The Bobby-Soxer (18 page)

I picked up the cartoon and threw it into a corner, not wanting to see across whose face and figure it had torn, or at what moral point. It flopped to the floor like a poorly made paper dart. Later Bill burnt it in the kitchen grate. No use of course. The three figures shot up straight as flames, my father the tallest.

“Leslie Warden’s going to buy this house,” I said. “Would you consider marrying it?”

O
UR DAUGHTER, AS MR.
Peralho had called me, was to be married from her own background as once arranged by her mother, in her grandmother’s house, her father and brother attending, accompanied by their friend. The two gentlemen from the farm hoped to be back just in time from their autumn tour of the elder’s artistic connections, renewed yearly continent by continent. Phoebe would arrive, with her precocious student-dean-ship-to-be already securely in ego. Mr. Evams, hearing us cast about for a minister, had revealed at one stroke that he had once been ordained, as well as how well the blind hide what they choose. When I remarked this, he replied that all the handicapped were adept there, except perhaps his wife, who was such a tidy package of goodness she had no room to spare. I thought him lucky that the one thing he couldn’t see in his all-but-sighted divinations was how her domed forehead, always facing him with love, sometimes willy-nilly went past him to another, my father. As for Watanabe, who when he and his wife returned home to news of my coming marriage, had made a feint at quitting us—he had been restrained by his wife Etsuko’s advice, to which he now applied as to an oracle—and by his furniture, so much of it built in. However, at a suggestion from my mother, always more sensitive with servitors than we Northerners who gave them freedom only, we were not to call him Knobby any more.

She came out of her room two weeks before the wedding date, unwrapped from all her cerements. The face underneath, almost wantonly restored by those months under the coif, was pink with misplaced youth. Her tongue too now and then slipped into observations that might have grown like herbs in the dark of her room. An outsider wouldn’t now have noticed her dress one way or the other—her final refinement, conscious or not. For me this was the great loss; I still wanted her to be as conscious of everything as she had been for me once.

Etsuko, a wholesomely compact woman with a nose a mite coarse for the ambassadorial front she had acquired by assisting at state banquets, took with passion to my mother’s absentee elegance. We were to understand that this was the air the great geishas cultivated in their decline. Meanwhile, she had wormed her way into my mother’s wardrobe, admiring and repairing for the next phase to come, and heartening us all by assuming that there would be one.

“Father thinks Mother now resembles Wallis Windsor more than ever,” my brother said. “I agree.”

I could see what they meant—that semi-morganatic duchess’s abstractly embittered, extravagantly cared for later style, and the Japanesy eyelids of certain small, middle-aged Southern women, and men too, whom one saw down home being deferred to at country-club tables.

“She would have to be a ghost of something for him. Or else—” Or else how could he stand to be in the same house with her? I didn’t finish. Mr. Peralho was behind us.

“Some women are never fully appreciated except by other women,” he said. “Or else by certain men.” He put his hand on my brother’s shoulder. “Your sister is not one of them.”

I never knew for sure which eye he was speaking from. Yet I knew he would not lie. I saw, too, that my brother had begun to trouble him, less by his oversilvery blurts than by the lack of decorum with which he let his meanness show through.

“Watanabe says Etsuko would like to do you a wedding dress,” Peralho said.

“Only she’s afraid her arms won’t stretch that far,” my brother said. This was a reference to how Etsuko had managed to get rid of the Pachinko setup.

No, Peralho would not be sorry to see Harvard loom.

I was wearing granny dresses now. In the Village they all were, often with bare feet on the hot macadam, which mode I too had tried, gratefully cured by having had to wear hipboots for my part as Portia in the school’s exam play for scholarship candidates. The theater would let you try—and help you cure—almost everything. “Oh, grandmother wants me to see if her wedding dress can be altered. I haven’t seen it yet.” Just to stand up in, she said. And she would order a repast. Under her softer glance I felt new, the approved child of my former self.

Down home my grandfather was now truly admitted to be dying, and my other grandmother not well, which might mean anything. Miss DeVore, the natural inheritor of all weddings, had actually died. We had had no wish to assault them with my mother’s state, or to have them up here to see, as they surely would have, that bride and groom were already living together. Other peculiarities of our house—in its family extension to friends, cousins, or what could be taken to be, were more like theirs than any other in town, and would not have had to be explained.

I was having to explain to myself the new warmth there. A house filled as its spaces deserve, even with such an assorted company as our three women, four men, and two servitors, has a rhythmic undercurrent that the happiest prototype foursome of man, woman, and two children cannot achieve. One seems to be living more, and with more variation. Peralho, still having his midnight confabs. Etsuko burrowing in my mother’s closet, emerging with cries of discovery. My father, trying to teach his prospective son-in-law, without seeming to, how to handle a cigar. Watanabe spiraling meals out of a genie larder these days incandescent with greens and fish, and tawny meats. Even the trays, going up the stairs for all their sad or abstruse reasons, but sustaining life. Even the sexual undertones—from my mother and grandmother in their severed cul-de-sacs, to the three men in obscure command of twin beds, a studio couch, and a paterfamilias bedstead—to the Japanese couple, busy at a correspondence love confronted—and found good. For Etsuko had been a surprise, but not a bad one.

As for Bill and me, we never made love in that house. At the pad we were almost at a standstill there, too. What with my school rehearsals for the
Merchant,
a cast picture of which had appeared in a city summer supplement, my father-guided efforts to get the trust money to buy the house, and Bill’s job hunting, there was scarcely time. Our part of the house’s rhythm was a lazy, never ominous sense that we were leaving it.

We were not going to live in Cobble Row. Would we ever? Enough for me that I had acquired the place, or what I saw when I thought of it—a moon and a window and a bit of torn drawing, like a painting with only moral to it, and a lamp now relinquished, on a hunched desk. To own the house before coming of age I had had to spend afternoons with the law and the bank, learning that the weather in all offices is the same—watery with judgment. My father helped me, apparently without consulting Peralho, but if that was so, it came too late. “Do you know why you want this?” he said. “Yes”—I answered truthfully—“and no.” He made one more try. “Even at the last minute, you don’t have to, you know. Do all of it.” He saw I didn’t understand. “You can have one without the other, you know. The house. Or the boy. Or you might even consider having neither. It’s the most important time of your life.” If he and my mother had felt so when they married, that was no recommendation. So I did not reply.

To me, this time of my life felt like an interim. At school, in a melodrama we had performed, there had been a line, from of course the heroine, a role which I did not play: “Shall I barter my brideship for all the bad faith to come afterward?” Note all the
b’s,
the visiting director from London said, lecturing us on alliteration. We would find it in the worst rhetoric—and in Shakespeare. Our job was to make it fit to speak, either way.

I felt no brideship. Few at the school would have, except perhaps two girls who had been disqualified as students and had gone back to being girls. As for the barter, we were learning from both melodrama and sacred William that one could only be wary, watch for what one’s innards were up to—and maybe have a care meanwhile for the
w’s.
My house would be cleaned up and marginally painted for a tenancy, the income to go back to the trust. Once it was bought, I got the bills for that, Phoebe got her half of the purchase price—which the bank had raised rather than be accused of preferentially lowering it, and the hospital had got its memorial—all so quick. Each transaction had had a different weather. The learning piled, and now that I had been accepted at the best professional drama school in the country I made what use of it I could.

What did I feel about this period of my life? That I was involved in one of those lengthy bits of stage business during which you pass the time, while the real intensities build. Any regular in the audience out there could have told me that on any stage you do not merely pass the time.

As for daily living, we were going to be one of those summer couples from the hinterland who perennially transplant into the winter pad. Bill’s student friend slipped us the lease over a jug of Gallo and awarded us his mattress, which we had earned anyway. If we ever turned out to be anybody here, he said, he would come East to visit us, on his first sabbatical. Being somebody was not a concept I had ever given much thought to, not considering that it could ever take precedence over being yourself, but I found that Bill understood thoroughly. It was the way he was going to pay us all back for what we were. Even Knobby—who had privately and sweetly said he would miss my calling him that—was to get paid back for those meals with fingerbowls.

At the big house, I never practiced gesture. If able, I would have made the place off bounds even for observing them. For school, however, I had to learn lines overnight, and these I did in my bedroom there, so neutral a territory that my old bed and dresser set surprised me freshly each evening. A room of my own was not what I wanted. This is a fact that many people of my profession, who when flush tend to buy ballrooms and ocean terraces, are forever having to relearn. Better to buy the moon when young.

Meanwhile, Bill was practicing his pencil on all of us.

“A leaping jackanapes—” my father said. While I strove to keep my own persona plain, as young actresses did then, and as is comfortable to me, my father was becoming more rhetorical. “And I could wish he’d go back to chewing weeds,” he added, surveying the inroads on his Havanas. Bill was becoming good at them.

“No, he’s better than that,” Mr. Peralho said. “He has something. You’ll see.” Still, he hadn’t again offered us both his flat, which Bill had rather hoped for.

“I already see,” my brother said. Bill always drew him accurately enough, but always alongside the highest armoire. “Wish he were a photographer. So I could smash his lens,” he said louder, Bill just then entering with his notebook. Bill never answered his jibes, except with another lightning sketch.

“What he draws best are the women,” my father said, when Bill had gone outside again to catch Watanabe in the old car, a sketch he thought he could sell. “Maybe it’s the Beaux Arts influence. What I mean is—those
are
drawings.” Which Bill distributed with largesse, always to the unexpected person, a tender drawing of my mother to Mr. Peralho; one of the queenly Etsuko playing Pachinko after all—to my father; and a cabinet-photo style study of my grandmother to me: “You can start a gallery in the new house.” He always now called it the new house.

“He never draws you,” Mr. Peralho said, focusing those unmatched eyes on me.

“He’s already done me.”

I was surprised when all three men burst into laughter, and half pleased at their joining, as another instance of that elusive warmth. Where a sex has difficulty from the world, it swarms in congress. The swarm can repel, but it also attracts.

It is awesome, to confront all the divisions at once. Yet who can regret knowledge?

Etsuko, quietly clearing the luncheon table, watched the men go. They were off to the farm, where these days they spent many afternoons and some evenings. The leisure there, my brother said, was like lying on velvet: “Once it was called repose.” I was saddened for him, seeing how he always chose the once of anything. “You’re invited,” he had told me. Bill was not. “There’s still a chance for you, they think.”

“For what?”

“To get off your seesaw.”

I knew that, yet I was impelled to go on as I was. There are swarms made up of only a single person.

Etsuko came around the table now to point out a huge dress box that stood in a corner, then folded her hands with her usual economy. We both knew what the box held—my grandmother’s wedding dress, sent down from upstairs. On whatever grounds, I planned not to wear it.

“Stay,” I said. “While I open it.” She missed her daughter, I knew, and their former communal life. I had grown to like that merrily splayed nose of hers quite as much as I admired the suave ebony of her head, meanwhile watching both sides of this lady deal with the husband whom she had got by a trick she had trusted herself to work out. She and he were more complicated than I would ever decipher. Where their nation left off and their own personalities began was a division I might never know. But while he meditated, and she acted for herself, between them they furnished me the kind of audience that gives one strength.

Boxes. Women so love them, acquiring all kinds; discarding is harder. But cleansing. They are what bind us to the house instead of the road. This one, of taped, stout cardboard from long ago, streaked where the gathered dust had been wiped, was marked in black crayon in a strong round hand with s’s like our turrets:
WEDDING DRESS. NESSA’S
. A nailbreaker of a box to open. Inside, tissue paper as fresh as day. See that, and drop into the abyss where time goes when it is worn out. How dare it leave this behind?

The dress was that hard blue-green people used to call Prussian blue, with a bodice like a cuirass to match, on a skirt that could have stood by itself, all of it of a heavy stuff with a shine to it, not wool yet not silk, quality in every inch the way the provinces do it or once did, the name of that kind of yardage, of its mercer and its maker, all lost. The dress? Solidly here.