s college life, for it had given him a new background. “It was a bankrupt’s house, got cheap with all its goods. For years I couldn’t get over the notion that bankrupt meant beautiful.”

Yet, though he could readily be made to talk about the old farmhouse sold when they moved, and my brother and I could walk its patterns in our sleep, he never talked in detail of his parents’ life there, or why they had all of a sudden come here, to what my grandmother, always interestingly grotesque in her summaries, called her “honeymoon” house.

Verging on eighty by then, my grandfather had died in it that year—at a house party for undergraduates.

I went upstairs to the gallery, to check his photograph. No, he simply did not look as if he could have acquired all that force for her since.

Watanabe came up behind me. “A husband.”

I had to laugh. Knobby had a passion for the ballet, fed by tickets from a niece, a costume girl for a celebrated troupe, who however scorned his wife-getting, and had informed him that “husband” was ballerina slang for a male dancer who was a trustworthy partner but would never be a star.

“What’s it like up there, now?” For weeks my grandmother had been clearing out things from the third floor, not relegating them to the attic above her, but sending forth a stream of packages and cartons as neatly bound as if for holiday mail, which Knobby was however required to deposit at the town dump.

He looked down at the tray he was carrying. She ate well. Under some handmade domed pottery dishes, which had been brought out when she moved up there, the lamb-chop bones would be picked clean, the butter plate blank. A rough sweet-sour came from her wineglass. In a tentative, stealthy unity not otherwise acknowledged between us, we three females were getting at my father’s wines, which had always remained in the cellar over here. A case had even been sent to the Evamses, and I myself intended one day, perhaps at summer’s end, to take a bottle or two to the city. My grandmother still lorded it over these bequests, but in an odd way, as she became more remote in her eyrie, she had become more generous.

“Knobby. You haven’t answered.”

“You can see the hills, from the—what you call it? Cap-i-tain’s walk.”

“You always could.” I loathed that enclosure, reached by a last twist of steps from the third floor. It had murky amber panes and a floor like painted hide, where your steps could only circle and never stretch. I had no desire to see our hills from up there.

“It is like a leaf viewing,” he said. “Only the leaves are gone.”

I followed him downstairs into the pantry. “You know what I mean. The apartment.”

“It has not changed, your grandmother says. It is the same.”

“Then what’s all this stuff from?”

The packages for this week’s dump day were already ranged down along the backstairs which led from up there. That disposal, oddly contested by my mother, would come up on tea day, which coincided. My question was a silly one, what with all the closets and drawers in this old stockpile of a house, and in similar houses here. People on our porches censured themselves every springcleaning for their accumulations, leaning back into these with Cheshire-cat smiles. I had even heard it suggested that people got senile quicker in cities, with less storage space to remember from.

Some of the drawers up there, I thought I recalled, had a tooled-gold line around the keyhole. I couldn’t recall any knick-knacks; maybe there had been none, or none to engage a child. “The same? Like what? What’s it like?”

Knobby had never looked me up and down before. I hadn’t realized a person like him could do that as well as any of us, even if bowing to the privilege. He was going to say something special. He often did—but as I check back now, never with such ceremony. Now he turned to the packages, bowing to them, and then again to me. Somehow it was inserted into my mind that it was an honor for each of us to know the other.

Sunlight from over the sink warmed my hair and fell on his clasped hands. “Very Samurai.”

On tea days my grandmother comported herself like company, often wearing a hat for the drive to follow, for which Knobby, too, put on a chauffeur’s cap. If being without income had made her almost benign, her autocratic public manner remained the same. As she shrank in size, though she was doing it hardily, she seemed to have come into the more spiritual promise of those great-flowered dresses, which now whispered around her with a tuberose perfume so heavy it affected the tea sandwiches. She seemed to be able to look at me now, though still not casually. Often I caught her contemplating me. I always stared back. Though I can despise people in small ways, I cannot hate them. They interest me too much. My stare never downed her. She seemed instead to sink into it almost fearfully.

My mother couldn’t rise to what she called “your grandmother’s act.”

“I don’t think it is an act.” We were waiting for her in the sitting room. Two of the charity friends, very old people also, had just left the house—and this, too, had been going on for weeks. Always they left with a bundle or two. Surely my mother had noticed this, though she never said.

“Ah well, you’re the acting expert,” she said.

My cheeks mantled with red, as the old expression went. At the well-known acting academy to whose summer classes I had transferred, hoping to qualify in the competition for full entrance in the fall, we were collecting these expressions and practicing them. The teacher was pleased with those of us who could blush; I couldn’t do it on command, but some students never had blushed at all. As to the academy—my mother had cheered me on, crying out the minute I broached going there—“Of course, of course—how is it we never thought of it for you?” She had put her hand on my wrist then, just as now. Saying, “But it’s—it’s the person herself who has to think of it first—isn’t it? Or it won’t work.” But yes, she had said, oh yes.

Each yes and but of hers had mounted to true recognition and delight. That’s what I was, an actress. Without knowing it, that’s what they had been fitting me for. All the planes of our family, our street, our town—had contributed. As a newspaper would one day note. But she granted it first.

The hand on my arm was very thin.

“I wasn’t making fun,” she said.

“I know.” I wished she would; she worried me. My mother and the city had collided, though with her usual tact she never went in at the same times I did, and never asked to meet me there. Clothes arrived, from stores with bleak French names. Stark outfits, with sudden spurts of frill. Too much black, even for the suburbs we now were. Swooping hats. She would dress in them and after hours of rapt preparation be unable to leave the house, sinking back to regard herself for hours, wineglass in hand. Dressed like that, there was after all no place to go. Once I heard her say this to her mirror, nodding from her divan, “All dressed up and no place to go.” When in the city myself, I once or twice peered into hotel lobbies where I saw she could belong—but on what errand? The worst of it was that she knew beforehand the dressing up might come to nothing, yet didn’t stop.

Today she was in all too perfect gray, silkily pouched on the vanished hips. She saw me looking at her new stiletto heels. “Don’t worry. I dress for the drive. But I never get out of the car.

A mirror was opposite. The house had many, and she tended to place herself in front of them, not for pleasure. “I used to look like a provincial just a little ahead of the crowd, didn’t I? Or too good for it.” She smoothed the ravages under her eyes and at her mouth. “I always did dress for what might happen. Down home, we do that. But now I look like a widow with hopes.”

Her accuracy made me flinch.

“Yes, it started down home,” she said, giving it home’s inflection. “We attitudinize. That’s so you don’t get too close to our hearts.”

I must have brooded.

She was handing me a glass of wine. “For better or worse, I’ve taught you the same.”

“For better. I’m sure of it.” I was flushed with all the first rose-pinks of the theater, and they had told us we must prepare to be hard.

I was wrong. Attitudes may get you into drama school. But in the end the heart must be exposed. It wouldn’t be Bill Wetmore who taught me that.

Another old person was coming down the stairs, one of the fading ones from our own street. He nodded in at us, holding up his cane. “Just look at the one she gave me. I’ll leave my old one in your bin.” The cane was an elegant briar, with an ivory grasp. He accepted a glass of wine, but with a gander over his shoulder, as if allegiances must not be confused, and went quickly out.

She laughed, then knit the plucked brows that gave her face an undeserved shallowness. I think she found that useful, or had once. Mine are what hers might have been—heavy and straight. A woman’s face can have too much character for quick luck. But I prefer to leave it so.

“I wish all the stuff went out to those poor dears,” she said. “There’s another load in the front hall.”

“Why do you bother, then?”

“Why indeed. You think I want the stuff, whatever it is?”

“Old clothes, old underwear, Knobby says. Old papers she can’t bear to burn, but scissors up. She goes through everything. Maybe it’s a kind of rite.”

“Maybe.”

“Then why do you care?”

“I promised your father. To keep him posted.” She took a second glass of wine. “Don’t look so amazed.”

I wouldn’t nowadays. The lines of communication can be down but not cut, only sagged from a slow, weaning wind equal to any storm. Yet one still communicates. The one who long ago first wheedled for it, does so once again; in duet, the one who in response long ago promised whatever, again promises—and at times the roles may even be reversed. Where that kind of power is exerted, distance doesn’t count. As every grave-digger knows.

“He said she might well do something strange, if we came to live in the house.”

“Did he say why?”

“He thought her memories may recently have been disturbed by something. She wouldn’t say what.”

“But what has that to do with us?”

She got up and walked about, carefully picking up her sharp heels from the mahogany floor, which gave her the gait of the larger birds who walk so. I would one day use that gait in a part I played, scarcely believing that I would ape her so, would do such a thing—but I did. “I saw you in the gallery, looking at your grandfather.”