The Bobby-Soxer (2 page)

“You went to school with Craig Towle’s divorced wife, didn’t you?” Gilbert asked my mother on another evening on our porch. “What was she like?”

“Yes, we were at school together,” my mother said. Seated as always well back of the elders, I wondered if he felt she had corrected him. People who had gone to boarding school said they “were at” instead of “went to,” it seemed. My mother, who had been a day pupil in such a school, in the New England town to which her father had been sent north as branch manager of the mill in his hometown, was the only person of that class of education any of us knew. It was agreed that she did not presume on it, but there it was, accounting for what people said was her style—though I didn’t think it did. My mother’s style lay in always going ahead with what she wanted to do, which she always saw clearly; it was just lucky she was so relaxed she didn’t want to do too much.

“His wife’s name was Venice,” she said now. “Because she had been conceived there, though her people were from Boston, mostly. Her father didn’t have to work, but he did. She said the men in her family generally hung around Harvard. We thought they were professors. She didn’t like to say they were trustees. Which was nice of her. I went home with her once. They were required to speak Italian at one meal, French at the next, and as far back as during World War I there had been a scandal because the family had refused to intern its Fraulein. Venice was best at Italian, because of her name. They had a retarded cousin living with them, a boy who looked like a frog, to whom they were very kind. They were very kind to me when it was found I knew nothing about sailing, though we were down at the shore. Dorchester, their summer place. Venice’s daddy let me wind things on their sloop. Even at the shore her mother had a bulletin board in the bedroom, on which she wrote her causes and the times for them. Venice said the board back home was even bigger. The beachhouse was very plain, but commodious.”

“Commodious” was one of my mother’s words. I never heard anybody else use it in conversation.

“What’s a Froylein?” I asked.

“Governess. German.” My mother laughed. “I asked that too. Back then.”

“And what did you do, when they spoke those languages you didn’t know?”

“I listened,” my mother said pointedly. “Like you back there.”

My father, nearest me, reached over to pat my hand. I always listened from the rear, he said—like him. He thought I would likely be a lawyer because of that. I was no painter, he said. He was right. But I was no lawyer either.

“Why didn’t they switch to English?” I said. “If they were so kind.”

My mother hesitated. That is, she poured more coffee for everyone, and tea for the blind Evamses, whose sense of direction coffee confused. It was a chilly September night, late for porches. No one among us drank liquor on Monday nights. “I think I was a cause,” she sighed.

The whole porch tittered. The house was real messy just then; that’s why we kept to the porch. But our neighbors on either side never failed to come for their Mondays, an off night, as they called it, when Mr. Evams kept no classes, my father never stayed over in the city, and Gilbert closed the restaurant.

“For God’s sake,” Gilbert’s wife, Luray, said, “the way you tease us fish. You Southerners. What did she look like? Craig Towle’s wife.”

“Venice? Why, she was tall and rangy. Taller than—than most of the boys. Long hair she never cut, and real crisp features. Fine legs, though she never wore heels. Parties with boys—she simply piled up the hair and wore family earrings. You know the type.”

Luray wouldn’t, as everybody on the porch knew; still, my mother wasn’t being mean. If she was circuitous she always gave full measure. She also had a way of talking like whoever she was talking to. It was said that Craig Towle had the same.

Now—Luray was a sexy talker. A big brassy-hair with a brass tongue, she was vulgar in the warm way that made people think she was soft-hearted, but my mother was of the opinion that Luray might be too busy to be, always changing her waistline as she was, and improving her diamonds, and heading the committees my mother would never join. “A looker? You didn’t say.”

“Oh yes I did, Luray. Blond eyebrows. No breasts.”

“Class,” Gilbert said instantly. “And the boy from Cobble Row fell for it.” He was from there himself, but he hadn’t done the same.

“Nerts—” his wife said, “listen to what she’s telling us. Those flat-chested kind, they can’t get enough of it. That’s what happened. Maybe on that sloop.”

My father coughed; the Evamses rose to go. Blind people are delicate in their tastes. Whenever I went next door to learn braille, as I did to enlarge my horizon, I was always very careful to wash, Mrs. Evams having told me how uncomfortable their sharpened other senses could make them, in company.

Luray got up too. She had her Flower & Fruit luncheon to benefit the hospital, the next day. Though she spread herself on her charitableness, we knew Gilbert charged the committee full price. All the women were crazy for Craig Towle, and ever since Luray had rescheduled their meetings to coincide with his regular day in there after driving his children back to school, the restaurant had never had so many reservations for Tuesday lunch. My mother could meet him too, Luray said, or next best to it, for he always nodded politely to all—if she just wasn’t so un-community-minded.

“Nevertheless, they got divorced, he and his Venice,” my father said, joining all at the porch railing. He was against divorce. So must my mother be, though I had never heard her say. “By mutual consent, I understand. And no property settlement. On either side.”

“Class,” Gilbert muttered.

My mother turned to him. “Maybe she was a woman of ideas, Gilbert. Her family dealt in them.”

No one had caught on that my mother had started to say that Venice had been taller than Craig Towle was. Weeks back, when he had come to see us, I had been home upstairs, comfortably in bed for the first hours of my period, not sick, but on my mother’s advice cosseting the rhythm of it, settling in to being a woman in the right way. I suspected I was being taught her own rhythm as well, but felt able to correct myself when necessary, meanwhile alternately copying a small Tiepolo drawing and sketching a bowl of real ivy, while enjoying the cool of the newly laundered blanket cover, the smell of wax and all the extraordinary couthness of our house. Over the past months there had been bad rows about the condition of our furniture, descended to my father when he married, and my grandmother, who blamed him, had been having a housekeeper sent in.

My father was in the city, with the lady. Perhaps she had no furniture, only pillows. Although in the city he played squash, a sissy game I had heard him twitted for when he and I went to the hardware store where our townsmen hung out on Saturday mornings, I thought of him always as seated in one of our high-backed chairs, his tanned face and thick white hair, not so premature as it once had been, sticking out over the top. He was taller than Craig Towle, and handsomer, as I was about to find out. Whenever I was tomboyish, rebelling against my periods, it was clear even to me that I was taking after him, though at the moment I was only five foot eight, and unaware that one day, when past eighteen and in full growth, I would be able to look him in the eye. That would be a day. Today would be another. One gathers them in later, the days that tot up.

“Honey—” my mother called, “can you come down?” Though she was not an affected woman, all the street had a company voice. “Mr. Craig Towle is here. He’s come from grandmother’s.” How quick she was. She always prepared me well.

I slipped out of my housecoat, jammed into my new plaid skirt and white saddle-shoes, and went bed-woozily down the stairs, my flesh heavy and sensitive. Perhaps that’s why I learned so much. I’ll be brief about that, while admiring the fact. In one’s forties, where I am now, reflection begins to drag the pace of learning down.

Briefly: my mother was in one of the wandlike dresses her home dressmaker down South still copied from
Vogue
and sent up to her, the dream-client whose measurements always stayed the same. Though she was slim enough to let waistlines rise and fall as they might, this dress winningly had none, and she had just been trying it on, in one of those lonely, self-gathering intervals when women do that. She was in luck therefore, for drop-in company. She had truly not expected him, at least not that night. But these intervals I speak of, when women try on and try on, rousting out the wardrobe of their expectations, do not come without reason. She and Craig Towle had met before. I had been called down in part to be duenna—though I think now that my mother herself may not yet have known this.

Craig Towle’s brown-eyed, pleasantly hooked face was hospitable, yes, but to facts more than to persons. When you are truly genial yet truly remote, then you are hard. I could see no trace of the Pennsylvania miners he was said to come from before his more recent forebears had descended to factory furniture, neither the Polack Catholic mother nor his father’s Scots. When you see a face that much on its own, take it as a sign, or a warning, of what may not be bad but is extra; When there is no trace. This she had no time to tell me.

He was too short for my romances at the moment, but his scrutiny was like a well that pulled on you, making you eager to find your own face in the depths down there. Women would cast themselves hopefully in; apparently, even my mother’s ninety-year-old mother-in-law had succumbed. He had gone to her, my father’s mother, as to the patrician of the town’s lore, and already knew of our six-month feud. He said he had also met my young brother in her house. No doubt our grandmother had introduced my brother as “My son-and-his-wife’s-reconciliation child”—a habit she refused to drop, though my parents had never really been parted.

“The little devil—” my mother said. Her smile was luminous, not only with motherhood. “We thought Tim was sleeping overnight with Pat Denby. So that’s where he goes. Well, he’ll learn there not to kick the furniture.”

So had I, and had hated that house for it. All families have these divided allegiances—and in my brother and me ours has two differing historians.

“He sits there entranced,” Craig Towle said—and turning to me: “I saw your painting.” He had asked whose it was and was interested to hear now that I already knew in what way it was bad. I saw he would not forget that, nor my brother either; we would be ready in his head like old shrapnel, until some needed surgery got us out. As for my mother, he had indeed really wanted to talk with her about his wife Venice, as soon as he heard the two had been schoolmates. I went back up the stairs then. Their glow, which they would soon begin to explore, was already visible. Perhaps I had seen it because he had been sitting in my father’s chair.

Upstairs, I tried to decode this jumble of the perhaps and the happened, which was so much deeper than gossip, but I could not. I was not old enough to want to be a well—and I see now that I have not been brief. The scene would never again be that pure. Reflection had entered in. But without it I wouldn’t have sensed what I had. It came through that wooziness and cell-breakage going on inside me. He too had a process whereby he sloughed things off. Mine, just beginning, had been alerted, though to what, I could not phrase, as I do now. Craig Towle found his privacy in women. They were the privacy he took on the sly. From now on, I thought, he had no power over me, even no charm, now that I had seen how it worked. For even a young girl could see that his process never would stop.

After that day I wasn’t to see him again for a year of the three he stayed on in the town. He telephoned her at first; later she telephoned him, neither hiding the fact nor obtruding it. But after some weeks, I one day said to her: “Why do they, why do all the women call him Craig Towle, never just Craig?” Even she did it, when she had to mention his name.

She smiled uncertainly. She really didn’t know, hadn’t noted, and now never would. Women such as she had to find their public in their lovers, and he was already that.

Now back to us at large.

Shortly after that day, my grandmother, majestic on the arm of my eleven-year-old brother—as if, though he had no license to drive her limousine, he could still squire her—came to visit us, to break the feud and, we thought at first, to check on the house-cleaning. Standards had already gone down; my mother relaxed servants, too. But the high fervor in my grandmother’s age-masculinized cheeks had to be otherwise explained, and shortly was. It was “Craig” this, “Craig” that; she had come back to us in order to talk of him. “He brings me out in the world.”

They had gone first to one of those “nasty” big New Jersey restaurants where they serve you steak and lobster on one plate, then to several others, increasingly better and farther afield, that, she wouldn’t further identify. Though she was no recluse, there had never been any question of our taking her out anywhere. Her house was where you went when asked—family being no guarantee—to large, discriminatory dinner parties, where the conventions of her youth were rolled out one after the other, on a par with her silver chafing dishes. She would avoid senility to her end, at one hundred and four, by refusing it her house. But still it was a shock to my father, whom she had derisively called “Sir” since his majority, to hear his past ninety-year-old mother say of a man younger than he: “He and I have a relationship.”

My brother had gone with them to some of the restaurants. What did they talk about? For that was surely what they would have done, my grandmother plucking at the discreetly flowered skirts that humanized her old bones, in order to sink the more lightly into that soothing depth across the table. My brother would not tell me. Years later, Pat Denby did. My brother had been sat at a small table apart. “Towle had him sent a fake Manhattan with a cherry in it. There was no disliking Towle. But Tim never heard a thing.”

In payment perhaps, if not apology, Craig Towle one day took my brother to a restaurant along with Towle’s other children, a pleasant act, if not the man-to-man talk my brother had hoped for. Craig Towle had not chanced to tell my mother about this, but there was nothing strange about that, though years later, hearing of it, she was surprised. We all of us, the town too, were continually surprised by the number of people here Craig Towle knew personally, and it would seem exclusively—though one always forgot this, they said, when his face fronted yours, one shoulder politely aslant. He had even been to the blind Evamses’. “He has a hard face, but a good one,” Mrs. Evams, who had been allowed to feel it, reported. Her husband said: “He listens abstractly. He could almost be blind.