The Bobby-Soxer (29 page)

“School is a bevy—” I said.

“But I remember Leo at the kitchen window after the funeral, ironing the dress your mother had worn to the party. And saying to me: ‘The touching way that girl says
down home.
She should not be put to traveling all the way there alone. After such an experience as hers. We owe it to her to escort her there.’”

I opened the window and leaned out—toward that train my young father and mother took South together, the first of the many she would travel later with me, or alone. “And you and Leo never spoke of it. Of what had happened upstairs.” I said this with authority. I don’t remember in which voice.

“No. But that’s how Leslie—happened. I found a person—the person, to whom I could speak of it.”

And had been faithful, through death in hospital, to him.

Another barge was now passing upriver. The Pearlwick sign held fast, a document for a time. We in our town had its product in our bathrooms, wicker at bottom, pearly flip lid—and inside, beneath the week’s soiled laundry, an ever-ready supply of rags lively with memory.

I leaned out the window.

“Careful,” my father said behind me—and I would be. I was a vessel filling. It would be a sensation I’d learn to live for.

“How did Leo die?” I knew my father had been away in military service at the time.

“Heart. The mitral valve was said not to be as it should be. A mild defect in some women, not ordinarily life-threatening. But in Leo it was more.”

I wasn’t surprised. As Boston had said, Leo was more, not less. Adding in sermon that this was what a monster was.

So at the door, I asked my father after all what I had come to ask: “Do I play Leo—as a she? Or as a he?”

He stood stock still. One never asks without telling. I had revealed what I knew. “You don’t mean—just dress?”

“No.” Boxes, so interchangeable, teach better than that. And a town’s dump.

“Dress means nothing. Nothing.” I saw an Oxford-Cambridge debate one year. The year I was waiting to marry your mother. They wore black tie, those striplings. To debate with the gods and the dons. And presumably—with themselves. I also saw the oracle at Delphi. A hole in stone. Behind some artfully disposed boughs—and some German tourists.” He laid a palm on the apple of my throat. “The oracle is here. I can’t tell you more.”

But downstairs, looking for a taxi to take me to my first rehearsal, he said: “I find I can give you two bits of advice. One possibly useful. Cannon Place is the pits for taxis.”

We walked over toward First Avenue and picked up a rover.

“And the other?” Out here I was alight with the city, standing as straight as a rocket pointing up, the towers around me ready to be knocked every which way like in an Art Deco poster, by me in my path.

“Don’t paint yourself into a corner, with Towle.”

The cab door closed before I could answer. As he had intended. So I never told him that Towle had already done that, to me and Leo both—but only in the play, and that I would hang in there and paint us both out of that corner. For though I had been born to my mother down home while my father was still in the service, and Leo, dying before they at last came North with me, had never seen me, it was to Leo I owed my birth.

Leo gave my father my mother.

We give what we can. And are taken in our acts.

“S
AY ANOTHER!” MY GRANDMOTHER
would cry, each time I came. By instinct she had recognized what recitative was; she never said “Sing.” So I gave her whatever the voice coach had newly come up with: two lines spoken from the diaphragm in Kabuki declamation, or five bars from one of Canteloube’s
Songs of the Auvergne
—as sung by that voice like a sliding knife—Madeleine Grey. I always ended with John McCormack’s “Jeanie,” her favorite. My theatrical training fascinated her, as long as I kept it practical—what one literally did onstage, and at what salary. She had no interest in ambition or myth. Nor as I vainly hoped, did she ever blanch at a certain sound in my voice and hold up a dreaming finger—
Leo!
And I saw she wanted no tender questioning. She had had her recitative.

I could even acknowledge that my loving inquiries to her wouldn’t have been as kindly intended as I had conceived them, and in any case would have been answered in that other language, the esperanto of two generations back, which might sound cognate but really wasn’t. While to her mind, my generation spoke a patois out of that nowhere—the future—which always corrupts.

It even seemed to me that my grandmother had no subconscious—that such a concept had to be connived with by the carrier before it was wholly true. I and my kind, born into a world of accepted double meaning, lived there as in some amniotic fluid that would never quite drain. My grandmother, untouched, undivided, moved in that primal world of gesture which could never become obsolete. It was no wonder she would rather hear me
say.

We never spoke of the third floor. I was on trial.

And what did I expect to find there? The greenwood heart of a house, beating on like in some old opera libretto held in the fist, while I waited to enter that forest of sound, poisonous and sweet?

Though it was I who would have to perform.

How that would happen my grandmother understood better than me.

At the time, I was living in three places and fully occupying none of them: Mr. Peralho’s in the city, my own house, in which I had never slept but sometimes mused, and my old room in her house, where I memorized lessons quickest and slept when I had to. I saw myself the way the age I was wants to—as a smart nomad where others were foolishly settled, a true solitary, but engaged as deep as any devil in the passing scene.

My father, Mr. Peralho, and my mother—attended by Etsuko—had left for Rio on what was to be my mother’s trial visit, their caravanserai making a sensation at our local depot, for at Etsuko’s hint—that this would be a gentle way to get my mother there—all had been dressed in white. By then she and my mother were as fully in step as some nurses become with their long-term charges. To Etsuko, risen from a lower class to near lady by means of an elegant smirch of brotheldom, my mother plainly embodied some myth a Japanese woman would burn altar tokens to. In that shrine, my mother, swerving in tune with habits of tint and finickiness not far from her own, felt puppet-safe. My brother, arriving red-eyed either from a binge or from being dried out, but very entirely sober, said: “Southernism isn’t that far from Buddhism, y’know,” also pointing out that Orientals mourned in white. And switching to tennis whites and headband, he had accompanied them.

So Knobby, Nessa, and I were alone. I was determined to call her that, but had not yet attempted it.

Then one day, Knobby rang me at Peralho’s, saying “Tea at five, any day after school. Upstairs. And I am not to bake but to buy. At Lundgren’s.” He despised the town bakery’s confections because my grandmother assumed these to be hospitality’s height. Much later on, I would be reminded of her by certain born-to-the-purple patronesses of the drama who served Cheez-Bits and meals cooked by Irish maids, with her same haughty ignorance—or wholesomeness?

At five o’clock I climbed the stairs. I found her seated in front of a huge platter of pastry.

Actually, Lundgren’s cornets filled with buttercream had been our splurge as kids. Out of disappointment at what the third floor at first glance had come to—an old woman’s lair, heavily draped and scattered upon—to her satisfaction I ate three, served me on the Haviland that was the town’s acme of taste. I was given no time to ask where the harshly burnt, squat pottery she had been using had gone. I scarcely was given time to look about me, though this abruptness was nothing new.

I had responded to the story of her own youth with one of those bouts of sympathy the young give the old of such stories, quite without understanding them. It’s hard to estimate, or even believe, the resentment of the undereducated, particularly in one’s own family, even though much of the populace in our country of émigrés or lost provincials is often in the same fix. My father and I had risen above her. Though this was an external pride, inwardly she could never forgive us. Or wanted to cut us down to size. Her early life had engrained in her bones that life’s version of the status quo. She was aware enough of that life’s other strengths. Yet she belonged to that class which wants to quash its own legends in favor of the kind they can buy at the stores.

For the former resident of this long room, hidden and fenestrated as any room in a fairy tale, this may have helped.

But all I saw now was my grandmother’s impish, at times almost evil, urge to make us admit we were indeed—only folk. It did not occur to me that she had brought me there for a purpose of her own.

“You don’t fatten,” she said, when I had finished the third cornet. “We don’t. Farm bones. And in our family—now and then a woman as tall as you. Never the men. Always had to marry short, those women—if they married. You maybe should keep a string on that boy.”

“Oh, I will.” I had. A student at school who knew him had reported Bill was joining the Coast Guard, but two drawings of his had shortly appeared in a Greenwich Village rag of some distinction, and when I phoned the pad—to congratulate, though in a funk I hung up instead—he had been there. And had known it was me?

“He may soon be living with a girl called Marilyn,” I said. This had been a joke between us: that for the sake of drawing practice, he might one day have to replace me with what he’d called a “svelte dumpling,” of that name.

“You could get him back just by wiggling your little finger. I saw.”

I looked down at that finger. Yes, I could. That was the trouble—and that I might. “Men don’t mind now. What size a girl is.”

I saw she didn’t believe me.

“I
was minded,” she said. “And I was nowhere near what you.”

Towle had dared to question her, why shouldn’t I? “But what about Grandfather?”

She wanted to be asked. One day, I will watch a great actress of eighty smear her nose with a finger and a Greek snuffle, hawk and spit and even fart her immortal lines, and then say to us other actors in the wings as she exits, in accents already like a lost bell: “At that age, at
mine,
one wants to do and say everything.”

“He was a prince. A prince. But he came too late.”

“But you got your honeymoon house.”

Her eyebrows, furry and mannish now, flexed, but I felt no shame. We begin that inquiry early, some of us.

“Doesn’t matter when,” she said. “Does matter how. But now—I’m away from it.”

All this time, glancing about me as she would allow, I could see nothing left of these quarters once secretly crept into and so well remembered—though we must be in that very space.

“Upstairs—” I’d said beforehand, “you’re sure she’s inviting me upstairs?” and Knobby had nodded without expression, although in
déjà vu
his noncommittal nods were often full of it—a reversal I recommend for study to those who would understand his nation.

Now, looking again, under the many shawls and the scarecrow garments, and past a line of shoes of too much experience, lined up like a bench of the unemployed, I saw that my grandmother was living in a room Knobby must have made for her out of those screens called
shoji.
Almost a one-room house this place was now. Ordinarily this would have pleased me, in the way a dollhouse or a box-within-a-box does tantalize. But this room, though Knobby must tidy it, was inexcusably rumpled with an old person’s living. The old have random ways no riotous youthful mess can reproduce. The stasis of memory is going. The relationship between ordinary objects is no longer the common one. A fine impermeable dust settles—nothing that can be cleaned away. Age wrinkles the air.

So—once more had Leo escaped me?—and my grandmother had helped. I had no conception then of how far we will go to keep the mundane always with us. And to hold love separate. Or that my grandmother’s image of that separation might be as fierce as mine.

In the next second, I see how tall the screens are. That other room, of furnishings maybe not so high in scale as a child would see them, must be shielded behind them, pushed, like most attic memories, with its back to the wall. From outdoors, if one glanced up, the fenestrations were still the same.

“Where’s the master?” she says suddenly. The interrupter is her role, will be to the end.

I know who she means, of course. “Craig Towle? He’s in Canada, drumming up money for the play. There’s a whisky distiller up there has backed him before.”

Though I’m not sanguine—Towle had said. That man never saw the play he backed. He was advised. Nowadays those ginks choose their own write-offs. I might lose out to Black Angus bulls. Or to a government arsenal up for grabs—

The tinny lingo he fell into at those times, was it meant to warn me, in our too detached joint corner?—“Good for me to go”—he’d said. And I’d quipped: “Too many women around?” For we still had our differences on Leo.—“No, never that,” he’d said, his lower lip suddenly indenting, the peaked eyelids widening, a man clearly remembering sex. I’d held onto my acerb pose but I too was recalling a past. The room thickened, or our bodies did, toward each other, with the swelling that comes like a seventh sense.—“No,” he’d said.—“I just need to keep in mind how gothic you all are.”

Then he’d looked me up and down in detail, the whole length of me. No doubt recalling all that fancy self-imagery he had extracted from me, which in the guise of our getting bodily closer to Leo I had been foolish enough to let him in on—all those allusions collected from other men. He looked me over head to toe, from noble Hera’s braids to 1890 goddess neck, to the flat breast lappets some men were mad for, and lingering for an infamous flick of a glance, his first, at the crotch of my shorts—behind which lay what Bill had likened to a Hasidic’s bearded smile. His survey traveled down my bare legs, now out of riding boots, to the Trilby feet. Oh, I had told him all, with what now struck me was my own lechery.

Then he’d gone down the hayloft stairs, tossing me a final blasphemy, which coming from him it was—a quote of my father’s, on his lips. And hadn’t I savored that too? “Oh, it’s all right. You’re still a modern girl.”