The Bobby-Soxer (16 page)

That too had stayed with me—and when I had seen her eyes. The soft armor which from that day on coiffed her only made more evident their gaunt stare. Now that other saner look again flashed in them, first at him, then at me. “She no longer calls you Bill Wetmore.” I felt the twinge of surprise one does when a parent gives warning of what one’s inner self has scarcely yet noticed. Then with the side-wave of the hand with which a passenger on a receding boat indicates the elements to those on shore, she went to her room. Picking up the purple box she had left behind her, I thought of the years of her chocolates, and of how long her fastidious habits had obscured her from us.

So that was how Bill Wetmore had become an intimate of the house. Having spent his fare to bring her home, he could not go to the city, though he had not said so. He would borrow from me anyway that next Monday morning. Meanwhile, there he was on our rubber-matted, brass-edged top front step—a flesh and blood figure, bred to me on dirty bedpads and river-park corners never shoddy to me, which I thought I knew as well as my own. We stood there half aghast, spun toward each other from funerals, bad errands, and weekend dearth. I myself invited him in to my other life. To his credit he was reluctant, out of certain doubts. But he entered it.

My father hadn’t come home at once. Though my grandmother had called him in Rio, her story of the dump must merely have borne out what he had expected of her. Or, in my mother’s case, what he did not care to confront. Yet, as could be seen after my luncheon at the farm, when he did come it was in the spirit of having us all confront everything. Bill Wetmore must have done so at once.

Watanabe watched us all with that servant devotion which is the most sophisticated of any. I would have caught on to a lot much faster if I had been willing to watch him in reference to more than Bill. On him, Watanabe and I vied on silently. Though by now our family fluctuations must have exhausted him, and he had been still busy as well with his efforts in anticipation of his wife, he disapproved of Bill’s driving the hearse. He disapproved of Bill and me doing jointly what should have been my private filial duty. He looked sardonically on Bill’s constant presence at meals, and on our table manners when together. After the first meal he brought out fingerbowls, his face smooth with gratification when Bill tried to fit his whole hand in one. After the second, he added cigars from my father’s old humidor, later tut-tutting over Bill’s sadly chewed butt.

When he one day came upon me giving Bill money, he turned a curious shade of tiger.

“Knobby disapproves like a father,” Bill said. Under Bill’s influence, which I, untutored, saw merely as healthy and masculine, for surely a young man so slim and well-featured would not be coarse, I began to think Watanabe outrageously funny, and worse, to show it, sometimes in cahoots with Bill. I do not now think that a servant’s devotion should ever be ridiculed. Though from well before Sancho Panza, people have not agreed.

My father caught onto Watanabe’s sly sabotage at once. “Fingerbowls?” he said, looking down the table at Knobby. “Ah, cigars—” he said, looking down the table at Bill. My brother, sniggering to me, said: “I never much liked either of them.”

My brother reported that my mother hadn’t been that eager to see him. For that reunion he had gone to her bedroom ahead of my father. “And when our father followed me in, she went mum. One would think,” my brother tittered, “that she was off men altogether.” He was always to be as monumentally wrong about her as she was about him. But the hurt was eternal. “I see the favorite is doing fine,” my brother then said to me, and went up the stairs to the third floor to see my grandmother, as he would be allowed to do every day of their stay.

When my father came out of my mother’s darkness that first time, to Mr. Peralho and me waiting in the corridor, he came first to me, and gripped me by the upper arms. “I had no idea. No idea.” When he had last touched me we had clasped hands only. I now felt that he had not acted unwisely. What a daughter admires in a father stretches so far beyond the sexual. That fussy Viennese uncle, Freud, on whom the world has so long depended for the key to its sexual shackles, had had his rabbinates confused. What I felt in my father was the holy ark of authority, brought into the domestic cave for all our protection. There my mother was our innerness, but one stretching far beyond the decorative arts, or even those of the psyche. Where he phrased life for us even when reticent, or was meant to, her life worked beneath phrases, even when she spoke. Who they slept with had less power to hurt me, or to inspire me, than what they withheld of those other powers—or gave. And surely he would give me his confidence.

But my father turned next to Mr. Peralho. “He’s bad for her. So am I. Juan—what’s to be done?”

As your parents grow old, you become the authority. But I was not allowed that time-lag. I saw my father, still in his prime, cast aside his own authority like a jackstraw. And not to me. The corners of our upstairs hall, filling with bloodlight, crept forward standing there autonymous. Jealousy is yellow to me. I sink into it like into plush, in my ears its shifty tambourine shake.

Just then Knobby came up the stairs with my grandmother’s afternoon tray. Once upon a time there had been buzzers all over the house, connected to a church-shaped wallbox in the kitchen, inside which the little flags had gone up on signal, each slotted to a room. Knobby had reactivated the ones to and from the third floor. He and Mr. Peralho nodded. They might already have had a midnight session. My grandmother had first dined with us the night before.

Mr. Peralho twirled a hand toward my mother’s shrouded door. For her?—his eyebrows inquired. Watanabe pointed toward the third floor.

“Ah na na na,” Mr. Peralho said. Reaching, he took over the tray. Holding it, he bent to my mother’s door. She had hung from its top a voluminous drapery I vaguely remembered as once worn by her. Of darkest navy, too curved for a door, it hung disconsolately, good neither against sound nor dust. Mr. Peralho wagged his brows again. “Cashmere.”

“She’s always liked
luxe,”
my father said.

“And you do not?”

Knobby had vanished down the stairs again. There would be plenty enough of that handmade china my grandmother fancied, for him to furnish up another tray. Unlike the inherited hand-painted stuff in half the better cupboards in town, which had been done on Bavarian blanks shipped for that purpose, this set had been made from scratch, in heavy brown and blacks I liked.

The two men had forgotten me. I hid in thoughts of china, like a child.

My father had not answered. He still had his noble looks, though two newly pouted lines framed his mouth under the tan.

Mr. Peralho saw that too. “Those with her trouble, they need liquid by the liter.
Other
liquids. And my dear, dear man”—the two dears spat out like shot—“they need to have the
first
tray.” Then, holding the tray waiter-style in one hand, he rat-tatted on the door and sallied in with his deerstalker’s stride.

We waited, but there was no sound.

“Is he a doctor?”

“A—medicine man. Without portfolio.”

“Is that where you went? To him? When you were ill?”

“So you know about that,” my father said. “No. I knew him from before.”

The questions were backing up in me, pouring out with the mud like the pebbles do when the dams of childhood break. “Like—Leslie Warden? From the time when you knew him?”

I meant that to come out like shot.

Why didn’t he crumble? In those days I thought all you had to do was to ask the questions, for the arks to slide. Like Babel in the Bible.

“So you know about him too. Yes, from when I knew him.”

He looked at the door. Still no sound.

“Let’s go down,” my father said. “I find I want my tea, too.”

Neither of us moved.

“Who made all that china? Like in that kiln, in the garage?”

“One of the aunts.”

In family parlance, that meant one of my grandmother’s sisters, all dead. His own sisters we called by name.

“The one—who lived upstairs once?”

“When she did, yes.” His eyes brimmed, not with tears but with story, though he did not go on. Perhaps he thought I had had enough. Or he waited.

Do houses breed habits? Or do the habits of a family breed the houses? Had we as a family always gone upstairs and shut the door?

I had one more question. Why had they left the farm? I was about to ask it.

“You should take Leslie’s money,” my father said. “He meant it kindly.”

“No,” I said. “I wanted yours.”

Haylofts are fine for a beginning. Soft and prickly, jocular, with a cushiony golden light even when there is no longer any hay. Innocence seeping out onto the floorboards. But that can’t be repeated. That nothing can be quite, is the first lesson. We tried.

The loft was different. Lying on the floor afterward, I already knew why. At my side, Bill Wetmore seemed not to. One glance at the desk where Craig Towle had worked, his chair, his daybed, was all it took. We had an audience.

“You’re so thin, all of a sudden.”

“Too thin?”

I have small breasts that lie flattened against the chest like lappets. Many girls have them, but it is a shape ignored. Beneath them my body is narrow, with hardly any indentation at the spoon-shaped hips, so that the long, long legs seem scarcely separate. I am soon to find that shorter and chunkier men go mad over such a body, and also, that since clothes hang almost in their own folds on such a structure, such a body is not surprisingly the ideal of the fashion trade, where so many men like that are the moneybags. Gossip blames the gentlemen designers for wanting women androgynous, but one ought to remember that the sexual sanction of those other men enters in.

I still thought I could never bear to copulate with a shorter man. I knew nothing as yet of the attraction whose very violence comes out of inbred standards departed from.

Bill Wetmore was the standard choice for me, as our schoolmates and even our elders were prone to emphasize. Tall men do as they please sexually. I was to be the grateful one, and I was. He covered me well, the head and toes extending beyond me, the cave of the eye little more pronounced than mine, the feet only slightly less arched—but the square-bladed shoulders satisfyingly alien.

“Too thin? For art?” We had already had this tease. But now I cast a look at that desk, so sequestered with its chair.

“Uh-uh.” He liked to be applied to as an artist. “But it changes the drawing.”

“You saw me only last week.”

“I know.”

We held each other. Nakedness was the only real seeing, back then.

“When you called me, you were crying.”

“I know.”

“Why?”

“Don’t ask me. Now I’m not.” My tongue licked his breastbone. How safe I was. “I hated waiting. Why did you make me?”

“I was—thinking … and believe me, that house is no fun to be in.”

“No other reason? Why you never ask me there?”

“Why should there be?”

So there was, then. But his reason wasn’t what I silently imputed to him—the thought of my mother tripping those cobbles once, a few houses down. Or of Phoebe, once my friend. No, his house wasn’t good enough for me, now that he had seen ours. But that sort of shame has to be lived with, before it shows.

We all but fell asleep, in that lulling amity which would never come again.

I was the first to sit up. “I have to leave.”

Other women will tell you that more often the men, married or single, lovers or not, are the ones who do the leaving. And of how they, the women, loathe being left behind. But it would be a long time before I came to that.

I stretched, yawning, deeming myself in full command. Perhaps, in a way I was. Certainly he saw me as so. “Wish I had a horse. All the way over here, I was wishing it.”

“Instead of a Lincoln. Of course.” He leaned back on the pillows we’d taken from the narrow daybed, his mouth wry. To him, I and mine were the impracticals who always landed money-high.

“No. Instead of anything.”

Horses are health to me, and a way of being in woodland. So they were to my father, too, who had taught me to ride. To him too horses were for riding, not for ownership. To me as an adolescent, also perhaps a chance at being in command. I’d never minded our having to rent or borrow them. But to Bill, even to wish for one was a matter of class.

He was still leaning back. Youth integrates some faces only briefly. I can’t swear that I even then saw, in what he called his Philadelphia face (as if to him all Philadelphia had only one) those flint-shaped peasant eyes. Yet I saw something, or heard it. “Well—you have the boots,” he said.

I got up, still nude, and went over to them. They were lying on the floor near the desk, where I had discarded them like the properties we tossed around the stage before a tryout or rehearsal at school, or else carefully arranged. I had shed them before I rightfully knew where I was, in the dark of a space once so much my own stage.

They lay in what my brother had high-voicedly pointed out as “all their amaranthine beauty.” Gifts excited his stinginess, as porn must do the impotent. The spurred ankle of one boot lay across the other’s calf. The bootmaker, he said, had thought from the size ordered that they must be a man’s.

I turned on the desk lamp, a plain brass gooseneck. A pocket of manila envelopes, a clutch of yellow pencils in a rubberband, a stapler, and a box of typing paper lay on the desk top. The center drawer, opened, had one typewriter ribbon in it, used; the file drawer was bare. The chair was metal, and pillowless. The daybed cover you could buy at any dimestore, and looked unused. How could this small array have put so much intent into a room? Putting the room itself into another history entirely, which even in the evening’s new air smelt of its own mulch.

“Has he gone for good?”

“Don’t know. He took the typewriter. He said to get rid of any stuff, if he didn’t come back.”

I sat down on the splintery floorboards. Soft, camel-colored socks had come with the boots. I slid them on, conscious that Bill was staring between my legs, at what he had told me was undrawable. Once he had had me shave down there, in order to try. This had been just after the Chicago Institute, posted one of Bill’s drawing books by an instructor of his, hadn’t bought it but had held onto it for a respectable time. Illustration had then still been a dirty word to him. I had sat for hours with my legs akimbo. No, I can’t, he’d finally said. It still looked like a Hasidic’s mouth to him. Impossibly vulnerable. Impossibly arrogant. Put it away. Oh he could be fun, when he had still been Bill Wetmore.