The Bobby-Soxer (25 page)

I am becoming part of the town. He thinks he’s wooing me to do what he needs. But it’s the town, all the people back there, back there in the secret life, among the old postcards and tatty lace. One doesn’t expect to find a power there, sitting in that antique dark.

He and I share his cold cuts and beer. It’s not hard to go back. It’s not easy to go back.

Leo is in the deserted barn, with the cats. They’ve never minded her presence; cats don’t care. They are circling for the milk that will never again be here. The herd has left, lowing its uneasiness, the farmhands too, touching their hats. “Bye, miss.” The sun slants in everyone’s eyes. “Bye.”

An empty barn has no more revelations. But for the sake of those one has had here, one might come to say goodbye to it. After the dresses are packed. “Where is that child?” Nessa cries. “Ah, there you are.”

Outside on the front lawn, the banker has come to say goodbye, and to see that the sellers take nothing that now belongs to him. Some people steal their own plants. The last of the machinery hobbles away. The first van of goods has gone on ahead. The sun clings like snuff to the women’s dresses. Leo’s is tobacco plaid. The odors are April lazy. People stand still.

Then my father comes out of the house in his new school-blazer and cap, calling: “Leo’s rocker is still upstairs. They left it.”

“Told them to,” Leo says. “I’ve rocked enough.” The voice is rich and amused. Even in the later decline of Leo’s beauty—the nose too noble, the neck cords tensed with song—people will remark on that voice’s positive joy. And now that swelling throatline—was it Greek?—takes the sun like the plaid.

“If I’d thought—” says the banker, who is recently widowed, gazing at Leo and taking new note of Nessa and the grandfather—the gap in their ages. “Still—you all aren’t going that
far,
” he says. “And Miss Leo—” he says, turning “—you are to take any you want of your plants.”

But Leo has fled.

“Far?” my grandfather says. “Far enough.”

So they leave. Oh, spare me, my old grandmother will say at ninety, but in the end she will describe. How Leo gathered and gathered the plants until it was well past dusk, with each armful asking reassurance. Like a nun going into the convent, only here in reverse, Leo kept asking whether the world outside the farm would have the proper furnishment. Was there really an upstairs in the new house—above the upstairs? “It’s a bankrupt’s house—” my grandfather said “—it has everything.”

“Does it,” Leo says, suddenly calm, and absently adding on another plant. “Then I must burn some things I still have in the cupboard up there. I was going to put them with the plants.”

But on a farm one does not leave a fire burning. So my father brought down a portfolio, and a hamper. “Clothes I bought in Boston, Nessa—that you didn’t know about. Except for the shoes, a monster mistake. But I’ll take it all with me. As a lesson in extravagance.” As this was said, Leo’s voice failed. Theirs was not a world in which anything could be kept private, maybe all the more because of their lack of nakedness, and Nessa, who must have known about the clothes in the hamper—all male ones, began to bawl.

At that point—at that exact point, old Nessa said: Leo became my elder. Both of us accepting that. When you’re the elder, it’s easier to be brave, Leo said. But I would put it another way. Leo thought it was my turn to be young.

The portfolio? Letters, old Nessa said. In a house in town they can be burnt, even fifty years later. And were. The hamper? Here old Nessa’s voice failed her, then found itself. Those, sir—articles of underwear and other garments—were in the bundles that went to the dump. The shoes, pairs and pairs of a high-buttoned style with the brand name Sorosis, Leo would wear for life.

And the life, loaded too into the van?

What a tale, the man in the restaurant says in spite of himself. Like a folktale.

We were not folksy, the old woman in the Stetson hat says. We were folk.

Sorry.

Accepted. One day—I may tell the girl, my son’s daughter, about that life, the old woman says. But just now, we are leaving the farm.

My son—that girl’s father—is leaning on the porch-rail, picking at his blazer buttons, which he hates. He has been hating a lot lately. “Our bikes—” he says. “Leo’s and mine. There’s no real room for them. Why don’t we ride behind and follow you?” Two British Raleighs, the pride of his existence, formerly. “And the plants will bruise them.”

Everybody laughs, even Leo, who quickly adds, “It’s miles and miles, yes, but he and I have done more: let us try.”

So we’re ready, but no one moves, even the grandfather. Those cows knew, Nessa said. Potato futures are down, though, her husband says, rubbing the grizzle at the back of his neck. Potatoes—the boy says; at school, that’s what I miss the most. No one laughs, all their four necks hunched out, shoulder to shoulder. You could paint them, hankering face against hankering face, locked toward that buff-colored crop-lined horizon, sealing now with night.

“Your window’s open, Leo,” the grandfather says. “Somebody go close it.”

“Let Mason close it,” Nessa says. That was the banker. “Let him try.”

The wind whips the curtain out. Nothing funny about that; there’s often a night wind.

“Nessa—we’re all trying,” the grandfather says. A man without temper. A rock to lean on. Yet one needs more.

“Somebody’s still there,” the boy says. “Looks like somebody’s still there.”

“Does so,” his father says, and climbs in the second van.

Driving down the road to the highway, they have to pass the entire front of their house, the van with the two in its cabin crawling heavily, the two bikes wheeling behind.

Out on the highway, the house fronts them again, following as it can. It understands why they are leaving, and is flying a white flag for surrender, nobody will say whose. Somebody’s image is still in possession there. As the four faces recede: land broker husband, wife and sister, boy nephew, Leo—or grandfather, grandmother, my father-to-be, and Leo—Aunt Leona, each face sees who has been left there, each in its own way.

Upstairs, in the lodger’s room, the androgyne rocks, debating what to be.

“
HE
WAS A GREAT ACTOR —
Leo.” Craig Towle got up to turn on the desk lamp. The prosaic flooded in and retreated. It would not dare the two of us, I remember thinking—a young judgment.

“I assume you know the life—Leo’s outer life,” he said. “The eccentricities a whole town was made to accept. The kindness that flowed.”

I
pre-
sume, was what was said down home. Taking for granted that a life, outer or inner, was not that easy to get to.
We
were the actors; couldn’t he see that? The kindness was what was real.

“Ever see his tombstone?” Towle said. “Worth a trip.”

I hadn’t. But when I went, I would go alone. And I would be taking the part for Leo’s sake as well as for myself. How black the window was now, how dark the town. The moon would rise over Towle’s final word on us, but not without me.

“She
—” I said, rearing my long neck at him, and scuffing the place on the floor where a moth had been. “She.”

“I
WANT THIS ROOM TO
shine for you,” Mrs. Evams said. “Yet I want it to blaze.” She didn’t have to tell me why. We were in their library, with all the windows that faced our old house—now the Walshes’—opened wide. I wondered though, what vision of light was behind that high, polished forehead, what concept possible only to the blind.

To attain it she had gone to the local rabbi and asked to borrow every branched candlestick he knew of in his community, then had ordered dozens of natural beeswax candles from an up-country apiary. The five thousand books had been cleaned by a corps of their students, who had been able to find scarcely a speck of the dust she had said she smelled. Two of them, two young men in their best jackets, now stood by, holding candle-snuffers for any emergency, and flanked by bins for resupply. She had wanted no girls, because one could never be sure what girls would wear. The two boys had been chosen in part for their jackets, which she had made them describe. One in a woolly brown that blended him with the leather bindings, one in sharp white, they did look like acolytes. One of them was sighted, for safety’s sake. Both were smiling.

I had given up counting the candles, all honeycomb patterned and twisted to a point that burned true even at eleven in the morning. Luckily the day was as soft as taffy waiting to be pulled. Brides’ weather, Etsuko had said, coming in to wake me, who had never had to be waked before—and adding hastily that this was a good omen too. She always had a polite one handy, often drawing out a wrinkled slip of rice paper to confirm it, from somewhere in her invisibly seamed garments. But this omen I felt had been improvised.

I was already wearing the biscuit-colored dress she had made to my design from yardage bought years back by my mother to take down to Miss DeVore but never used, and now cast into a plain shift banded low at the waist, and with an irregular drift of skirt, of a kind I still wear. The wedding was not to be until four, but I had dressed early—for the candles.

“Does it shine?” Mrs. Evams said, facing the windows, her arm at my waist, weightless but unprecedently there. “Does it—do that?”

Across the street at the Walshes’ a smart gray van from Trenton, there when I arrived, was now being emptied by a uniformed crew of two who were delivering unidentifiable gear inside. Now and then there were nervous shadows at the Walshes’ windows. Perhaps they were planning a rival party. No one was to come here except family.

Mr. Evams, suddenly behind us with the quiet footfall practiced in this house, had heard her question. I could feel that he knew of the activity across the way, but glancing sidelong at his face—at the aquiline nostrils expanding, and the wise eyes, blank with infinities always changing, I saw that I was not to signal to her of whatever, high up on her own alp of vision, she hadn’t sensed.

I would miss the cues gathered for me in this place, more than I knew how to say.

“The room blazes,” I said. “And it shines.”

At four, Mr. Evams, wearing a surplice, grouped us around the oak table at which students always stood in a body for the more difficult or unique instruction. On it lay the ordinary braille Bible always there. Today, another book lay beside it. I should have recognized it, but trembling, I was noting the order in which he had placed us, for no one ever left this table without turning to fingertip the face on one’s left, the face on one’s right. And I hadn’t yet told anyone what I was going to do.

Mr. Evams had made a masterly dinner party of us. Placing himself at the head of the table between bride and groom, so as to conduct the service, which was to be as agreed, a civil one, he had put my father on my right, in effect to give me away, though the service would not press him to do so. Next after where Bill would be on my left, came my mother, after her Mr. Peralho, surely now family, and as the staff she often leaned on when awake. At his left was Tim, at once placated by this, then my grandmother, who would want him next to her, then Watanabe, whom she would want also. Etsuko, as his spouse, came next, though on his left. Her delicate scent and graces would soothe Mrs. Evams, by etiquette on my father’s right.

And so we come round again to the bride, the minister—and the groom, entered last, as grooms when flustered sometimes do. He was wearing his best, a jacket I could see my father thought surprisingly decent, not knowing it had been left behind by the former owner of the New York pad, to whose pleas to send it out to him Bill had responded, “Should
you
turn out to be somebody, I will.” The style of that had pleased me; he might still be Bill Wetmore. But was that why I was marrying?

As we settled in, my mother reached for her purse and a slight pressure went round the table. To watch her sip from the flask now always with her—given her by Mr. Peralho, who swore it held only fruit juices—was still not comfortable to watch, for by this time we knew she slept even when seemingly awake and with us. Now and then a remark would escape her, she always staring at the ground as it did so, and on occasion lifting the sole of a shoe to look there, as if she walked on needles, always self-directed, one of which had pierced its way up.

Mr. Peralho had formed the habit of reaching for the hand in the purse and kissing it to quiet it, but today he kept still, his mismatched eyes almost crossing, in evident prayer that wedding manners would sustain her. The hand came out with one of her lavender lozenges.

Next to Peralho, Tim fluttered up at him, seductive, anguished and smart-alecky, all at once. I knew how much it was costing him to blurt nothing. Across from me, was even my grandmother—having noted my dress—stretching her lips in approbation? Etsuko, in bliss over the dress, Watanabe holding the printed cotton foldover bag carried by men in his home city, from which he intended to scatter a ritual something, my two dear blind guides—and even my father, who this morning had given me a check, muttering: “Something blue—put it in your stocking,” and adding that it came from the sale of his lawbooks, as if nothing less would do—how did I know what all of them were thinking? Was this the common lot of brides?

Across from me, Mr. Peralho was checking our circle with his keen, flawed glance. I liked him more and more. Last night he had come to me to volunteer not to be present, as not being family. The two gentlemen at the farm weren’t coming either, he said; I guessed he had so persuaded them. “No,” I had answered, “you must come.” This is our daughter, he had said to those two at the farm that day, with his one off-color eye hopefully marking it, though he knew I was not that and never would be. The other eye, unflawed, must know as much about acceptance as a man could. Today he reminded me of the poll-watchers at election time. Nothing partisan, for or against a particular candidate, can be said within so many feet of an election booth—or of this oak table. But never glancing at any of us too long, was he letting me know he was counting the vote?

Mr. Evams was about to begin. Though he was to marry us in his capacity as a justice of the peace rather than as a minister, he had indicated he would not do so without homily: “A few tags.”