The Bobby-Soxer (31 page)

In the kitchen I concocted my nightly meal of sandwiches with lurid fillings, meanwhile missing Knobby, presently walking the misty streets of Japan, maybe toting that same cotton bag he had brought to my wedding, which had held not rice but paper blessings never scattered. He had given me a private handful instead. Of all the people I would miss later—and I would become faithful to the point of neurosis there—he cast the least burden. Perhaps I could have asked him about Leo. His language was more cognate with our country’s past than with its present. As is often the case with foreigners here—though only they seem to notice.

Sandwiches make me optimistic. I went up the stairs singing for real, passing the locked third floor, for which I now had no need. Up the pie-cut steps to the triangular landing, through the tower space with its purple and amber bordered panes and slanting floor, and I was out on the walk itself, a lacy three-sided railed balcony that surrounded the mean-sized tower and excused it. Here I could survey the town, and more and more it was Leo’s town, for I felt sure that after the hidden errands of charity and other shy forays of Leo’s day, those shoes, pair after pair, wearing like iron and yet wearing out, had mounted these steps.

What I was seeing, and daily more familiar to me, were the lanes that people’s workpaths make. And that these have little to do with whether a town council has paved with macadam or tar. The path to the factory was trod early but by few, all older men lumbering along as if linked by one and the same arthritic twinge. At 6
P.M.
twenty or more women of all ages flounced or sagged from the new department store, the cleaner’s and the other service shops, their sharply coiffured heads of white or blond, russet, or brown dotting erratically between the houses, until each singly entered her own door. On Friday nights the two beauty parlors, one a Nook the other a Bower, took in the disheveled and sent out again these sedate blooms. The doctors’ offices, most now in one medical building, seemed at some hours to disgorge more than they took in, and at others to do the opposite. The exception was one granddaddy house only a block away, a replica of ours even to the tower. In that house’s similar carriage house the town’s reigning doctor kept the special-built Packard that doubled for funerals as needed, in the mortuary run by his son-in-law. One went to this doctor as a last resort. Through both his door and his son-in-law’s the patients entered at stately intervals in a thin, selective line, to exit in identical lines and with much the same mien as before, only somewhat nearer the grave.

I watched this theater of the ordinary with the eye of one who had never traveled, and with the aid of a pair of opera glasses found in a case with the music society’s gold stamp on it, inside the glassed-in bookcase I had after all opened. Possibly the books there, all of them on law, contained much to do with what I was seeing: how people moved, divided, connected—and were mowed down. People were a crop.

Why did I feel it necessary to tell myself I was seeing the town as Leo saw it? Because I was seeing it with love?

I was doing “Oh, Rest in the Lord” when the front doorbell rang. Leaning over the railing I saw the police car at the curb, but couldn’t see who was below. “Door’s open,” I called, leaning out farther.

“Don’t
do
that,” the police captain’s voice said.

He climbed the flights at a stately pace, nothing like when he and Denby had stampeded the loft. Once on the landing, he leaned in, framing himself in the tower’s doorway. “Nice lookout you’ve got here.”

“Built for sea captains,” I said. “Emphasis on
sea.”

“And only accommodates one?” he said. “That’s a change. What the hell you up to now?” But he had already scanned the plate of food, the schoolbooks dumped on the floor, my decent shirt and braids, and neat ballerinas, and I could see he was relieved.

“Rehearsing, for a play.”

“I heard. Who’s the leading man? No, don’t tell me. Heard that, too.”

“You heard wrong.”

He grinned. “With you, I always hear wrong. Don’t you do anything—
downstairs?
”

I had to laugh. “Who phoned you this time?”

“Nobody. Keep my ear to the ground. Have to, the kind of crime this town mostly commits. Murders in haylofts. Voyeurs in braids.” He pronounced it
voy.
His eyes went again to the opera glasses lying on a box of Kleenex for polishing them.

“I was studying the town. How it would’ve looked to the person who owned those.”

“You don’t say. Tell you something. This is a real town. Not some play-acting. People worry about you. Know you’re alone.” He bent over the Kleenex box to scrutinize the glasses, but didn’t touch them. “So—who belongs to these? Our local genius—and lady-killer?”

“No. He—he studies on his own.”

“Bet he does. So then—who?”

“It was a long time ago. Thirty years.”

His eyes crinkled. “Try me.”

“Mary Leona. My great-aunt.”

What he did then—he stepped inside the door frame, over to where I was. There was room for two on the walk after all. Lowering that big head of his from left to right, he checked the view, then stood still for it, his hacked profile forward. If there had been a ship’s wheel up there, his head could have manned the whole walk as if from a prow.

When he said: “So
that’s
what he’s onto—” he no more had to say he meant Craig Towle than one of a pair steering some old packet boat always on the same course would have had to say to the other—
South, southwest.

Then, still looking out and over the town, he said—“Leo …”

Not a question, not just a statement but in the way two inhabitants would refer to what a whole town knew, but didn’t talk about.

So—I nodded back.

That rough-cut mouth didn’t change, nor that big ear, which had to keep itself to the ground. I had to answer to them.

“Was.” It came out a croak. My throat hurt. “Was onto. Now—I dunno.”

“Uh-huh,” he said. “Saw the evening paper. Too bad.”

The local paper came at four o’clock. Its delivery box was down there at the edge of the lawn. But the paper had been stopped.

“The play—” My voice broke clear. “They’ve announced the cast of the play!”

He turned, shaking his head slowly at me, the way he must do when he came to a house to report a crash—and a death.

“Towle’s young wife—the one who died? Parents in Boston are suing him. For neglect.”

Then he patted my cheek, which was what he must have come to do—and to check on the view from here. After which he did pick up the opera glasses, handed them to me, and went back down the stairs.

T
HERE WAS SOMEONE STAYING IN
the Towle house—and I thought I knew who it was. Once or twice a day the Volks, not so new now, passed my grandmother’s house, going slow. Towle usually drove with his left arm out the window, but the car was on the wrong side of the street for me to see the driver. I didn’t think it would be he. At night, from in front of my own house, I couldn’t quite see whether there were lights in that other house down the Row, but as one by one the houses in between went dark, the cobbled path in front of the fifth house down was still luminous. Whoever was there stayed up late.

Each morning, waking early and ravenous, I would walk over to my grandmother’s. At that same hour those workmen who still lived on the Row were making their way to the old factory, the few young apprentices slamming by in their cars, the elder men still on foot, as befitted men who all their lives had made furniture by hand. On a pearly morning, one could see clear down the Row to the nineteenth century, to where the factory’s low buildings, all of cobble too and improvidently made to last, clustered like a village, among trees dwarfed by age or else by a decision to stop growing. No apprentice with any get-up-and-go to him ever stayed there long.

One day, halfway down the Row, a new car glittered, its hood like a long upper lip clamped in disdain. A tow truck, from the garage at this end of town whose habit was to repair at night and deliver in time for those who drove to their jobs, was just drawing away. By the license plate, this car, not a big car, almost mutinously small, worked in Massachusetts, if at all. My brother, who had once been mad for foreign cars, had classified this kind as not like a Jag, for show, but if you wanted to hide your wealth like the Chinese—as he had recently reported some Bostonians still did—this was how you might go.

At dusk of that same day, just as I was leaving my grandmother’s house to go to my own, this same Citroën drove by, at a crawl. People unfamiliar with the town tended to do that, often stopping dead to have a look at our impressive turrets and bays, though this car did not. I hadn’t yet left when it returned from the other direction. This time I could see the driver’s arm, a woman’s, dangling. Maybe from long intimacy Towle and she both drove the same. Surely this time the car would stop. But again it drove on.

Why did I go to Towle’s on my own? For a purely physical reason—to deal. And because I had never yet dealt physically with Towle himself? That too, though I wasn’t conscious of it. I was doing what we call instinctual. I had spent my short life watching the patterns of others: I wanted my own to begin.

Our old hearse of a car had also once been elegant. I drove it there not for that but because I had seen what walking a set path in this town could do to you. The car stopped with a jolt in front of Towle’s house.

She opened the door.

“I’m—”

“I know who you are.” Looking up at me she said that while I was still on the doorstep. Her accent was a shock, but I had known beforehand that everything here would be. The bobby-soxer had said the same more softly, but as clear. It could be that every woman associated with Craig Towle had waited to say that to some other woman in good time.

“Aren’t you going to come in?”

I bent so as to enter and came into the light. Women’s eyes don’t widen at me; they fix. One of her hands slipped into its pocket in the enviable white slacks. The arm, in its short white sleeve, was a little gaunt. Her gray-blond hair, streaked chastely only by time, but clipped and polished to a silvery shoulder-length casque, would swing only when she wanted it to. She was not beautiful, but the features were still crisp. She had that style which partakes of the expected and knows itself wanted—the style always just coming in or never quite gone out.

She would never be what I was, or with persistence could come to be, but she made me feel as if out in a world where as a beauty I would be the dragon and she would use every steel she had. She had been surprised, but I saw that I must give her no advantage. So I said nothing.

“I was going to come to you,” she said. “But I waited. And here you are.”

I saw that she was used to her own simplicity, or sparse way of doing things, which she might take to be sense, or even kindness, and no doubt was used to being admired for. I did—but the stage teaches the value of pause.

I had had a second shock. In the inglenook where the bobby-soxer had once had her puzzle, the table again had a gameboard on it. I suppose inglenooks breed the same habits. As I came farther into the house, a light-haired person, as slim as the bobby-soxer had once been, arose from the table. I saw at once that this was a young man, or a boy almost that—but still it was a shock.

“This is my son Tarquin,” she said.

So this was the little boy found weeping on the beach, and picked up by that swarm of girls, bright in their dotted halters—those sweet sophists, lisping of youth, whom his father had married.

He hadn’t been that little—as he has long since told me. He was eleven, but hadn’t got his growth. And wasn’t lost, but crying with rage. At the way his father was getting out from under as usual, knowing he could always depend on her to hang on.” And those girls, all over me so cutesy; it wasn’t for me but for him. I saw the whole thing.”

He doesn’t resemble his father; he has her features and height. Except for that he would for a while recall my brother to me, though I soon saw that his femininity wasn’t physical but that of a Picasso clown-boy, who at the time had a fey interest in miniature objects, which he collected and cosseted. What I’d mistaken for a game were some of those. In youth many mother-reared boys have a certain femininity which they are hard put to express. If Tarquin has certain ambivalences they are not of sex. By now, like most of us, he has dealt with them, in that imbroglio of adolescence out of which the real sex-to-be rises bare-toothed.

“Come, sit down,” she said. “I love inglenooks, don’t you? Tarquin, clear that stuff off.”

She was false and she was hard—was what I first heard.

“Thanks. I just saw your light. And knowing the house was empty—On the Row, we kind of check.”

“Civil defense?” She smiled; she was a veteran of all kinds. “But you don’t live on the Row.”

“Not yet.”

I saw Tarquin stiffen. He loves that house.

They wouldn’t have known about mine. As for her, I had merely confirmed what she already thought: this girl too wants to marry Towle.

“Indeed.” She had a tendency to smile as if she knew everything. Sad, powerful women often do. “Know who I am?”

I glanced at Tarquin. “I do now.”

“I want to talk to you. Tarquin—go chop wood.”

He was staring at me. He would know everything she was sending him away not to hear. “You’re the girl in his play, aren’t you? I’m sorry for you.” Then he went.

“Am I?” I sat down in the inglenook, opposite her. Oh, I thought I knew how to play Portia now. “I know he’s been working at your house, in Dorchester.”

But drawing-room comedy was more the way it came from my mouth. When you are being schooled in many modes of playing, they tend to emerge all tumbled.

“How old are you?” she said, with that smile.

I put my hand on the checkerboard Tarquin had removed his collection from. I had better be cheeky at once. “We’re advised professionally—not to say. And I haven’t asked
you.”

She sat quite still. “Craig said it. But I didn’t believe it.”

I wouldn’t ask what. She had waited. So could I.