The Bobby-Soxer (19 page)

Etsuko held it up, or tried. Nessa was my grandmother, to be sure, and still a tall woman. But even the shrinkage of age would scarcely account for the height of this thick daytime costume with its long-waisted top, or for a skirt length that would surround her ankles in folds. It was handsomely sewn, but perhaps they had lacked a Miss DeVore.

I dropped my sweater right there on the dining-room carpet—who was here to watch now except the two dreaming women upstairs?—and slid the dress on, Etsuko’s hands gliding from hip to sleeves to neckline, to help me. Her arms were long enough for this performance no matter what size the model, her face serenely intent. This was her profession—to attend the adornable. I have never felt closer to my sex as a sex. The thousand-and-one hidden professionalisms of women—there should be an Armory Show of them.

Still, no art of Etsuko’s could account for how snugly this bride-to-be fitted into that other, as the mirror over the sideboard clearly showed. Otherwise, the dress was not becoming. What an oddity its owner must have been, in this stiff collar, high as a parson’s, that hid the neck, this bodice so tight over the breasts that its wearer must have had even less there than me, and these long, ungainly sleeves with a dribble of lace at the cuffs, as at the costume’s hem. Dust-ruffle, that used to be called—why did I of the short-skirted generation still know this?—and that such a ruffle was more often attached to a petticoat? Instead, the dress had long inner pantaloons of the same sturdy white as its lining, and the lace border had been sewn straight on them. There was no dust on it. Maybe the church aisle had been well swept. Or red-carpeted.

By my wish, we were to have our ceremony at the Evamses’. Both they and Bill were extremely pleased. Mrs. Evams was in a froth as to whether their library curtains should be open or closed, in order best to chastise the not-to-be-invited Walshes, who had continued to complain of the eeriness next door to them. “Their life is an open book, they say.” Mrs. Evams’s forehead had a special glow. “Then let them see what five thousand books must look like, when
en fete.
All of them in braille.”

Mr. Evams, hearing Bill’s glee, was more thoughtful. “We shouldn’t wish to take advantage of other people’s—vengeance. Are you sure, Bill, that your father-in-law-to-be won’t see it as a slap—having the marriage here?”

Oh no—I’d interposed for him; we were all to come to my grandmother’s house after, for a wedding dinner the Watanabes would cook. “If I’d still been living in our own house—but I’m not. I have a lot of backgrounds, you see. And your library—.” I hadn’t said it out. They knew I loved it, but not wholly why. It belonged to a house where the people in it had felt my face.

I would never wear this harsh dress over there. But the costume room at school could well use it, and in several roles to come, I hoped, so might I. A good period costume protects the actor inside from the mannerisms of his own era, yet is strong enough for any passion. I found the pantaloons allowed for free stride, the collar and cuffs nicely neutral. The best of such costumery denies the real extravagantly enough so that everybody out front can take comfort in that illusion, one that they are indeed there for. Yet surely this tight shell I was wearing was meant for workaday, not for a wedding? I could sense the person in it going over the accounts, monitoring a kitchen or a garden, working with the hands at the domestic preoccupations of those times in this house, maybe even wearing the pince-nez that would more or less fix the period for the viewer. A character role inhabited this costume, not a star.

Watanabe now appeared in the doorway, bearing the big tray. So it was tea day; my grandmother would come down; no wonder the men had decamped. She could be beakily amusing on life in the old market towns of Jersey, informative on how linsey-woolsey was not the same as the woven coverlets that now were so wanted, or—like a parrot taught the swear words of another era—engagingly direct with the people she was with now, in her angered way always making us feel that this is all we were to her. But dinner with her was long enough to have to watch her comport herself as the star she had become. What had changed her from this subsidiary being I was wearing? The rage, even at ninety enlivening her? Over what?

These are the questions—Miss Pevsner, head coach at the school, told us—that actors must ask about every character. I felt as proud of her guidance as some do of the psychiatrist. Even now, waiting in the wings to go on, I will find some adage of hers lurking too.

So, I didn’t mind if Knobby made a face at the dress. Actually, he had no facial expression. Disapproval was merely a kind of stillness on its usual state of non-change. “That is for the wedding?” He himself had of course brought the box downstairs.

“Don’t worry. I’ll ask mother to countermand it. Is she coming down?”

“I had no signal.”

When she was coming down or had a request, she pressed her own bell, now also reconnected, whose wire raised yet another of the small metal flags in his signal box. It takes so little to enchant a house forever in memory. That little does it for me.

So—would she sleep away the afternoon then, maybe to arrive downstairs at dinner, once she knew from Etsuko that my grandmother, sated by her own matinee indulgence of tea and ride, would not appear? Then my mother would be the center of everything, not that she ever wanted that alone. I think she wanted only one thing always, but that desperately. One man. At one time. One man at a time? Not quite the same thing are they, Miss Pevsner says. And—which man?

Knobby still stood there. He wanted me to ask him something.

“Yes, Knobby?”

“That gentleman is coming to tea.”

“Oh—the old man with the cane. That’s nice.” Austrian born, he was full of tales of his service with the Lippizaner horses of Vienna, before he and his wife had emigrated. Sometimes she came too, clearly for the tea. Even the crotch of his trousers was elegantly sharp for such an old man, Bill said. And he always carried the gift-cane, as token of his thanks.

“No. The man from the dump.”

“The dumpster? Whatever for? She paid him.”

It was known that the dumpster pawed over things at his own pace afterward, and sometimes censured people later for their own castoffs; he liked objects and appliances to keep on going. That baby carriage—good as new if you fix the springs, sure you don’t want it? No? Then, mind if I give it that sister-in-law the new postman, her name’s … Always identifying the receiver, even if the “Donor”—as his insisted upon receipts were always marked, didn’t have a prayer or a care who. And often the receiver didn’t want the thing either.

“No. The other man.”

Etsuko squealed. I had stepped backward on her foot. But she nodded understandingly; clearly she knew all that story. She said something in rapid Japanese, at which Knobby frowned: he did not like her to take advantage that way. “My wife say even a ninety-year-old lady have a man-story in her life. And that now the young wife is dead.”

We all looked at one another.

“He telephone,” Knobby said. “Want to take her like old times to restaurant. She say no, that time is over, she don’t eat out again. He to come to the house.”

Knobby did not eavesdrop. Up there, he was required to listen, so that my grandmother might discuss it with him afterward. I could see her at that, casting him her thoughts and conclusions like some major-general to the aide-de-camp bringing him the campaign lunch.

“My mother—” I said. Closing my eyes for a minute, I felt myself be her, lying sleeping, unaware. Mr. Peralho had torn down the material hung over her door to no avail; sleep was now her drapery. Then I opened my eyes, shamed; an actor’s inhabitance of others can go too far. Or she was too close for it. “He won’t have known she’s here, will he.” Not seen on the street for months, she was rumored to be with her dying father. Next week, if she was well enough, my father actually planned to take her down there, along with my brother, who had at last agreed to go. To get Tim there, she would make that effort.

What effort would she make here? Or should I?

He could come and go, that long-dreamed-of guest, without her ever knowing. If she slept. And if I let it be. It’s not fair what circumstance does—or is it? Even Miss Pevsner could not say. But if by chance my mother woke, then surely she should not be allowed to come down to that tea table unwarned. Yet
allow
was a word I did not enjoy.

“I go up to her,” Etsuko said. “Maybe I say nothing. She want to come down, I push Watanabe’s bell.” She went off, up the back stairs, Watanabe following. Only when they were gone did I see that they had left it to me to decide. Was I to hustle him out? The word was an indignity to her. Perhaps she would sleep through all. But should I let her? That’s her lookout, I hear you say. But what was mine?

Too late I heard my grandmother begin her descent. I came halfway out of the dining room to the edge of the front hall. She had a callous step, I told myself, exactly like her conversation. Yet somewhere behind both must be the woman who twenty years after her marriage to that state portrait upstairs could still speak of her honeymoon house—even if all her love of it had now gone into the furniture. I didn’t much credit her for her recent charity to the elderly; any town like ours has powerful old women who dispense. If even they and she were vulnerable inside their print dresses and behind their tyrannical dinners—then all the world must be. Yes, Miss Pevsner, I see.

The door chime rang. I heard my grandmother call from halfway down the curved front stair: “I’ll go, Watanabe.” She never did that. Yet what did I know of her nevers?

Just in time, I retreated to the niche under the stairs, in whose closet I had once stashed two of the packages meant for the dump. Forgotten during my mother’s worst time, then remembered and opened, the flat, laundry-shaped one had revealed half a dozen knitted silk-and-lisle men’s shorts and the same number of vests, all from Hanro in Switzerland, and all unworn. My grandfather’s? Bill, shown them, said they were too fine for himself. “Try the ‘Three’—” he’d said, his name for my father and brother and Peralho, but I hadn’t thought of applying to them, and under his glance never would. Etsuko had taken the underwear gleefully, exclaiming over the workmanship, but Knobby too had refused them. A wasteful country, she sighed, bowing to make it seem a compliment, and that got my dander up. She never wasted emotion, or not our kind—did she have it to waste? “Use them for dishcloths,” I said. The other package had been a framed snapshot of two bikes. No owners, just the bikes.

A last clump of a shoe. My grandmother was in the front hall, then in the entry. I heard her open the front door.

“Nessa—” a man’s voice said. No more masculine than many. But with an edge. Of what? I had never heard my grandmother addressed by her first name before. No one would have thought themselves old enough. Except this man.

I heard them seat themselves in the sitting room across the hall, where the tray had already been laid. Back of it were the two parlors where there had been a graduation dance once—perhaps why we were not encouraged to use them. These led around the rear to the dining room and a small anteroom through whose arch I had come into this side of the hall. The archway was fretted with niches for the tall plants which were no longer kept.

The murmur of their two voices came like an itch. The sitting-room door was open but I was too far back under the stairs. If I crossed the hall again, back to the archway, I could hear. I tiptoed into the archway.

For a while I heard nothing but the clink of tea things.

“All true stories are private,” that voice said then. “Comes a time when they’re no longer that.”

I couldn’t hear my grandmother’s reply. Perhaps she made none.

“Besides, I have the story now. I think—all of it. That’s what I came to tell you. To let you be the first. I shouldn’t like you to hear of it from others. And I’d like us to be friends, you silly. I hear you wanted to sue.”

This time there was a reply I couldn’t get. He must be the one nearest the door.

“Ah yes, the dump,” he said then.
“Mea culpa.
But I’d do it again. For my purpose.”

Again, a reply I couldn’t hear.

“Higher than God’s? No. No. Just—for my god. The work. Nessa, hear me out. I’m not the man I am in my work, or seem to be. Just—a man. Doing his best for it.”

This time I did hear her guttural “And never mind the people in the way?”

He was silent for a while. “I can’t always keep it separate. Keep them. Yes, that’s true. Though they have been known to cooperate.”

I could hear his smile. And hate him for it.

My grandmother would have seen it. I heard her clearly this time. “And my daughter-in-law? Did you work her in, just for your purpose?”

I was amazed, never having heard my grandmother speak to any outsider except socially. Or to any of us in this way. Adult to adult. And who had I heard speak in that same dead-on voice? My father, to whom she never in my hearing had spoken so. Who himself spoke in it—I now believe, trust in, and sorrow for—only to me.

“No,” the nearer side of the tea table said, “Though I was to blame there. If any of us are to be. For these sudden—irruptions. I had gone to her to get to you, you see. For that connection. And a little, yes, for my first wife. To hear of their joint youth. One never knows what perspective one will find. Which might explain. And even heal … Your daughter-in-law was my wife’s generation, you see. My first wife’s. Who’d left me. And returned again—and left. Because of the work she’d thought she’d married me for. Her rival. It was to have been only the jewel in
her
crown. When it’s nobody’s—not even mine.”

That’s what makes the edge in his voice, I thought. That.

“Your daughter-in-law would never have done that,” he said. “She wants—only to be a man’s jewel. In an affair that goes on and on … But she knows nothing of what I wanted from you. You knew that. Nor would I have asked.”

There may have been an answer. I never heard it.

“That’s why I could go on with her,” he said. “She had nothing to do with the town. There’s always one person or more like that in a town. Lovely as she was, she was something of that for me. And I took it from what she said once, that she was used to affairs. Perhaps I shouldn’t tell you that. But there was already one affair in her life, she said. One that had gone on and on.”