The Bobby-Soxer (7 page)

I knew the house. Once again I mourned Phoebe, only five doors down from here. She would have been the only one with whom I could have shared this: how I was now walking up the path my mother must often have trod, slipping on the round stones in those dainty heels of hers, never vulgarly stiletto but curved in. How I knocked now at the witching door, thinking that I had never sat with a newborn baby before, which was about all this one could be. How Craig Towle, the dark man of all this town’s sonnets, opened it.

I had to bend my head to get in under the door. Once inside, I could straighten up, though barely. The house was identical with the Wetmores’, but I had been shorter then. Over there it had been dirtily sallow, a house handed down and not risen above, beyond a sunporch added on from the grandmother’s earnings as the town’s head nurse. Here, with the short, thick beams exposed, sprigged wallpaper and floors stripped from linoleum back to pine, it was trying to shrink my brain to Revolutionary era size and to ignore the rest of me.

Craig Towle wasn’t. He was giving me the look older men did on the street. Sometimes a man muttered at me, often a short one, Big enough for you if you want, baby. When a girl my size wasn’t a round-shouldered washout, that’s what she got. Quickly I told him who I was. In case he didn’t recall.

He did stare and stare. “Good Lord. Of course.” His face didn’t change, now that it knew I was my mother’s daughter. It even came forward, the nose jutting like a guardrail. “How’s that old beldame, your grandmother?”

How did he already know I wouldn’t mind him saying that?

“Is that Penny?” came a voice.

In the room to the left, where the Wetmores had installed a Heatilator, the Craig Towles had had the old inglenook exposed, black iron pots hanging in its niches. Seated at its table, over a jigsaw puzzle, the bobby-soxer got up slowly. Though her name was Nancy, I never learned to think of her by it. “Oh—you’re not Penny. Oh—hello.”

“This is—
”
he began.

“I know who she is,” she cut in. Once she must have been quicker-mannered than him, in the casual ways we young ones were. Now and again this would show. Through the sloth. “I asked the bookshop lady who you were.”

The silver-blond hair was dog-eared and gone greenish, as that kind of hair does when left to dull. Under the once-charming pink wrapper which she must be too much in the habit of, I saw where the baby was—still inside. Then why was I here?

He was watching. “Our live-in goes for the weekend. I don’t like to leave her alone.”

In those days, when there was only one thing to say, I often said it. “Then why do you?”

He cocked his head. I would one day use that same ploy. Listening for the motive, one ignores the speech.

“He has to work.” When she stood that straight the baby stuck out. I saw she wouldn’t have herself pitied. She even smiled.

“Penny and I got ourselves switched. Maybe you would rather she—?”

“Oh no. Not at all. Tell the truth, she was kind of a trial. I know the names of all the boys on your route. And their characteristics.”

She had a delicate accent. I wondered how many languages she knew, not having had to wait until college for it. There was nothing wrong-in-the-head about her, I thought. She had fallen into the habits women sometimes did when left too much to themselves. Like me, she was learning the several thicknesses of silence in a house. What would a wife’s silence be, when the man is with someone else? Such a young new wife.

“I’ll have to have a phone number to call,” I said. “That’s the rule.”

“Sorry, I don’t have a phone there. That’s why I go.” He was still staring. “It’s a hayloft. Or once was. Five doors down.”

“Wetmores’!” I said. “Phoebe. How is she?”

“Off to college, I hear. I’ve never really talked to her.”

“I wonder where.”

“Somewhere around Boston I gather. From my landlady.”

“I have—” the bobby-soxer said. “Talked to her.”

I saw Phoebe, all scrawn and no great shakes as a scholar, but already in Boston. “Nurse Stevens always wanted her to go. But there was never enough money around for two. I wonder how they managed it.” Under their eyes I heard how I was talking. Like the town.

“Well, I pay them top rent,” he said. “Canny old bird. Brings me coffee now and then. But I don’t get to use her phone. If you need to, you come running, eh. You look as if you could.” He dropped a kiss on the top of her head, looking up at me. He’d kiss mine, I’d felt, if he could reach it. “See why your grandmother’s kept so quiet about you,” he said.

Then he was off. We could hear him scrunching down the path.

When he was gone she said softly and slowly, “I know who you are.” Then at her direction we sat in the inglenook and had soda pop.

I went there four times. As we felt each other out, we switched to beer, were girlish with each other but never quite became friends. Even aside from what we never discussed, how could we? She hadn’t finished college, and didn’t give a hang for it. She had already been halfway round the world, if only in play, and expected the other half would soon be coming up. What I wanted to sacrifice for I didn’t yet know, only that I wanted to. I could tell her that, and she wouldn’t laugh, but that would be her best effort. I grew to love her instead, for what she was. The girls in the blue and yellow sweaters—I would never get over admiring them, even for their limitations. Though she would never again be one of them.

Sometimes, as she went chipping along in the voice of all her summer crowd, I wondered if that had yet got to her. She seemed at times to forget she had a baby in her. I know now that this can happen to anyone so fixed, at any age, and not only with the first. You are maybe sitting alongside the fire, even pleased with what you’ve got and are. Or in a room of cocktail slims, just before your time comes. Suddenly that birth date to come is a bull lowering at you with its upside-down eye. You could have escaped, had you been another kind of matador. For a minute you do escape, purling along in last summer’s voice.

Other times though, the minute I came in I saw she had been thinking of nothing else but where she was, and why. Like the night she took me to see the wing they had had built onto the back of the house. Four bedrooms and baths for the guests—“Oh, we knew we’d always have them.” Going down the hall which led straight from the old back door into this bright honeycomb, she was almost matronly; it happens with the first furnishings.

At the hall’s end we came to a large room, bare and unused, built to the breadth of the house. A studio for him, built as a surprise. He hadn’t wanted it.

“Great for the baby,” I said. She did not reply. She hadn’t chosen the nursery yet, or a layette either. He had bought her another house gown, though, since I came, exactly like the old one, as she had asked. The bedroom she led me back to had the same pale green. “My friend Julie chose it. This room was to be hers.” Softly she named them all, each at a door. She herself had wanted six guest rooms but the plot here wasn’t big enough, even with the extra back alley they’d bought. “He said maybe I would have to choose four. Friends. Choice was a fact, he said.” No sweat, she said, her face alight. “With our crowd, the way we were, we simply doubled up.”

So—he had married all of them. It must have been like marrying an anagram you only kind of remember from your own freedom time, I thought almost jealously. Our age—he married it.

“Why don’t you ask them all back?” I saw how she needed them.

We were now closing each door, to save on dust. “No, no. They’re too many for him. Too many young.” I heard how she quoted him. “One of us is just right, he says.” She closed the last door. He never lied to her, she said. But I wondered how much she asked.

I had to give her something of mine. I told her about Bill Wetmore. That he had existed. That he still hung around in my head. “Very destructively,” I said, applying second-quarter psychology, letting first-quarter logic go.

“I knew there had to be someone, for someone like you. Is he tall?” Sharp-eyed from solitude, she’d alleged that I was growing between visits, and measurement had proven her right. Hadn’t I better see someone? Good looks were no guarantee. Six foot and some over was enough. As her own cousin Venetia, kept too long from what could be done for you, had found out.

“He’s a sculptor.” And yes, tall, I said, amused. Though that didn’t count with me.

She dismissed that. “Oh good. Then he can model you.”

I remembered now, how that had been my own hope.
Sacred nudity,
he’d said to mine,
and such a stretch of it.

I sat up suddenly. “Venetia?” And taller than Craig Towle?

She was sharp. “No, his wife was named Venice. I’d never met her. They were already splitting. He’d met the whole crowd of us. On Brown’s Beach.” The crowd had grown up together on that Boston enclave, from the age of tin dippers and pails. “He and his children—theirs—were staying with friends there.” And little Tarquin had come along the beach, crying and lost. “We brought him back. Little Tarquin.” She wrinkled her nose. “Her idea. Of what went with Towle.”

“Did you ever? Get to meet her?”

“Once,” she said. “She called me up.” She seemed about to say more, then clammed up.

“She was a woman of ideas.” I half-parroted it, intent on that group, cool as native plants on that strip of sand. We here had heard of it.

“A—?” She couldn’t sit up further, the weight of the baby’s water already grounding her like a sandbag, but her hair swung, silkier now that I had washed it. “How do you know?”

I felt my flush, my only legacy from my mother. Or the only one that could be seen. Avoiding her in one way, we had come round to her in another.

The girl herself saved us. “He’ll never talk now about his wife. Not a word. Only his older girl will—she hates it here. If we have eggs—‘My mother never boils them … My mother wears only white in summer … Believes we should do this … Does not allow us to do that.’” She broke off, then said under her breath, “‘And hopes your baby has two heads.’ Craig’s banished her for that. I spoke up for her. No, he said. I never saw him so—so absolutely chill about anything.” She lifted her head in pride. “‘No—’ he said. ‘She’s reporting on us.’”

His other children now and then came and took over the new wing, and left their evidences.

“And Tarquin?” I said, curious.

“He never says anything at all. But he comes.”

Perhaps she and Towle could take the baby into the old house, small as their room was, I said. “In there it would be more unique.” She ignored me.

“So they come here,” she was saying. “Dozens of them.”

“Dozens!”

“Three. I like them, actually. Even that girl. Or could. But the minute they get here, they feel to me like dozens. Or their mother sees to it … How
do
you know? About her.”

I had my alibi now. The old one, the permanent, it slips out easiest of all, from porches eternal. “You don’t know this town.”

“Don’t I—” she said. And struggling up, she lumbered to the front door where my hat and jacket hung, and jammed on her head my hand-me-down slouch hat.

Why do women signal with clothes like that? Bracelets. Even candy boxes—that whole silly repertoire. If we knew why, we would tell you; it might be sad. The signal is always for oneself; I know that much. The hat kept my mother with me. I had brought her along.

The hat sat grotesquely, vying with the bobby-soxer’s belly. Neither seemed hers.

After a while I said, “Keep it on if you want to. But let’s get out of here. We’re out of beer.” Her Volkswagen convertible, new when she married, shone through the window. “Put on a coat and we’ll go to a bar. I know one near.”

She didn’t move.

“How long is it—since you left the house?” I said. “I know it’s hard. You get stir-crazy, yet you can’t.” I got that way myself sometimes, down in Greensboro, I told her. When you are in an inharmonious environment, I said.

Or sometimes when the old one comes up in your throat. I didn’t tell her that. It hadn’t happened yet.

But finally I wormed an answer out of her.

“Since the night everybody saw me. At the station. And—and saw you.”

Us. She couldn’t say it.

“Does he know why?”

She wasn’t sure. She’d never said. Nor had he asked. “But he usually knows everything.”

I thought of him in the hayloft, working away at Bill Wetmore’s great-grand-uncle’s rolltop desk, which was too big for the house. Working on us, the town.

While Phoebe’d got away, all the time quicker than me. With less to go on. Nor did I have to think hard on how the girl here had learned what she had, when there was Phoebe to talk to, with her lip rolled back.

After a while I said: “If you’re thinking of wearing that thing until he comes, he never saw it, that day. Or us.”

“He sees what he wants.” But she took the hat off.

Now it was I who was staring at it.

After a while she said: “You must look like your father. I never—got to see
him.”

“He goes away. He always goes away … Yes, I do look like him, they say. In Greensboro especially.”

She didn’t ask what Greensboro intended by that. She was deep in.

So was I. I had come at seven, to stay until twelve. Soon their cuckoo clock would strike. Nine. Her crowd had sent it to her, from the Tyrol. Far places.

“He’ll not come back, I think. My father.” I stole a look at her. We were both so hemmed in.

The clock did strike.

“Please, could we go out?” I said. “I’ve never driven in a Volks before.”

So we made it, the both of us. I got her dressed, pointing to a sweater and skirt out of the many that hung in her closet, when she stood mute. She really hadn’t gained that much weight. Getting into the car, we even marveled at that. She drove.

Nobody was in the little bar near my mother’s garage. The factory hours were long over. We sat at a table. Two men came in, salesmen by their talk, from the nearby motel. Soon they sent us drinks by the barman, who set the whiskies down with a flourish. We had ordered beer, as the men could see.

“What’ll we do?” I whispered to her.