Borrowed Finery: A Memoir

by Paula Fox

  They all went back to the subject under discussion, which Allen and I had briefly interrupted, the marriage of Artie Shaw to Lana Turner. Shaw was urging books upon her, lecturing her, hectoring her. Stella held up her pretty hands. “He wants to educate her against her own wishes. What a darling situation!” Then she turned toward me. “Educate her,” she murmured in an amused, confiding tone.

  I was nearly fainting with self-consciousness in such company, and excited by it, sweating in my tweed suit and not only because of the weather. Stella got up and went into another room. When she returned, she was holding a large photograph of a painting of a dark-haired child.

  “My daughter, Ellen,” she said wistfully. I loved Stella at that moment, and I thought to myself that Ellen was the most fortunate of children, the inheritor of every marvelous thing, especially the velvet dress she was wearing in her portrait.

  Then she rose again. When she came back this time, she was carrying a blue covert-cloth suit in her arms as though it were an infant.

  “May I give you this?” she asked me.

  Everyone in the room had fallen silent. Odets hit a piano key softly, middle C.

  “I think it’s the right size,” she said.

  Harold Clurman nodded his head and smiled at me. Allen said hurrah, for no apparent reason. I took the suit.

  Elsie and Linda

  When Elsie was ninety-two, dying of old age and emphysema, two of my three children urged me to visit her on the island of Nantucket, where, as far as I knew, she had been living for more than three decades. I had not seen her for thirty-eight years.

  I wanted to please them. I had no desire to see her. With my permission, my daughter had given her my telephone number. She called me. I heard the old seductive voice, deep and familiar as my own. I felt the same harrowing tension for a moment; then it went, and it was as if I were speaking politely to an utter stranger.

  I went to the airport the next day, but Nantucket was fogged in and the flight was canceled. I hardly had the nerve for a second try. But I made it without the nerve. I landed on Nantucket around noon. I took a taxi to her address; the driver was a voluble old bohemian who had lived on the island since the late sixties.

  Her house was one of several like it in a new community extending out from the port town. As I got out of the car, I thought of my grandmother, dead and buried without my having been told. “She wouldn’t have been interested,” Elsie had said of me, one of my uncles reported. Perhaps I had deserved it. But not from the woman who was my mother. I looked at the house and shuddered. The door was unlocked.

  I walked into a conventionally furnished living room. From a small room on the left came a sound that I told myself, grimly, was a minotaur breathing, but it was only an oxygen-supplying machine. I looked inside. My mother was asleep on a big bed. I averted my eyes from the figure beneath the bedclothes.

  I must have sat in the living room for twenty-five or so minutes, looking at a magazine I had found on a table, when I was aware that someone was looking at me.

  I put the magazine down. My mother was standing a few feet away, swaying slightly. She reminded me of an old conquistador, thin, tall, white hair like a helmet. I would have recognized her anywhere.

  “Paula?” she asked, beginning to smile.

  “Yes,” I answered, as I stood up. She was wearing a thin white cotton nightgown. Her chest bones protruded slightly. Her skin was transparent and tinged with a bluish cast.

  We shook hands. I followed her into her bedroom just as the front door opened and a young couple entered. They were her caretakers, a South American Indian from Peru and his plump young American wife, pale, with frizzy dyed-blonde hair. They lived in a spare room upstairs.

  He addressed my mother as señora. They had been out on an errand. He was a trained nurse. While I sat in a chair next to her bed, he brought her a drink that looked like malted milk. With a winsome smile, she commanded him never to leave her. Then, still smiling, she asked me if he didn’t have a “perfect Indian head.” I thought of Francisco Pizzarro cutting off such heads.

  I detected panic behind her effort to keep him charmed, an infant’s fear of the dark.

  She asked me to go to a room across from hers and bring her a photograph. I went, found a closed door, opened it, and saw the floor was covered with boxes filled with papers. On the top of one box was a sepia-colored photograph of a man standing in front of a horse and carriage in parkland. I brought it to her.

  “Who do you think this is?” she asked archly.

  I shrugged. She answered her own question dramatically. “Your grandfather! And the horse? It was his own, sent him from Cuba to New York City. Her name was Beauty. He said American horses were too slow for him.”

  She laughed and then had to use the oxygen machine. I put her drink down on a table. She had barely touched it.

  “I want you to have this photograph,” she gasped. She stopped speaking, and the nurse came into the room.

  I went out, and when I came back she had played her trick; she had hidden the picture under the bedclothes knowing, somehow, that I wouldn’t want to search there for it. I didn’t ask her where it was, although I couldn’t help casting glances at the bed.

  I needed to urinate. I excused myself and went outside and walked until I found a field and a tree. I couldn’t use a toilet Elsie might have used. My revulsion was so deep, I took the chance that someone might spot me crouching next to the tree trunk.

  I don’t know what we spoke about during the hours I spent with her. At some point, I mentioned my brothers and sister and their mother, Mary, and she held up her hand.

  “I still can’t hear her name,” she said. I knew it had been over half a century since she had spoken to Mary. When my father died and I had called to tell her, she had made polite uninterested noises.

  I went to the airport an hour earlier than I needed to, hitching a ride with the nurse who, as we drove off, told me he had a part-time job: standing on the small Nantucket airfield holding two lighted rods to guide the incoming airplanes.

  He parked in front of a small airport restaurant I had been too tense to notice when I landed that day. It was dark now, and patches of light from the windows glowed on the ground.

  I walked inside. There were tables, a counter with a plastic cake stand, a coffee machine, a waitress wearing a short black skirt beneath her apron, and an open window to the kitchen. The customers were few: a family with two children, a young middle-aged couple, two men holding hands, a man in a business suit reading a newspaper, two young women speaking earnestly to each other. I sat down at a table, its surface gritty with grains of sugar.

  I was surrounded by the saints of ordinary life, and for an instant I felt that God was in the restaurant. After Elsie.

  A few months later, the nurse’s wife telephoned me at home to say Elsie had died that morning. I murmured something comforting and realized I had spoken as if Elsie’s death was the wife’s loss.

  When I hung up, I felt hollow, listless. I had lost out on a daughter’s last privilege; I couldn’t mourn my mother.

  * * *

  When I was two weeks away from my twenty-first birthday, I gave birth to a daughter. During my pregnancy, I had gone to an agency for financial help, Native Sons of California. A beefy-faced man looked at my swelling belly and said, pointing to a bench, “Sit down, dear. You’ll have a long wait.”

  After a while, I got up and left. My labor lasted a day and a night. In the San Francisco hospital where I went for my confinement, babies were brought into the ward in their wheeled cribs. From the corridor just outside, two nurses looked in at me. I heard one of them say, “Not her.”

  I must have been on a low floor, because I could see, through a window near my bed, the branch of a tree, leaves, a small bird. All the women around me nursed their infants. I had put my daughter up for adoption.

  Ten days later, I went to see one of the doctors who had been an intermediary in the adoption and asked for her b
ack. The doctor told me it was legally too late. I didn’t know any better, so I accepted his lie as truth. I had asked a second doctor who was involved in the adoption to find a Jewish family to take her. I guess to comfort me, he said jovially, “He travels fastest who travels alone.” The world is filled with empty phrases. He hadn’t even gotten the gender right, and he didn’t get the family right. They were middle-aged Sicilians.

  Many years later, Linda found me. One Saturday I received a thick FedEx envelope. I was sitting in my kitchen when I opened it. There was a handwritten note on the top of a letter, and it said, “Go slow.”

  I knew at once. I called up the stairs to my husband, “She’s found me.”

  We wrote every day for three months, sometimes twice a day, telling, telling, telling.

  We didn’t speak on the telephone during that time. We both understood that our communication was to be written. She suggested we meet somewhere, perhaps Santa Fe, New Mexico, where, if we got bored with each other, there would be other sights to see.

  I suggested San Francisco, where we had been parted. She agreed. Her assistant telephoned me to make arrangements, and I flew there one day in mid-May.

  When the airplane was a few hundred yards from the ground, I wished it would crash. In the face of great change, one has no conscience.

  It was eleven-thirty and a clear day in San Francisco. I walked off the plane and into the airport waiting room. I hadn’t gone more than a few feet when I heard running steps behind me. I turned to look at the woman who was doing the running. We both laughed at the same time. We walked so closely together, I could feel her breath on my face.

  “Have you got a cigarette?” she asked me. “I quit yesterday,” she added.

  I gave her one. “Let’s go in there,” I suggested, pointing to an airport bar we were about to pass.

  We spent two hours drinking soda, talking. I found her beautiful. She was the first woman related to me I could speak to freely.

  I have had splendid close friendships with women, beginning with Bernice in elementary school. What I had missed all the years of my life, up to the time when Linda and I met, was freedom of a certain kind: to speak without fear to a woman in my family.

  We went to a hotel where we spent four days together, most of the time in the hotel, like lovers. We had separate rooms and we left notes under each other’s doors. She told me she had wondered about who I was all her life. She had guessed I might be Marilyn Monroe, or a murderous old woman she had seen once on a bus.

  We spent one of the days in what felt like an eternal traffic jam, headed toward Carmel. When silence fell between us, there was no tension.

  She asked me again about her father—she’d written me that question.

  I told her that the day her first letter had reached me I had called him up in Los Angeles, where he had lived for many years. His widow informed me that he had died a few months earlier. What did I want with him? the widow asked. I was an old friend, I said. I had yielded to him once one evening, rather gracelessly.

  Linda and I went to the street where I had lived when I had been pregnant. I had rented a room on Telegraph Hill in a two-story building that was the only house left there from the forties.

  We sat on the curb and looked up at two dark windows. I told Linda how a black friend had carried me to the bathroom the first day I had come home from the hospital, after she had been born.

  I’ll leave us there, sitting close together on the curb. Now and then someone passed by but paid no attention to us as we told each other stories from our lives, falling silent every so often.

  A READER’S GUIDE

  From infancy to womanhood, Paula Fox’s life story embodies essential human experiences: the quest for love and security, a yearning for parental acceptance, the process of getting to know our true selves. Unfolding in a series of moving, precisely drawn scenes, Borrowed Finery inspires compelling conversation. With that in mind, we offer the following questions to enhance your reading group’s discussion of this poignant memoir. For information about other Reading Group Guides visit us at www.henryholt.com

  1. Fox is able to recall her life in Balmville with remarkable clarity, from the contents of the Corning house’s bookshelves to the medicinal scent of Uncle Elwood’s sister. What were the lifelong effects of this chapter in Fox’s upbringing? How did the Reverend awaken Fox’s literary talent?

  2. Fox’s road to adulthood is a circuitous one. After momentarily calling the Hudson Valley home, she is shuttled to locales including Cuba, the West Coast, Cape Cod, Florida, and the outer boroughs of New York City. In the book, does her fractured sense of home become whole? Compare her depictions of her various residences. Is there any common denominator among them?

  3. Judging solely on the book’s opening scene, in which Fox cannot afford more than one suit for her job as a clerk, you might expect Borrowed Finery to be a memoir about poverty. Is it? How is money handled by Fox’s various families? What do you make of her father’s financial extremes and his exploitation of the few possessions his daughter has?

  4. Like many children who are estranged from their parents at an early age, Fox is a fearful child, especially afraid of the well, the furnace, and the windy road to West Point. How does she comfort herself from these early terrors?

  5. The author’s name is the feminine version of her father’s name, as if she had been thought of as Paul Fox, Jr. Though he causes her tremendous heartache, does her dad impart any positive legacies to his daughter and namesake? Given her father’s job as a screenwriter, does her choice of occupation (novelist) seem significant?

  6. Paula Fox’s ancestry is as varied as the homes of her youth. How do her many roots balance one another? In what way are they at odds? With which aspects of her lineage does she seem most at home?

  7. In terms of tone and structure, do you detect any shift when Fox progresses from childhood to adolescence and from teen-hood to adulthood?

  8. Fox’s memoir is full of brushes with celebrity, usually during decidedly unglamorous moments. What is the effect of these cameo appearances in the midst of Fox’s struggle to meet basic needs?

  9. Fox encounters numerous glimpses of religion in Borrowed Finery, ranging from Uncle Elwood’s Congregational parish to Mattie’s “testifying” in the woods, and including Fox’s days in the Catholic boarding school and her grandmother’s anti-Semitism. What do we learn about Fox’s own take on spirituality?

  10. Fox spent enormous amounts of time by herself as a child, often traveling unaccompanied on subways and even swimming alone in Cuba while a revolution simmered. She observes that it was safer for children in those days. How does her self-sufficiency compare to that of today’s many latchkey kids?

  11. As a young woman, Fox struggles with two universal issues: career and romance. She halfheartedly attends Juilliard to satisfy her father, botches a future in modeling, and marries an older actor/seaman because she “could think of no alternative.” When does her identity at last become less fractured?

  12. Unlike the daughter she put up for adoption, Paula Fox had intermittent contact with her birth parents and their relatives, yet didn’t meet the daughter she put up for adoption until the daughter was an adult. How might Fox’s memoir have unfolded had she never known Paul and Elsie? Why were they incapable of giving her the kind of love that she so easily showed Linda in their first few days together?

  13. Elsie’s death is described in the same chapter as Fox’s reunion with Linda. What is the significance of these two events occurring just paragraphs away from each other?

  14. After a life of charity clothes, rented houses, and surrogate parents, Fox receives a blue suit from Stella Adler. How does this one contrast with the blue suit in the opening scene? What does this “borrowed finery” from Adler represent?

  ALSO BY PAULA FOX

  Novels

  Poor George

  Desperate Characters

  The Western Coast

  The Widow’s Child
ren

  A Servant’s Tale

  The God of Nightmares

  Nonfiction

  The Coldest Winter

  Books for Children

  Maurice’s Room

  A Likely Place

  How Many Miles to Babylon?

  The Stone-faced Boy

  Good Ethan

  Hungry Fred

  Dear Prosper

  Portrait of Ivan

  Blowfish Live in the Sea

  The Slave Dancer

  A Place Apart

  One-eyed Cat

  The Moonlight Man

  Lily and the Lost Boy

  The Village by the Sea

  Monkey Island

  Amzat and His Brothers

  The Little Swineherd and Other Tales

  Western Wind

  The Eagle Kite

  Radiance Descending

  Praise for Borrowed Finery

  “Captures the off-balance existential wooziness of experience in compact, unbidden epiphanies … [A] singular, unsentimental memoir.”

  —Chris Lehmann, The Washington Post Book World

  “Fascinating.”

  —Thomas Mallon, The New York Times Book Review (cover review)

  “The marvel of Borrowed Finery is just how even-tempered and objective her approach is to material that is ready-made for judgment.… Entirely refreshing.”

  —Chris Navratil, The Boston Globe

  “[Fox is] one of our nation’s most particular and morally probing writers.… There’s nothing naïve about her plain language and clean, sharp images; she’s an artist all through, shaping the memoir as deliberately as she does the fiction.”

  —Polly Shulman, Newsday

  “Tantalizing for its restraint. Paula Fox’s much-anticipated memoir, Borrowed Finery, recounts with her trademark economical style her lonely and nomadic childhood.”