The Bobby-Soxer (26 page)

Yearning not to hear that man straddle what he could not approve, or pretend to be as blind as the sighted—and do all this for me, I turned to my brother, whose verdict I knew already, its blue glare fixed on Bill. Once he had come upon Bill and me scuffling in the back hall where my grandmother’s house divided, a prosy arena where snowboots could walk in and slickers hung. Hatracks make me horny, Bill had been growling, clasping me wetly. Now I’ve got you where I want you. “No you haven’t,” Tim had said from behind us in his bow-tie voice. “You’ve just got yourself where you want to be.” And flinging up his hat, which had lodged like a goal-shot on the hatrack’s top hook, he had passed us by.

“Well—!” my grandmother said now, in the voice that knows itself to be a yea-sayer. I dared not trust that voice, even though I knew how it had come to be.

I could trust Knobby, but he would not speak. Though if that bag of his could have held something even better than a finger-bowl to show up the groom with, it would have.

Etsuko, mother of geishas—for by now we knew there were two—would always cancel out his vote.

And why anyway had I left the counting until now?

Bill, studying the grain of the table, had his drawing hand in his trouser pocket, where it would be abortively moving … “Have to be careful in buses, I do. Take me for a pervert. Never sit next to a girl, I don’t. Only next to you.” The groom. Who will stand there totting up his own charms and other scores the way smart people do crossword puzzles—in order to keep other conundrums at bay?

My father is the only one looking straight at me, clearly thralled in a hot attendance he sees he should have given me sooner. But that is all he will give me. Plus something blue. He is like me—but in what way?

And Mr. Evams has not begun. When the blind won’t look at you, you have done something bad. Or you have not done what you should.

“The faucet!” Mrs. Evams cried in sudden agony. Releasing us.

One of the candle boys ran over to the tap where we students washed our hands before braille, and shut it tight—and Mr. Evams began.

Though he goes on inexorably with his pre-marriage sermon, I do not hear it, nor will I ever be able to recall more than the edge of what he said. Perhaps he counted on that. For down the arc of the table my mother, the forgettable, has raised her head, intent on the big double door to the corridor, which creaks lightly, as if someone waits there.

It is only Terence, the Evamses’ Sheltie. Not trained to be a Seeing Eye dog, but sired by and brought up with the one Mrs. Evams had used early on, he has learned his fierce obligations anyway, waiting to be admitted at every room where she is engaged with people, always entering any classroom a half-second before she is done. He will know when instruction is over.

My mother stands up. Etsuko has dressed her cannily, not too elegant, one dull jewel. Except for the turban she always wears, which keeps her out of all eras and frames the two fever-spots of the cheekbones, she looks like the mother of the bride. Perhaps that has cued her sufficient strength to come down the table to me on her own. Mr. Evams’s skein of words falls silent. She puts her arms around me. They were always long enough. “He’s come for
you
this time, hasn’t he. When I saw you go off with him I knew he would.” I whispered back that it was only Terence, that I could see his muzzle through the crack of the door. But she knew better. “No, you know too much. Do what you must. But be careful.” We might have been mother and girl on the train again, putting the flats of Jersey behind us—and for a minute we were. She gave me a squeeze. “You never did like chocolate.” Then, still holding me, she raised her head to the rest of the table, spellbound there. “I see it all from my window. It’s just that I cannot always wake.”

Still in her arms, I felt the shiver she said that with, pushing me to look out these windows, across the street to our old house—and I saw what the Walshes had done. They had given in. Heavy drapes, sculptured like marble, now blocked ground floor and landing; upstairs, every break in the façade had been packed with lace. They had curtained the whole house. It’s only what a town does, of course, even if the Walshes had had it done tighter than the street had ever seen. “Yes, tell them—” she said. “For me too. Tell it all to stop.”

The candles helped persuade me, pulsing their gold. There should be candles upstairs here at the Evamses too, around that cameo bed—attesting to what ought to be. Behind us all, the tap rill-rilled. Across the way, my mother came to a college party in a dress that crackled compliantly with death, and won a strange groom, who as a boy had kept snapping a picture with nothing in it except two bikes. On the third floor of a house much like this one and the one across the way, my grandmother keeps a companion. In a gentleman’s farmhouse, kitchen boy now quarrels with garden boy over who loves who—but in the grain of a past that maybe resides there yet—maybe in the old horsehair plaster of the walls, maybe in the night creaks an old barn gives forth like coarse conversation—a rocking chair rocks, debating. I have obligations to all of them.

“I can’t marry anyone right now. Bill—if you can wait, one day I will.”

Etsuko, never too stunned for ritual, makes a wavering Japanese sound.

I face my father first, because of those two bikes that pedaled steadfast all the way here. “I’ve been given the role of Leo, in Craig Towle’s play.”

And Bill? Wild for an adversary, he peeled off his filched jacket and flung it behind him. Then he fled.

My brother’s jeering
“He’ll
wait” followed him.

“That was unkind,” Mr. Peralho said. “But perhaps too cowardly slow to be heard. I better go after him. Perhaps to order a picture. Perhaps—one of you. Come along.” Tim followed him.

“Tim has the sweetest tooth of all—” my mother’s whisper came. “But I couldn’t foster it.” Then she looked down at her shoe, and Etsuko and Watanabe, who knew the signs, led her away.

My grandmother came toward me. “When you want to come to the third floor, you are welcome.”

My eyes filled. So did hers. She turned to my father. “Take me to dinner. In my own house.”

He put his arms around me. I was a little taller than him now. The time for looking at each other eye to eye had passed without our ever knowing. I put my head on his shoulder. What he said came to me in vibration. “I am glad that you were born.”

Terence, the Sheltie, came through the door for his charge. Mrs. Evams, making a sign to the candle boys, went out with him.

“They’re all leaving me,” I said. “Why does it feel so good?”

“They’re wedding each other,” Mr. Evams said. “You’ve made that possible.”

The acolytes were putting out the candles one by one. They had a system good to watch too, the blind one first, following the heat of his hand in order to quench a candle, the one who could see following him to the next. When all were quenched, they left.

“Are we in shadow?” Mr. Evams asked.

I nodded.

He smiled. “Thank you. I would marry you myself, if your ears were not so jug. But I have a present for you.” He led me to the table. “For not having made me complete that service.”

He was giving me the Ronsard, and I knew why.

I was the beginning animal.

That was the beginning of how I have come to live in my house. I had never lived in one that did not have strong reasons for me and mine being there. People like me will always find reasons for why they must domicile themselves in a place, or even doom themselves to it.

In a town like ours, the merely expedient—to work in the hayloft, with Towle a few easy doors down the Row from me, was also the most troublesome. I wanted that too. I wanted the town as audience to what it would immediately conceive to be corrupt, and I knew to be pure—or professional. Perhaps I needed their help to keep it that way. But of this I was still ignorant. Can you remember that bracing joy—of being ignorant?

So for three months Towle and I would spend every afternoon that I wasn’t at school in the loft there, in slavishly sexual concentration—and with never a touch. For me it was all for Leo, for him the play—on which he talked business with a vigor that shocked me. To me “business” was the theater’s compelling slang word for the business of life as transacted on stage. I was surprised to find that even a man like him would have to hunt backers. “Oh, they’ll listen.” No worry about that—and their agents would ploy. But getting up the ante for a play like this one wouldn’t be easy; some money would be repelled. And he wasn’t having a star. It might have been hard to find one. “Though I didn’t choose you because of that.” Nor for the brief news value in an untried actress, nor worse—for my family connection with the play. Or worst, even in my possible bodily connection with the part. Though many would slyly think so. Until they
saw
—he said—and again that beam of light went through me. To be seen
being
—the thrill that cauterized any wounds I had.

Often we went into the city together on the morning train. I think now of the poker players behind us, in those first weeks their ears growing through their hats, and not a card heard to drop—as he and I discussed the Boston clinic’s report on Leo. An anciently evasive essay, as much mumbled as written, its language reminded him of the gothic romances of its day. “More monkish horror than medicine.” The doctors had vacillated over what to record, and while satisfying themselves of the situation had decided that in the case of a living person, “non-concealment” would cast “contumely” on the patient—and even disbelief on them.

Our own argument was always the same. “She urinated as a woman,” I said, “I feel sure of it.” Behind us, a chip was at last tossed into the pot; perhaps they were getting used to us. But when he answered: “Remember when they were in the church—he must have erected as a man,” the players got up and moved from their own consecrated spot. After that, we sat at the car’s end in the seat where the conductor kept his supplies. In that seat, we settled it that part of Leo’s organs must have been vestigial; we would never know which.

Later still, and not on the train, I told him what I would and would not ask my grandmother. “She would never have seen Leo in the nude since Leo’s puberty.” But at the hotel where they stayed in Boston?

I searched among the small authorities that with practice seemed to be coming to me the way the fingers acquire thimblework. I don’t believe in spirits. But spirit transmits. “They wouldn’t have shared a room together. But I’ll ask.” And I would also ask her—because I thought I already knew the answer—to describe that lovely babe at birth. I would ask anything that gave my grandmother pleasure, or relief—no more. I thought of her now as an old tree transplanted, its dreams and comportment still on the farm into which I had projected myself by inheritance—where he could only research. He and I were changing seats even with respect to the two of us. But he knew that sooner than I.

“I won’t press you to ask—”

“My father? No. Don’t.” But in my researches, at night before I went to sleep, I did ask him, and slowly he was telling me.

When we actually met it would be at Mr. Peralho’s apartment in town, where he spent much of his time. Peralho had gone back to Rio, Tim being at Harvard at last—on probation. My father was staying on to help, in what we all knew was a matter of Tim’s conduct. My mother was not now a consideration, or rather to us a permanent one, not subject to change.

Meanwhile, in the loft, where the town surely imagined me in all the carnal positions a girl and her mother’s lover would try, I was walking back and forth as Leo would, limbs hung so, arms held thus, and trying never to posture. I no longer thought of it as a role in a play, his play. Our practice
was
Leo, coming alive between Towle and me.

The school was partially taken into our confidence. The voice coach, accepting the challenge in his own high decibel, was acquainting me with recitative, in a range from falsetto through countertenor to second alto, to light baritone; and one day, among a pile of old discs—Peter Pears, Bidú Sayāo, Kathleen Ferrier, I found the voice in which I could sing—for four words only—but perhaps could learn to sing-speak in: the dark alto vehicle of Rose Bampton, long before she made herself suffer upscale into soprano—singing O,
rest in the Lord.
The next phrase—
rest patiently in Him
—I could muster, though not as well.

Miss Pevsner, the drama coach, not confided in, was highly allusive in the Strindberg style. After her class, which Towle sometimes came to watch as he did the voice class, he and I could laugh, our sole time to, and even that helped, for I began to wonder at Leo’s own reliefs—what had been broad enough, or grotesque enough to make a Leo laugh?

“Found that out yet?” he said one day in the loft, at the end of a long afternoon. Each day I reported to him on my outside labors, if not on all my thoughts. My grandmother was away at her one indulgence, a summer stint at Chautauqua, taking the Austrian couple along “because the lectures will help them with their English.” After forty years in this country!—but both she and they had to have an excuse for her charity. I was glad of the delay. Over the weekend I had been to see Knobby and Etsuko. She had shown me a picture-book, lent by the ballet niece, on the Japanese male actors who played women. She had charmingly refused to let herself understand why Leo’s case might not be covered by such a switch, I told Towle, and miming, I began to play Etsuko in Kabuki gesture, until warned by his glance. I had better play no one but Leo. For the time being, I must be no one else.

At the moment I was having tea with gloves on, in an effort to find out why Leo might have worn them so often. I took them off. Absurd. But Leo would not have been a fool. Then why? In the pictures the hands were well formed, free of rash and not really large enough to be hidden either for vanity’s sake, or for maidenliness. Neither of which, I decided, Leo had suffered from. But those hands would have had their own gestures—perhaps unique? Gloves of thin kid, like these found in a thrift shop, would restrain them. I flexed my fingers. “At times maybe one would simply want relief—from being reminded. Of what one was.” Whatever that had been.