The Tall Boy: A Memoir

by Jess Gregg

  She too was changing. Her spelling became a little less inventive, the handwriting considerably less intricate, and there was often punctuation. “I see how words are written in your letters,” she told me, “and find them again in the newspaper. Maybe I will try a book nex. What book do you read, Buddy?” The fact is, I was halfway through a two-ton adult novel, Anthony Adverse, but I replied, and honestly, that I still enjoyed The Wind in the Willows. At Christmas, I sent her my copy. Whether she actually read it through, or just identified with the pictures I cannot guarantee, but sometimes she interrupted her news to exclaim, pertinent to nothing, “O that Mr Toad. He is just Like my whole life.”

  Shortly before summer, the postmark on her letter changed dramatically—

  Kansas City! She had finally resumed touring with the circus. It was a small outfit, one that only played the Midwest and upper South, but her joy, at least, was three-ring. I sent her my congratulations, but apparently blundered in asking what the new freak show was like. Her reply, when it eventually arrived, was written in ink, and the absence of crossed-out words suggested it had been diligently worked over, then re-copied. “Dear Jess,” she wrote, “you are sweetest boy, like my own to me, and I know you wood not hurt no one, but that is a word we never use. To ourselves we are not freaks. We are not little man or fat girl or beard lady, but only people like every one else with job to do and mother to support and dear friend to right letters to.”

  The letters continued until I was fifteen. My parents had sent me off to prep school in the North, and while I wrote Mazie about my class activities, I did not mention how restless I was there. The discipline was little short of martial law, and the boys, unlike myself, were earnestly conformist. Fortunately, I was not the only one singled out for their criticism. The boy in the room next to mine was from the Bahamas, the son of a wealthy planter. Blond, with an arrowhead taper to his torso, Erich showed a skill at water sports which should have guaranteed his popularity. He made no effort to fit in, however, and since uniformity was their law, the other boys gradually dropped him. This troubled him very little, but gave me a wonderful opportunity to be his only friend. I could scarcely believe my good fortune. When I’d tap on the wall at night, he’d tap back. Some mornings, we would cut class and hitch to the nearby town. Often, we did our homework together, although more often study gave way to confidences. Only a year older than I was in time, he was decades my senior in experience. He had already traveled to Europe and China. He kept a bottle of white wine under his bed. He had been with women. A blonde in Panama had called him a dollar-head. A dollar-head? “What’s that mean?” I demanded.

  He just laughed. “I’ll tell you when you grow up.”

  I had nothing exceptional to confide in return, except my correspondence with Mazie. I had never discussed this with anyone, but to compete in his league, I finally worked it into one of our bull sessions. He listened as much as he ever listened to anyone, and then, as if I had never spoken, began recounting how he had seduced a thirty-year-old divorcee at Waikiki.

  His description was graphic, and, not unaccountably, both of us got aroused. “Did she call you a dollar-head too?” I wanted to know.

  “They all do,” he said.

  The fury of inexperience suddenly swept over me. “You made that up!” I accused. “Dollar-head, for gosh sake! There’s probably no such thing!”

  He marched to the door and jammed a pencil between the knob and bolt, the classic way to insure that no prowling master would burst in. Then, turning back, he opened his pajamas and showed me. I saw at once what the blonde from Panama must have meant, but was not about to inflate his already considerable pride by admitting it. “That’s nothing special,” I scoffed. “Everyone’s got a dollar-head.”

  “The hell they do!” he cried.

  A moment later, we were comparing notes. Trying not to breathe hard, we stood there in undetermined expectation. My mouth was so dry, my smile became beached on my teeth. “Get me hot, Jesse,” he whispered abruptly, and pushed my head.

  I resisted, he persisted, and we wrestled around the room, bumping into the furniture, tipping over the chairs. As I recall, we ended up in an ingenious position that so simultaneously obliged both contenders, that I was surprised nobody had ever thought of it before. When we finally opened the door again, the tension was gone, and he nudged my ribs slyly. “No wonder you write to the fat lady,” he whispered. “You’re a freak yourself.”

  “Look who’s talking!” I said, and we laughed. Yet that word, freak, followed me back to my room, and I had the feeling it had been following me all my life. Why else had I sought out Mazie in the first place, if not to lull, with like company, that fear of being different?

  But that defense only seemed to make me impatient now. The difference I had sensed about myself so long ago had just been proved true, and the world had not ended. I felt suddenly as if I had just graduated.

  In the week that followed, I became so engrossed in self-discovery, that when a letter from Mazie arrived, I didn’t immediately get around to reading it. When I did, every line of it was predictable: the admonition, the fondness, the faith. It was like being offered a second helping when I was already full. Always before, I had replied to her letters quickly, spontaneously, but this time I ran out of words after the first paragraph.

  Two or three times, I was tempted to wad up my reply, and chuck it at the wastebasket. Still I kept trying to write it. Ultimately, it lay on my desk for two more weeks. Re-reading it then, I realized there was nothing to do but let go gracefully. By some intuition, I knew that only a cad tells a woman goodbye. A gentleman says “I will never forget you.” That’s what I wrote at the end of my letter, and signed it the way I used to before I grew up: little pal. Then I mailed it, and ran along to the pool where Erich was waiting to teach me to swim underwater.

  3

  DRESS-UP

  That was the beginning of my life. Or at least, the life that was to occupy me for years to come. My more conventional beginning had been in my grandparents’ house in St. Paul. As soon as my mother and I could travel, my father brought us back home to Los Angeles; but every summer until I was nine, we returned to the Midwest. This was called “going back East”, and was a terrible trial to my sister Sharlie, and consequently, me.

  Her name was really Charlotte, and she was so constantly my companion, that for my first few years, I thought we were the same person. Even after I discovered we weren’t, I kept wishing we were. People smiled at me tolerantly, but they exclaimed about her! She was very pretty with her thick tawny hair and green eyes. And though she was only fifteen months older than I, she was already wise and experienced. Before she could even talk, she had won a Beautiful Baby contest. By the time I entered kindergarten, she was already reading, and could count forever, or at least until people implored her to stop.

  Best of all, she played dress-up. She needed no more than bedclothes—could drape sheets into togas, such as people wore in our favorite movie, Ben-Hur, or clutch the down quilt around her so that it practically duplicated the velvet wrap our mother wore to the theatre. Sharlie could convert anything into fun or adventure, which was fortunate because neither was provided in St. Paul.

  with Sharlie in St. Paul

  There was nothing to do in that great gloomy house. Grandpa told us jokes sometimes, but Grandma was always rather formal. She didn’t like us to race in the hall, and shouting was forbidden. Our mother tried to keep us entertained with jigsaw puzzles and picture books, while Effie, who had been Grandma’s maid for thirty years, often took us out for walks. Not even that on Sundays, however. In California, we would have been taken to a movie or the beach, but St. Paul still observed a puritan Sabbath, a day set aside for inner research, and if possible, self-reproach. In my eyes, Sunday back East was no credit to the Creator. At least not until the Sunday Sharlie discovered the attic.

  For want of something better to do, she had followed our father up the steep steps to the third floor
. Naturally, I tagged along. It was a part of the house I hadn’t even suspected. Shadows were deep and stationary here, lending mystery to the dusty furniture and steamer trunks. I had never been in a real attic before—in Los Angeles, we had a crawl space—and the warm, evocative smell of camphor and rose sachet hooked me at once and forever.

  My father was packing away a khaki uniform and a stack of letters, when suddenly Sharlie pointed to something pink in the trunk. “What’s that?”

  He lifted out a pair of little old-fashioned shoes. High-heeled and satin, they were the color my mouth turned after sucking cherry drops. The heels flared out at the bottom, and the pointed toes were embroidered with tiny pearls. Sharlie held one of the shoes alongside her foot. It made her child-size look gross. Incredulous, she asked, “Who wore these?”

  “No one,” my father said. “They were just samples.” He pointed to the shoemaker’s name stamped in lacy gold letters on the inner sole. “Your grandmother used to order her shoes from Paris, and these were probably sent over to tempt her.”

  “Did she get tempted?”

  The mere idea made him laugh: his mother was very correct. Returning the little shoes to the trunk, he locked it, and put the key back in an old leather pocketbook full of other keys. “Let’s go downstairs now. Watch out, it’s steep!”

  Sharlie was unusually quiet when Effie put us down for our much-hated nap, but the minute we were alone, she was out of bed. “Quick!” she whispered. As she tiptoed out into the hall, I noticed she had the key purse looped over her arm. I followed her to the attic door, which she unlocked and held open for me.

  “Why are we going up there again?” I demanded.

  She seemed surprised that I even had to ask. “I’m going to try on those pink shoes,” she said.

  Cinderella’s sisters couldn’t have struggled more gamely with the glass slipper. Sharlie’s feet were narrow, but even when she eventually managed to squeeze in her toes and the ball of her foot, the little satin shoe ended under her arch, leaving an inch of her heel sticking out. Since only the front view mattered anyway, she finally crushed her feet down upon the heel cups, flattening them into mules, and so was able to hobble around the attic with that clack-clack sound which is the very heartbeat of dress-up.

  I paid little attention to this agonizing triumph until she suddenly emerged from the shadows. “Look at me!” she cried. The green felt hat she had perched on her thick fair hair was clearly Grandma’s, although the rakish tilt was all her own. With piercing eyes and a regal toss of her head, she snapped out an order. “Apologize to me!”

  I shouted with laughter. She sounded just like our grandmother at my seventh birthday party. Grandma had given me some toy which Sharlie had hoped was to be hers. She had expressed her disappointment a bit too impulsively—had in fact, called our stiff-necked grandmother a darn fool—and the party was suddenly over. For sheer consequence, that had been a moment in our lives second only to being born; but it made splendid drama for us now. We spent the rest of the afternoon acting out scenes in which Grandma (Sharlie) exacted apologies from a series of passersby who broke dishes and fell down and did other humorous things (me.)

  This useful story line expanded astonishingly in the days that followed. The plays we composed for ourselves were full of peril, and the dialogue was largely mutual instruction. “—and then you must say that the house is on fire, and I must say, ‘Quick, jump out the window,’ and you must say—” Repetition gradually built these scenes into resounding climaxes. “Help, help,” Sharlie cried, clutching her throat in terror. “The room is full of tigers!”

  In search of inspiration, we ransacked every suitcase, chest, and packing box in the attic. However, the biggest wardrobe trunk, plastered with peeling stickers from European hotels, resisted every key in the leather purse. As a last resort, we pried open its lock with Effie’s scissors. Our expectations were only moderate, and even these plunged when we lifted the lid on a full inventory of long woolen underwear. At the bottom of the trunk, however, we came upon some bundles wrapped in newspapers so old and brittle, they seemed to break apart as we opened them. “Lookit,” Sharlie breathed out, bringing the contents nearer the light. “Just look at these clothes!”

  They seemed to have been made for a princess. The hat, big around as a bird bath, spilled over with pink plumage. And the dress was long and silvery, sewn with tiny disks like fingernails, except glittering. “But who did these belong to?” Sharlie cried.

  Certainly not our grandmother, a woman so conservative, she wore her beautiful pearls hidden unseen inside her dress. Sharlie, far more daring, was already wriggling into the quicksilver gown. The gap in back didn’t show, once she put on the opera cape. This was silk so stiff it whispered when she walked—lavender, with purple chestnut leaves stitched flat around the sweeping hem. The only problem was that such grandeur so completely overwhelmed our make-believe, we could think of no drama to equal it.

  This, however, was the kind of problem my sister was born to grapple with. Under her direction, war was abruptly declared, and we divided up the khaki uniform between the combative armies. Steamer trunks were lined up as barricades, and from behind these, we fired salvo after salvo at the other, each of us dying many times, though at no cost to our enjoyment. At the height of this carnage, there was an inexplicable instant of silence, as piercing as a ray of light, and into the no-man’s-land stepped a princess, Sharlie in the plumed hat and glittering dress. The very incarnation of Reason, she raised one hand, and her voice was many things: entreaty, command, seduction. “War, stop!” she said. So astonishing was this idea, so unheard of, so logical, that both sides cast down their weapons. It was magnificent, of course, but there was no way to top it, so we performed it all over again.

  The fourth time we repeated it, my enthusiasm was a little forced. I didn’t want to cheer Sharlie’s heroism anymore. I wanted some of those cheers myself. I was tired of wearing that old khaki uniform, while she got all the flash. I wanted to be the one everybody was looking at. I wanted to be the princess. “You can’t be,” Sharlie said, firmly. “You’re a boy!”

  As she had never used that argument when our limited casting had me playing the stepmothers and ugly sisters, I paid no attention. Grabbing the great feathered hat, and throwing the lavender cloak around me, I stepped out into the crossfire, and showed her how heroism was really done. There were no cheers, however. Instead, the hostilities intensified. Sharlie’s brows were bunched, and she cried, “You just look silly like that!”

  “I do not,” I defended.

  “You do too, you ought to see yourself!”

  Actually, this was something I already had in mind, and with my finery dragging behind me, I marched downstairs toward my mother’s room, where the big three-way mirror would settle any dispute about looking silly. Sharlie followed, but as we hastened across the hall, we came face to face with our grandfather.

  Usually, we weren’t shy with him, but now the eyes behind his glasses were troubled, and we backed away from them. “No,” he said. “No, that won’t do at all, sir! Get those things off!”

  It was not the kind of voice that told jokes. It was the same sharp voice Grandma had used when she said, “Apologize to me!” Yet when Grandma, herself, came out of her room to see what was wrong, her voice was unexpectedly gentle. “It’s too warm to play this way,” she told me, and took the big hat off my head, the lavender cape from my shoulders.

  Leading Sharlie and me downstairs to the music room, she got the jigsaw puzzles out for us. I wondered what I had done wrong, but her face gave me no clue. When my father came home, however, I could hear Grandpa’s voice, even though he was several rooms away. “What are you raising the boy to be?” he was demanding. “Letting him play with girls all the time! Dressed-up and parading around like I don’t know what! The Queen of Sheba, or—Cleo de Merode, or someone!”

  “Who’s Cleo de Merode?” Sharlie whispered.

  Grandma did not hear. “Work your
jigsaw puzzle, dear,” she said.

  Sharlie obeyed, but touched her toe to my shin under the card table, a way of telling me we would go right on with our dress-up the next day.

  Yet the following afternoon, we found the door to the attic would no longer open. Even as we rattled the knob, we saw the metal hasp that had been newly screwed into the woodwork, and the shiny brass padlock holding it shut. We scurried around, looking for the key, even giving Effie’s room a quick search. It was not there, and not in the leather purse either. Nor did it turn up anywhere else in the remaining days of our visit to St. Paul.

  When we returned to Los Angeles at the end of the summer, the consequences were immediate and far-reaching. Three times a week, I was taken to a junior gymnasium after school, where I joined a group of young boys being drilled in swimming, calisthenics, and boxing. On Saturday nights, my father took me to basketball or hockey games, sometimes even to watch two pugs slug it out, often with sudden shows of blood. It did not interest me particularly, but I learned that ice cream was the standard reward on nights when I faked some enthusiasm.

  Cleo de Merode

  This process, I later discovered, was called “butching up the act,” and as I grew older, I was additionally packed off to a summer camp in the High Sierras every August. Here, with a swarm of other adolescent boys, I learned to rough it. We lived in tents, swam in icy water, gutted the fish we caught, and gave near-religious heed to baseball. Once I understood that my piteous letters to my parents were not going to rescue me from this, I settled down and pretended to fit in. Not all of it was time wasted. I learned most of the popular obscenities, smoked my first cigarette, heard about rubber things called “merry widows,” and marveled at the inventiveness of a lout from a rival tent who exuberantly marched around with his baseball cap hung on what he called a “boner.” By the end of each summer, I had acquired a deep tan, gained a few pounds, and won the kind of award that everyone else won too—improvement in riding, progress in marksmanship, headway in diving. And all this time, it was clear to me that pretending to be a regular feller was just another kind of dress-up.