The Bobby-Soxer (8 page)

“Accept it.” She smiled. “And if they get porky, I can just stand up.”

I looked over at the two men, who were well-dressed but dumpy. “And so can I.”

When they started over to our table—after all, we had drunk their whisky—we did just that, exiting without a look behind us, she with her stomach grandly before her, I rearing my neck. I was now taller than her by far. I drove the car back. I had left the hat in the bar.

Entering that house again was a downer for both of us, but I could afford it; I’d decided I wasn’t coming back. Almost having a friend gets to you. Maybe she thought so, too. It’s different from having a crowd.

“I’ll walk back on my own.” I still had on my jacket. We were in the tiny vestibule.

She nodded, slipping off her coat. Absentmindedly, she began to pull off the yellow sweater, too.

“Oh no you don’t,” I said. “Please.”

“Okay—” she said, after a minute. “Thanks.” The fire in the inglenook was out. She poked it, leaning over with her skirt hiked up. If you don’t exercise, the pregnant behind sometimes gets as big as the front. But she was still strong, only nineteen. She reached over, tipping the heavy table toward the fire, and swept the whole jigsaw in. “And you—you know what? You can have him if you want him. I’ll help.”

“Have who?”

“Don’t pretend, you noodle. Your Wetmore. I’ll write Julie at Dartmouth—she’ll find him.” She put her face to the fire. “I’ll get the whole crowd back. Flopsy and Mopsy too. My sheepdogs. And get in some cats. Cats
don’t
suck babies’ breath. Though that’s not why they’re not wanted here. They’re incessant movement—that’s true. But babies love that, don’t they? And they
like
noise.” She picked up a last piece of the puzzle and tossed it in. “Anyway, we’ll have a weekend party that’ll—and invite your Bill.” The poker fell. Turning to the room, she tossed her head so angrily that the tears whipped from it. “You can get him if you want him,” she said through a stream of them. “Just be totally—.” She hunched in, saying it. “Like me.”

I put my arms around her. I’d just remembered something. I likely would not be coming back here anyway. My mother was returning. On extraordinary business, she’d said this morning. I could hear the whole of Greensboro listening. I had better keep it from her that I had ever been here at all. “Okay. But promise me something.”

“What?”

“Just—promise me.”

“I do.”

I couldn’t say what it was. My own tears were streaming, and not only for her. “Please—” I said. “Please.”

“Say it.”

“Please—keep yourself up.”

She put her arms around me. I could feel her belly, but it seemed to me that even my mother was in the circle, also my father, and all our joint households—except Craig Towle. Together we breathed in the sorrows of the unrecorded world.

Down at the bottom, I saw our two sets of saddle shoes.

I was almost at our doorstep when I saw the light on upstairs in the master bedroom, a term my father made fun of. For a minute I let myself dream that the figure up there was his, but I knew better. My mother and her extraordinary circumstance had come home. Knobby’s room under the eaves was dark.

Then I heard the car creeping to a stop behind me. Neither we nor the Evamses had one. At this dead-end hour it would be the men from the bar. I stiffened my long neck, which as the armature of my height is my defense and my weapon, though men are inclined to say No, it is the eyes. But when I turned I saw the car was only the Volks. Had she come after me then to spend the night, as unmarried girls do?

It was Craig Towle. They always paid me my five dollars tactfully, in a white envelope. I could see it in his hand. He beckoned me. I went.

“She says you’re a breath of outside air. Thanks. I was afraid she wasn’t going to be able to hang on. But now she will.” He still held the envelope. “She’s a lovely girl, you know.”

I might be some man he was saying this to. I had no way to respond.

“Who’s that up there?” he said.

The shadow behind the thin draperies, in what would be its tattered old dressing gown from Paris, was walking up the length of the room, and returning.

“That? Oh—.” She was going to miss the hat; she tabulated her life by clothes no longer worn. I was glad I wasn’t wearing it. “That’s—our Japanese butler. He sometimes irons up there.”

“Ah. Didn’t know they ironed. Never had one.” He stared at me as he first had at their door, absently toying now with the envelope. “Remarkable. How you do resemble her.”

“Who?” He couldn’t be saying this to me.

He shook himself. “Your—grandmother. Who else?”

No one had ever said that.

He saw I hated the idea. “Disregard that. Perhaps it isn’t true.” He was still staring at me. “There’s a group picture she once showed me. Of the family when she and your grandfather first moved to town. She was going to give me a copy. Now I expect she won’t.” He handed me the envelope.

“I don’t want it. Buy the baby something with it.”

He glanced up at the house. Had my voice been too loud? No, the figure was still pacing. It couldn’t see us.

“Our hedges prevent,” I said. “Seeing out.”

“You are—remarkable,” he said. “I might even explain. You see—I’m
not
a lovely girl. I merely acquired one. While—hanging on to something else. It’s true she won’t buy for the baby. I wish I didn’t know why.”

“Maybe because it’s low class to trip through the stores for layettes and stuff.” My grandmother’s voice sure enough, though I was mimicking. “You’re supposed to have it all in the attic. My brother was practically born in my father’s bassinette.”

I wanted to wound him. That’s the first hint.

I’m sure he saw. “And what about you?” he murmured. Not really asking.

We both held very still. I could smell the work-sweat and the pearlike starch of his shirt. The cap of his hair, dark and silky, was some barber’s triumph over bristle born on Cobble Row. Where they had no attics, but many a beaked nose like his, Englishy or Pole. Invisible wings of other revelries and knowledge stretched like a fay’s from his shoulders. And had brought him back here.

Would it have been the same to someone from Brown’s Beach?

So this is the womanizer, I thought. The word suggests a cockatoo, moving its head forward, and in. But this eye—I fixed on one in the starlight—is remoter than that. Any girl with him will move questward, in the arms of that remoteness. Or drop by the wayside.

“Look up there,” he said. “At that bedroom. You have to.” He hadn’t touched me.

Up there perhaps the figure was only putting its clothes away, but it went back and forth still.

“People mostly don’t marry for
who
the other person is, but for
what
that person is. With rare exception. She up there—did it about as badly as anyone could. Other than me.” He stepped back, into the shadow of the hedge. “I expect I’ll soon be moving on.”

“Then—you’ve finished your play?”

He froze. “No. I’ve scarcely begun.”

“But that’s what it’s about, eh? About what you just said.”

“I don’t do domestic plays. Marriage ones.” His face was a scowl of distaste. “Nor leukemia ones.” I remembered the newspapers the waitresses at Gilbert’s had pulled out of the wastepaper basket after he left.

“Sorry—” he said. “I take advantage of you. Of your youth. And I just may do it again.” He moved to the car. “Maybe I’ll write about you.”

“Not if—you’re leaving.”

“Hmm, that may be just when.”

“Ah, you wouldn’t—” I threw out in scorn. “Be writing about me. Not if you can say so.”

“No. But how can you tell.” His glance strayed. He had had exchanges like this before. “So that’s Gilbert’s house, over there. Two lots extra to itself. On either side. Yet he wants mine.”

“He won’t get it,” I said confidently.

“This town. This town. My God, how it knows itself. No, he won’t. But maybe you and I should collaborate.”

“It’s unfair. For someone like you to talk that way to me. Why can’t you stop?”

Knobby’s room lit up.

“She’s called to him,” I said. “About where I can possibly be.”

“Out being a breath of fresh air,” he said. “Yes—why can’t I stop?”

He means his plays, too, I thought. And yet—he’ll move nearer. The comprehension was so heavy that I thought I would cry. Instead I broke out into a sweat and stood tall, hoarding my armpits. When he did come close it was like our doctor did, his breath cool and reserved.

“Sorry—” he said, “but if I asked, you wouldn’t let me. Just a bit of research.” His forefinger traveled down my right cheek, steady, not a caress. Then he slipped the envelope into the breast pocket of my blouse, his hand lingering for a second, and quickly stepped back. “Apologies.” He said it twice. Then he was in the Volks, leaning out. “But if you ever want to talk—about the town—let me know. I promise—to pay nothing.” The car started. Back of us, the porch light went on. “Ah, the butler,” he said under his breath, and drove off.

So he and I finally met on our own. I had not known I wanted to. All the imaging and hearsay I had witnessed was true, yet now he was both more than that and less. I could think of half a dozen names to call him, words to describe him with, but no one of them alone would do. That was why the town called him Craig Towle.

The landing light went on now too, but I didn’t need to look up. I had been doing that all my life.

M
Y MOTHER WAS AN HEIRESS.
Legal notification—that all the property, excluding personal jewelry, of one Leslie Warden of New York City, had been left to her—had arrived the week my father had said it would; a New York bank’s statement and confirming instructions had only now followed. In token of that, Greensboro, which during the interim had stood at hand to help her cope with any doubt about acceptance, had sent her off with a corsage now in an etched glass on her dressing table, rosebuds and stephanotis, in a frill stuck with a pearl pin.

“I hated myself for carting it along but I couldn’t help myself.” Except for weddings, funerals, and proms, our street, which grew its flowers for free, thereby achieving two kinds of grace, was stingy about bought flowers, and so always kept them overlong. My mother had never before done that. I mark it the first sign of her decline as a heroine of the sort I and some others would still take her to be. A woman of style—but style merely—has to rise continually, even to a bad end. Otherwise, there is so little place to go.

“So are you—” she said. “An heiress. Three quarters of the money is in trust, for you and your brother, as each of you attains twenty-five, or at the discretion of the trustees. And it’s a lot.”

“Not through Grandpa, then? The money?”

“No, poor dear. Though he sends you his love.” My other grandparents did well enough on their pretensions, which included some fancy relatives, but the pension that allowed this would die with him. “No. No connection of his.”

“Then who left it?” Who was this Leslie Warden?

She was plumper. I had just noticed it.

“Your father’s—friend.”

Who all these years, apparently—though who could be sure—had parlayed my father’s support, and maybe his gifts, into the divers stocks and bonds which had been bequeathed. Or so my mother had been told—whether by the lawyers only or by my father as well, she did not say. It may be that she was told nothing, except that the money had been left.

There was no need to say why. “What a horrible act,” I said. “You’re not going to take it?”

She was not as quick to agree as I had expected.

“At least if it had been left to him—” I said. Returned, one might say then. Even if threefold.

“The jewelry’s been left to him. There’s quite a lot.”

That was the second time I had heard that phrase.

“What tact!” I said. The morning sun was streaming in, showing us his empty dressing room at the bedroom’s far end, shining with his special furniture, given him as his mother’s wedding present, which Knobby had made lustrous once more. I had never before spoken to her that way. Last evening had left me with a feeling of success I couldn’t localize. “Well, at least he never even wears a signet ring.” On her silence, I turned. “Mother. You’re not going to. Wear the stuff.”

“For God’s sake no,” she said. “What do you take me for? He’ll sell.”

Then she came forward, in her furry morning gown. Last night when I came up the stairs, we had just embraced, under her “In the morning, my darling,” and had fallen toward our beds. Bounding up early, with a zest I ascribed to her homecoming, I had gone for a walk, dressed in the jodhpurs and other rig bought for the promised horse we had had to flub buying last year after all, and had then brought her up a tray, knowing it took her days to divest herself of the South. Sun always made her blink; she was for later hours. “Feel as if I’ve—never seen you before … I haven’t. Darling, you’ve gone and grown again.” She’d never minded; she was old-fashioned only by whim. “How much is it now?”

“Six foot three.”

She mused. She was thinking of my brother. When you don’t love enough, your own disaffection still leaves an emptiness. I myself might one day know that for a husband, though never for a child.

She now surveyed me, her manner a cross between the grooms at Tipton’s Livery down home, where we could ride for almost nothing, and Miss DeVore. “Handsome indeed, you are. In the new mode. But now it had better stop.” She lifted a hand to the top of my head and rapped it smartly with the flat of her palm. “Stop, do you hear?” She listened, head cocked, the way we had crouched in the grass and listened for leprechauns when I was four. “Stop.”

Then we laughed and kissed.

And do you know, I did stop. I believe you can talk to the genes to a degree, about their apportionment. Or they lie in wait, for what comes.

At the moment, I snitched a piece of her toast. “Well, I’m not planning to accept that money.”

In her almost amused glance at my nibbling, I saw how I had always been provided for. Still, my flesh crept at any change in her stance, until then gallant to me. Like the autumn hills which surrounded all our meannesses. “You won’t then? Refuse.”