And yet I felt myself growing protective of Kendra, who it seemed to me had a face made for tragedy.
It’s funny; eventually I’d introduce Audrey to Kendra—something about their, how to say, ability to withhold judgment suggested that they’d get along—and the three of us would sometimes go together to Zooprax, the Barnard film society, to see great old things like The Major and the Minor and Angels with Dirty Faces. But I knew Fang and Trina would have no interest in the likes of Kendra at all. And in fact I was all too aware that Trina was looking at me in her canny way with her amber eyes as I told these stories. After we’d all finished smoking and put out our cigarettes, I’m ashamed to admit now, right in the remains of our dining-hall dinners (I can picture a Camel Filter plunged into the blameless side of a barely touched slice of sponge cake), we all wearily picked up our satchels and trudged off to our various places of work and/or study. Audrey headed to Havemayer, Fang to Avery, Trina to her dorm, and I to my job at Burgess-Carpenter, which was at that time the cool library within the hulking mass of Butler, cool not only for its wonderful holdings but because the guy who oversaw the work-study students was very understanding of angry young punk-rock kids and, as a bonus, played in a Yo La Tengo–ish band with his wife, whom I remember to be an extremely short person and an almost preternaturally awesome guitarist.
Anyway.
Trina lingered with me a moment—we of course had to pollute our lungs with another cigarette before parting—and I remember she said to me something like, It’s not that I don’t think Kendra’s nice and all, but maybe you should watch your back.
4
It should probably be stated that once I was infatuated with a person, I displayed very little talent for watching my back.
Also, I’m probably making this sound like I was one cool customer, rolling with the punches, taking things as they came, etc., but in reality I was an extremely self-conscious, consistently second-guessing, routinely defective personage. I wanted to be all hard and bad and not caring, but really I was just about as tough emotionally as your cake-baking granny.
But neither was I one of those weepy, sentimental teenagers. I hadn’t gone out for any high school theater group, I did not write lavish how-I-will-miss-you notes in friends’ yearbooks, I did not believe in group hugs. I was suspicious whenever I saw lots of people all doing the same thing at the same time. At my all-girls Catholic high school, sometimes they’d make us assemble for whatever reason on the bleachers in the gymnasium—there was, for example, an annual faculty-student volleyball game, just the kind of thing to make you want to projectile vomit—and at the end of the day, Brother Zuppa-de-Zum would lead the prayer, In the name of the Father, and of the Son…And since the great banks of bleachers faced each other on either side of the gym, you would see two hundred girls all crossing themselves at the same time, like a synchronized stadium wave, and you would understand that you were on the other side, with the two hundred other girls, subsumed into this stadium wave yourself. And if you were like me, you preferred not to.
Anyway, after that conversation in the dining hall, strangely enough, Kendra began showing up on campus.
I was at my work-study job, doing the thing they called “shelf-reading” one day—which consisted of looking at the spine of each book on a given set of shelves to make sure the order of the call numbers was correct, and which was kind of a useless activity, since things in Burgess-Carpenter were in shockingly good order, which perhaps proves that angry punk-rock kids make conscientious book shelvers—when she appeared. Actually, by that point in the semester it had become clear to me that being sent off to shelf-read actually meant Go disappear into that room for two hours, young person, and do whatever you like! And so I would go, take Elsa Morante’s History down from the shelf, make myself comfortable in a hidden corner of the floor, and read until my time was up. In this way I actually read that whole 555-page novel while in the employ of Columbia that semester. So I was off in a corner reading Morante when I looked up, and there stood Kendra.
“Do you want to go get a drink?” she asked me.
It was just about three in the afternoon.
“Strange to say, I’m actually working.”
She tilted her head to the side and gave me a devilish eye.
“I totally have an urge for shake-and-bake right now,” she said.
“Shake-and-bake?” I said with low seriousness, not wanting to appear ignorant about drug varieties.
She rolled her eyes at me.
“Chicken, honey! That shit with the beet coloring and modified food starch and all that crap—mmm!” she said in a pretend southern drawl. She stuck out her hand and pulled me to my feet, and that day I clocked out early.
The rest of that semester was all sewed up: it was go to class, go to work, hang out with Kendra, and study when I could. Sometimes she’d convince me to blow off the dining hall and we’d go to her dorm kitchen to make dinner, which invariably consisted of some junk-food thing she couldn’t have at home because Clarice was such a fascist WASP. Weekends, when Kendra’s parents and brother Bert were up at the country house, we’d hang out at Eleventh Street, ostensibly because Kendra had to watch Cornelia and Zeyde—her brother Jerry never appeared—but really because despite everything, Kendra loved being in that house, that world, and maybe understood how much I did too. It wasn’t long into this scene when I came to understand that her mother, the Clarice she was always referring to, was Clarice Marr.
Clarice Marr!
I should mention that I grew up in a house full of books. My father was an equal-opportunity book buyer, a man with a BA, an EdM, and a JD who nonetheless believed that every book ever produced had some kind of wisdom to impart. Child of the Depression who carried that Depression on his back all his waking hours, he trawled library sales, flea markets, and discount stores, buying books for his kids, for himself, for his incarcerated students up at Hell’s Acres (who were generally appreciative of Dr. Varani’s kindnesses, except for the boy who set a copy of Otto of the Silver Hand on fire and threw it at my father’s head). In our house we had incomplete runs of long-defunct encyclopedia sets, easy-eye editions of Erewhon and The First Men in the Moon that had something like five lines to the page, automotive manuals, Time Reading Program Special Editions of books by Agnes Newton Keith and John P. Marquand that smelled strongly of glue and whose spines would loudly and irreparably crack when you opened them, multiple copies of Robert’s Rules of Order, enormous and contradictory histories of the Black Plague, the Great Game, and the Expedition of the Thousand, issues books from the ’50s and ’60s like Why Johnny Can’t Read, The Power Elite, Soul on Ice, The Hidden Persuaders, big nostalgic scrapbooks with names like I Remember Distinctly, Fighting Forces Series paperbacks about the fish, plant, and reptile life of the Pacific, and cool-looking things that yielded little explanation when seven-year-old me tried to read them, such as Pedagogy of the Oppressed, The Wretched of the Earth, and Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds—that last was quite something, but I stuck with it for one whole afternoon round about 1976. My terminally furious, righteously indignant dad also had hundreds of law books and journals, self-improvement books that concentrated on positive thinking—ha!—and how to get ahead in the world. Besides all these, there was my mother’s humble stock of art and architecture books, her large stock of devotional literature—she had a special interest in stigmatics, beheaded or disemboweled martyrs, and saints beset with any sort of skin affliction—and her much-read pamphlets on topics such as the coming of the Antichrist, Venerable Edel Quinn, and the Great Chastisement. I am actually not doing justice to the breadth of books that were packed double-deep and in no particular order in the bookshelves of our house. I remember, as an early teen, the friend of one of my brothers saying to me, I always like coming to your house because there’s always so much to read—he was holding a copy of One-Dimensional Man in his hand, though I didn’t know who Marcuse was at the time—and how I sniffed
at him, offended, because I had been to his house, his palatial house in the north part of the city, which was equipped with a swimming pool, a laundry chute, multiple bathrooms, and an Anglo lawn jockey, and I thought he was making fun of our crummy little row house. But it turned out that he was sincere. Now I appreciate these things, but for many years of my life I saw only what I did not have.
What I did not have, and wanted so much.
At any rate, amid curios like I Saw Red China and library-sale paperback bargains by Frances Parkinson Keyes, I came across a book with a photograph of a very striking woman on the back of it. The book was a big ’70s-looking thing with a title in the swoopy, chunky typography used on a lot of books by women in that era, and the writing inside didn’t interest me so much as did the photo of the woman, who sat at a desk in an elegant room lined with bookcases. In her hand is a cigarette with an agonizingly long ash, which she holds beside her cheekbone. She looks directly into the camera with a thick, studied insouciance, and her arched eyebrows give an imperial cast to her face. Actually, the woman reminded me of no one so much as Tallulah Bankhead.
Clarice Marr. That particular book, Waxen Minds, Marble Wills, I was to find out much later, was her one crossover hit, and it had dated badly, not unlike the other issues books kicking around our house (Famine 1975!). It was the kind of book that was refuting another book about some very specific midcult moment that was perhaps refuting another book, but the linkages had been lost to history. When I finally read it, I found it mostly boiled down to an embarrassing defense of what could only be called female exceptionalism. But that came later, once I knew Clarice. And knowing her, let’s just say, colored my judgment.
In college, Clarice Marr was just a name. She wrote essays, I knew, and I classed her with Susan Sontag in my mind, though somewhat down the ladder and minus the boots and the cool and the skunk stripe. Years later, when I was so much in her company, Clarice would always be going on about how we’re only allowed to have one female public intellectual at a time, and because of the mere bad luck of her having started publishing later than Sontag, she had to walk forever in the woman’s shadow. Maybe it was because of this that Clarice endlessly insisted on herself, lavishing superlatives on her own work, complimenting her reflection in the mirror, implying that any woman around her, insightful or lovely or intellectually nimble though she might be, was strictly Amateur Night.
One late hungover morning Kendra, Cornelia, and I had been playing hide-and-go-seek, with Zeyde temporarily left alone in the parlor, listening on his little orange transistor radio to the station named for Eugene V. Debs, WEVD, which at that time still had some Yiddish-language programming. Kendra had never really given me a tour of the house, and so I just followed her lead and went where she did, roaming up and down and all over its floors. That is, except for the master bedroom. Kendra never seemed to open that door.
Sometimes we’d go to her brother Bertrand’s bedroom and snoop. It was an amazing room, a Wunderkammer, filled with very particular collectibles such as antique electric fans, bone-handled penknives, vintage hatboxes artfully stacked in order of descending size, and an entire wall of turn-of-the-century hand-tinted postcards of impossible places like Örebro, Sebastopol, and Île de Salagnon. Kendra didn’t get along with Bertrand and especially hated the fact that he worked as their mother’s secretary: What a successful parasite, she would hiss. She also hated the excruciatingly neat order he kept his sock drawer in, and she was always yanking it open and messing up what she called his candy-ass gangster hose—men’s silk dinner socks, stored with rolls of colored tissue paper stuck into them—or leaving an old and curiously disgusting-looking jar of Nutella nestled in their midst. From Bertrand’s room there were double doors leading to a kind of storage area and, on the other side of it, pocket doors that led to the master bedroom. Sometimes the doors were left slightly open and one could almost see in, but Kendra never entered that room.
That day playing hide-and-go-seek, as Cornelia counted one Mississippi, two Mississippi loudly up to one hundred, I soundlessly ran up the stairs until I found myself in Bertrand’s room. I tried under the bed, but it was too low, and then I found myself in the storage passage, thinking I could close myself in the tall, narrow linen closet (I was about a hundred pounds at the time). Then I heard Cornelia speed up her counting, and I squeezed through the pocket doors into the master bedroom.
I stared. The curtains were half closed against the light, but even so I could see it was the most extravagant room in the house. Except for Kendra’s rumpus room and sleeping quarters, the Marr-Löwenstein abode was in impeccable taste, but this room looked like the set of some naughty operetta.
An enormous bed filled the room, canopied and festooned with swags of stiff pink-and-silver stuff that trailed to the floor. The same fabric, gathered and ruched and overabundant, hung before the tall windows, which flanked a gilt-edged pier glass. A recamier in contrasting silk stood by one of the windows, and there was a rococo coiffeuse, a vanity, with another big mirror, this one framed in bunchy, curling garlands of carved and painted roses, with a low, tufted stool in a more sedate Directoire style before it. On the marble mantel of the fireplace sat a big silver loving cup stuffed full with dried hydrangeas, and over it hung a gloomy nightscape of a wood in the style of Ralph Albert Blakelock, which seemed out of place in the room, it being so dour and lonely. That was when my eyes landed on the photograph of Clarice Marr. I went around the bed, picked it up, and gazed at it. And as I held it in my hands, my mind did a kind of delayed, exhausted Oh.
Oh. Clarice. That Clarice.
And looking about this silken, tufted, overdone, feminine-in-the-worst-way room, all silvers and golds and pinks, I couldn’t help but think that Kendra never came into it because she was disgusted by the idea of her mother having sex.
“You’re supposed to hide, Francesca!” Cornelia, exasperated, said to my back.
I put the photograph in its heavy frame down again, and I turned to her. But she had seen me looking.
“Isn’t it beautiful?” Cornelia breathed out.
“Yes,” I said, and I surprised myself by the unexpected ardor in my voice.
There was some noise in the hallway. The door opened, and Kendra stuck her head in. She looked from me to Cornelia and back again.
“Let’s get out of here,” she said coldly.
Kendra liked nothing so much as the Saturday morning chill-out: to hole up in what she called the rumpus room, which looked out on the backyard, with cinnamon toast and picture books, mountains of pillows on the floor, favorite movies in the VCR, lolling around in pajamas late into the afternoon, having pizza for lunch. The only thing that kept this from being what a lucky ten-year-old did was Kendra’s obligatory inclusion of Percocets, Vicodins, or at the very least codeine. Valium and such sedatives only made you “flat,” Kendra explained to me, like any competent research chemist, and were no fun at all. You needed a good painkiller to “take the edge off.” Conversely, amphetamines were only for nighttime. Back in the city where I grew up, which was a lickety-split exit off the popular Miami-to-Maine I-95 drug-trafficking corridor, I would think of anyone who knew as much about illicit psychopharmacology as a hopeless loser, but with Kendra it was something else entirely. We spent so much intense time together so quickly that in fact I became magically immune to Kendra’s quirks and contradictions.
For example, my crew all liked to think that we were, as Fang-Hua would say, punk as fuck, but when I hung out at the house on Eleventh Street, it became clear that Kendra’s heart really belonged to Tin Pan Alley. She liked show tunes. It would be hard to explain exactly how uncool this was at that time. The Löwensteins had a baby grand piano in the parlor—the absolute ruin of a room, Kendra would say with mock disdain, paraphrasing Elsie de Wolfe, which I of course didn’t know back then—and one Sunday morning when it began to snow hard, she ordered Cornelia in from the kitchen downstairs (where she often could be found making freaky old desserts like
war cake or cherries jubilee) and told her she wanted to sing. Cornelia had great piano-playing chops for an eleven-year-old, and she opened the lid and did some crazily good Fats Waller–style glissandos up and down the keyboard.
I went and wheeled in Zeyde from the solarium, pulled over a chair, and sat to listen.
Kendra, who had briefly disappeared, made her entrance. We all turned to look. She wore a glamorously tattered kimono and, tied around her hips, a fringed scarf. Dangling from her ears were big chandelier earrings, and on her head was a lamé toque with a mashed feather aigrette. In one gloved hand she held a long cigarette holder, a red Fantasia burning in it. She crossed the room, turned haughtily to her audience, and leaned against the piano in a seen-it-all-sucker posture. She turned to Cornelia, whose dangling feet in blue PRO-Keds barely reached the pedals, and gazed upon her for some moments with a weary Marlene Dietrich stare. Then she gave Cornelia the chin, signaling her to start.
Cornelia played an introduction that I didn’t recognize, drew it out to a lugubrious length, then tipped her head somberly to Kendra, who began to sing with a laden heart:
When the only sound in the empty street
is the heavy tread of the heavy feet
that belong to a lonesome cop…
I open shop.
When the moon so long has been gazing down
on the wayward ways of this wayward town
that her smile becomes a smirk,
I go to work.
“ ‘Love for Sale’!” Zeyde said to me, turning. “It’s a heartbreaker!”
Never mind that the idea of singing a song about a streetwalker to your eighty-seven-year-old grandfather was, to me, crazy obscene. But. No one in that house ever noticed any eccentricity in their own behavior.
Time's a Thief Page 5
