The Bobby-Soxer (21 page)

“Shall I tell you? What the play’s about?”

“I already know.”

“Who, then?”

“Somebody young.”

He laughed. “Don’t look so sullen about it.” But his voice was dashed. “Yes, young. In 1927. Come. Turn around. I’ll tell it—as I found it. In props. Prop by prop.”

I knew what he meant. In improvisation class, we were dealt situations to dialogue over—and sometimes a hasty assemblage of objects, perhaps a still life on a table, of ordinary objects, a handbag and a notebook, plus some oddity—a flute, a doll’s shoe, a knife. But he hadn’t found his properties merely, or been dealt them. He had burrowed. This was why our class improvisations were so weak, though no one at school could quite tell us why, not even our haughty mentor muttering of Aristotle’s unities, and of her own one
succès fou
—in Strindberg, at an age little more than we were now.

What was missing in our arranged prop fancies was the real dramatist’s lack of shame. And the real actor’s. Down in the mud, for the glory of the theater. Not to roll in it simply, but because it is there. And is not always mud. And what is mud, my dears? Stare at it long.

“First prop—” the voice behind me says.

He holds that yard-long farmhouse photograph from my grandmother’s upstairs hall. These stiff old shots are often that shape because of the length of the porches, and the size of the families disposed along them. Brownstone, on backgrounds aged to yellow, they harbor a stillness one doesn’t see in the modern technique. “I just now snitched it, from your grandmother’s. While you went upstairs to change.”

I had run up the backstairs, Etsuko vanishing out to her and Watanabe’s ell. He would have gone up the front stairs. To take the photograph, which had hung in the hall to the left, he would have had to pass my mother’s door.

“Was my mother already asleep?”

He will not answer me. Not because his former lover happened to be my mother. As I will learn, he will not ever talk about his lovers. His silence then would be his only acknowledgment that she had been one of them. To him, his lovers are inviolate, not for their own sake, but because they are his.

“Just face the camera.” He’s smiling broadly now. One of his forefingers reaches around the photograph’s frame, pointing to a head.

She is facing the camera too, my great-aunt Mary Leona, in her family called Leo for short, the last born. As often with those, she appears the handsomest, and to me, the most modernly near. When I was born she was still alive.

My grandmother, in the photograph still a young woman, has her left arm raised so that it may rest around her much taller youngest sister’s neck. Nessa—as I will grow used to hearing my grandmother named—
is
still alive. But in the photo Leo next to her seems as vigorous. A photograph can be made to do this, the person in it toning forward to whoever will agree to revive her or him. We are maintaining Leo. First Nessa, in the long, long run that travels away from a grave. Then Craig Towle, arrived like a bolt out of the blue. And now me?

Does he know that in grandmother’s eyes I have long been what silly old women, leaning over my cradle or bemusedly gripping my soft, untutored hand at graduation have sometimes exclaimed: “The living image!”? When did she start not being able to look at me square?

Or does he think he has discovered me all himself? He sets the photograph flat on the desk, and reaching into a drawer, places a magnifying glass on its surface. “If the photo itself weren’t under glass this would do better. But see there.”

“No.”

“You don’t agree?”

“I mean—I don’t have to look.”

Actors dislike authors with reason. When the material is good enough we begin to forget it is theirs. They begin to stand between us and what we must make our own. They themselves shadow it—sometimes even against what they want of it. And we, outside both it and them, are the ones who have to make it be.

And in this case—I was the material. At the same time enraged—as a target might be—and proud. “I’ve been in that dress.”

In how many greenrooms, in how many theaters, he must have heard the cast chattering of their positions in the play, confirming or inveighing against those as people in real life discuss their destinies. And had been grateful to overhear, or desperate?

“You’re an actress all right,” he says. “But how much do you know? I mean—of this?” He tapped the picture. “Of—Leo.”

I thought of the pottery in the garage. Of the apartment my grandmother now inhabited, scattering her flowered dresses—why did female ancients so often wear jungle prints?—on all that severe wood and manly green leather, one sight of which had stayed in my mind like part of an archive not yet gathered. One dating all the way back to Phoebe Wetmore and me fiddling in bathrooms like small girls do, she the leader, giggling to me what her grandmother, once a layer-out of dead bodies, had reported. Or to my mother’s account of my grandfather’s dance with her: “little pots of those flowers like pansies with the mumps, set out all around the dance floor.” Flowers—the aunt who had lived there then had had a way with them. Flowers also then always kept in the empty niche where I had hidden this afternoon. Once, my father, coming down the stairs white-faced after a bout with my grandmother, had stopped dead in front of it to say: “Leo always kept that niche full of flowers.” Who was Leo? “My Aunt Leona,” he had replied, but had never again spoken of her. Why had I not forgotten any of it?

“I remember everything about her,” I said.

He smiled. It’s his business to know where all the lies come from. And though it may seem strange in an actress, I have never properly learned to lie. That’s from having been with the blind, he’ll tell me later. But I am not sure.

“I haven’t told you what was on the box that did go to the dump,” he says. “In that old-fashioned writing they used to call ‘Palmer script.’ In black crayon. Ha. On yours too, eh. But first—what did
your
box say?”

“Not mine.” Any more than that other box, all those boxes, wrong, or belated, opened or bound up again—were his.

But he could wait; he knew what he wanted. I didn’t have that advantage. And that’s when we give in, move with the tide, even marry. Hoping we’ll learn from the tide itself what we want of it.

So I tell him.

“Ha. Just
‘WEDDING-DRESS. NESSA’S’
—eh? How the womenfolk used to mark things, in the old days. Even the stuff in their own dresser drawers. As if they knew all the epitaphs beforehand.” He bends toward me and takes my cold hands in his. My extremities are colder than normal. Tim, my brother, used to tease that the blood had to go so far—until I found out that his hands are as cold. My profession warms mine. His is no good at that.

But no matter. Craig Towle is talking to me. And will not stop. “Those boxes, those bundles at the dump. They are yours. And they are mine. Don’t forget, I come from this town.” He let go my hands then and said low, like a creed: “We inherit them.”

The hayloft window frames him. What do we inherit, what did we acquire? This window—how divide it? If the moon comes up I’ll leave now, I think—I’ll take myself out of his grasp. But the moon did not rise.

“The boxes would have been marked and mixed up at the same time,” he says. “Maybe at some crisis.”

At once I knew what day that had been. Glinting down all our lives, even mine. Why don’t we go see the farm, girl? Because we came from it.

“What?” he says sharp. “What?”

“The day they left the farm. For here.” And then I give up. “Okay, tell me what it said. On Leo’s box.”

“It said, ‘Not a Wedding Dress. Mine.’”

I am looking at him from a long, long distance. I am leaving the farm, with them. Am I crying over that box? For her?

“Yes, yes, yes—” he said. “Come sit down. And let me tell you a story.”

For the first time I think of him as a man with children, the ones we in town never seemed to see. My father, when a very young one, used to say that very phrase to me at bedtime. Although his stories were always about the little girl who was me, I never accused him of want of imagination, indeed helping him fill in. And now tell me about being a little boy, I said once, startling him. About when you were one. He never did. Perhaps that was kept for Tim—who would never say.

“Any story,” I say, hardening. “As long as it’s not mine.”

When this man is about to make a killer remark, he telegraphs it with the slightest lift of chin. Fencers do that, almost as if they want to. Craving the rhythm, not the kill. “Planning to avoid yours, hmm. By marrying?”

So he pulled out like a thorn what had been drugging my days, puzzling my nights. “How do you know?”

“That you’re marrying young Wetmore? Heard it at Walsh’s. Everything’s on the menu there.”

“I mean—why I am.”

“You just now told me. You’re avoiding—something else.”

“Did I?”

“But you yourself—hadn’t caught onto it?”

“Not really.”

“It’s a common enough cause. For marrying.”

I toed the floor. The workmen had cleaned well. “Yours too?”

Few beard this man on his own motives, I would find—he being the professional grandee of motives; I saw him hesitate because of that. And speak the truth because of it. “No, I did it to find out. That’s what I do.”

So I find out from him early. How the animal hides in the professional.

“Well—” he says, “aren’t you ever going to sit down?”

I leave the window slowly. I hear the breath drawn between his teeth. “The same fairy-tale gawk, it would be. The way you move. I can see it. I got in as deep as anybody can after thirty years—but maybe I’m not done yet.” He watches me sit. “I knew it when I saw you. I could write a line for each one of your bones.”

“But I am not—like that person.”

“I guess not.” Did I hear though that he had had a wild hope? “But—with what you are—and with what I could do—perhaps you could be.”

It takes me a minute to understand he might be offering me the part. That sometimes did happen, even to beginners, in some agent’s grubby office, or in the producer’s dreamboat motel. Otherwise—it would be tryouts for tryouts, showcase theater for the lucky ones willing to work for free, and the gossipy grapevine at the unemployment office. At school we were all coached on the odds.

“Oh”—I say—“
Pygmalion.”

“Christ Jesus,” he says. “Education.”

“No. Movies.”

He laughs. “You’re a worthy—”

“Opponent?”

Only a phrase, tapped out in the rhetoric class at school, along with “mortal enemy” and “fast friend.” But it told him, he said later, that I too watched language.

“Collector.”

He watches me examining his desk, no longer bare, as I first saw it, stacked now with typescript at one end, a typewriter at the other, and in the middle, retreated to a last stand, a long yellow pad scrawled in a black as heavy as subway graffiti, and a felt pen.

“I play Russian roulette with those pens. I seem to be able to buy only one at a time.”

But has squandered two years, he tells me, tracing Leo everywhere. Town records. Town newspaper. One photograph—at a flower show. “Of the winning plant only.” A music society that by rumor once sang for a year or two here but had no history. Two ancient shopkeepers, now retired, who remembered the best customer of their apprentice days; the grocer who recalled most a telephone voice; and the past owner of the bookshop, who supplied a list.

“How do you describe a recluse the whole town knew?”

Who baked cookies with rosewater, but once ordered a whole sheepshead in order to taste the eyes—cooking it according to a Turkish recipe—and read Milton’s
Areopagitica.

And wore men’s underwear ordered from Switzerland.

Who gave handouts anonymously, the source being known to all, but must never be thanked—which induced a shyness almost hysterical. Who once traveled, it had been thought, but thereafter never would hear news of the world—only of the town. “Yet who did not faint at the sight of blood”—once rushing from the house to pick up a child seen to fall from a neighbor’s window—and once taming a young bear that had wandered in from the Poconos and was scavenging the garbage cans. “Who—according to the minister of the Dutch Reformed Church, whom I tracked to his nursing home in Reading, was the happiest person they all knew, and not at all strange?”

He reached behind the desk. “Then at last I lucked in. Those old biddies and geezers Nessa began bundling the effects to—they’re not Nessa’s friends. Poor old war-horse, she may have none but me. They were the music society.” He brings up a couple of framed pictures, cabinet-size, and holds out one. “The old Austrian says Nessa gave it to him. More likely he sneaked it. Nessa had them all up there this year, he said, one by one. They’ve never seen the place. Asked me not to tell his wife about the picture, which is why I have it. He had been in love most with Leo’s voice. But his wife would never forgive. Ah God, know them? They must be in their eighties.”

“They come to grandmother’s for tea. She’s younger. And eats without speaking. Nothing in common with each other—and it has gone on so long. But they still act out their domesticity. Scary.”

I see I have thralled him. He’s slow to hand me the picture. “Yes—scary.” Then comes that shift—a professional screen dropped—which even his children when grown will never learn to anticipate. Tarquin, who often comes to stay with me these days, especially.

“Well, my dear, here you are,” says Craig Towle. “In 1923.”

Yes, the dead hold very still for interpretation. The heavy cardboard that even then maybe only provincial photographers still used makes it easier. Am I looking at myself three years ago, but long-skirted instead of short, calico instead of my tartan, in the background a barnyard instead of a riding stable, hair cropped close instead of my new bob? They say the twin always looks different to the other twin. If I could see the hands I would know how far likeness can go—surely no two people have the same hands, but these are thrust in the pockets, ungirlishly. I used to do the same. Farmyard boots.

“The hair was cropped because of scarlet fever. Then, Nessa let drop once—for a while Leo wouldn’t let it grow out. The old guy had never seen it like that.”