The Bobby-Soxer (17 page)

I sat on the chair to draw on the boots. What purpose had sat here for so long in our town, where now my own buttocks rested? I was remembering Craig Towle’s sweat and the jut of his nose. And his cool throwaway promise. To pay me nothing. For what nothing could pay. He must be much more than solvent. But he would understand my father, down to these boots.

“So he took the typewriter.” I thought of the man who could gather up his intent and take it away with him, maybe all over the world. Through all towns, all wives, all deaths. Not a fair man, probably.

I stood up. Yes, I still had the boots, gift of my father. “I’m not crazy. But I am loyal. And I’m going to go on being.”

Bill would have to count that in, I meant. If he kept on hanging around us.

He got that. But he asked anyway: “Loyal to whom?”

“To—everyone. To Knobby, even.”

He reddened at that. “What an aristocrat. But then—you know who you are.”

“No, I don’t. Not—all of it.” I found I didn’t want to tell him more about us, about what until today I had thought of as the mystery of the farm. Now that I had seen the farm modern version, was the mystery once there even more alive, having migrated past our third floor? Past my father and brother even. The family mystery, migrating on, even to me.

I stared at him, aghast. There waited for me matters I didn’t want to tell this person to whom, it seemed only a minute ago, I had wanted to tell everything. It was a bad loss. The bottom had dropped out of that safe place in his arms.

“You know who you are—as much as I.” I wanted him to stand by his own folks: the woman Francie, his mother, and that vague outline, the old workman, his stepfather, to whom he was unrelated, yet through him linked to all his own working forebears here on Cobble Row. And the old nurse, that witch of the winding sheet, of whose death, in its common stench, he seemed ashamed.

He would even sell this house, if he could rid himself of it handily, and be glad of the price.

America is full of people like Bill—the man to whom I would one day try to explain Bill Wetmore and my quarrels with him—would say to me in this same loft. Elective orphans—the West Coast crawls with them; no history on their backs except what’s new. Or there are the selective orphans, this man would say, with his hooked smile. Those who keep a few picked ancestors around, for show. That’s the other Coast. Ours. Like your Bill. William Wetmore Storey—would he have been your Bill’s sculptor great-uncle? Or perhaps a cousin?

Cousin—I would say. Yes, he turned out to be only a cousin, several steps removed. You see too much.

For, as that man would tease me, I was an aristocrat—but only in the common way. I romanticized other people’s trials, along with my own. To that, he said, the stage would add its own exaggerations. In the end, if I and the audience were lucky, we might both get hold of the truth.

But right then, what I said to Bill was childishly direct. Schoolgirl-style repartee—I’m not sure there isn’t a place for it.

“You’d sell this place, wouldn’t you. Just to hang on to your father’s baby clothes.” I flung out my arms. “This place.”

Under the riding moon the hayloft lay around us in rumpled shadow.

“You buy it,” he said. “You have the money for it.” He got up from his lounging, always his ultimate gesture even in the pad in town, and turned on the loft’s solitary bulb, flicking off the gooseneck lamp. Maybe he’d sensed that audience after all. “Only one way I can pay you back. I’ll draw it for you. What you’re hanging onto.”

There was paper on the desk, pencils handy. Materials for that brand of explication always are. I leaned over his shoulder as I often did, fascinated by the streaming leadpoint or pen nub which bred people in lightning outline, never seeming to lift from the page until the last dot. Then the instrument would uncover its brood, hatched in a style half fairy tale, half caricature. As their maker would one day tell a newspaper diffidently: one made them just askew enough to be recognizable.

He had already drawn three heads when he dropped the pencil and picked up another, then another, scowling at the numbers on them. “Eversharps. Too soft, really. Or too hard. But they’ll have to do.”

In the end he used both hard and soft. I had already identified the heads: Mr. Peralho, my father, and my brother. At first he populated page after page with their three figures, in what I took to be at random. Then seizing on the stapler—oh, he was always quick to make use of what was at hand—he fastened all the pages together in what I saw was a progression even before he slipped the whole length of cartoon on a line of wooden wall pegs next to the window, in whose center the moon had risen, after all almost full. He had numbered each page of the cartoon.

On page one my father appeared, downstage front, neat as a pin, the way he had been in his commuting days, and about to drop to our platform from the train. A few heads were behind him, all women. In number two he was alone, walking stage right. Mr. Peralho, slightly rubbed in outline, appeared on number three, behind him a map of Brazil. Number four, they met, feet planted on that map. Then came a succession of sketches—coffee plantations, the harbor of Rio, bars, and evening parties, the figures of the two men gradually nearing, then linked, often hand in hand. Then, as my brother appeared, my father, though never disappearing, faded backward, until, in a similar progression, Mr. Peralho and my brother were linked. Except for the clasped hands, neither couple was seen any nearer to each other than lolling side by side on sofas—these however enormously stuffed or torturesomely elegant, and in a mise-en-scène of increasing vulgarity. There was only one page one could call obscene—on which the three heads, drawn with the fuzziest thick-leaded pencil, shared features indiscriminately, seemingly to be one person, one sex.

“Do I have to title it for you?”

I couldn’t speak. One goes mute. Or I do, once a thing long borne, even admitted, is phrased. In the same way, when one finally leaves a man one has lived with, one may do it silently. Everything will have been said.

He was talking in my ear now, in the earnest way people do when they prate of what they think the general world disapproves. Special friends, he said. That was the fancy French phrase for it. I would have thought better of him if he had produced an unfancy one. Our house stank of it, he said. Probably that was why my mother was as she was, he said. Possibly that was why my grandmother, even. Things went backward, and forward too. I must get out of there. For good.

I found my tongue. “Houses that stink. You seem to specialize in getting out of them.”

A ring of moths was circling the bulb hanging at eye level between us. They kept passing, freckle-colored, between his face and mine. Light beaded his blond evening beard. Two nights without shaving made him a vagabond. Behind him the sashless window had its casements wide, framing the dead factory two streets beyond, across alleyways rarely frequented. Anyone looking up could have seen us, framed in its low-silled triangle.

“They’ve weaned you,” he said. “In a few weeks.”

No,
he
had. Bill Wetmore, become Bill. He’s whatever he says. You begin to remember it. As you look at him.

“Haven’t they. From our whole time together.”

A miller moth flew in, bumped the line of stapled pages, and clung. My shirt and pants were on the peg farthest from me, unreachable. The sweat ran down my bare legs. I reached.

“No you don’t.” His long arm, gaunt with drawing muscles, barred the cartoon.

“I wouldn’t. Tear it up, if that’s what you mean.”

“Sure?”

The moths hypnotized me, not one of them yet burned. I had come here to be safe? Here? I flipped the miller moth from the page it was pressing against, fluttering vainly. It ricocheted the room, thumping the walls, then joined the circle. The cartoon jiggled at us. None of my father’s letters to me were indicated in it. Or my brother’s hurt. Or Mr. Peralho’s generosity. And we three generations of women—in this account of our house, where were we?

In his own way, this soul mate of my summer streets was farther from me than those he had drawn, no matter what their sins were, either against me or all the squared-off households of the world. His were sins of omission only. But those are the ones their owners never can shake.

While those three—they were the sensitives. They knew who they hurt. My father knew. As for my brother, he knew that no one would ever love him enough to be hurt by him. Even my grandmother, whose hurts were now all in the past after one last try, would never sue
him.
That’s all right. Out of all this my brother would make a personality of the kind universities harbor—and in the end perhaps love.

Mr. Peralho and my father would meanwhile make amends if I would let them. They would help me with my professional life. When nobody’s to blame, that’s the best way. But that takes a seeing I was too young for. The yellow bloodlight remains.

I tore the cartoon down the middle because I knew I was going to be doing something wrong with my life.

Bill was there to hit me for it. Under the blow we went down together, clutching. The moon watched him plow me. I felt his apology pour in. Sex would no longer be the same with him. Now that I saw I could manage him. Or we had both been managed. That’s the animal after-sadness they talk about.

Downstairs, somebody pounded on the door. Craig Towle, come to rescue me? I don’t have a phone there—I heard him say again. That’s why I go.

“Somebody saw us,” Bill said.

I stretched up a leg, clenching my toes on the light bulb’s dangling string. Two tries. Then I pulled us into dark. In the dark I drew Bill’s shirt over me. I would pay Craig Towle nothing at first. Not even my nakedness.

The two who burst up the rickety stairs each had a flashlight. One was the old police captain who had been so decent to my mother, the other was our former sheriff, Pat Denby’s father, dismissed for drinking but on some nights still employable. Since cops have to travel in twos, the town thought it might as well be him, in order to help out his kids, all of whom now worked. Most nights were dull here anyway, except for the odd smashup. Or somebody going to the theater at a windowsill. When a widow phoned, the two officers had cynically waited. When the factory watchman down the alleyway reported us, they came out.

“What kind of kickshaw you making up here?” The captain was irritable. He had been asleep at his desk.

Mr. Denby was the kind of drunk who turns a nasty weak white on his day to be sober, and a bully by that same nightfall. He didn’t like me and mine either, for giving his son big ideas, like getting away to school as my brother had—or for having a quality view of his garage door. “Why’nt we pull these two in. Less maybe they’ve got a bottle on ’em.” His son Pat Junior’s nice smile sat on him like a bow tie on a donkey.

The two flashlights were dueling with the moon.

The captain was one of those fine leftovers still bred on small streets, a man with a seagoing profile even if only at the prow of a town, and with a good family doctor’s responsive slouch. What other kind would have taken on Denby for deputy?

“Haul
you
in, I should,” he said to him. “Man’s on his own inherited property. At least for tonight. But don’t nobody turn on that light.”

Then he spoke to the “man” as to a boy. “You two have any more peepshows in mind, take that train of yours to the city for it. Somebody thought murder was being done. With two houses on the Row dark from death, people get nervy.” The beam of his flashlight searched out my foot only, though I was covered with the shirt. “Known all the women in your family. Do what they want to, every time.” In the white candlepower my foot did look like Trilby’s. Maybe that’s why I didn’t feel shamed. Or because I am what I look to be. And the captain did not intend to shame me for it.

The beam switched from me to Bill. If Bill, according to my father, wasn’t what he looked to be but what he said—then, he said nothing. I would never see his face clearer.

The beam switched back to me. “Just be sure you want to,” the captain said.

They went down the stairs. The moon had won out. But the miller moth lay dead on the floor.

Who were we to think ourselves a pair who had evaded the light? Or the layers on these streets? I found I didn’t mind that for any convention’s sake. But those who lived by their secrets had a second power, a separate if parallel time sense. One could acquire a taste for living like that.

Then there were those who were allowed only one circling of the lamp.

Two houses dark here on Cobble Row. She had been dead for weeks, the girl I had baby-sat with, and I had never since given her a thought. Dead of her own baby too long aborted inside her, it was said, and not a peep from her until too late. Perhaps she too had been trying for secrets.

It takes a long time to become a friend. She wasn’t granted enough time to become mine, but I would become hers.

I poked the moth, which lay without color or injury, a perfect specimen.

“If you’re not feeling too singed—” Bill Wetmore said, “I’ll take you home.” Yes, sometimes he still inhabits his full name. A droll remark will do it, lodged in one cheek like a quid of tobacco. Those long-flanked cheeks, now his face’s prime feature, seem to me like the supple calves of a smaller person who shadowily inhabits him.

We are all of us one creature, Mr. Evams said—a creature unevenly distributed among us. Listening to a person, he said, he could sometimes hear the separate ones in each of us. Though with Mrs. Evams, love prevented him.

No, I didn’t want to go home, where all the unacknowledged parts of us were gathering. “I’ll stay here with you. You’re a man of property.”

That was always where I would hurt him. “So am I—” I said, softer. “A woman of. And neither of us has got it.”

And soon it was going to be morning, in whose tonic reality all the properties of this world rise up. The city never seems property to me. It’s where both he and I would have to go to find all the gestures of the world. It’s for that I want the layered street. Onstage—they say—one can always spot those who do.