by Jess Gregg
Both of us stared at her. The way the woman’s urgent enunciation made her face writhe had been familiar to us for years. We sneaked a look at each other, and simultaneously mouthed her name. Vera!
I had risen to go, but now sat down again, and when she was gone, picked up the conversation where we had left off years before. “A fireman on Delancy Street has been giving her a very hard time,” I confided.
Bill’s voice, worn down to a whisper, was exactly right for stirring up scandal. “Tell me every word!”
We gossiped about Vera and the fireman in complete absorption, this leading into a discussion of the Dallas Palace Little Theatre’s latest production, a life of Bess Truman acted by computers.
I saw him the next afternoon, and the next. On the day he was allowed to sit up, he handed me a worked-over sheet of paper. The writing was hard to make out, looking like a forgery of his usual hand. “Out loud,” he whispered. I cleared my throat, and read it back to him: Elvis Elegy by Flower Bungley Bassett.
“Pink-pout punk, pot-
Hot. Husky hero heroin
Secedes his star, slides slow his moon
And high the holy handsome heaves—”
“She’ll finish writing it tomorrow,” Bill croaked. “The same four lines, except backwards, it’ll make a statement for our time.”
I did not really expect Bill to recover, but he did. I swore I would not lose track of him again, but I have. I don’t doubt that he’s somewhere in Paris or Santa Fe, bossing prima donnas around and menacing stagehands. Any day now, I expect to get a picture postcard, or find a note in a bottle washed up on the shore. “Rigoletto again,” it will say. “Loathsome tenor, but the chorus is piquant, and (one of them) affectionate.” And at the end of the message, of course, “Thrive!”
You too, sport.
13
WHAT CAN I TELL YOU, HON?
Everyone who met Marion was instantly on first-name terms with her. Several years into our friendship, however, I took to calling her Mrs. Cole in a last-ditch effort to ease some dignity back into her increasingly outrageous life.
My own life had seemed relatively simple at the time we met. I had come to the Hamptons for the summer, not to play, but to finish up some work, and was looking for an unpretentious little house, quiet, inexpensive. By the third day of my search, I was used to the laughter these specifications set off, and was ready to modify them: a room. Anywhere. “You might try Marion Cole down the block,” the check-out girl at the supermarket said. “If you’re broadminded, that is. Some of her friends are rumored to fly.”
It sounded wonderful, and I went to the address at once—a shingled saltbox with a sagging screen door. No one answered the bell, so I poked my head inside. The front room had apparently been abandoned at a moment of cataclysm, like those villas in Pompeii with the table all set, and a knife in the loaf. Here, the artifacts were somehow less poignant. A convertible sofa had not quite made it back together again. A pink plastic curler shared a dish with a quarter pound of soft butter, and Scrabble tiles were scattered over the floor. The only visible movement anywhere was a silently spinning turntable, long since at the end of its tune.
With Marion Cole
The combined smells of Shalimar and cabbage turned me toward the cluttered kitchen, where I glimpsed a woman washing her hair in the sink. Convinced by now that I could do better almost anywhere else, I was tiptoeing away when she straightened up and, pulling aside a swag of dripping hair, peered out at me “Hi, hon!” she cried, as if I’d never been away.
I bumbled out some excuse for being in her house, but she was already busy drying her hair. “Great!” she called through the towel. “Wonderful! Let’s get some breakfast going.”
It was two in the afternoon, but she quickly scrambled some eggs and found a wedge of banana pie in the fridge. Her friendliness kept suggesting we had already met, but I couldn’t recall ever having seen her before. She was not physically memorable, neither young nor handsome. There was no fat on her, but she was solidly made, barefoot in her pink slip, with a round, good-natured face, and lots to say. “Wasn’t that a hoot last week?” she cried, winding her damp brown hair around wide rollers. “Phil ought to know better’n to ask Bobby and me to the same bash, because all we do is tango, no matter what the tune.”
She rattled on as if, naturally, I knew who and what she was talking about. Edging a word into this wasn’t easy, but eventually I made clear I hadn’t been at that party. “Well, don’t worry, hon, there’s another one tomorrow,” she said. “If you don’t have wheels, I’ll borrow Jimmy’s old wreck and come get you myself.”
I sidestepped this by claiming not to be a party person. “Well, hell, neither am I,” she replied. “But—what can I tell you, hon? It’s better’n sitting home alone.”
We sat at breakfast until dinner time, laughing, talking. I learned she was a widow with two grown sons; but despite a confidential tone, she confided little. It was all small talk. Anything deeper quickly collided with her husky laughter, or one of those nearly meaningless phrases she substituted for opinion. “Oh, honestly!” she would say. Or “Ya dirty rotten kid!” Or “What can I tell you, hon?” Yet in some mysterious way, this starvation fare was nourishing. She was fun. She was warm-hearted. She had, to a remarkable degree, a welcoming presence.
Later that night, we took a tour of the gay discos, and wherever we went, she instantly became the hostess. She called the tune, she set the pace, she hammered out the beat. The Madison was having its brief autocracy, and the dancers, zapped by wildly amplified music, lined up shoulder to shoulder, moving somewhat in unison, like those uncoordinated choruses that were the soul of burlesque shows. I watched and wanted to join in, but only did so when she grabbed my hand and pulled me into the line. “Turn!” she instructed hoarsely. “Again! Left foot! Left foot, hon, there you go! Smile, and you can be president!”
It was after four and foggy when I drove her back to her house, neither of us very sober. I’m not sure we had discussed rent, or even the possibility of my living there, but she showed me up to a little slanty-roofed room, and when she had moved the piles of laundry, loose snapshots, and a stuffed pheasant from the bed, she left me to sleep. For better or possibly worse, I had moved in.
Not, I must admit, without second thoughts. When I woke up the next noon, my head was thumping, and the phone downstairs had not stopped ringing. Eventually, I answered it. The caller, asking for Marion, turned out to be someone I knew. “What’re you doing at The Madhouse?” he cried. When I told him, he warned, “You won’t get a lick of work done there.”
“Why not?”
“Wait and see,” he said. “Apres you, le deluge.”
I was to find out what he meant that evening. “Quick, they’re here!” Marion shouted, as the 7:20 from New York rounded the curve. From her door to the depot was only a minute’s run, so we arrived the same moment the train did. “There they are!” Marion cried. “The dirty rotten kids!”
Out of the swarm of weekenders emerged three glowing faces—Jon, Bob, Gary—actually six glowing faces, since Jon, Bob, and Gary had each brought a boyfriend. Marion was laughing helplessly as she hugged them. “I don’t know where in hell I’m going to put you all,” she admitted.
Marion tricked out for a masquerade.
“But she always manages,” Gary told his weekend friend. “Once, she even had ’em sleeping upright in her shower stall.”
It didn’t quite reach that extreme. Couches were opened up, a spare mattress was unrolled on the floor, one of her guests never returned from the bars that night anyway, and another crawled in with me. Even so, when people began to wake up the next day, the house was densely populated. There was a constant wait to use the bathroom, the telephone, even the narrow stairs. On the other hand, all sorts of invitations began coming in—brunch, cocktails, dinner—so the place was empty most of the weekend after all. The quiet I needed was glorious. I adjusted the lamp in my room, pulled out my typewriter, and
got back to work.
It did not occur to me yet that I had come home.
Mondays were always a let-down for Marion. When her playmates returned to the city and secrecy, she seemed left without light. This Monday, however, the darkness was literal. I fussed with the fuse box for twenty minutes before she suggested that maybe the electric bill had not been paid. The unopened mail that had accumulated on and under the table soon verified this; and more. All her utilities, and her town taxes too, were in arrears. “Let’s get ’em paid right now,” I suggested. “I’ll address the envelopes, if you write the checks.”
“What checks?” she asked.
I realized suddenly she wasn’t kidding. The tact I quickly switched to wasn’t necessary, since she was perfectly straightforward about it: somehow, money always got spent before it could be used. All she had coming in was her widow’s pension, and the loans her mother occasionally made. “And on Fridays,” she added, “I earn a few bucks burning hair.” She had set up shop in her kitchen, she explained, and gave shampoos and sets for far less than Mr. Jac at the salon in town. The combs and lotions of her trade were heaped in a frying pan as if waiting for someone to ask for a bacon rinse.
“How about your weekend guests?” I asked. “Don’t they pay you something?”
“My boys?” she cried. “Of course not! They bring their own booze, and—y’know—buy the groceries, and take me out to dinner—”
“They use your house,” I cut in. “They use your hot water and phone. Not to mention your sheets and towels and cologne.”
“I don’t care!” She turned away, stubbornly loyal. “I can’t ask ’em for money on top of everything else they give me. I may be a slob, but I’m not a whore.”
I paid my next week’s rent early so she could settle the electric bill. The lights blinked back on, but the next week, the phone got shut off, and she came pounding up the stairs to my room. “Can I use your car, hon? It’s urgent!” It had to be, I told her, since her driver’s license had expired. “Then could you drive me?” she begged. “I just got an idea how to shake the money tree.”
We drove a few miles out of town to a cement block dance-bar called the Quarry. It had recently been acquired by Johnny Dio, a tan, unsmiling surfer, but nobody much went there—it was too far out of the way, and when you finally got there, it wasn’t fun. “It’s as simple as this, hon,” she told him, when we arrived. “You got an empty disco, and I got a following—we could make beautiful music together.”
Johnny wanted proof before he committed himself, so that weekend Marion diverted her friends and their friends and their friends to the Quarry. The juke box played non-stop, and the cash register made music no less percussive. After that, she was definitely on the payroll, a nightly attraction there, greeting old acquaintance at the door, leading the line dances, and keeping the action fast, sassy, and familial. Nobody in her radius remained a stranger. She seemed never to forget a name. “We’d only met once, and that was five years back,” someone told me, “but when I came into the Quarry, she yelled clear across the room, ‘Why, Gordy Kowdowsky, how are you?’”
The change this new job made in her life was immediate. No more fretting about Monday darkness; she kept her lights blazing all the time now. When the Quarry closed for the night, she rushed off with her crowd to someone’s house for a drink, a swim, some cards, and the breakfast for fifteen that she somehow invented at daybreak. She’d be getting in about the time I’d be getting up. When I would ask if she’d had fun, her answer was always the same, a phrase I predicted would be carved on her tombstone if she didn’t get some rest: “Oh, I had such a good time!”
Rest, however, had to share the mornings with her telephone, shower, and the tuna sandwiches she spread up in case anyone got hungry. At noon, five or six of her closest buddies brought her to the beach in her black bathing suit and string of department store pearls. (“You can’t beat basic black and pearls,” she would say, no matter how often.) As soon as she had spread her towel on the sand, she deserted it to blanket-hop, gadding exuberantly from group to group, playing cut-throat Scrabble, or having a good gossip. She enjoyed hearing all the latest bed news, but I don’t recall her speaking unkindly of anyone. Nor did she take sides in the feuds that were the summer’s outstanding pastime. Her laughter tended to be raucous, and she could cuss like a roustabout, but she never adopted the boys’ jargon, not even words like gay and camp that even the straight world was starting to use.
On the debit side, she was devoted to dreadful aphorisms, apparently of her own devising. She called her lunch a “tunisani”, lit up a “smokin’ stick”, vanished into the dunes to make a “hum-hum,” and at the approach of Labor Day, was the hostess of a vast beach “snickeroo.” By blackmail or magic, she persuaded Johnny Dio to donate cases of beer, and the supermarket to contribute the hot dogs, while she herself boiled up laundry tubs of night-borrowed corn. There was never enough of anything, which is not surprising since people she had never seen before came out of the surf to enjoy her hospitality. With welcome so general, some of the boys acquired status by not showing up at all.
For not everyone adored her—not even everyone who claimed to. They called her “Mad Marion” and La Folle, for she did nothing that she didn’t overdo.
If the beach got littered, and the township did nothing about it, she was likely to show up with a stack of plastic trash bags and organize a fete of picking up refuse. And when the commercial fishermen edited their catch and dumped the unsalable sea-robins, skates, and flounders onto the sand, she and her young men would rush up and hurl the flopping, gasping fish back into the ocean. “I got a fellow feeling for ’em,” she told me. “Not so long since, I got dumped, myself.”
If she never quite explained such statements, others did. Eventually, all of us heard how her father had cut her off. About the disaster of her marriage. About her husband’s suicide in the cellar. Not that anyone really believed these stories, but everyone repeated them.
What happened at the posh Estuary Inn was more than hearsay, however. “I was there,” the Duke told me much later. “I saw it, I heard it!” Called the Duke of Wellington because of his grand manner, prominent nose, and uncanny resemblance to the Goya portrait, he was literate, well-connected, and—once he had rattled his sabers to establish a defense—kind enough.
“She was there to meet one of the lads for dinner,” he confided, “but she was early or he was late, so she was sitting at the bar having a sherry, and even managing to look like quality. And suddenly in swept the deadly Vivian Woodruff and her crowd, high as smoke, my dear, and livid because their table wasn’t ready. Marion moved a few seats down the bar to make space for them, but either Vivian thought Marion was cutting her, or she couldn’t endure a commoner putting her in debt for a courtesy. ‘Too kind,’ she called to Marion, and turned to her friends. ‘I want everyone to meet the Hamptons’ most popular fag-hag.’
“Every eye in the place turned to Marion, and the silence, my dear, could have etched glass,” the Duke continued. “I mean, Marion would have been justified in hurling her drink in Vivian’s face, but instead, she bowed graciously. ‘How do you do,’ she called to Vivian’s crew. ‘Marion Cole, here. Nice to meet you.’
“Such artlessness would have shut up anyone else, but not la Woodruff. She kept trumpeting the same appalling note over and over—fag-hag this, fag-hag that—and each time, Marion somehow harmonized it. When she finally finished her sherry and got up to leave, she even blew a kiss to everyone.
“Of course, I hurried right after her,” he added. “She was standing on the porch in a state of shock. ‘I didn’t know what to say,’ she kept bleating. ‘What could I say?’ I tried to assure her that being gracious had been the perfect rebuke, but she was absolutely sunk.” He prolonged a sigh, exaggerated a shrug. “She’d been over-protected by the boys, you see. Because they never catch the irony of her position like another woman does.”
“What irony?”
“O
h, you know,” he said. “Being female, Marion’s the only person in her crowd who never makes out with a guy.”
Marion never mentioned the incident to me, yet I wonder now if this humiliation didn’t begin to make her good times with the boys an entirely secondary pursuit. Not that it was immediately discernible—she continued to show up everywhere with a big escort of young men—yet when I returned to the Hamptons that next spring, it seemed to me she had determined to get a bona-fide man of her own.
“Don’t!” she cried, when I started to answer the phone, the night of my arrival. She let it ring several times more, and then, smiling mysteriously, picked up the receiver. “Hello, you!” she whispered.
I teased her later. “Got yourself a guy, Mrs. Cole?”
She guffawed. “Millions of ’em!” But her face went red as sunburn.
We never did sit down and talk it out, but the bits and pieces she gradually let fall formed a cohesive mosaic. He was a dentist from Worcester, Jewish, a widower of forty-seven, whom she had been writing to since Lincoln’s Birthday. They were not lovers, not yet, but he seemed to be crowding her in that direction. He liked to sing and she liked to sing, he told her, so what was wrong with a duet?
What was wrong was his unexpected arrival at noon, one July day. Marion was at the beach, and I was shaving in her kitchen. I could be explained away, but not that kitchen. Its defiance of three thousand years of sanitary laws sent him running back to his practice in Worcester. Marion was disappointed, but philosophical—attitudes that were promptly swept away by Tom Fletcher.
Fletch was not actually a newcomer in her life. He had gone to high school with her younger sister, but Marion had never paid him any attention. It remained for Gary to do that. “Who’s the tall number who just went upstairs?” he whispered.
“Just the mailman,” Marion said, not looking up from her jigsaw puzzle. “He stops in to use the toilet.”
