The Bobby-Soxer (32 page)

“That you were—‘a Venus of the mind.’”

Who could help flushing?

“‘—Who—hasn’t yet found her natural dress.’”

I sat back. He was right. Though that was nothing new.

“But then he always has a phrase of that sort about the women in his plays. He did about me.”

“But you weren’t an actress.”

“No.” Everybody would know who she was, her smile said. “Those he
writes
about.” The casque of hair swung. “I was the first.”

And proud of it. She would have liked me to be a Portia worthy of her, if I could.

“Yes, he did say once—that he might write about me.”

I take advantage of you, he said that night in our yard, the night my mother, an heiress, came home—and I may just do it again.

“He doesn’t do well on women, the critics say,” she said. “Each time he’s tried, it’s come to nothing. But he always thinks he’ll do better—once he’s slept with them.”

She didn’t smoke. But onstage, any director would have told her to light one now. For the pause. “But you haven’t,” she said.

I had no manner left. “He told you?”

“He doesn’t have to. I only have to open the door to him, to see the trouble he’s in. Oh, come. Isn’t that what you’re here to ask me? Whether you should? A lot of them do.”

“The young ones—” I said. Yes, I could see how they would. In this time where all women were becoming friends.

“They’re all young.”

Was that her triumph? That they were?

Lips can go stiff; I hadn’t thought mine could. “The girl who was here. Did she come to you? To ask.”

“Oh, poor girl. I knew her, you see. All those girls, one saw them about. None of them knowing for love or money what to do with themselves. Her new stepfather, a strict Frenchman, the kind that keeps its girls in convent till they marry, and the mother going along with it—we all knew that girl was having a time. The sort of godawful time one does, at that age. And so, in his way, was Craig.”

Maybe wearing white helped one be honest. Or he had taught her his brand of it—of everything, even to the way she drove.

Her head did bow, though. “He and I were split, you know. Wasn’t as if I had a stake in it. So—matter of fact—I went to see
her.”

If I had a real rapier, I thought—not the dull foils they hand out in fencing class—I could make that bowed head roll.

She was studying her fingers. “It’s the Frenchman who’s making the mother sue. And not for money. Not even for costs. That makes it bad.”

“Costs?” I said.

She misunderstood me. “It’s a legal term.”

“I know. My father’s a lawyer. And—my great-aunt was—Leo?”

But the name meant nothing to her.

“Ah, then you know.” A look of calculation pinched the long, inbred face. In some ways she was oblivious to what others felt. She had attitudes instead. Nowadays one often sees her kind among the women of new principles. “But perhaps your father won’t like you to testify.”

“Testify?”

She put her hands across the table. “I apologize. I misjudged you. I was bowled over. And I can sometimes be a hag. Whatever you choose to do about him—Craig—about that, I mean, you’re on your own course. It can’t change things now.”

Can’t it? For me?

She didn’t hear. Or perhaps I didn’t say.

“Yes—testify. It’s what I came down here for. Craig doesn’t know I’m here. To ask you to testify that you observed him and her closely. As you did, I know. That’s how you and he met, he said. Testify that he even engaged you to sit with her. That he did
not
neglect.”

The room was hot, airless. She and Tarquin hadn’t opened the door to the new pastel wing. Those pretty rooms I had tripped through, and the soft voice saying that incessant movement was not wanted here—what was neglect?
I’m
not a lovely girl, he had said.—I merely acquired one.

To speak the truth and admit it even to one’s own shame; what’s it do to that hooded eye of his? Is it wrong for a face to be that much on its own?

“What did she die of? No one really told any of us here.” My voice was husky. Maybe that angered her.

“Toxemia. But when a baby dies in the womb, the mother must surely know. That late in the day. But she let it go. She let it go on. Horrid. She was a depressed girl.”

But one who could be cheered. When we marched out of that bar past the two salesmen who had sent us drinks, her belly well ahead of both of us, she had laughed hard enough. “He said she wouldn’t buy a layette for the baby.”

“See! You have only to say.”

“And that he wished he didn’t know why.”

She slumped, rubbing her face. People who do that must feel they have two faces. Or want another? Under the rubbing hands the face so often doesn’t change. “He knows too much about us all. For his own good. And he’ll always testify against himself. Every time.”

How had he taught her that?
Venice.
How that name unlocked her for me—all the way back to our front porch. Had she kept up her Italian? Was there still a sloop? I could see her opening the door to him, to their summerhouse with its ancient bulletin boards still crying their causes, and closing it, closing it and opening it.

And was he teaching me the same?

“Venice—”

She wasn’t surprised that I knew her name. Everybody would. Or anybody connected with him.

“What was the phrase he had for you?”

No doubt a winner. Suitable for a lifetime of use.

“Oh—that. He used to call me—a woman of ideas.”

“He still does,” Tarquin said, reappearing at the kitchen door.

“Tarquin. Stay the hell out.”

He was only getting at the order of things. Like me.

I stood up to go. It was awkward getting out from between that small bench and table, even if one had no belly. No, I didn’t like inglenooks; I wasn’t built for them. One tolerates them—as I wished I could again—for a friend.

“Then you will?” she said. “Craig need never know. You could come forward, of your own accord. That could be better still. Say you will. I’ll have our lawyer call.”

“It would be worse if I did testify. Far worse.”

She scanned me—up, down. “You mean—the judge or jury might get other notions?” She drew a sly breath, already hopeful that we were conspirators.

Tarquin could be seen in the far corner of the kitchen, head averted, but not too far away for a normally keen-eared boy. It was no concern of mine. The order of things has to go on, will go on.

“No. It wouldn’t be of any use. He had an affair with a woman in town.” I had to swallow. “On and off.” It hurt to say that, one of my mother’s catch-all phrases. It was what she would have said. “An—older woman. There isn’t anybody in town who doesn’t know. And the bobby-soxer knew too.”

“Who?”

That had slipped out. But I saw she knew whom I meant anyway.

“Nancy?” She whispered it.

If I was going to cry I would do it for both of Towle’s women. For the lanterns swaying in a girl’s face, at a depot, the entry to a town. And for a jaunty slouch hat. “She knew from the moment he brought her here.”

She didn’t ask anything more. In the scheme of her life, maybe an older rival wouldn’t do. Or it was enough that the phrase he had dubbed me with—“a Venus of the mind”—even echoed her own name. Though perhaps he had done it unconsciously, in that grand slump of release where such slips are made. Ruthless herself, she would be the one person his conscience need not serve.

I would keep my mother from her as I could, safe in her own poor web. But I myself could see how the younger ones would seek out this woman, as moths do the death lamp. She had a face not to be rubbed away, emerging as she sat there, the casque of hair framing it. The face of a Joan who to avoid the stake has left Rouen for Paris, for anywhere—and is still burning.

Later that night I lie thinking of what I will make happen. This is a dream best dreamt in one’s own house. Lying on the Salvation Army mattress of one’s choice. Eyes awake.

I have my own gestures now, or enough. His I shall steal from his own testimony freely given, fed and coached me over a prompter’s book of afternoons. To be confirmed by the man himself, when he arrives at my door. Who will be traveling—according to the mailman’s red flag on the box and the telegram inside, by plane and train straight to me, his star witness for so long. As men go first to the girl they have not yet attained. It is very late for that. But I am dreaming well.

The curtain will rise on me seated naked, left of center of a divided stage, with my back to the audience. So risen, it will fix me in the mind of all, in a style simple if unnatural, for the rest of my life in the theater. Or my theatrical life?

In our profession, one migrates constantly between, he says, emerging from the wings—and at the same time entering a door, my house door. Onstage that is simple also. The problem of costume is easy too, Towle says—if you think it through.

Or perhaps he will say that later—later still.

At first, when he closes the door behind him—for at his knock or ring I will stop this dreaming and go to the door to let him in—all he will say is—Your hair has grown since I last saw you. And I would still be clothed. Though lying in wait for him.

This is a dress rehearsal, when one may do the same thing over and over. Again I am on my mattress, with my back to him. My shock of curls falls to a triangle mid-shoulderblade, not too short for a handsome woman, he says, not too long for a beautiful man. Note those adjectives, transposed too. Our unaffected days are over. Language too must twist as bidden. We have painted us into this corner, Craig Towle and I.

Except for the glowing mind of the dreamer, the house lights are dark. But she lies in wait. Somewhere along here there will be a dialogue. Once he is inside my door.

“So you’ll play yourself,” he will explain. “Yourself—in your town.”

His tone is as holy as if he’s asking to marry me. “For me the focus changed like lightning—once I saw I was trying to conclude—what one cannot conclude. I saw that the real focus wasn’t Leo but is you. What
you
saw, and how
you
grew—in the town.”

I do not quite hear my reply. Do I ask him whether I am what he thinks he can that easily conclude? But I hear his next lines.

“It’s not a matter of ethics for me. But of obligation. To what see.

“Nessa says you’re a sneak.”

“So I am. One of a long, long company. Now and then honorable.”

“How do you know? When you’re honorable?”

“When what I do—exceeds me. Then I know.”

His face will darken then.
(Use the blue spotlight.)
“When my own life creeps in—then I don’t.”

Yes, those were his exact words, once. He would have been thinking of the bobby-soxer maybe.
(Anyway, whenever that happens, use the blue.)

“And Leo”—I’ll say—“couldn’t you have exceeded there?”

He will assume that posture—more a stance than a gaze, though the eyes are steady, quizzical—which always made me feel the apprentice I was. This time it will not. “Maybe
you
could” he says. Even on your own, someday. I wouldn’t be surprised if you could. But not me. Or not without you.”

Is it then I will tell him about the third floor? He has been hunting the mystery of Leo so long—and I am honorable. Lying awake.

So why not take him there? Now as well as later. Montage is easy, where one plans ahead. And the lighting more professional. Would I really let them use that crude blue? Yet his words will remain his, when or wherever he has said them, on early trains, or on a whole hayloft of afternoons.

How will he look going up my grandmother’s stair—grave? Gleeful? No, he will look as always. Say that for him—he is never two-faced. As for me close behind him, I am shivering. I should be smelling only the mystery of what we are after. But the long-gone dead are the one odor one cannot smell; that is what they are. Even Leo. And was there ever really a shirt starch that smelled of pear? What draws people to Towle is the odor of a meditation that both repels and attracts.

Now we are there. The screens that Knobby so tenderly arranged are behind us. We are in my childhood. We are in that room as it was in Leo’s time.

Leo, if there, follows us like that shadowy black crew Knobby saw at the Osaka Bunraku, who moved the great ten-foot puppets, everywhere at once. The rocking chair is stilled, and will remain so throughout.

We—Towle and I—are the cleverest. Where I’ve brought him now, one has to be made entirely of artificial light. Where, as I have been taught, the true word is that much more true.

He is hunting the books. He finds them. I say nothing here. I found them so long ago. But if he asks me again, as he did once, whether it is my opinion that Leo when up here alone always dressed like a man, I will not now be too shy to answer that women do not find the trouser as comfortable—that it would depend upon the crotch. Or that women clench with the physical, whereas men in some non-somatic way exalt it.

Yet I must honor him. Somewhere in his absence he has come to the conclusion that outreaches either of us, rearing over us like a puppet come alive.

How is it we have got to the captain’s walk? I did not intend ever to bring him there, even in dream, for he will ask me what I see when I look out there at the town, and will I want to say? Even if awake? On the ugly floor there are now no dead flies; perhaps it is not the season, or else someone has swept. No ghost, only Knobby—yet what shoes am I wearing? Pointed, high-laced, brown leather, marked Sorosis—Size 10? The size happens to be the same as mine, but I am not fit to wear those.

“What would Leo see,” he keeps asking, “—when standing here?”

“Or, pacing,” I say. Leo would pace.

He’s waiting as he so often did in the loft, or as one used to see him in his earliest street exchanges on a town curbside, or in the hardware store. Listening, the way a deep-sunken well seems to, luring yet remote. I am not—am I?—going to cast myself in.

Wake!

I am awake. And will remain so to the end.

“I see the town lanes,” I say. “And their crop.”

It’s then I see the inner light of a face like his when it opens—the light that makes him Craig Towle. He and I standing there are one day to be mere holographs of bodies remembered, but this was—ever will be—a light.