The Bobby-Soxer (30 page)

Had he really gone to Canada? Where else might he go? And had he gone only for money or sex? Where would a man like him go, for advice?

For it had become worrisomely clear even to me that the play was still a shambles, its shiftings not lively and natural but hectic and slow—and with only one plus. The fake girl-character, Leo’s “inamorata,” as he had called her, had faded out, along with any mention of the two actresses who’d been so right or so eager for the part—and had not been replaced. Something else was needed, he’d kept saying. “Or someone. The narration—haven’t hit it right yet,” he’d said, not meeting my glance, then turning to stare full at me. “Once I do, it’ll flow,” he’d said.

Now I think to myself, perhaps he already had hit it. Or has another studio somewhere. Men tire of haylofts. Although he and I hadn’t shared what one normally gets there, perhaps he has already got what he wanted.

“At least he’s never asked me for money,” my grandmother said. “He’s honest there. But only because he doesn’t care about it.”

That was true. When he talked of backers you could tell.

“But never trust those who say they don’t care about money, your grandfather would say. Only look harder for what it is they do care about.” She was staring at me squarely enough now. “Have to hand it to Towle; he tells you. Keeps telling you. How he only has his eye on one thing.” She leaned back, with the ratchety croak that had once been a laugh—“He thinks people care about
that”
—then fell to musing, cuffing and cuffing the knob of her chair in one of those repetitive movements that were accumulating on her like an equally silent repertoire. “Knew he was a sneak from the first. Happened I needed one. And am old enough to admit it. To talk your heart out to, there’s nothing like a sneak.”

I felt mine there. My heart in my mouth.

“Just so long as you know the bargain, girl. That one day the talk will be turned against you.”

At nineteen, how consciousness hurts. “Sometimes
he
levels with
me,
about Mother. My own mother. I don’t like that.”

She pursed her mouth, shrugged.

“He said Mother ate chocolate the way other people drank wine. And that when she drank wine, it would be the way other people ate chocolate.” I’d excused myself when he said that, and had gone down into the yard on the other side of the house and bawled. Then had hardened myself—in the interests of the theater and what one could honorably do there—to go back up the stairs and hear more. “He said that my mother was the bankrupt among us. Bankrupt from mirrors. Her life.” I had listened to that without bawling.

“Clever,” she said. “But only what everybody knows.”

“But he didn’t get to know it from everybody!”

She banged on the chair knob. “No—didn’t I say!” Then looked at her hand in surprise. “But I’ve got this place out of it. After he and I talked—and I’d had enough of it, I told Watanabe what must be done. It’s hard for me to be myself, these days. And maybe won’t get easier. Watanabe knew exactly what to do. He always does. And so he did when I told him to bring you. ‘Bring that girl,’ I said, ‘for me to listen to’.” She gave me a sharp look. “‘And to listen,’ Watanabe said.”

“That’s what I’ve come for,” I cried. “To listen.” I hadn’t thought of her listening. “I’ll do both,” I said more humbly. “But first—could I go behind the screens—to see what’s there?”

“Do as you like,” she said. “Too much light for me back in there. I’m done with it.”

I get up slowly, and walk in. So there it is—childhood’s greenwood, in shadows subtle as in a forest where animals almost move. The high chests are quite as tall as I remember them, the leather inlay of the open desk is as buttery an olive green as once. Light comes lucidly through each small pane of the two casements, yet since every other pane is leaded, the luster is as hoarded as it should be. Watanabe, coming here to clean, would surely stand in verdict: yes, very Samurai. There is even a rocker, too elegantly spindled to have come from the farm. But when I touch it, it rocks.

The drawers are everywhere slightly open. Knobby would do that to counter mice and mold. There’s nothing in any of them. But books fill the breakfront, all behind glass, tight against one another. To reach for books under glass always tires me. Such books are so often the kind one doesn’t believe. These look more like armor than like friends. But to one side, on a table, there is a small shelf of worn volumes, humped between a pair of bookends of the kind schoolboys once made during the hour called “Shop.” We had had a pair like these at home, from my father’s school days.

A confirmation Bible, from its freshness rarely used since, is next to one of the Little Blue Books—by the Robert Underwood who billed himself as an “Iconoclast.” Next came a green-and-gold edition, lovely to thumb, of the
Cathedrals of Europe,
next to that a coverless cookbook, yellow-spotted and very early, printed in our own county. I would one day ask to have it and be given it. The recipe for sheepshead is there—and in the margins, the only examples of Leo’s penmanship. Almost every recipe had been tried—marked with a large check, or a cross, or even a “Nix,” and some of the old ingredients had had their current substitutes noted. For isinglass, a penciled “Cornstarch?” and below this—“No—agar-agar.”

I keep that cookbook to remind me of the everchanging pharmacopaeia of women; maybe Leo did so also. Nothing on that shelf brought me nearer that creature’s spirit. Certainly not the miniature copy, printed by one Thomas Mosher, of John Donne’s
Biathanatos,
an apology for suicide. Alongside it, as if in answer, a healthily large Newman’s
Apologia Pro Sua Vita
had been stacked. The last book on the shelf was much worn. Duns Scotus? I had never heard of him, as most have not.

A short preface stated that Scotus, a British or Irish scholastic commonly called “the Subtle Doctor,” had died in 1308. Asserting that any knowledge of finite truth rested on that ultimate truth which is God, he had denied the individuality of matter.

This I could not understand—God helping or not. And am not sure even now of what a Leo would make of it. Would a Leo have wanted a denial—or an affirmation? But the huge engraving that hung frameless above the shelf—that I could appreciate. Its fine-print title said:
Château d’If, State Prison off the coast of Marseilles. Illus. Comte de Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas.

I had never cared for Dumas. But the prison looked like what it was.

Lying on the table beside the shelf, there was a portfolio of red leather, stamped
LETTERS
. Empty. Towle had reported such an article, brought from the farm, and gradually filled. Letters to people we never heard of, Nessa had said. Letters to books, long-ago books. And the authors dead, most of them. Letters never sent. She had destroyed them all, unread.

Resting my hand on the red leather, looking up at the Chateau, I made a vow. “I’ll write your letters, Leo,” I said.

I found my grandmother asleep, or nodding. Was she half awake? With those who can destroy, one is never sure.

“Nessa?”

In extreme age, the pupils of the blue-eyed either go greenish, like cheap glass looked at from the side, or clearer in their own color, with the clean innerness of flint. But her pupils were that brown which rims with mauve, as if from an ever-perfected past.

“Go back,” she said. “Go on back in, my ewe lamb. No, I’m not done with you. But that girl is here now. The one he’s writing his play about.”

I climbed the twist of steps to the captain’s walk—as I had every day since. I needed an ugly place to be. The house below was empty. My grandmother, for months the target of the old Austrian’s plea to let him and his wife show her their country, had given in, half out of amazement, when she discovered she was not expected to pay for them.

“Every Austrian has a nest egg,” the old man said, and that had sealed their kinship, for though my father had been conned into paying her expenses, all along so had she. Also, such a country seemed the right sort for a ninety-three-year-old’s first trip abroad. “Travel’s like housework, isn’t it?” she wrote my father, who had never done housework in his life. “Why didn’t you say? It clears the head. At my age that counts. By the way, I said something to upset your girl. Don’t remember what.”

He sent the letter on to me, saying he well understood what she meant about travel, though her version of it was a demi-pension outside Vienna, where their party would stay put for three months. As for him, Rio was now home—perhaps the reason why it hadn’t yet helped my mother, although she had been slightly roused by her new Indian nurse. Etsuko, lingering on in the name of duty, had finally persuaded Watanabe to detach her by promising to meet her in Japan, to which until then he had refused to return. “As for your grandmother, take her with the usual grain of salt. Her age is certainly wandering; far as I know she is not yet ninety-one. Maybe those debentures are the draw.” He concluded by saying that I was the only one of us who had not traveled, which he would someday help me toward, though of course I was busy—and how was the play getting on? “We will all return for your debut, of course.”

It was his first real letter, and I treasured it.

By then, I had also had a note from Towle. He was at the family beach house with his children, saying that their presence was useful since he was keeping the children’s scene in, though rewriting it.

But Leo is no longer the main character. I was pretending that to myself. As well as to you. What I’m doing now works. Hope you’ll understand, once I’ve got it all, and will agree to play your new role. No more—until I see you.

Watch for the flag.

For rendezvous we had used the red flag on the mailbox of my empty house, which no longer received mail or sent it. Whatever the mailman thought—when he stopped for the pickup flag and found nothing—went into the granular underdust of the town. For it all goes somewhere, I believe now. If the flag was up when I came by of an afternoon, it meant that Towle was still in the loft and at work, in which case I continued past it to the backyard of my house and sat on a torn, tan-striped garden chair whose seat sagged as the weeks went by until I was almost on the grass. I remember that humped waiting, excited but mindless except for the pattern between my knees—and their jump—when he called me to come up.

I rarely went inside my house. When I did, at first only Phoebe was there, if feebly. A mere arrangement of light and the sound of a name, in the way of persons not seen for a long time and once known too well. But then Bill joined us, and with that I couldn’t yet deal.

But now I slept there every night, on the mattress the Salvation Army had refused, Towle’s letter beside me on the hall floor where I had tossed it, where if I left it long enough it might tell me all. There was that virtue in owning an empty house. Or three houses to be alone in, in a kind of spirit-travel, in which I was going from one to the other, out in other company only at the school, which would shortly recess. Not before teaching me that very few egos, there or perhaps anywhere, would ever have as much time for me as my own. My getting the part had been a nine-days wonder. That a role—or a play—might evaporate, was not.

“That’s the theater for you,” the voice coach said, basso profundo on this anodyne which would perhaps serve us both best of all. “In the mornin’ and the evenin’.” He had just rehearsed “Mighty Lak a Rose” with two boys slated for a television commercial—canceling my final lesson for theirs. They had a job. “Read in
Variety
that Canada weren’t the only ones backed out. Hear Towle’s gone away. To revise, it said.”

“I know. I had a note.”

“From Towle? Signed?” Mr. Margolies hummed a certain three bars—his own signature. “Save it, if I were you. Never know when one’ll need a testimonial.”

“Him? Or me?” I said, and left him shaking his head—in six eight time.

So here I was, in recess, when one is supposed to learn nothing. Or else, as they advised at school—to go back to life. But I seemed to carry my life with me wherever I went. Which practice, as Miss Pevsner had warned, could keep one unprofessional. A group of students was going to Spain, to wallow in the scenic and forget that they would soon graduate, but I told them that I had an obligation. “To Towle?” said a boy who fancied me in a light way and had declared I had better learn that style sooner than later. “Come on—shape up.” No, not to him, I said. Other students had dropped me bids to parties in the city, but Mr. Peralho’s was to be painted; I couldn’t stay overnight there—and didn’t want to, though I already knew that the city in dead of summer is operetta, is nice. Ambition is in its own dead swoon—or at the shore.

Towle’s note had been sent from Dorchester.

As for me, I felt at the height of physical and mental power, ready again for the scenery of sex, or to board Shakespeare on strophe after strophe, or to strip to its core any blood-and-thunder script a casting agent would toss me—my own history waiting second by second to burst from my veins and deal with anything, if only there were something with which to deal. Meanwhile that half-obliterated postmark from Dorchester, whose oval I had turned this way and that to read for sure, lay in my mind’s eye like a seashell for which I would not stoop.

In those days the train to our town took at least an hour and a half. I boarded a slow afternoon number known as the “Philadelphia freight,” whose wheels seemed to be deploring their own slackness:
Tsk
—
ull, tsk tsk.
Only the morning trains had many men on them. I thought of the two in whose company I had traveled this route with such intent on my part, such significance, each man only half joined to me, each riding with one shoulder pressing forward beyond the two of us—and the division between men and women seemed to me the heaviest I would ever bear. Perhaps that was why Leo had never ridden the trains.

In the town as I hurried home on foot the evening sun made dark dunes of the narrow streets near the depot. Children, poor ones, were still out playing in all the networks children maintain. I knew none of these little webs anymore. But what if one had known these, stepping along in one’s Sorosis shoes, steady, steady, between all the signposts of generosity and will along the path one had made for oneself? Had had to make.