The Bobby-Soxer (15 page)

On the surface theirs was a seamless life. I hadn’t lived long enough to know that in the end everybody tries to make one—that even the adventurer, maybe breaking with every rule except the bedouin, still gathers some sameness to himself at night. But as I sat, childishly mum, at that cool marine table, while the one hipless boy they had in the kitchen kept replenishing our water glasses and his twin outside pruned a sandy, yellow-green shrub whose leaves, the second gentleman laughingly said, resembled banknotes, I sensed what any child would, that whatever is this seamless keeps something at bay.

The water glasses were extraordinary, each goblet footed with the cloudy-crystal body of a woman. As the willful-mouthed houseboy piled my plate and the two hosts cozened me shyly and sweetly, I felt that while I was here I too was a kind of amulet, and that the Dollies and Ginnies and Millies who peppered their affectionate chitchat might be something of the same. Even though this world I was temporarily in might be like any house presenting itself for company while covering up any subfamilial rages—I glanced up at the serving boy—there was also a fealty here, as delicate and accomplished as the napery on the table.

I could see why my father, who never preened himself in our house, could stretch so at ease; even if his fine brown hand from time to time closed anxiously on its napkin ring at some sally from my brother, whose cockalorum manners were the only false note. Once or twice I caught my brother himself casting sheep’s eyes at me, pleading for my understanding. He had it. During dessert, a sense of enclosure momentarily beset me. I listened to my own femaleness, thundering small in my fingertips. Yet I could perceive the quiet attraction, or even the fiercer one, of a world from which women’s agony, even women’s inner entity, were barred. I myself was feeling how that could be. Under the table the dog’s huge russet head made eyes at me, as benign a dog as I had ever seen.

Before we left, they showed us where the pheasant run had been in my grandparents’ time. They planned to revive it.

“But not the refrigerator in the parlor,” I said, and everybody howled, the dog barking at us. My father could not take his eyes off me.

Out on the steps, my brother hung back. The elders were already at the car. Steps make Tim confessive. Or he has to educate. “Sis—.”

I said to him what I said to my mother when she attempted to tell me the facts of life. “You don’t have to explain.”

When we all left, I too was kissed.

On the phone to Bill, I burst out crying. “They were so nice. So terribly nice.”

Emotion can do very well on the phone—especially if you wish to be saved from it. He was spared my real tears.

Meanwhile, I could hear his answer clearer than if he stood before me. “You’re not going to be crazy loyal?”

In turn, a phone voice can’t lie, even to itself.

Though it may pause.

“To whom?”

We were to meet at the hayloft, giving him a couples of hours’ time. His grandmother’s house, emptied of all but the bundles for the welfare and the leftover medical appliances, still stank of bones gone bad. She had left neat directives for the disposal of all her effects except those. The house was to be sold to satisfy the liens on it which had paid for his and Phoebe’s education, as well as to fulfill a memorial bequest to the hospital, although he had been informed that he and his sister could have first-purchase rights for a short period agreeable to the bank and other lenders, unless a hot purchaser came along. My father had advised him that this arrangement, though it had little basis in law, was likely to be honored by small-town decency. But Phoebe didn’t want the house, even if she could have paid for it, and Bill had barely enough money from part-time jobs to live in the city—on hope.

Our house had become his oasis. The day my mother came home from the dump, walking, he had been in the empty house on Cobble Row, ready to go back to the city. His grandmother’s funeral had been two days before. Because of that, he and I, parting in the city and agreeing to meet there on the following school Monday, had not even communicated while in the town. Young live-at-home people, conducting their divided lives, have a fierce sense of those partitions. In my own house I was another person, a totality of my history with the family. For hours I might not think of him. Whenever I did, my lower limbs might swim with our secret unity, but I kept him and the tiny apartment where we met, just as I kept the school and the city’s daring streets—at the other end of our first train ride together.

In the house on Cobble Row that day, he had just flung the old casement wide. The wind we had felt at the dump was still up, a dun, hurricane stealth that bypassed us late every summer, on its way to the coast. Behind him, welfare bundles lay on the floor and the rented wheelchair, oxygen tent, and intravenous feeder waited to be picked up. The Wetmores’ economy had never much needed the dump. He had just about decided to take what food he could to the city with him, and hole up there until Monday, drawing. He never got much done when I was there. He wasn’t thinking of me, except perhaps in that reverse way.

He was about to shut the casement when my mother floated by. Her hat must have been pinned, for she wasn’t holding it against the wind, and her shoes dug from step to step, as if by themselves. The body in between might have been all silk, blow-able. He took all this in with the quickness that was to make him so good graphically, so poor at paint. Her arms were what floated, like scarves. The face, as it bobbed near, had the dedication that madness brings. “She’s beautiful, isn’t she?” he said, telling me. “I never saw that before.”

He jumped out of the low casement into the flowerbed and called her by name. She had a hard time stopping, as if on a vehicle that wanted to roll ahead. He thought she recognized him, and that she perhaps was not crazed after all. When she swayed, about to fall, he grasped her. She held onto him. He said her hold on a man was something that man would never forget. “The bobby-soxer’s dead—” she said. “Everybody knew it except me.”

Craig Towle must have tried to drive her home from the dump, and she must have refused him. Several porch-sitters on the road back to town reported seeing a car like his following her anyway. The section nearest the dump was made up of old wood-frame cottages, the early seedbed of the industrial part of town. Mostly pensioners lived in these, or the bachelor tag ends of old occupations. Watanabe, out looking for her on his own, talked to one of them, a retired signalman for the vanished freight railroad. “Sure, they paraded right by here, him in second gear; looked like he was pacing a greyhound.”

Nearer town, the trail disappeared. What had happened was that she had gone into Walsh’s Inn, where Craig Towle had not followed her. Gilbert and Luray weren’t there, but the barman was, and a few regulars. She told one of them, a veteran Legionnaire whose picture made the
Sentinel
every year for selling the most poppies on Decoration Day, that she had never been in a bar alone before or at that hour of the day, but that she recognized him. I recognize a lady when I see one, he said. She paid for her own drinks, he said, out of a little silver change purse.

My mother never went out of the house without carrying a handbag. Inside it would have been that chain-silver purse in which she had carried her mad money since she was a girl. All girls of her era, she had long ago told me, had toted such insurance against having to climb out of a car. “On a double date mostly, when couples tended to egg each other on.” Or a blind one, when you hadn’t picked the man yourself. No girl of her acquaintance had ever admitted to having had to use her money. When I’d wondered at that statistic, she had answered in that sudden, ambery drawl which brought Greensboro right back to me: “Reckon they stayed on—in the rumble seat.”

She had had two drinks at the inn, about all that her five-dollar bill and some change would have paid for. Nobody there had dared offer her one. She would have sat on the barstool, sipping like a poster girl, a slim pointed leg hooked on the brass footrail. “I been nipping—” she told them. “That’s what we call it down home.”

Down there, one rarely saw anybody you could say was out-and-out drunk, but Southern company never went without a glass of something, and its lawns and days were crisscrossed with errands and droppings-in, business or household, which on the instant qualified a person to be company. Nipping could become exaggerated, like at the “old-crowd teas” which also served as our birthday parties from the time of our christenings—crepe-paper hats on our blond heads as we grew, and the darkies snickering, not always at us. And old ladies walloping their cars home afterward. You could draw back from nipping “on doctor’s advice,” or lean into it gentlier and gentlier, especially if you were a woman. Though if you were like our Miss DeVore, no one ever saw you more than a tiny bit blank, and you could always cut cloth. “Always go to Miss DeVore in the morning’ was all down home ever said. With the men, of course, hard drinking did not have to hide.

I think people drink in order to be able to tell the truth to themselves. Up to then, my mother had abstained as she could. What she would do, once Bill brought her home, was to hide herself. Where she had been brought up there was one more alternative, if you found yourself sliding too far. You could go away, but not to an institution. Many of the houses down home were just right for that. My grandmother’s, with its two-step drops here and there into separate suites of rooms, much resembled those. As my mother’s separation wore on, I sometimes fancied that even as a girl, come there that party night in her graduation dress, an inner something unknown to her at the time might have seen ahead to the possibilities of that house.

I don’t know whether my mother ever fully realized that the house had already had what one might call a harboring experience. To her there would have been no connection between her plight and that other once-upon-a-time life upstairs, which I would come to know as not hidden, but staged. At any rate, she was never to mention it. From her own wedding day on, perhaps she had been in too deep for other considerations. To me, as I myself grew stagier or was trained to be, plight became the exact word for her situation, so troubledly between the archaic and the real. She had come to that dark room of hers too unfairly, and not through maidenly shallowness.

Taken into Bill Wetmore’s house, once he had persuaded her there, she sat in the only chair left, staring at the old beams and at the Heatilator in the inglenook, sipping at the water brought her as if it were contraband. All the Cobble Row houses are from the same early builder, who knew only one way to set up that stone. Seeing the piled floor and the gear ready-packed, she said: “Ah—clearing for a guest wing, are you?” We would get to know that murmur, made with such effort. Then she saw she was in a wheelchair, Bill said, and sprang up in fright. All those who self-hide are afraid of forced incarceration. She would not enter his beat-up old Volks. “No, I can’t go home in that.”

Nor would she ever enter it in the following weeks, when he and I drove her to various doctors, first at our behest, then at hers, on what we thought were her fool’s errands, until we realized she was stocking her room with vitamins, paperbacks, every requirement for a long indoor siege except the food she knew would always be brought to her. We always had to take the hearse, which Bill drove, and she still dressed for the ride, even on the day she asked to be taken to the police station. “To lodge a complaint?” I said, fearful. I could scarcely hear her answer. “Oh my dear love, against who?”

What she did want, nobody could have dreamed. “I’ve come for a breath test,” she said to the old captain at the desk, so low he had to ask her to repeat, and so imperiously lorn that he did what she wanted. We two helped her unwrap the endless headscarf in which she had encased herself from head to neck and down to her shoulders. It was exquisitely done, Bill said after; did you notice? Like that old Elizabeth Arden ad that went on for years, he said, in which the model had looked to be ready either for surgery or for immortal mummyhood.

While my mother was breathing into the tube the officer whispered:
“Has
she been driving?” We shook our heads, no. The results were positive, he told her, though the percentage of alcohol wasn’t high. “Ah, I’ve been nipping again, have I?” she said. “I wasn’t sure.” She wrapped herself up again abstractedly, as one put away an article long possessed and known to be breakable, if no longer so cherished as of yore.

On the way out, she extracted from her purse her packet of breath pills, a small box of the lavender-flavored pastilles which used to be sold at the cigarette-and-candy stalls of good New York office buildings. Nowadays I procured them for her as my father had. I had thought of this habit as one of the little city encrustations with which women like her, not quite of the provinces, would flavor their life. In the car she offered us each the purple box; we each took one of the tinted squares. They are seldom found anymore, but I can still build their essence on my tongue. To Bill they were like eating perfume, but he accepted one, for which I still honor him. She flashed a sane look at him. “Tact. You two will live on it.”

Officially we waited for those saner looks; actually we feared them. The orphic insights of the disturbed are the hardest to tolerate. Or to congratulate them on. Yet once inside the house, we always tried to delay her leaving us. “You no longer wear your big hat,” Bill dared.

“Oh, Bill—” I warned. The day he had brought her home from his house he had had to order a cab, paying for it out of the money he had earmarked for his train fare. He was always broke before Mondays. On the way she had asked twice whether someone was not following them. No one was. It was raining hard by then. As he helped her out, the cabby noticed she had left her hat on the seat, and handed it to her. She had ignored him. Bill had accepted it for her. Standing with her head full up to the driving rain, wet to the skin, she had said: “The weather must not be allowed to sympathize.” Running out to meet them, I had seen the cabby shake his head.