The Bobby-Soxer (3 page)

We had all humbly and correctly diagnosed Towle’s relationship to each of us, but it would seem that our own gossip, in which all roads and all nerves were interconnected, had kept us “from really taking the man as a whole into our consciousness.

As was never clearer than the night my father brought down his own house with his soon verified report of the bobby-soxer, Craig Towle had a larger life.

And now we had heard that larger-life echo, in our own house.

“—married a bobby-soxer” my father said.

Before supper that very evening, my father had given my mother a gold bangle, very handsome, but as she and I had already exchanged in a glance, too heavy for our tastes. Some fathers never gave to the mother without giving to the daughters too, but neither he nor I would have cared for that—wanting not to dilute what he had it in him to give to her alone. The bracelet was one of those whose embossing seems to spell a name but doesn’t. I felt it would never spell hers.

A rose silk shade shaped like the Taj Mahal hung over our dining-room table. There were several of those around town, meant to soften the harsh outlines of the day. What ours did was to influence for life my idea of dinner conversation. Under the lamp’s cast, I could chew the gristle of some heartache and appear only to be concentrating, or my brother could creep to table with his latest secret safe in those daylight-blue eyes which could not otherwise hold back. My mother, who never stooped to hide anything of value, merely indled more quietly. My father, who conducted his life on some theorem apart from us, seemed neither to need that light nor to notice it. Men are not as subject to home shadow.

“A—bobby-soxer?” my mother said. She might have been asking what that was, though I sat before her, in the new penny-in-the-slot leather loafers which had overtaken saddle shoes, and ankle socks. I was seeing how even the Taj Mahal could not hide the dark red shock of life-surprise.

My father reached out to grasp the wrist with the bangle on it. He was a man who liked to see that houses, and the lives of those in them, kept themselves up, and that night I wondered if he wasn’t helping her at this, under the rose radiance of the dining-room lamp. I wasn’t sure why they stayed together, but I wasn’t one of those children popularly held to be afflicted by fears of impermanence. I always knew they would continue as a pair.

N
EVERTHELESS, SHE AND I LEFT FOR
Greensboro the next morning. Once a winter she and I went to see her parents, now removed from the small manor farm which had been my maternal grandmother’s inheritance to a tiny white town house, where I was able to learn the real etymology of indling, or the temperament, and how breakfast on a tray could still be managed for all, even on a small pension, if you still had an in-coming black. Up North, my mother had simply kept the temperament. That winter, although we had come on such short notice, we would stay longer than we ever had. “What with one thing or another—” my mother phoned or wrote my father back home—though she never said precisely what, we would not return again until well through spring.

On the train down there, she was restless; she had forgotten her chocs, she said. That alone would have shown the power of the distress under her neat suit, toque, and fur. But I had picked up a box on my way to the car. Father of course had driven us to the station.

“Honey, I’m so touched,” she said to me, once we were in the train. “You have the memory of a Southerner.”

“And we can buy chocolate bars from the vendor who comes through,” I said, basso with responsibility and praise. “Soon as we get beyond Philadelphia they still have them. Vendors.” I was already remembering what you had to remember if I was to be as my mother had said. Napkin-rings all round, not just for babies. Bibs on the babies. Parties with old ladies at them. If the babies and the small children were there also, a “dawky”—a word my mother said I was not to say, would be there to take care of them. Whether or not I said it, the girl would be there. My other grandmother, a fine contrast to my severe Jersey one, would feed us up “as if our livers are to be made into pâté,” my grandfather would say, proud. After that, his free-to-coarse speech would be curbed, at least at table. The women loved to. We two would have a round of obligations, attending to which we would acquire the fierce, if temporary local opinions which made it easier. Any eccentricities I had, if interesting and not too troublesome, would be praised as individuality. In return, I would have to drawl, not cross my knees in company, and giggle when there were boys. Compared to Phoebe Wetmore’s brother Bill, they would still be boys.

“Have a choc,” she said.

I took one, careful as always to take the nougat she didn’t much like, though when she caught me at it she would make me take a truffle creme, not suspecting, I thought proudly, that I didn’t care which.

She took one of the pink bonbons she usually left till last—often saying they melted on the tongue like leisure itself. The train made our wrists brush. She was wearing the gold bangle.

“Very distinguished—” she said, “twenty-two carat. Not eighteen.” Might this mean the mistress was given the eighteen-carat stuff? But was that the only reason she was wearing it? She rarely wore her own good jewelry, substituting the odd little bits of Bakelite now known as Art Deco. She only liked to have the other by. She caught my eye. “Your Greensboro grandmother will be pleased to see this. It will make up for our not having a maid.”

We munched, while the last pig-towns of Jersey raced backward, unable to hold us. I would miss them, yet still be full of new delight. Father would miss us too. But he had New York. And the lady.

“I think—I think he gave it to you—for you.” This was daring.

She sat up. “Why?”

Because of the bobby-soxer. But, looking at my own legs, the accordion-pleated skirt, the whole outfit—I found I couldn’t say it to her. “Because—you’re you.” And that was true, too. We never lied.

She sat too formally straight for the fields of smashed cars and other rusted iron we now were passing. She even closed the chocolate box. “Tell me. Do you think—you know too much?”

That depended. Had she noticed last year in Greensboro that I no longer giggled at men—even at uncles? Did she know that Bill Wetmore no longer regarded me as merely his kid sister’s friend? Or that when we lay upstairs in the loft of the old outbuilding, once a hayloft, that now served them for garage, while he spoke of his great-grand-uncle, the Beaux Arts sculptor he meant to emulate, and I of the painter I wanted to be in spite of absolutely no background for it—that we had no longer merely nestled? Or that I had stopped going there altogether, the day after Phoebe, who had only a grandmother to inform her, had told me what she said no one else but them knew—that my mother visited Craig Towle in his nearby house? To tell me had seemed for a minute still friendship, if misguided, or—in the arcanum of what the Wetmores already knew about us—even an ever deferent old-town function. Until Phoebe had added, lip retracted, “Maybe these days, for what both of you come down here for, she could give you a lift.”

“Take your time,” my mother said. “Or don’t answer at all. Or not yet.”

I thought of all I knew because of her—which was what she was asking. How, at the rare times we went to New York as a family, I lost myself in fancy on the side streets of where I meant someday to paint all streets, and to be the mistress as well of somebody who had no wife. How, in the very scene we lived in, I would never have sensed the layers of things, even to the small, severe still-life judgments between truffle and nougat. Or to the way the lip retracts in jealousy, even on an otherwise nice young girl. Without my mother, I would never have had the hayloft courage to do what I had done with Bill Wetmore, which I did not regret then, and do not now. Even at this moment, she was teaching me the difference between fast and slow.

If the parents don’t burden us, they cannot teach us. I didn’t know that yet, but I answered, and joyously.

“Never. I can never know too much.”

She smiled. That’s my girl. She whispered it really, bowing her head. “Your father would not agree.”

Though I was desperately fond of him, here he seemed an intrusion. I did not mind that he thought as he did. Though I would never fault her, he was the brake. Because of him, I had an inkling I would one day do as she had: I would marry well.

But at the moment, her mention of him confused me. Was she running away from him, or from Craig Towle?

Perhaps she saw my state. Her way was to confuse me further, but always one step ahead. “Would you like to know something I know about you?”

If she saw my scare, she also saw I was ready. To be told I was illegitimate? Or destined to suffer a rare hereditary disease? No—this she would have managed to let me know. But suppose she had seen that I was not going to be able to do what I thought I was fitted for?

Anyway, she put her arm around me, which was rare enough to be valuable. Under her pushed-back cuff I saw that she was wearing another bracelet entirely, a broader flash of torqued silver, the purest, worked with many angled forms of onyx and jade—what must surely be the lustrous Paris progenitor of her Bake-lite.

We both looked at it, hung there at my shoulder. “Came last week,” she said. “I can’t send it back. That would be bad taste. And they’ll have only that small mailbox out there.” So did we. But out there always meant the old town. I could see the mailboxes, the Towle one not too far down the lane from the Wetmore’s. And the bobby-soxer, going to it.
“Bracelets,”
my mother said, squeezing her eyes shut. She opened them. “Here—why don’t you wear it.” She quirked at me. “Forgive me, but on you they won’t know it’s real.” She put it on me, kissing the wrist she clasped it on.

“Is that it?” I said. “What you know about me.”

“Why, darling.” Her face crumpled. So had mine. “No, never,” she said. “Never.” I thought I heard an echo. “Never” always made one. She put her lips to my ear. Lovely lips—I never saw them retract. I hear her whisper. “I know—that you really don’t like chocolate.”

Then we embraced, as the train and we flung ourselves forward onto the long green fields.

W
E CAME HOME THAT SPRING
much refreshed. Down there I could be smart without having to show it; unlike up North, you could just use it in your daily life. My mother, languid toward new dresses, had been admonished on her duty to the dressmaker—“We owe it to Miss DeVore.” Obligation was different from convention; fewer people—often nobody—could be blamed, either for expense or offense. Gossip, open and catty, was so polite you could mistake it for lessons in etiquette. I learned once again how my mother had come to be as she was, when we talked to my father on the phone, as of course we did—with everybody in the house listening. I tried to be as knowledgeable about him—knowledge is charity—but with him that was not the same. I wanted him to be a mystery so that I could still love him. For the sake of them both, I succeeded in losing the silver bracelet, but Greensboro, furnished with two systems of vigilance, one black, one white, unfortunately restored it to me. Nevertheless, when we came home I was not wearing it. Neither was she wearing the gold one, but that was mere impatience with the object itself. My mother was still a woman with two mysteries in her head.

The difference that spring was that now my mother would be doubly alone. Father’s mistress was very ill, and in his loyalty—which stretched vainly, like too short an elastic, between the two households, finally took precedence. He slept in the city, spending all his spare time at the hospital. Meanwhile, I was going to a junior college in our neighborhood, in lieu of the real college for which I was eligible but deemed too young. Later, I could be a transfer, perhaps next year.

It struck me that my family was beginning to make too many substitutes for the real, but in any case I wouldn’t be around home very much. Next term my brother, in spite of the democratic influence of the Denbys, or perhaps because of it—Denby Senior now drank openly inside the garage door, never closing it or sleeping in the house—was slated for boarding school, if he could get a scholarship.

For it seemed that my father’s mother, though utterly willing, could not pay for him as planned. In a snit over her suddenly terminated “relationship”—since though the Craig Towles at the end of their extended honeymoon, applied to see her, she would not receive his “juvenile wife”—my grandmother, reverting to her customary chain of command, money, had suddenly invested in what promised to bring her a fine return in her one hundredth year but meanwhile left her short of ready cash—which my father must now supply.

This was the end of the first year of Craig Towle.

The evening my father was to come back to deal with all this, the train station was brilliantly lit for a town rally over what some posters cried as
KEEP OUT URBAN SPRAWL
and others as
DON’T BE A BEDROOM SUBURB.

“Seems a developer has been sighted on the horizon,” Gilbert said, nodding to my mother and me on the platform. Some forty miles away there was talk of a convention center. “The protesters will naturally want to call attention to us.” He and Luray, there to pick up an important woman speaker for tomorrow’s luncheon meeting, wouldn’t object to a little sprawl; at least there then might be station-cabs.

One of the circle of protesters filing up and down stopped to comment: “Yeah, to bring ’em straight to your restaurant,” but it was all quite genial; everyone knew everyone else, and the banner carriers might well end up at Gilbert’s for coffee, although having less than a full meal there was now discouraged. My mother and I had not known the town was threatened. We came so seldom here, as was clear from other platform glances. To my father, these seemed to say, our house was already a bedroom suburb.

“He coming to pay the old lady’s taxes?” Gilbert said. “Saw in the paper her house is up for them.” I saw Luray give him a nudge. “If he’s pressed, we might work something out. Leave the old lady occupancy till she goes.”

“Oh, lovely,” my mother said lightly, down-home artifice still with her, “but who’s to say she’ll ever go?” Though we didn’t want grandmother’s house for ourselves, I could tell she was what Greensboro called “spit furious.” Her eyes were fixed on the track.