by Mona Simpson
The black-and-white dining room was filled with Academy nuns. They always stood around the food, because they were shy.
I found Pat in the foyer with an older woman who was famous for having been writing a novel for the last twenty-two years. Estella Clerf. No one had ever read it, but it was supposed to be about a farm in Illinois. It was said to exceed eleven hundred pages at present. She was a woman who stood out at these gatherings, because, although she was married to the owner of the newspaper and they had plenty of money, she was the only woman of her age in the room who didn’t do her hair. It hung the way mine did, just down, and it was dark streaked with a crinkly, silvery white. She had little wire-rimmed glasses and teeth the size of corn kernels. Her voice was tiny like a little girl’s. I’d always liked her. She was part of the book group Marion Werth led the first Monday of every month. One year they’d read War and Peace, the next year it was the Greeks, the year after that Proust and Menus from the White House. They’d made the dinners, at a different house every month.
She was asking Pat Briggs why the fifth floor of Briggs’s showed furs.
“People want ’em.” He shrugged.
The woman said it wasn’t true that shearling coats didn’t really hurt the sheep.
“Ann here’s grandparents were mink people,” Mr. Briggs said, winking at me.
“I know that,” she said. “I know Ann.”
Pat Briggs turned to a couple who had just walked in and stood, pulling off their gloves, finger by finger.
Merl joined us and began to talk about the book she and Emily were writing about Tom Harris. They had been talking about this for years. They were compiling an anthology of recollections of his exploits and Emily was going to do illustrations. They were asking all their friends to contribute. Merl brought this up because she was talking to the woman writer.
Behind her through the living room, I saw Emily kneeling on the floor again in front of the dog, whispering to him, the wings of her dress on the floor. As much as she worried about acquiring clothes, once she had something on, she didn’t care.
The religious crowd had now gathered by the tree. They were delicately hanging ornaments and then standing back to gauge their perspectival effect. Others sat on the large stuffed chairs stringing popcorn. Several of those women were recipe editors. The church, every year, put out a local cookbook for fund-raising.
“Udgy budgy udgy budgy woodgy cudgy,” Emily said.
I was waiting to get one of the Briggses alone. I had to ask about the box. The whole Tom Harris business bothered me. It wasn’t the dog. It was them. They invited a hundred people over for food but mainly to follow them around and watch them in their mumming attentions to this private dog. My family had never been like that. We didn’t invite people to come and watch us live our lives. We didn’t really have lives that way, things we did every day the same. When we got dressed up it was for guests. We were there for the other people.
I touched Mr. Briggs’s shoulder. It was funny to see him in this costume. A bald Jesus and too old.
He did his wince and tick. I looked down to the marble floor. People always looked away when he did that. Everyone except Emily. She would just look straight at him.
I told him what my mother had said about the box and that I was looking for my father. His features lined into an expression of intentness. He was completely, smoothly bald so that his whole head seemed cleanly nude, like a foot. The top of his skull ridged slightly. He rubbed his hand again, from the forehead back, where the hair would have been.
“Mmmm,” he said, inhaling and closing his eyes. He had a certain style. For as long as I’d known him, he always wore thick black round glasses. I found out later that he’d copied them from Mies van der Rohe. He got me interested in Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier. He gave me books. No one else, Merl or Emily, cared a hoot.
“I hope we can round that up for you, Mayan. I have a vague recollection of it all. The box has got to be here somewhere, God knows Merl doesn’t throw a thing out, but where—”
Just then, Danny stood there, his fingers in his jean belt loops, looking down. He was just wearing black clothes, I couldn’t see that he’d changed at all. I felt bad for not telling him this was costume. Behind him stood another guy I knew—Eli Timber. He was carrying some kind of instrument in a case and he was dressed in an old-fashioned black suit and twenties tie.
A girl I didn’t know, in an elf uniform, stood offering us miniature hot shepherd’s pies from a tray. They probably hired her from Saint Joseph’s Academy. That’s where everyone got girls for parties. Danny looked around and then whispered to me, loudly, “Jeesh, I’ll be right back, I’m gonna go outside and take a piss.”
Merl tilted her cheek for Eli Timber to kiss. Her hair had been done so it was curled, not in ringlets but in long S’s, and only starting about a foot down from her head. She had on white striped tights, a short dress and shoes like little girls’ Mary Janes.
“Who was that?” Merl said. I started to explain. “He’s from here?” She shook her head. “No. Felchner, I’ve never heard it. You can tell him we have indoor plumbing.”
“And who are you?” Eli Timber asked.
“Guess,” she said, holding her hands out. “I’m Alice. Alice in Wonderland.”
When Danny returned, Merl looked up and said, “Have you met Tom Harris?”
“Uh, no, I don’t think so,” he said, hands in black belt loops.
“Oh, well, you boys are in for a treat. You, too, Eli. Come on.”
THE PARTY WAS IN FULL FORM. The tree quivered, brimming with laden ornaments, and the chandelier had been dimmed twice now to allow for the effect of candles and the bulbed strings of lights. Just then Otto Kapp walked in. Otto Kapp looked like Mahatma Gandhi and at every one of the Briggses’ costume parties he came as Mahatma Gandhi. He had his arm under his sister’s elbow while Pat Briggs helped her fight off her coat. Underneath, Clara was dressed as some kind of wood sprite and looked almost dead. Her hair was light as cloud and pure white, and she had a head wreath of twigs and leaves and dry berries that looked like thorns. She wore a loose gown but what you saw in her was just skeleton: bones and teeth. Her hips were the size of a toaster. She advanced slowly towards the living room, her head bobbing in different directions, greedy. Her gaze went right over me.
They were the royalty in this room, because of their age and what they’d built. Money. Kapp’s was closed and sold by then, the dark wood carved booths and cuckoo clocks auctioned off to collectors in Milwaukee, but a group of five of the old waitresses, each over eighty and European, met once a month for a kind of club. The recipe nuns were negotiating with them for a special cookbook but it seemed that none of the amounts or ingredients had ever been written down.
Emily sprang off the chair she was sitting in and the white wings of her dress wisped behind her. She went and curtseyed, kissing Clara’s hand. Otto kept looking around the room. As Gandhi, he was part naked and extremely fit and tight for a man of his age. Slowly Emily led Otto and Clara over to Tom Harris and this was the sacred moment of the party—as when the hostess lifts her first spoonful to her mouth and, with everyone watching, lolls her tongue in a pantomime of savored communion—and now, tilting after, the party could really begin.
There were two types of religious. There were the artistic families—where the women went barefoot and cooked with gin and juniper berries and made tissue paper flowers in colors like deep red and purple and grouped them together on top of a grand piano. They were paid-up members of Saint Peter and Paul’s, but they were known to drive out to the university for Saturday night guitar masses. They bought attractive Lenten wreaths and ceramic crèches made in third world countries and attended seminars and lectures at Saint Aubergine’s Bookstore and Saint Norbert’s College. The younger nuns wore regular clothes and had hair and worked for the poor and took a lot of trips to Latin America. They were the hip religious.
They had been my mother’s friends. Among
them, my mother was considered the one who had discovered white. The all-white apartment. In our family, we all sort of believed in each other’s virtues, even when we hated each other. My grandmother or aunt would never have denied my mother’s talents, or the quality of my grandmother’s pies or kindness. There were limits, even in our jealousies.
And there were the old nuns. They mixed in the corners of the dining room or around the tree. You always found one or two of them in the kitchen getting in the way trying to help.
I sat down with the hip religious. There was an older couple I vaguely recognized, dressed as a Joker and a Dunce. There were other cards around us too. A Queen of Spades and of Diamonds. A King of Clubs.
Letitia Skees, the laywoman who owned Saint Aubergine’s Bookstore, was talking about a trip a group of them had recently taken to Europe. They’d managed to spend under a thousand dollars each because they’d stayed in old Benedictine abbeys and they’d eaten with the monks. We heard about the meal in every abbey.
Someone lifted a needle onto a phonograph and the room began to sing. Emily and her mother, released by the ceremonial act of Otto Kapp and Clara greeting Tom Harris, began pushing the old couches and chairs against the wall, Emily’s slippered feet kicking up dancily behind her as she skated with a slipcovered armchair. A tall woman dressed as a fish began to dance with a man in brown terry cloth meant to be, it seemed, a reindeer.
“I do hate decision, decision, don’t you?” Viola Pride was asking at the puzzle table. Viola was known for having been, in her time, president of every women’s club in Racine. I asked her what they all were. “Well, Rockland Art, Saint Fiacra Garden Club, Avila Book Club, Bread and Book, that’s where we read and eat, Christian Women’s, Bridge Clubs, Lawyers’ Wives.”
The room began to waltz. Mr. Briggs began with his wife, and several other costumed people rose and lurched and swayed. The Briggses were right about one thing. People danced with more abandon when you couldn’t tell who they were. Several of the habited nuns clasped their hands together in front of them helpless and a little humiliated just where they stood. One of the younger nuns, Sister Peg, who’d just returned from Honduras, started to dance a hip-loose swing with a twelve-year-old child.
Danny sidled up to me and whispered, “You want to?”
“Somebody should ask the nuns,” I said.
He went into the dining room and asked the first one against the wall. I watched her pantomime of no.
Mr. Briggs stopped and asked his daughter to dance and as her arms lifted and fit on his shoulders, I could imagine her wedding. Mr. and Mrs. Briggs had always said they wanted waltzes at Emily’s wedding. I wasn’t the least bit surprised Tad wasn’t there. Tad was always late, if he showed up at all.
Otto Kapp moved onto the floor with Clara. He swayed and shuffled his feet in time and she barely moved. You could see her fingertips just touch his shoulders. For years she’d lived in a one-bedroom apartment they’d built her over the store.
“And then in Paris,” Letitia Skees was saying behind me. I watched Danny through the arch as he asked the next nun against the wall. She shrank further, the small of her back pressing the way I did sometimes in an exercise for my stomach.
“That was our last stop. And we had to wash our clothes. We had loads of dirty clothes. You know those abbeys don’t have washer-dryers. They did their wash by hand. And Paris was the only place we didn’t stay in an abbey.”
“We had a hotel there,” the Dunce said.
“A nice hotel,” added the Joker.
“Oh, very nice.”
“And so we went out and found, you know, a laundromat. And there was an American girl, from Iowa, and she was working over there as a model and an actress. And she was wearing a black sweatshirt and jeans and tennis shoes. And she put all her clothes in the washmachine and then she took off her sweatshirt and she threw that in too and then she took off her bra and in that went and then, we’re sort of looking and sort of not looking, we’re wondering just how far this can go and so now she’s not wearing anything on top and she unzips the jeans and they go and the panties and then she takes off the sneakers and she just sits like that and waits there until it’s done.”
“She had a magazine.”
“I thought it was just great,” said the Joker.
“I did too,” said Letitia Skees. “To be a young actress living in Paris.” She turned her large face up and sniffed, as if she were taking in free ocean air.
THEN ELI TIMBER came up and bowed and we danced. His arms and shoulders felt hard inside his shirt. I was thinking that small men look different when they’re young. For a long time they look like boys but then all of a sudden they don’t. It’s as if they skip middle age.
Across the room, Danny was going around the walls. He implored the second-to-last nun in a full habit and she refused him. Emily sprawled in an upholstered chair, talking to an older couple I vaguely recognized. Her wings hung pleated over the arm of the chair. The man of the couple must have said something funny because Emily flattened a hand on the belly of her angel gown and bent laughing, but her drink spilled on the King of Club’s sleeve. He stood up violently brushing at it.
“Mmwhy,” I heard someone say as we danced past.
Eli Timber was a graceful dancer. He had long thin legs and they moved as if they were light and controlled from above by strings. I knew how to waltz too, not from Cotillion but my grandmother, but I found myself always counting and humming, in her voice, as I went along.
From a far corner of the room, we heard, “And who are you?” and gasps of delight as a mask was raised.
And then the music changed and we stopped waltzing. There was something underwater free about moving your hands and body and knowing you were being watched but not recognized.
THE MUSIC KEPT ON but I wanted to go outside. I moved to the edge of the room, by all the crowded furniture. On the mantel, I noticed a silver wire basket with my bananas in it. Good. The Briggses were fruit connoisseurs. They had things shipped especially to them from Florida and California, big boxes of pink grapefruits and kiwi and majool dates.
Dorothy walked across the room with a tray of soufflés in tiny ramikins. I took two and napkins and spoons.
It was strange being in Racine staying with the Briggses, my grandmother’s house sold and gone. The French door sighed a little when I opened it. Outside was cold. Danny sat on the cement wall, next to a dry fountain. His cigarette was the only light, that and the small many stars.
My hands cupped my elbows.
“Want my jacket?” He didn’t wait for me, but settled it on my shoulders, patting it down. “What a trip,” he said.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Do you know anybody here?”
“A few.”
“That’s more than me. I don’t know any of them.” It was peaceful here. The weeds were familiar and the outside sounds. Mrs. Briggs’s old fountains and sculptures were chipped and speckled. They looked like ruins. The moonlight made it all seem equal.
“I’m sorry,” I said again.
“I like this. I’m having a good time.”
“Outside?”
“I’m overhearing things. That’s what I like to do at parties. I like to stand somewhere and listen. I know everybody’s gossip by the end of the night.”
Mrs. Briggs’s copied Winged Victory had leaves caught between the right wing and shoulder. The moon lit half of her. I said, “Like your names at the cemetery.” Venus de Milo was down about four feet. David was here, too.
“Should be the fucking Burghers of Calais,” he said, flicking his ashes onto the old stone terrace.
I sighed. “I better go back in.” I’d vowed tonight, I’d talk to every Briggs about the box. Parties were always that for me. Duties. It seemed I’d never gone for no reason. I usually had something else to do besides fun.
I found Merl sitting on a sofa with a group of people ringed around her. The more I looked, she did seem like Alice in Wonderland. It wa
s the forehead.
“A hat shop,” Merl repeated, when I stood next to her. “Millinery. Hat and Glove Heaven, it’s called.” On the coffee table, a tray of vegetables petaled around a dip: miniature carrots, baby corn cobs, tiny asparagus, small eggplant.
“That’s what they told me,” said Estella Clerf.
“From the center of the library and the Charity Benefit Committee to this?” That was the Queen of Hearts.
“And what did he want to do out there?” Merl spoke slowly as always.
“He wanted to be some kind of farmer. I guess he grew up on a farm.” That was a man who was dressed in a toga and a holly wreath on his balding head.
“And here we fixed her up with everyone we knew. And I mean doctors and lawyers, she met at our house. We had everything for her. And she didn’t want a one of them. We always thought she was married to her work.”
Dorothy passed a tray of cheese with tiny red and yellow apples, mandarin oranges and bunches of the miniature grapes. The girl in the elf costume followed behind with pigs in a blanket.
“Italian sausage,” Merl said.
Emily appeared behind her mother. She did almost look like an angel. In the low light and candle glow, her hair seemed to hold fire like a wick.
“He’s a short little poop,” Letitia Skees was saying.
“How old was she?” Emily said.
“And so,” I felt like saying. All my life I’d fundamentally misunderstood social life. My mother had taught me to take it far too seriously. As if more could be gotten out of it than a raw good time. I wasn’t even drinking. I wanted to stay alert. For the box.
Emily had asked the right question. The Joker’s face opened with yawning delight. As she talked her jaw and painted eyebrows moved up and down as if her whole face were diamonds chewing. “Well that’s the interesting thing. Nobody really knows. You know, we never asked. But now we’re all thinking that she must’ve been a lot younger than anyone ever suspected.”
