The Bobby-Soxer (14 page)

“Can I have some of your tea?” I liked the plummy stuff, but he was more in need of it. Whatever vision he had had of us that afternoon, our prospects had made him panicky about his own.

Yes, he said over the tea—walking back toward us he had come upon Craig Towle behind the biggest dune, in process of rewrapping a package Towle had then carried back to the top almost absently, replacing it where it had been dumped. They had been too far apart to speak and Knobby had thought himself unseen. Returning, he had said nothing, only wondering how to tell my mother who the trash sifter was. Nor had he seen what the package contained.

I only wanted to know one thing. Did he think Craig Towle had dropped the bundle toward us on purpose? It had been the kind of gesture which put me in mind of the
Aeneid,
a mist to me in high school, which thanks to Mr. Evams I had begun to understand in braille—the sixth book particularly, with its “Here be lilies” and other hails and farewells.

“It was the wind,” Watanabe said dolefully, looking round the careful rooms he had prepared for so many months. “It is always the wind.”

“S
O THIS IS THE
farm,” Mr. Peralho said, standing between my father and my brother, in the cow parsley and ragged robin of what had once been a potato field. A merry brown keg of a man with brindled hair and a black moustache, he was at home here as he was everywhere else, in his palely woven deerstalker suits from the last supplier in Scotland, and boots so engine-turned they must be able to walk by themselves. During the weeks since the three had flown from Rio he had become everyone’s favorite, by from the first partly acting like one, spending hours in my mother’s darkened bedroom, adjacent to the two rooms, formerly my father’s, which the three men now shared indiscriminately, or hobnobbing in the kitchen, saucepan in hand for a steaming café-au-lait, or brewing maté, for which he had brought along the proper silver-crested gourd and long sipspoon. Though he had yet to be asked to our third floor, my grandmother, bringing out her best downstairs tureens, made every evening meal a state dinner, and Watanabe seemed cheered rather than not by the extra forces which had brought on all this butlering. Perhaps he and our guest had even had after-hours sessions over his own destiny, for Mr. Peralho, who tossed out words like that with an impressively accented calm that he well knew resonated, was also confessedly a midnight man.

Only Bill Wetmore, always at my side since his grandmother had died, could not bear him, even on this bright excursion day holding back, chewing satirically on a stem of wild garlic. A few feet on from us the field ended abruptly, at the edge of acre after rolling acre now given over to lawn. My father had wanted us to approach this way first. “Following the potatoes—” he’d said, with an eye-crinkle at me. “Then dip right, at the pigs.”

“And left at the cow barn,” I breathed, giving the old responses. “Where the cats will get their supper, except for the old torn that ate green peas with his paw.”

“—Then in at the truck garden, past the scarecrow—” my brother shouted, so that we all looked at him. Newly a dandy in tailor-mades, he smiled back at me crookedly.

In the distance the farmhouse, sleeked and unporched, rode too high on its new and profitless green. Of all the random buildings so well-known to us by description, only the barn remained, staunchly bigger than the house, as had once been practicable.

“Lost its ballast,” my father said.

“House was never Revolutionary,” my brother said. “It’s not even 1850.” In the way of those who wear special ties in order to be seen, he had also begun to be ponderous. At the time, the manner was unduly heavy for his whittled bone structure, making him seem like a bird carrying too big a worm. Always sisterly, I had told him as much, when the manner had been tried on me. “Ah, but in academia,” he’d said, “they’ll only see the worm.”

His aim was to research in the Beinecke Library, though Mr. Peralho was agreeable to either Harvard or Yale.

My father glowed, proud of both of us. Ballast was what he had gained. His health was clearly now in tune with his looks. Browner than ever, his skin was almost what Mr. Peralho’s was by nature, and in ease, too, he now resembled him. As I told Bill Wetmore, he had unshouldered some responsibility—probably us at home. Something missing in him haunted me though, until seeing him with my mother I identified it: he no longer had his censorious click. If he had opted for the sensual life, I said to Bill, I no longer blamed him.

“Don’t daughters usually?”

Not this daughter, not anymore, I’d said meaningfully, but Bill Wetmore had not been amused, even when I added that at least from Brazil we didn’t have under our noses week to week whatever my father’s life down there included. As, after all, he and the others now had the two of us. “Brazil—” he said “—does that excuse them everything? In spite of his Beaux Arts relative, he still disapproved of other countries, in the Cobble Row way that going away to school had done little for, and though he meant to go to Europe some day, as we all did, he tended to think of the rest of the world as backward. I recalled too that he no longer had ambitions to be a sculptor. Without knowing quite why I saw these things, or that he saw the change in me, I was beginning to estimate him.

“Gentleman’s farm—” he said now, shifting his chaw.

He and his had never been farmers enough to criticize. He saw I was thinking that.

“Gentlemen—” Mr. Peralho said serenely. “Two.”

His acquaintance with the farm’s most recent owners was why we were here. I thought of how many of our taken-for-granted family barriers had melted in his presence in the short time he had been with us. My father had never volunteered to take us here, might not have refused us—but then my brother and I had never asked it. There were always mysteries at the bottom of all families, as our street had long since taught me. I do not think even now that we had more than our share. But whatever the initial premise on which my parents had built their lives, this had been compounded by their habit of not speaking of it, most importantly not to themselves. Manners had excused this and indeed united them; they both had the remoteness of the polite.

My grandmother would have been moved by more anciently lurid conventions. But she or we weren’t unique there either, except in the details. All families are bound to a primal contract so visible we come late to thinking of it—that legend-making which begins the minute we are born. How delightedly one watches children, ours or not, compounding this in its earliest stages, innocently aloud. But it’s not we professionals who keep the legends going. The rest of the world merely conceals its performances.

On the path to the house, Mr. Peralho seemed to skip, but when you looked at him square he was ambling like the rest of us, though we were the entourage. It was the same in our kitchen, never before a place for men, to which my father and brother now gravitated, following after him. I would have too, except for Bill Wetmore.

“What nationality
are
you, Mr. Peralho?” my grandmother had said with just that emphasis, after a day with him. We already knew that his name, like his native language, was Portuguese, his fortune from the Cauca Valley of Colombia, and his birthplace Brazil.

Smiling, he gave her a kindly poke. “Latin greaser.”

Eating soup next to me, my brother spluttered, muttering He’ll have her in his pocket now; isn’t he marvelous?

On my other side Bill Wetmore said low, He’ll tell anything, won’t he.

My brother said, not so low: I heard that.

Hush up both of you, I’d said, busy watching how sparsely Mr. Peralho spoke. It was answers, mostly.

Up ahead on the path, my father was momentarily alone. I ran and attached myself to him. For days I had wanted to. The happy change in him had made me hope it might be easier. But he was always with the other two. Now I remembered how good walking with him was. We had the same stride.

A lot can be said silently between two who share that. I could tell—stride—that he would prefer me not to talk—stride, stride—that he could not himself find anything casual to say—stride, stride, and stride—and that both of us knew—saunter, saunter—that I was going to speak. “Is it Mr. Peralho’s money that makes him so cheery?”

Stride—bump. We were out of step.

“Who told you that?”

I was caught. Shift to get in step again. “Bill Wetmore said it.”

“Shouldn’t wonder.” Quickstep, quickstep. “No. It’s not the money.”

“What is it then?” Hard to keep up. Like when I was small.

Full stop.

“Acceptance.”

I stopped too, still small.

My father looked back to where Bill Wetmore lagged self-consciously. “Whatever Bill Wetmore says—is what he
is.
I suggest—you consider that. I beg you to.”

He made me walk on. “I’ve always banked on you to speak for yourself. You always have, best of any of us … And why do you keep calling that boy by his full name? We know who he is.”

I hadn’t been aware. I guessed at once, though. Craig Towle—always fully named also. I had them both in my head.

Up forward on the path, the pair turned briefly, then Mr. Peralho urged my brother on, taking him amicably by the arm. Their steps did not match. My brother slipped his arm in Mr. Peralho’s.

“He can’t see anybody else for beans,” I said. “You’re his father. Don’t you mind?”

I was wearing a belt with silly dangles. My father touched them.

“I accept it,” my father said. Then he took my hand, the way he used to when we crossed a street. The calm I felt is with me yet.

All four of us met at the farmhouse door. My brother spotted my father and me at once. “Oo, lovey-dovey.”

My father looked at the oak door, shook his head at the brass knocker.

“Not our door!” my brother and I said. We were both freehanded now.

Bill Wetmore came up from behind. He had switched to a long stem of last year’s straw that waggled all the way to his cheekbone.

“I’ll bow out—” he said. “Thanks very much for—everything. Been eating with you day and night.” He lifted his chin at me. “Call you.”

“Thank you, Bill,” my father said. “I’ve been meaning to. For what you did for my wife. In case we don’t see you again.” He gave him a long look. “Otherwise—come on in with us.”

“Yes, do,” my brother said. A giggle spurted from his mouth. Lack of control is his agony, but he’s always kidding himself he has mastered it. “As an artist you really owe it to yourself.”

“Thanks—no,” Bill Wetmore said. “It’s not—my farm.”

Mr. Peralho said, “Na, na, na.” Each sounded placating in a different language. I saw his eyes didn’t match. One was a genial brown, the other had a hazel flaw in it, like the tip of a gold knife. He reached out winningly to take the straw from Bill’s mouth. “Give him a cigar.”

The door opened shyly on two gentlemen, both in jeans, both with hair cut boyishly close to the pate. They and Mr. Peralho greeted with fond ceremony, cheek by cheek. With pleased cries of “Rio!” my brother was drawn in. My father shook hands with them.

“And who’s that good-looking young man going off?” the one holding back a big dog said. “A new friend?”

“No,” my father said. “Hey! He has no transportation. How’s he to get back?” He ran down the path after Bill.

“Uh-uh—” my brother said. “Not a friend.”

The dog was sniffing my new boots. I get on with dogs. I dropped on my heels to him.

“Pity about Leslie Warden,” the dog’s master said. “We met him more than once. A fine man.”

My father came walking back. “Wetmore says he’ll hitch a ride.”

“And who’s this beauty?” the other gentleman said. He smiled from my father’s face to mine, then at his partner. “We think we know.”

“This is—our daughter,” Mr. Peralho said.

I called Bill for hours before I got him, at about eleven that night.

He’d had a hard time getting home. “But I enjoyed it.”

“Can I come see
you?”
I never had. “I’ll take the hearse.” His name for my grandmother’s car, which weeks back he had driven a lot for a brief time, helping me take mother where she had to go. She would not enter his old Volks. No one had used the hearse since Mr. Peralho, who had friends everywhere, had borrowed a silver Citroën from a friend in Doylestown who ran an agency there. Watanabe was in California, waiting to meet his wife.

“I’m not asking because of you.” He would hate me to apologize for not having left with him. “Because of me—” I said.

“Did you stay for dinner?”

“Al fresco.
”

“What’s that mean?”

“In the garden.” I had just learned this. The meal had been wonderful, simple but everything of the best, with one or two items I had never heard of either. I wolfed it all down as if it were knowledge. The farmhouse’s interior had been mannishly suave, fixedly looking back at the people in it, in the way of places always set for company, and of course it now had nothing to do with us, though the word “Farm” had been retained in its new name—the other names given it by previous owners being bantered—all the way back to us, who had never called it anything.

For drinks we were offered everything from kumiss, drunk by the artist elder gentleman ever since his years in Morocco, to Pernod, of which only my brother partook. The second gentleman had spent his fateful years with the first one. What else distinguished him was not disclosed. They admired my new riding boots, and my father for having had them made to my special last by Mr. Peralho’s little Spaniard in the Calle So-and-so, “Not that other leather butcher,” they said with laughter. It was revealed that Mr. Peralho owned an apartment in New York to which they had been, and which it seemed he now hoped I would use during my drama-study years, since it was hardly ever occupied. My brother’s Harvard future was also brought forward, Mr. Peralho’s genial right eye presiding over both these statements.

I saw our hosts weigh the balance between my brother’s physique and my own, and tuck some mutual judgment back in. “Isn’t she something!” they said to the air, to my father, ready to warm their connoisseurship into affection, if he and I would allow it. “Oh, she must come visit, when you’re away.” I saw what their friend Peralho had meant by “our daughter.” Friendship was their family, and I could become a property of the unique sort they could not otherwise acquire. In quite another way, my brother had already been absorbed. Meanwhile the two of them moved with quiet dignity through all they had been able to acquire on their own—their books, art, opera loves, barn studio, and the elder one’s ringing professional life, the two of them meanwhile inclining their boy’s pates in the most experienced conversation I had ever heard.