The Bobby-Soxer (35 page)

“Well—” he says, “this is not the only porch in town.” He is pale, for him, but we can hear Walsh’s Inn and Mayor Walsh fuse. “I know Luray joins me. Whyn’t you all come on over to us?”

So—after all our goings-on, are we to see that porch again? On the ride over, in the huge but homebred mayoral car, I am frightened.
As it was, so shall it ever be
—surely I am still too young for that text. In the back seat of this official car, which has engulfed us all except for Tim, who is enviably tailing us in the latest of his own getaway jobs, Luray leans over the front seat. “I can’t wait to show you-all what I’ve done to your house.”

Mr. Evams and my father are on the jump seats, facing my mother and me. My father says without turning, “Thanks, Luray. But tonight—just the porch.”

Is Gilbert’s nape a beefier red? The car is full of evasive summer light. My mother says: “Cross my heart, Luray, I’d love to. But tonight, let’s just indle.”

Luray sighs. “For thirty years I’ve heard her say that. And you know what? Tonight I get what she means.”

Is the car so full of amity because it is the official limousine? Or because of those thirty years?

Tim is waiting for us at the bottom of our old front steps, now carpeted. I recall how he and I used to come out on those steps for our sibling revelations. I see that his car, though still a foreign brand, is now a sedate molasses-colored sedan. There have been changes; so there’s nothing to fear. It might have been worse though, if we had come on foot.

“Some car.”

He and Gilbert have said this at the same moment.

We go up the steps.

Our former house is now known around town as “the vault,” on account of the Walsh’s marblelike curtains, and the two wrought-iron cemetery chairs with high backs and low-curved legs, that flank the front door. Since Luray is a newcomer, she musn’t be aware that in funeral-director circles here, which tend at times to include us all, those chairs, often rented for the occasion, are called “hired-girls on the pot.” Otherwise the porch, though just as crammed as Nessa’s, is now a Hawaiian paradise of chaises into which we sink modernly around one grand coffee table—plus one splayed-out pillowed affair that holds Gilbert in its center like a baseball glove.

“Won’t fall backwards from this one,” he says with a leer at me—and am I sorry or glad that his hand, once leaned for a minute on the knee of the girl I was, now squeezes the rump of the woman I am? “Ahrr, don’t sit so far away,” he says to me. But that place was always the best from which to hear.

“She always sat back,” my father says. “She hasn’t suffered from it.”

So did you sit back, I want to say. But let’s not tally up who has caused what suffering for whom. This is the present—because it hurts.

“Well, roll out the carpet, Luray,” our host says. “Everybody—what’ll it be? Tea? You don’t mean it.”

But we do—one neo-Bostonian choice, one Rio coffee-drinker who can no longer tolerate the American version, Mr. Evams who has always drunk tea, and my mother, who likes to pour it. I, fading into a wing-chair, have indicated nothing, have not been asked.

“Well, we’re still for coffee,” Luray says, but isn’t sorry to be able to haul out her new twin-urned silver service.

“Why—it’s almost exactly like Nessa’s,” my mother says.

Luray says, “M-mm.”

“A reproduction,” Gilbert says, twiddling his thumbs, “but we do our best. You know what intrigues me most about today?”

“What, Gil?” Mr. Evams says, almost tenderly.

“That that hoighty-toighty old gal—no disrespect—but that she would ever actually fall in with a jamboree like today’s.” Gilbert is squinting at the silver with some disdain. “Me—a mayor has to cater to all tastes. But that rip-roaring old aristocrat? … Excuse me—no disrespect.”

“Age wilts the principles,” my father says. “In favor of what’s good for our muscle tone. Haven’t you noticed that, Mayor? No disrespect.”

Gilbert grunts. “Just like old times, this porch.”

“No it’s not—” I say from the rear. “For one thing, Tim is here. Not over at Pat Denby’s.” I hear my childish voice.

“Why—she can talk,” Luray says. “Beginning to think she kept it all for her fans.”

“Both senior Denbys are dead,” her husband says. “Separately. And young Pat is in practice in New York. House up for sale.”

The Walshes are more separate now, too, I think. Luray, although she still shimmies up to any man she talks to, is newly grim. Maybe she wanted a lover and didn’t find one. Or maybe lost one. I should be ashamed of my diagnosis as not modern enough, but I am not.

“So what are you going to do with your house, Tim?” she says. “When your grandmother passes on. Going to keep it for weekends?”

“Simple. My grandmother is not going to die.”

“Oh yes she is,” my father says. “So she informed me, just this evening. People are beginning to bore her. She is planning to—‘Kick off for the trumpets,’ were her actual words. She even has a due date. One hundred and four.”

We can see Luray counting on her fingers.

“Dad—” Tim says. That’s a new word, from him. “Let’s tell them.”

“You.”

Tim turns to Luray. Every Christmas Luray writes on her card to each of us—as if her need is in some baffling way connected with the winter solstice: “Regards—and just remember, I have first refusal on the big house.”

“I don’t need the house or want it,” Tim says. “Not ever.” He hesitates, but I see he will save his own news until it is true and done. “So Nessa’s sold it.”

Luray says: “S-s-s—?” She can’t get out the rest of it. “To
who?
Who could
possibly
—”

“Dare?” Tim has never liked her. I can predict the woman he’s marrying. Small-boned, spirited, nice. But with a twee-twee voice, inborn or learned. I know certain actors still on the sexual fence who cleave to those, some happily.

“Who?”
Luray wears dresses studded with nailheads or sequins, and lots of gold jewelry, but her true element is brass. I wonder whether, if playing her, I could convey that, and still keep the customers’ sympathy.

“I can offer more,” she’s saying. “Whoever it is. Whatever the price is.”

“I think not,” my father says gently. He has always avoided her, but defended her, we never fathomed why. But now I see her stance, all pliant, swelling abdomen, as she rises toward him from her chaise. She wears false eyelashes, great curling ones that become her; she knows her element. And is pitiable in it.

Yes, I could do it. I could play her to the nines. If the audience were to see that she wants so much more than a house.

“Please—” she says, and I applaud. She hasn’t chosen the right target, but how many can? And that rasp of hers has modulated like a veteran’s. “Whoever it is—couldn’t we work something out? Just tell me who.”

“The Watanabes,” my father says at last. “Knobby finds he doesn’t really like Japan.”

Knobby Watanabe—how we have snared you.

Yet Knobby must know that, I think. That is what his obligation would be.

“It’s my mother’s bargain, Luray,” my father is saying. “So I’m afraid it’s a lost cause. She’s going to live with them.” He coughs, pulling in our attention eye by eye—and I am seeing where my talent comes from as well as my voice. He’s going to play it for laughs. “Paying no rent, of course.”

He gets his laughs, from all except me.

I am about to speak. To remind Luray of what is always more apparent from the rear, that even the most firmly lodged or recently acquired house is still mutable, to point out that Etsuko is willful, even that Watanabe is not young—when Gilbert Walsh leans forward, so much on the edge of his lush seat that he may tip it forward, if not back.

“If it’s another house you want, Luray my old Dutch—” That’s Cobble Row talk, to call your wife that. It may have no etymology.

“If it’s only the house you want to change,” Gilbert says, “I know where there’s one for sale. Craig Towle’s.”

So here we are, yes. I had forgotten the robins though, always here at this hour, and how they always looked to me—the bird nearest in drawing to the hieroglyph. It’s not nearly the gloaming yet—did we have daylight saving time even back then?—but the dark is in the air. The robins stand to attention, looking just as stamped and Egyptian as they did then. They are eleven-o’clock-in-the morning birds, but they come to us twice.

My mother leans forward. “There are those robins again. What do you suppose they find on our lawn?”

If she still speaks of this lawn as her own, no one will dispute that just now, not even Luray—and I am no longer frightened. I am thinking that the children should not be in Maine but here with me on this porch, to listen from the rear as I did.

My father leans over to me there behind him, and shows me his watch. The only item he had kept out of a certain collection he inherited, it shows the calendar, not because it is one of those new electronic timepieces but because it is such an ancient one. When he enters the monastery, which he had last night told me he hopes to do if they will take him, he must dispose of all such goods, and will give me it. He whispers, this conspirator it so gladdens me to have, even at such cost. “What do you know. Listen to us. And it’s not even a Monday night.”

That name, of the native son who so aroused us and so blithely left us—are we going to pass it by?

Mr. Evams gets to his feet. “Time for my walk.”

I get up too. “I need a walk too, after that meal. I’ll come along.”

The porch is silent as we go.

When we are a few paces away, I hear Tim’s voice, and then my father’s, answering him.

“Tim must be telling his news,” I say. “There’s no reason why I shouldn’t tell you. He’s going to marry.”

Mr. Evams hesitates. “They all have their news.” He hesitates again, then we walk on. Whatever it may be, he has decided not to tell me, or not yet. I am comfortable enough with that, hedged once again in the routine where he leads us, two musicians or even two actors, attending each other’s stops and starts.

It’s a short walk though a steep one—to the cemetery. “I drop by there most evenings,” he tells me. “She wouldn’t want me to come in rain.” He hasn’t yet dealt with the eventuality of snow.

We pass my grandmother’s house.

“Confirm me something,” I say. “Was Luray always—out for more than the house?” That’s a hard way of saying it. But Luray would say it herself.

He slackens our pace, though not from need. A tireless walker, he knows the whole town’s acreage. “I know a bona-fide real estate motive when I see one. Yes—it isn’t just those turrets up there.” He raises his face as if he can see them; perhaps he does. “She’s always had the notion that the son of the house could somehow be bought with it. Of course the whole town knew.”

I used to hate that phrase. Now the doorways we pass seem to me only easing, like muscles.

“We used to think it was Gilbert who so wanted it.”

“He did once too. Now I find house property doesn’t much interest him.”

“That’s how he knew about the Towle house! You’re handling it.”

“Towle’s lawyers wrote me, yes. Towle wants a quick sale. And a pricey one. I told them this wasn’t Hollywood but I’d give it a try.”

“Why did you think Gilbert would want it then?”

“He—has a secretary.”

“Oh? And as everybody has surmised?”

“We keep ourselves on the edge of knowing. That way, we can be tolerant.”

I can tell he’s smiling. I don’t look up. “Cobble Row. Why does it always attract—the off-the-record in us? Or the lost.”

“Old houses often do. Does yours—for you?”

“It did.”

We are going the opposite way from the Row. The cemetery is on the first of those hills I used to call the autumn ones. The depot has the best view of them, for all the trains coming in.

“I know about my father, Edward,” I say. “In case you weren’t sure. He told me last night.”

He checks his reply for a second, as always when I call him by name. “As he did me. And about your mother.”

“Like—that there’s a convent nearby—near that monastery? An accessory one; where the nuns bake and sew? The monks brew only theology. … Like—that the two—forces—meet very congenially. In the most serene countryside?”

“He said an admirer wishes to marry her. Your father won’t stand in her way. But hopes she will not.”

What is sex but a question the body answers? In the end as in the beginning.

“It’ll be the convent,” I say. “All her life—she’s expected to have only one affair. And—she will look just fine in a wimple.”

That about does it. I can’t remember when I last cried for real. It’s much saltier. “No thanks. I’ve got a handkerchief somewhere.” It’s in my purse, next to a clip from a newspaper. “Let’s change the subject. For instance—I can tell you what Towle wants all that money for. For that play.”

How he lights up at theater talk. Some must find that strange. I know he comes to hear me in whatever I do in New York—though he never comes backstage afterward.

“Not a new one?”

“No. He was never able to get it produced. He’s always rewriting it; it’s always being announced. And he hasn’t done so well out there lately. Nothing since that movie
The Troupe.”

“I heard that was very visual. So I didn’t go.”

“Very. The way a movie should be. I hated it at the time. For other reasons. I was wrong. It has—what I’ve always thought he meant his plays to have.” Though the words for what it had are not mine but Knobby’s.

“What was that?” Evams’s voice is harsh, for him.

It’s not an easy thing to say to a blind man. “Respect—for the moment that makes you see.”

“Oh, I understand that,” he says. “Perfectly.”

I know this. Why else are we walking here, so in step?

He seems to survey me; he often does. “You still see Towle?”

“Only twice. Both a long time ago. He came back here for one night. The last time—the time of that lawsuit—the one that never came to trial. I—slept with him. That one night. I owed it—to both of us.” I glance at the face climbing beside me. The town would have known at once what I have just told him; the morning lanes here are so clear. The face is broader than it used to be and not so blunted or smooth—altogether more recognizable on its own. It no longer has a twin.