Not much has changed since then, but Betty Friedan has her finger on the problem—“the problem with no name.” I tore through her book and left it dog-eared. I’ve followed her from the early fifties when she wrote for UE News and reported on HUAC and jackasses like Nixon. Her subject is “the American Housewife” and how she’s been molded into a commodity. She’s a cash cow, apparently. She’s a mechanism of consumption and economic growth—a queen and a prisoner of her domain: suburbia. I wonder what Friedan would think of Philippa and Judy, of everything we did over the past fifteen years. Not very housewifey, were we? We’d murder before shoving ourselves into girdles and crinolines, before making hubby a “Welcome Home” martini (“Extra dry, darling!”), before whipping up grandma’s soggy meatloaf recipe, and before squeezing out two-point-five children. We’d murder before we’d do any of it.
Cleve was just the beginning. The tip of the iceberg, so to speak. Inadvertently, he was signaling to us that destructive forces were closing in, about to envelop us. Would we have become what we did without him? Who knows? Could we have saved him had we known the truth? Would we have even wanted to?
* * *
PHILIPPA, OCTOBER 15, 1948
So, there I was in Judy’s foyer, my entire body buzzing, the adrenaline still surging. Minutes ago, I’d struck—no, slugged—Cleve with a piece of metal. I didn’t know I could do something like that. I was astonished at myself. I’d been operating on pure instinct. Cleve would’ve plowed into her; he could’ve seriously hurt her. My arm ached from the impact, but it felt like an old war wound, a badge of sisterhood.
Instead of whisking me upstairs and out the window to the roof, Judy said, “Wait here. I’ll be right back,” and disappeared through a small door under the stairs.
I took a deep breath and stepped from the foyer into the front hall. On a table set in front of a sizable gilt-framed mirror, I spotted a spray of lilies. Their spicy-sweet odor was bright and nauseating. Under the bouquet, framed in fine white gold filigree, a young girl of six or seven peered out from a black-and-white photo. Her gray felt tam complemented her houndstooth coat, and a flip of straight dark hair fell across her forehead. She seemed smudged at the edges, a touch out of focus. Since Judy had always rushed me through the hall, I hadn’t noticed the photo before. I thought it was a younger version of Judy at first—more subdued, more girlish—but as I leaned closer, I realized it couldn’t be. Their eyes were different. This girl’s pupils were dim flecks, cooled ashes. They lacked Judy’s intensity.
“Hello,” a stern but not unkind voice said behind me. “And who are you?”
A man of fifty or sixty—age in older men is always difficult for me to determine—emerged from the hall beside the staircase. He had a bushy mustache, well-oiled hair, and watery eyes. He wore an expensive wine-colored tie with gold geometric shapes, and his tailored three-piece suit held him in like a balloon does air.
“I’m Philippa, a friend of Judy’s,” I said and shook his damp palm.
“I’m Mr. Peabody,” he said, leaning forward.
I caught a whiff of his sour breath. Alcohol? “We met at school. We’re in English together.”
From the other room, a woman’s voice rang out—“Bart, who are you talking to?”—followed by footfalls. Around the corner strode a wide-hipped and big-breasted woman roughly Mr. Peabody’s age. Her thick-heeled shoes whacked the floorboards. She was frowning.
“Edie,” Mr. Peabody said, “it’s a friend of Judy’s.”
Edith wasn’t so much attractive as she was, like Mr. Peabody, fashionable. She wore a navy-blue pleated silk blouse and elegant wool skirt. Her face was smooth and gray and proud like the marble bust of a Roman emperor, and her wavy auburn hair was cropped tightly to her head, showing off a pair of diamond-encrusted opaline earrings the size of half-dollars.
She gave me a nod and said, “I didn’t know Jackie had a new friend.”
I stared at her—Jackie?—then, catching myself, I remembered to smile.
Correcting her, Mr. Peabody said, “Judy made friends with Philippa in English.”
“Yes, well, she’s never spoken of you before,” she said, the charm bracelet on her wrist clattering.
“I just moved here. My father’s in the Navy.”
“I see.”
“A lawyer. JAG Corp.”
“Impressive.” A smile fluttered to her lips and died away. “My uncle Andrew was a JAG. The courts-martial is a more effective judicial system than our civilian one, wouldn’t you agree?”
“I’m not sure I could say.”
“Our civilian courts are absolutely broken. Damaged. Damaging.”
Mr. Peabody sniffed at this, which annoyed the Mrs., but before she could respond, a little black dog with twitchy bat ears scampered through the door under the stairs. Mrs. Peabody groaned, and Mr. Peabody smiled, his grooved and pockmarked face lighting up. The dog darted around his legs, gave a couple sharp barks, and came to me, ignoring Mrs. Peabody.
“Philippa, meet Roosevelt. Rosie, Philippa,” Judy said, following close behind.
I kneeled and held out my hand. Rosie had a stripe of white fur that ran from his forehead over his crushed nose and disappeared into his tight cord sweater. He licked my palm, rubbed his back against my thigh, and dashed back to Judy. “He’s so cute!” I said, standing again. “Is he a Frenchie?”
“Cute he may be, but intolerable,” Mrs. Peabody said. “Judy, I told you not to let him into the front rooms. He’ll chew my cushions.”
“He’s never chewed a cushion,” she said, glaring.
“It’s in their nature,” Mrs. Peabody said. “Dogs are destructive.”
“Rosie’s a good dog,” Mr. Peabody said, adding to Roosevelt, “Aren’t you, you rascal?” The dog began pawing at his knee, and he patted his head. Something about the gesture made me feel sorry for Mr. Peabody. He seemed tender, not the nightmare Judy seemed to think he was. Edith must be the primary source of her ire.
“Come on, Philippa,” Judy said and scooped up Rosie, who licked her neck and her chin and the side of her face, cleaning away the thin smear of blood on her cheek from Cleve’s attack. She laughed openly, something I hadn’t witnessed before.
We played with Rosie in the upstairs den for a quarter of an hour. Judy had found him nosing around the trash behind Hill Estates that summer. He’d been starving, encrusted with infected sores, and swarming with fleas. Despite Edith’s protests, she nurtured him back to health. He was named Roosevelt because, while the family was listening to a retrospective about FDR on the radio, he stretched out his stumpy neck, threw back his ears, and cooed every time the president spoke.
Growing tired of his friskiness, Judy shooed him away and said, “Let’s go to the roof.” She fished out a portable record player in a cracked leather case, a stack of records, and said, “Come on.”
After a tricky balancing act crossing the board over the alley, Judy popped open the player, dropped a record on, and cranked it. I leaned against the sun-warmed bricks at the roof’s raised edge, watched some stray clouds straggle across the sky, and listened to Edith Piaf’s dreamy warble over the murmur of traffic and pedestrians. Passersby below drifted back and forth on the sidewalk, vanishing into and materializing out of the canopy of turning leaves. Based on their hairdos and hats, I imagined their life stories. There goes a victory roll (she lost her husband at Midway, poor thing); there goes a queue curl (she’s pregnant out of wedlock and hasn’t told her family); there goes a brown fedora with a navy-blue ribbon (he’s a spy who fell in love with a German woman); there goes a dramatic purple cartwheel (she’s the wife of a disgraced senator); there goes a beret and there a crochet snood and there a redhead in a scarf—
“You really let Cleve have it,” Judy said, bumping me with her elbow.
“He was going to run you over.”
She smirked. “I could’ve moved out of the way.”
“It didn’t look like it,” I said, a little miffed. She should’
ve been thanking me.
“He deserved it.” She shook her head. “God, what a jerk.”
“Something’s wrong with him.”
“Miss M knows why.”
I took a deep breath. “So, what do we do?”
She looked at me but didn’t respond. She just picked a hair off my sweater, held it into the breeze, and let it float away. Piaf’s voice swirled in little eddies around us. I caught a lyric or two, the French that I took before switching to Latin came back a little. Piaf was singing about a girl who’d killed herself. Something about her dreams being full of madness. I glanced over at Judy, who’d propped her elbows on the cornice, still deep in reverie. The sleeve of her shirt was dirty from the attack and ripped to the elbow, but her slender arm underneath was clean, olive-toned, her little scars faint. Still high on the exhilaration of striking Cleve, I had the urge to slide a finger through the tear in her blouse and run it over the delicate ridges of her scar tissue. As soon as the thought entered me, I felt woozy, embarrassed. I shook it off, and I said, “I have a confession to make.”
Snapping to, Judy said, “Okay, spill it.”
“I’ve been reading a detective novel Miss Martins gave me, and I can’t put it down.”
“Detective novels are so boring. I’m always a step—no five steps ahead of them. I like the racy hardboiled books best. Chandler. Cain.” Her arms were crossed, and she was now regarding me.
“Why do you think Miss Martins would read mystery novels? It’s so—I don’t know—beneath her.”
Judy rolled her eyes. “Oh, don’t be a snob.”
“Dad wants me to read only the classics. Shakespeare. Homer.”
“Does he lock you in the closet and make you read the Bible, too?”
“I think he’d rather I read something practical, like a chemistry textbook.”
She turned away again, letting the low evening sun warm her features. “At least you’re not scolded by Edith every time you break one of her stupid rules. She’s a total fascist.”
I tilted far over the edge of the building, letting my heels lift off the roof. Piaf was still singing. Dreams full of madness. The strange urge to jump tugged on me. I’d had a similar feeling when Dad held me by the waist as I peered over the edge of the Golden Gate Bridge. The frothy chop below had looked like rows of jagged teeth, gnashing, hungry. I rocked back on my heels and said, “I have a question.”
“Okay…”
“Edith called you Jackie instead of Judy, and Bart corrected her. Is Jackie a nickname?”
Judy sighed. “I need a cigarette,” she said, pushing herself away from the wall. “Change the record, would you?”
“Okay, sure.” I put on Nat King Cole. “Nature Boy.” Soft strings and fluttery flute.
Once we had our cigarettes—I held mine out, smoking as little of it as possible—Judy said, “Do you really want to know why I can’t stand B and E? Why I can’t wait to leave this place?” Her eyes were level, serious.
I nodded. Of course I did.
“It’s because of her. Jackie.” She took a long drag and blew a thin cone of smoke to the sky.
A sooty smudge ran along her cheek. I suddenly wanted to wipe it away. “Is that why you want to change your name to Nightingale?”
“Who told you that?”
“You did.”
She squinted at me. “No, I didn’t. Whatever. It doesn’t matter.” She took another puff. “Anyway, they adopted me because of Jackie.”
“Why?”
“Because she was murdered.”
It was staggering news. A murder? I didn’t know what to say. I just listened to the mournful and sweet piano interlude of Cole’s song. “The photo on the table with the lilies,” I said. “That’s her.”
She blinked. “She was strangled by a boogieman when she was nine and dumped in the Anacostia River.”
“That’s horrible. Did they catch him?”
“No, but B and E are sure it was this man, Bogdan, a mechanic who worked at the Navy Yard. He’d sit outside St. Timothy’s and watch the girls come and go. He had a Shirley Temple thing.”
A Shirley Temple thing? A ripple of nausea passed through me.
“The police didn’t have enough evidence to lock him up, so out he went, back into the world. Caught and released. Who knows where he is now? It’s been eight years.”
“That’s why she was angry about the court system.”
“Sounds like her.”
“But what does that have to do with you?”
“I’m her replacement. Edith was too old to have more children, so they adopted me. Presto. Instant daughter. Back then, I even looked a bit like Jackie. Mediterranean, that is. Dark hair, golden skin. Edith comes from a wealthy Greek family. Georgiou.”
As she was speaking, I thought of Jackie’s photo. In my mind, it wasn’t the blurry image that I’d studied in the hall. No, it was as if she’d been posed like in a Victorian postmortem portrait. I imagined the Peabodys propping her up, sliding a rod under her coat to hold her shoulders in place and strapping her wobbly head to the curtained backdrop. Once her body was secure, they smoothed her hair; adjusted her tam, blouse, and coat; positioned her hands in a deferential pose (always their little angel); and dusted her gray skin with phosphorus to give her a “lifelike” glow. But the eyes… Well, there was nothing you could do about the eyes. They were stubbornly vacant, beckoning you in as if she were a room for rent.
I expected Judy to say more, but she didn’t. She just stood there, smoking. Even after the song ended and the record hissed and crackled, she didn’t move to change it.
And it occurred to me: She didn’t want to resemble Jackie at all. Her black bob, her pale face, her double strand of pearls, her forced gloom, her choice of music, even Roosevelt, all added up to something—a line in the sand? What was it she said to me? “I understand what being shackled is all about.” Perhaps she does.
PHILIPPA, OCTOBER 20, 1948
This morning I woke up late and, in a dash to get ready, left Love’s Last Move by my bed. After having it for a week, Miss Martins asked me to return it. So last night, I rushed to finish it, which wasn’t difficult. I couldn’t put it down, and she was right, it had a good twist. The murderer was devious. Can someone conceal their true nature that well?
I arrived early to class and confessed that I’d forgotten it.
“It’s all right,” she said, shaking her head. Her cheeks were flushed, or perhaps just overly rouged, and her eyes were red-rimmed. “You need to keep your promises,” she added, her affect flat. The light she usually shined on me was out, extinguished by her bad mood. At first, I felt angry: How could our guide, our muse, our Miss Martins be so cold to me? But then, I wondered if everything going on between her and Cleve was taking its toll. She seemed to notice my sinking emotion and softened, dusting her voice with levity. “So, what did you think of the ending?”
“I suspected Clarence until the last few pages. I didn’t think he was going to be the final victim. And Mabel—she was shockingly vicious.”
“Kane based her on Lady Macbeth.”
“Oh.” I’d read Macbeth last year in English, but I hadn’t made the connection. “I didn’t suspect her. She was so… something.”
“Appealing?” Miss Martins said. “Kane knows how to manipulate a reader’s sympathies. That’s the fun of it.”
That was true. Kane made you fall in love with Mabel, her brashness, her excellent sense of humor, and then pulled it all out from underneath you. It was cruel but delicious. I wasn’t sure I’d agree that it was fun, not exactly. More like, gripping.
Miss Martins smiled, seeming to sense my ambivalence. “Kane’s second book was also very good. It’s about twin brothers who are accused of murdering their father,” she said, “but I’m not going to loan it to you until you return the one you have.”
“Alright,” I said, wanting to read it, craving the dark spell of the first book. “I could go home during lunch and grab it.”
“You shouldn’t skip lunch.” She thought about it. “Why don’t you drop it by my apartment at Ninth and East Capitol after school? That’s near where you live, right? I’ll be there after five.”
“Well…” It did make my life easier, and I could start reading it tonight. “Are you sure?”
“Of course,” she said, and her mood shifted, darkening, but instead of shutting me out, she leaned in. “Philippa,” she said and took a breath. “You and Judy are tight-knit now, aren’t you?”
“I suppose,” I said, uncertain where this was headed.
Her eyes were silvery with moisture, and suddenly her makeup seemed as fragile as eggshell. “Lovely. That’s what I was hoping for,” she said, but there was no brightness in her voice. Whatever was eating at her was disturbing to watch. I wanted to say something, but who was I to comfort her? That’s not the usual dynamic between student and teacher, and I didn’t want to risk embarrassing her. “And is DC beginning to feel like home?” she added, another smile flickering and fading.
“It’s okay,” I said. “My mother grew up here. So, I guess Washington is in my blood.”
“She did?” Her eyes lit up.
“She and my father met here. My real mother, that is.”
“Real mother?” She smiled. “You mean your birth mother?”
“Yes,” I said. “Dad has a funny story about how they were paired up through a blind date, the matchmaker, some busybody friend of my mother’s, was matching up another couple at the same time and crossed her wires. She accidentally paired up Dad and Mom; they were supposed to go on dates with other people. Dad thought her name was Betty most of the evening. They didn’t even like each other at first, but it all worked out in the end.” Realizing, of course, that it hadn’t worked out in the end, I added, “Well, not the very end.”
“Oh,” she said absently, “that’s a great story.” As I’d rattled on, she’d receded again, like a ghost in a dark passage. She wanted to be present, to be herself, I think, but she seemed to find it impossible. I felt drawn in and then thrust away—first the beckoning finger and then the sudden flat palm. An emotional yo-yo. It’s how I feel when I stare at the photo of my mother in her wedding dress: embraced by her smile but rejected by her two dimensions. I sense that her loving expression is for me, but then realize—my heart sinking every time—that that couldn’t be the case. I didn’t exist to her then.
The Savage Kind Page 6
