The Bobby-Soxer (27 page)

He was always as attentive to these revelations as if he were at a seance. Or as a lover might watch one disrobe. Or might listen—the day beforehand—to one’s dreams? Though I knew he stared at me, I had never caught him at it.

“What Leo laughed at.” I made it a statement, not a question—as if like all these matters, it was there to be found, a jewel mislaid but somewhere safe. “Maybe. I didn’t find it though. Knobby did.”

“Oh, you talked to Watanabe—good girl. No telling what Nessa might have let fall—or he’s picked up.”

He spoke so idly. I understand artists’ casualness with their own work. The way a sculptor, showing the studio, will cuff a statue the way a father cuffs a child. Roughing up what no one else must. But Towle, when offhand, unnerved me, unable as I was to tell where “the work” left off and he began.

“I speak to no one about Leo but you,” I said fiercely. “No one else.” Then I caught his stare. I had become easy with his smell, heady but now not dizzying. The eyes, brown-pupiled but no longer liquid with youth, were like a fence, scarcely divided by the nose. Out of his presence one thought of the nose as a hook; returning, one saw that it sloped. Of course one doesn’t see a body’s whole import in its eyes. But one may see the flicker behind the fence, or the undisturbed brown. I thought to myself: in him the idea of only one other besides oneself, of that exclusivity between two people—one for one—which my small world and many books had taught me to long for—is not there, is simply not there.

“We’d been making cookies,” I said shakily, and certainly in my own voice. I had wanted to do even that in the persona of Leo. Knobby and I were alone, he watching quietly; I had told him nothing. Just as I needed the sieve, he reached not into the drawer but in a cabinet above, on the side where the set of brown-black pottery dishes was kept, and brought down an odd-shaped one from a corner that held strainers, tongs, and other kitchenware, all, as I now saw, with the pewtery shine of old implements. “The best,” he said. “Make the flour like silk.” He knows, I thought; Knobby understands what I am doing. This stretching back to be another person, in order to honor them. That natural tribute to one’s ancestors, which one performs time after time in daily life.

“Then, all of a sudden, we had this big plate of cookies. And nobody to come for them. And Knobby said: ‘Children should be coming for them. Our family house Kamikura, they come like clockwork.’” He said “crockwork,” but I had long since stopped grinning at his accent or his specially trotted out phrases. “Knobby wanted children, you know. But Etsuko’s turned out to be too old. And then he said, ‘Children are monsters. Dal-uh-ring monsters. With them one can laugh.’”

We two were quiet. As at each of these discoveries when they rang true. It’s a solemn thing to reconstruct a life. This was why in spite of all, I could approve of him and maybe even why—as the town became aware of what we were up to—it let us alone. I would not know Mr. Evams’s role there for a long time.

“I’ll visit the day nurseries,” I said. “As Leo did. Everybody thinks they know what it is to be a child. Especially someone my age. But I’ll go.”

I finished the tea, bare-armed. Arms in long gloves move differently at the elbow, protected as they are from excessive gesture—was that it? But which such gestures, of which sex, would a Leo have been seeking protection from? Even to the oddity of wearing gloves inside the house. And when one wore them, in or out, did one or did one not touch the face? “Makeup,” I said. “Are we back to that?”

Would the Leo I was feeling my way toward have worn it? I felt not, but Towle maintained this might be because I didn’t wear it myself, except when acting. “For you it means the stage,” he had said. “Not what women feel they have to do.” The play, as so far shown me, had had a scene in which Leo, as Aunt Leona, returns to the church after years of avoidance, wearing too much rouge. Painful—but too beautifully written, he said, and had discarded it.

It still amazed me, that in his mind the scenes changed from day to day, and might do so up to dress rehearsal and even after. I had thought that somebody as eminent as he wouldn’t do that, or have to.

“May I never be—that eminent.”

I wasn’t too stupid to see that my use of the word amused him. But I was still to learn that he was leading me through a part, more than I would ever lead him toward his play.

Only yesterday I had challenged him—did he really know what he wanted his play to be? “Of course,” he said, quick, “I want it to have—a haunting provincialism.” I saw that he both grudged and loved saying that. Then he lowered his head, to slap me down for it. At these times the nose has a definite hook. “Exactly like you.”

“Look, Towle, don’t stare,” I said now. “It puts me off.”

“Good voice, that—” he said at once. “Make note of it.”

I did, and of how it had come without thinking.

“Does it scare you?” he said. “To be becoming someone else?”

I nodded. “But not enough.”

I rubbed my face with my hands—it hadn’t changed. Leo would have had no beard, we had agreed, but I was becoming ashamed of our practice, so mincingly literal. I stared at my palms. The children. Eyes like magnifying glasses spying at the pores of adult flesh. Luray Walsh’s mouth corners, for instance—how repellent their thick pink, wet with beads of saliva, had been to me when I was eight, the year the Walshes came to town. Younger children see even closer, with the same gaze—open to first principles—that they give to the Silly Putty in its staple primary colors and to the building blocks.

“The children—” I cried, “could Leo have worn the gloves for them? Maybe not to touch them.” Not to repel. The conscious monster, protecting what it loved. “Oh that would be—” I couldn’t find a word. “Oh, how can I know, at my age, how Leo felt about them?” The loft echoed. “How anyone does,” I said, in my own voice. That was the key. In what I said—and in how I said it, both. But I wasn’t ready to know that yet.

He knelt to pick up a piece of paper, one of his everlasting notes to himself. “What we’re doing—it’s for real but also
not
for real—can’t you learn that?” In his cool distaste, I heard that I had become too partisan. Was he mulling whether he would have me in his play after all? Deciding that what we had done here was about all the use I would ever be to him?

He stood up and went to his desk, fingering the big pile of script, of which he had fed me only a scene here and there. “Yes, the children. That will be it.” He didn’t mean how it had been for Leo, but how it would be for him. He handed me one of the scripts. The pile, always changing, had never been so high. “So you too have come to that conclusion. Good girl.”

He dropped to his haunches, in front of me—later I would note how he always did that when explaining a part. “Here. Time you read it, began learning your lines. As well as learning how I may change them.” He stood up over me. “Going out to get us some dinner. Might have a few drinks on the way. Are you too hungry? No? Good.” Climbing down the ladder which led up here, he still faced me. “Read between the lines, remember? Not just bung on.”

“That’s unworthy of you,” I called after him. “But teaching corrupts.”

The play in that version began in Boston, with Nessa and Leo walking on the Common. The hospital and the hated doctors one never saw, except as a background chorale, in half-dark. Though the two walkers never left the stage, there were flashbacks. One to Nessa’s wedding eve, not confined to that bathroom but including it. One to the time when she first held the babe in her arms. The order of these scenes was not yet certain. There was also a flash of the farmhands in the barn—though Nessa was there too. The two main characters, Nessa and Leo, were sometimes there in the flesh, sometimes only in the spirit, and all variations of this were played on. This he called spirit-shading, and I supposed it to be his method—he replying when I said this, that yes, he supposed so, since the method had been around since the millennium.

He didn’t like the analytics our school so fostered. Even with only those two walking, his stage was often densely packed, but the shadings were never intentionally cloudy. “I write to make things clear,” he said, “and don’t you forget it.”

The second act was all Leo’s affair with a man, one not so silly as Ruskin Swazey. “I think he was not silly,” Towle said. But the scene in the church was there. It was to hang in the mind, the directions to the stage designer said, “like a postcard painted by Raphael.”

There were no suggestions as yet to the actors.

I hadn’t got to the last act, when he was back.

He fended off what I was full of and about to say. “Pizza? Or quiche?” He always brought both, as well as other delicatessen, laying out the food and beer like a picnic.

“I never thought Nessa would actually be in it,” I said. “Does she know?”

“Eat.”

I was hungry, with an anger against him that added zest. All through our association he would play on that anger.

“She does and she doesn’t know,” he said then. “It won’t matter.” He put out a restraining hand. “Come come. It would matter to your grandmother as you know her, maybe. But not to Nessa. Or not that much. And they both want the same thing.” He reached for his beer. Not a stage pause. In his own life he never acted; he was one of the few people I could trust not to be theatrical. My father was another.

“She wants Leo to live,” he said. “For as long as
she
does.”

I was near tears. Such violations were new to me.

“Eat.”

I did; my appetite these days was huge. I thought again of prisoners. As I was to always to do, when I must act at someone else’s behest counter to my own. “The lines. They’re—kind of primitive. Some—are they to be read double? As if the character wouldn’t know all it’s saying?” It was a relief to call Leo the character. I began doing so that night.

“Read those plain,” he said harshly. “Leo would know everything.”

And there we utterly agreed.

When we’d finished, he said: “See you haven’t read the last part. Go ahead. I’ll nap.” He stretched out on the couch. He often did that. I no longer stole secret looks at him, as one does at a male sleeping. He was no longer that to me, I thought.

I bent to the playscript. Up to now it had been all continuity—a flow. But in this final section, not an act in the usual sense, more a charade, the actors spoke in stylized cries, as if in echoes of an old theater craft that everybody might have forgotten. The stage was filled with them—with the town. And children were everywhere—urged away from hot pokers and sneaking cold biscuit, kneeled to and scooped up, and fed warm cake. And all, all were imaginary. Not only to Leo. Spoken to, their answers could not be heard, except at the end, when Leo did hear one of them, who emerged into the real. A boy of fourteen, speaking in low peroration.

I saw how heartrending that could be—or could be played—the two, he and Leo across the stage from one another, separated by that dumb throng of the imaginary.

But all of the scene was spoiled for me, spoiled, spoiled—by the presence of the town girl—she the silly essence of all those small-town girls whom banking money or land money would send into the world to boarding schools, only to come back—and in physique like those bow-mouthed, frill-necked cloth dolls that the divas and housewives of Leo’s era had had in their bedrooms. A girl Leo now loved. And more imaginary—I thought scornfully—than any of the throng.

Towle was smiling. When I said nothing, he yawned. “We could have production money now. And dates. And two winners willing and eager to sign for the girl. One from Hollywood—who can act up a storm, by the way. The other, from Broadway via Park Avenue, doesn’t have to. She could lisp that part in her sleep.”

“But what’s she doing there!” A girl—such as my mother might have been—at the time.

“I knew how you would feel.”

“I hate it. It’s not true.”

“For Leo? Why not true for him?”

“Her!”

We were both standing now. Even if he had been as tall as me, we would never see eye to eye. Why must I always seek that, with men especially? Whereas with women—Etsuko, my mother, even my grandmother, I had a warm tolerance for their variation, and with my girl classmates could argue amicably half the night? Because we already had a common ground?

And the play’s end—that boy, leaning against the two bikes. How did Towle dare?

“I’m going to see my father.”

His eyelids flickered. “So I’d hoped.”

Mr. Peralho’s flat was in one of those large apartment buildings on Cannon Place, where my father said old money on the run came up against new.

“Slightly on the run,” he added, looking out with me on the East River below. “Nothing serious.”

The river, with so little now of the gear and traffic of a live waterway, must be only a print of its former self, and on the run too. To a gelatinous shoreline not far enough across, and holding almost still, mere window bric-a-brac for buildings such as the one in which we were. Massed together over the East River Drive, all on one side, these apartment houses gave off a gray money-light. Flowers dotted them, at closed casements. Terraces did not flaunt but hid. The windowsills here were lined with plants inside the panes. Across the water a sign said
PEARLWICK HAMPERS
, a vista from a factory fairy tale. “These places seem to me like hampers for
people,”
I said.

I had mostly been asking my father mild questions since I got there, to get him used to them. When talking of money, older people, men particularly, are always glad to instruct.

“Well, the florists’ bills on this side are certainly large,” he said. He had already told me that the West Side, where our school was located, was the side of the city where people thought about money even if they had it; the East Side was where it was kept. As I would see if I came to live here during the play.

“Is Mr. Peralho’s money old or new?”

“Old. And not on the run.”

“He’s kind.”

“I’m glad you see that.”

“I like him a lot. Or else I couldn’t stay here.”

“Neither could I,” my father said.