The Bobby-Soxer (22 page)

“No?” But I might have done the same. You are fifteen, and you don’t know what you are, much less who. At the same time you are full of life. The only people you know to have a crush on are other girls. Every day your features vary, seeming to grow on different days, the nose your mother’s, a small woman’s, the chin—your father’s, as a youth. Let’s cut your hair mannish, says Phoebe, who has been taking a mail-order course in beautician stuff. Then let’s go in the bathroom, and fiddle. The nurse isn’t home to catch us, but later, when she sees my hair, she crosses herself, then comes to twitch my cheek. “Any spots? No. Creatures like you don’t get spots, even at the age they should.” And I’d thought she meant diet—the lamb chops and beef juice they didn’t get on Cobble Row. Granny says not to hang around girls like you, Phoebe says next day, fiddling, her face hot.

And all the time, the person you are in love with is yourself.

“See anything?” he is saying.

“So what if I do?” I have to swallow, though. “Leo looks like a modern girl.”

Maybe it’s my expression makes him hand over the second photo so silently. The music society, taken in the downstairs hallway of my grandmother’s house. The young women are all in dark surplices, the men wear flowing ties. The Austrian has high color and light wavy hair.

“They all got a copy of this one,” Towle says. “He had his tinted.”

Leo is in the center, leaning against a niche from which palm fronds spill. It is a pose in which divas of that era used to let themselves be “caught,” as if staring at a basilisk from which they cannot look away. The gaze is deep, the lengthened eyes lucent enough to compete with their jewels, and in the best of them the brow is broad, the cheekbones well planed and easy to highlight, the mouth mobile. Leo has no jewels, only the structure of a face I know too well. Though mine was not destined to attain what Leo’s already had—gone past a girl’s curve or a boy’s narrowness to that questionable human marble which unites. Leo’s hair, superabundant even in the pulled-back 1930s coif, keeps the question alive.

Nowadays my own face is my dear machine. Make-up battered, speech-inflected to the smallest muscle under the skin—I watch it daily, but only for age. It is mine; I have earned in it. But in those days it was only what had been given me. Down home had been the first to approve of it, though dismayed at my other growth. Behooves you to keep yo-seff mo-ah a lady than most, heah?—the dear sweet ladies said. The Evamses had approved of my face almost as if for good conduct—and it had helped me get into drama school. Seeing Leo’s face did not scare me. I felt myself safe from that kind of beauty. Or if safe is not the modern word, say then that my body had already declared what its intentions were. What I felt, looking at Leo, was awe. My face, too, would someday be mine alone.

I turned the framed photo over. On the manila-papered back all the names had been inscribed above the date—May, 1932, and in a young hand the name of the taker too.

“Do you sing?” the voice at my side asks. I shall resist letting the man who owns the voice become more than that.

“I have no ear.” Such a good strong instrument, our school impresario said, holding his head. And listen to her shift key twice in ten bars. “But I can imitate—even opera singers, for a bar or two. It’s not really singing.”

“Which singers?”

“You’ll laugh.”

“Try me.”

Oh I would, again and again. What I wanted was for Craig Towle never to come near enough to drop out of the myth that the town, and I too, had made of him. Never to become an ordinary man, in a room with me. Or even an extraordinary one, unimaginably near. And I was afraid that I wanted him nearer.

“Chaliapin.”

He didn’t laugh. “Where from?
Boris Godunov?”

“No. I don’t know that. ‘The Volga Boatman,’ just the Yo-o-oh’ part. And Kirsten Flagstad. Not the Valkyrie cry; it’s too sustained. But the first bars of the Love Death—
Mild und leise,
and a few words on—I can do that. And John McCormack’s ‘Jeanie with the li-ight brown hair’—not always, but sometimes. That’s the hardest.” The Evamses, though they couldn’t take opera in performance, had a wall of old records I was free to play, and had listened to me with glee.

“Tenor—” he said. “You have quite a range.”

“It’s not singing. It’s like—talking. But from the diaphragm. And with what they call
timbre.
”

“Do one.”

“Uh-uh …
” I give it that down-home lilt. You can snow people with Southernism, if you’re good enough. From me, it surprised him. But he caught me looking in my lap anyway, and looked over my shoulder.

“Why—your father took that picture. That long ago.”

“Wasn’t
that
long ago. Or not for him.”

Then he does laugh and laugh. “That you—should have to tell me.” He sobers. “Maybe I’ve been thinking too much that way. Of a period. I don’t want a play to be that; I never do. Yet even my own early life here seems to me out of a family album. It’s the town—and the reason I left it. Still forty years behind.”

“No!” I say. “It’s not.”

We sit as if over a chessboard. At the window is the town I could never paint as it should be. “It’s not like that,” I say, in a deeper voice than I have ever before let myself find. And deeper yet: “Not at all.”

What an old trick, dropping the voice with each repetition—but I didn’t yet know this. All the tricks were passion once.

“I’m the one who bought this place,” I say, with the same alto joy. Now that I see why I have bought it. To own what you love—and can’t get away from. As people do, never sure of which comes first. “That’s why there’s nobody living here.”

Has he heard me? His head is cocked—he might be one of those students the Evamses crave most, who at the height of practice appear to be listening to decibels beyond the ken of the sighted. He isn’t yet sure of what brand of creature I am.

A flush creeps from my neck to my temples. Old-style actors in the sticks used to hold their breath to turn themselves red, we were told—and were applauded as they reddened. But this crept of itself. If he wasn’t sure what I was—I would never tell him.

“Leo wore gloves half the time, claiming an allergy. Know any reason why?” His tone is strange.

I hate him for it. “Kid in my sixth grade, white kid, her arms were all liver and pink; said her mother was frightened by a stoat in her sixth month. But that’s just the town, eighty years behind.”

“Your round,” he says—and seizes my hands.

They are comely, and small for my size. “I have my mother’s hands,” I say. And I’m a bitch. Let him know that.

He puts my hands back in my lap, slowly. “The part’s yours—Portia. Now—let me walk you through it, though. That a deal?”

How will I feel when I inform them at school, I wonder—proud or shamed? Answer: I will know what bribery is.

“And then—
you’ll
walk
me
through it, my girl. With every thing you know about it. Or feel.”

Why do I tremble, like a prisoner offered a cigarette? Answer: because you are savagely learning more about the business of life than you have it in you to confess.

“So—you’re my landlord.”

It was my window, even if I couldn’t make the moon rise in it—the same limits under which the rest of the town owned its property. The Row will buzz no more than it always has about me and mine. He leans toward me, a shorter man than he seems. The crown of his head hasn’t lost a hair. He doesn’t gossip; he takes one into the ways of the world. The back of his head is not as well-shaped as Bill’s.

I face him squarely. Again I hear that intake of breath, and this time I know what I have done. I have assumed that pose. There are divas who must go to school to become one. There are those who come out of the town.

He tosses a key in my lap. I let it lie. Then toss it in the air and catch it. Then toss it back. I will hear his story to the end. As he gives it, I will add to it, until at times it will seem that I am playing all the parts in this family. In many voices. The voice of young Nessa, grandmother-to-be, and the harsh crank of her when old. The twanged Boston of old medical records never resolved—and how should they be, when nature itself has refused to?

“Some facts I’ll imagine,” he says. “Some I know.”

And will it also be the other way round? Some I will imagine, and he will confirm?

Through the air the packages will come flying toward us, under the glare of an ashheap sun.

As he begins, both our faces are incredulous. He has given me the part. I have inherited it.

T
HE DAY WE LEAVE THE
farm, the men who come to move the tractors, all men from the district, say the cows already know. All machinery is being cleared off as a condition of sale. This is not a dairy farm; the herd is a small one, personal. It too will be led away at four o’clock, by which time we will be gone. The furniture, when auctioned off, may have been shamed by the low price set on its dignity, but most neighbors have much the same stuff, and no call for new. Only the grand white icebox remains in the parlor to greet the purchaser like one of those huge, retarded hired girls who around here are sometimes included in such deals. The buyer, our leading banker, is coming to take possession, denying that he is acquiring us for the sake of our fields. “That barn is chestnut,” he said. So perhaps there’s hope. A lot of the household stuff is made of that wood too—no point in saying it. The newspaper has congratulated him for saving the finest farm in the township. The township is Cranberry, New Jersey, but that kind of bog tilling—half nature’s and half raucous bands of pickers and babies made in the bushes—is not what we have ever done. That morning, the slightly acid smell of potato fields stretches as far as the low-level brown horizon, as if it always will.

It is on record—as told by an old woman dining in a restaurant with a man who, though a native of the same state, doesn’t know beans about its farms—that Leo, the sole reason for the move, was the last to leave. Though it’s not yet time to go. “Look at that crew,” my grandfather says, then shouts to the men shifting the John Deere. “Put her in neutral, you lunkheads,” but they know he’s only yelling to explain away his red face. The machines whine on and down the driveway, which in those days was dirt, though fine-packed. “Where’s Leo?” Nessa says, as she has said how many times since Leo, fresh from the dead body of their mother, was placed in her arms, she then younger than Leo is this day—“where’s that child?” Though the child is now seventeen.

Leo was born when their mother, the tiny, cramped farmwife in the porch picture, was fifty years old. Six had already come from that worn uterus, and when it was made to expel its one sure beauty, the mother’s heart had already failed. Nine pounds nine, the record says, though in those days the doctors, all family doctors proud at the christening, used to weigh their own hand as well, for emphasis. The mother had brought one treasure of her own to the gaunt house and its giant farmer—a set of pointed coin-silver spoons, and when the baby was placed in Nessa’s arms to raise, she wondered whether she would get the spoons too. Didn’t. They were lost—which is what a family has to say when there are eight women going over the bureau drawers. But she got everything else. And her doll-child, too, heavy as it was.

Now, sir, let’s not put on the farmhouse stuff too thick. Or the old days either. There is that inside part of us which passes from one to the other even in a city, or towns like this one. Cranberry was the same. Then there are the outer things, which if you’re trying to live till your debentures come in, can change into the new world they didn’t warn you about. Good for the arteries, if not for the soul; take it in stride. But to find where Leo is—at the moment saying goodbye to the cats in the barn, though that’s not finding—you’ll have to feel the changes between then and now. Not just by reading the old newspapers, but as if you were us then. What you’ll have to know is how we named the nameless things. No doubt you think we mostly didn’t, when it’s just that what you and we won’t name are different. In Leo’s case, what you have to hold clear in your mind is the state of our household nakedness.

Like when Nessa married. In part because she was over twenty-five and that was nearing thirty. In part because her own father, that huge bulwark, had had to go into the nursing home for good. Leaving her and the lodger alone on the farm. A man of sixty, and of such substance that his lodger status had been all but forgotten. Now it would be revived. If he had been one of those poor neutrals that can dangle their lives out on a farm without notice—but he was a bachelor with as good a jowl and gold tie pin as any married man, only wedded to his business, which involved a lot of traveling. There the men would assume he took care of himself as regards women, even if he didn’t talk of it—while their women would not think of it. Bachelors could be bachelors in those days, dividing off into the shy or the selfish, the rake or the mother-bound or the duty-held, plus a large class, wistfully envied by even the happy husbands—those single men who were consummately taking their time. The name for these was “latecomers.” Grandfather, though tardier than most, had always been classed that way, and so it turned out. Perhaps he’d had Nessa in mind all along, only hadn’t gotten around to her. And if the affair was a bit like uncle and niece by now, that had been heard of. There was no kinship involved, the porches said. And meanwhile, all that substance, most of it in paid-for land.

As for Nessa, so long tied to a father who demanded, and to the doll-baby, a big girl now, on whom she doted, and out on a farm, fine as it was, that isolated by its very acreage, who else could she have been waiting for? It was World War I, with the young men gone or going. On market days in town, she never let the child out of her sight; on the rare church Sundays when the father could be torn from his fields, no one else being allowed to drive the Buick, she dressed the child fit to kill, in bought clothes from Trenton. Some who knew no better even believed the child to be her own by-blow. Farm families, used to animals, often do that kind of taking in. But even in those rigorous times, when doting was less taken for granted than abuse, nobody wondered that Nessa spoiled Leo. Some persons, when spoiled, respond only by bringing light into dark corners. Even in Cranberry, where the state of being good, the onus of it and the rules for it, were thrashed out all the week and winnowed on Sunday, it was standard to remark that Leo, with whom old and young were so easy, must have been somebody’s love child.