My Summer With George

by Marilyn French

  A week later, Mrs. Sherman called me into her office. The teachers in Millington High School, determined that I should go to college, had made a vow. First, they took up a collection, and gave me a hundred dollars for a typewriter, clothes, and books. Beyond that, they promised to send me twenty-five dollars a month throughout my college years! I was overwhelmed by their generosity, and my predicament. My heart leaped, my tongue failed, my courage waxed and waned. Could I do it? How could I tell Mother?

  All the way home, I tried to build up my courage. I had a right to a life. Didn’t Jerry and Susan have lives of their own? Weren’t Merry and Tina miserable sacrificing theirs? But what would become of Mother if we all did what I was doing? That was the moral problem. I wouldn’t be earning anything. I’d be the only one in the family who wasn’t contributing something. If Merry and Tina acted this selfishly, Mother would be destitute now that she was old (she was only in her forties, but she seemed ancient to us), after working and sacrificing all those years for us.

  But I wanted wanted wanted to go. I had to go. I would die if I couldn’t go. I couldn’t go on living if I didn’t go.

  I knew that whatever I did would be a judgment upon me, would fix my character forever. I hadn’t made a final decision by the time I got home—I was still mulling and weeping—but the minute I got into the house, I announced the whole thing. I crowed, I laughed, I jumped in the air and cried out for joy—I gave them no alternative but to celebrate with me, congratulate me. Mother was so touched by the teachers’ act that she wept and hugged me. She was so proud of me, she said. Smiling, I swallowed their acceptance, not by a single eyelash flicker revealing my knowledge of my selfishness, my awareness that I had betrayed and abandoned them, my profound sense that my character was now fixed in stone, and it was bad bad bad.

  My conviction that I had a bad character was reinforced at the end of my freshman year in college, when, like a punishment for it, Mother died. It was June 1948, and she was only forty-eight herself. Dr. McCrary told us she’d had angina for years. None of us had known about it, not even Jerry. Merry and Tina and I clung together, weeping, until Jerry and poor wrecked Susan arrived. Devastated, we all tried to comfort each other. Even when she was ill or depressed, Mother’s will had held us together. For all those years, she made keeping the family together our first priority. And staying together had enabled us to survive. Now what would we do? Realizing that she must often have felt sick and weak over the past few years, we girls were overcome with guilt at the way we’d treated her or, worse, the way we had felt about her. We’d been irritable with her, sick of her depression, her constant weariness.

  The night of her burial, we sat in the dark kitchen and tried to remember any moments of happiness she’d had.

  “That lamb’s-wool sweater we all chipped in for, three Christmases ago,” Merry recalled. “She loved that, said it really kept her warm. Even when she had to go out to the porch.”

  “It was such a good color for her too, that light pink,” Tina agreed.

  We chewed cookies.

  “Jerry’s Christmas bonus the year after he was made floor manager. Remember, Jer?” Tina swiveled toward him. “She needed that money so badly, remember? That was the year we had to get an oil burner, when the coal furnace cracked. She was so proud of you, Jer.”

  Jerry smiled weakly.

  “She was happy the time we went to Cape Cod for a vacation when Daddy was alive,” Susan said in a nostalgic voice. “We stayed in a little cabin, and it rained, and she cooked out of cans on a kerosene stove, and the smell made me throw up, but she loved being there. She went swimming. Remember, Jer?”

  He nodded.

  “The day Elsa got her scholarship!” Merry announced. “She was really happy that day, and so proud of you!” All of them turned toward me with glowing faces. They were all proud of me. I burst into tears and ran from the room.

  Yes, my name was Elsa in those days, Elsa Schutz. You can understand why I changed it. I chose Hermione for two reasons: I found it elegant, and it resembled my father’s name, Herman. Since I couldn’t remember my father, I was able to invent him, and over the years, I’d created a sweet loving kindly man I would want to be named for. I chose my last name, Beldame, because it meant beautiful lady—fitting for a romance writer. I have also published books under other names—Ariane Hart, Lorelei Lettice, Misty Marsh—but that was in the years when I had to write several books a year to earn enough to live, yet had to avoid seeming like a spouting faucet. But my sisters still call me Elsa.

  We closed the bakery for the funeral and never opened it again. Merry and Tina packed it away, viciously dropping the fifty-pound bags of flour and sugar and baking powder into cardboard boxes to take to the orphanage a few towns away. They grunted as they lifted the heavy bags, and their teeth were set as if they were casting out something evil and cruel and dangerous. The five-pound blocks of butter and the jars of trimmings—jam for fillings, chocolate sprinkles, maraschino cherries, chocolate chips—they dropped on top, in a wild parody of a cake. I packed up all our unused cake boxes and bags and balls of string to take to the other bakery in Millington: no point in letting them go to waste. A new doughnut shop in town agreed to buy our glass-fronted counter for a hundred dollars. In a few hours, we dismantled the shop we’d spent years getting into its present near-professional shape. No one paused for even a moment of regret, except maybe Jerry, who ran his hand over the old table we once used as a counter (it was going out with the trash), a little nostalgically. But he’d had only six years of it, not fifteen, like Merry and Tina. And Mom.

  When everything was gone, we sat down around the kitchen table. We didn’t look at one another. I felt we’d thrown Mom out in the garbage, and I imagined the others felt the same way. It was as if Mom had become fused in our minds with misery and darkness, with boring, endless work that brought no reward beyond survival. We sat there as it grew dark. I was a little frightened: if we were capable of such rage, what else might we do?

  But after a while, life roused in us. Jerry acknowledged it first. “I’m hungry,” he said. There was nothing in the house to eat, so we walked downtown and had dinner out. In a restaurant. Well, a diner. It was the first time we’d ever eaten out as a family, the first time I’d ever eaten in a restaurant at all. Giggling with the nervousness of the forbidden, we ordered Coke with our dinner. For Mother, Coke was taboo: it was expensive and not nourishing, she said, a waste of money and calories. We didn’t care about calories. In those days, we were all too thin. And that day, we didn’t care about wasting money, either. We had gotten a hundred dollars for the counter, and even with Coke, dinner for the five of us came to only thirteen dollars.

  At the diner, we began stumblingly to talk about what we were going to do now. It was a hard subject, because the truth was, Mother’s death had freed all my siblings. Merry and Tina suddenly recognized that they could now do whatever they wanted to do. I saw them realize it, saw the joy, the terror, and the guilt of it hit their brains like a shot of dope. And Susan and Jerry would be able to spend their whole salaries on themselves. Susan was distraught, breaking into tears at the thought that she had not seen Mother in six years, that Mother had never forgiven her. She was grieving, but I believed she could not forgive herself for feeling happy that she could keep the thirty-five dollars a month she’d been sending.

  Only for me was the new freedom lonely. Mother’s death opened a door for them but brought me only a cold blast. I had selfishly chosen to have my own life, and I had it: but the center of my life had been cut out like the core of an apple. I felt like a paring.

  Over the next few days, we tended to hide out from one another, each of us sunk in a new question: What do I want, just for me? We all felt selfish, wrong, defensive. We snapped at each other at the least thing.

  We were especially depressed at the thought of giving up the Millington house, which had been in our family for four generations. This felt like a complete betrayal of Mother. But we
could not afford to keep it, and the day after we buried Momma, we put the house on the market. Merry and Tina were whispering gleefully, plotting their futures. They were going to move to New York and get rooms at the YWCA until Susan’s roommate Eleanor got married, at the end of the month. Then they would share Eleanor’s room.

  “After that, we’re going to try to drive my other roommate, Audrey, out of her mind,” Susan said.

  “That’s not a very nice thing to do, is it?” I asked tentatively.

  “She’s not very nice,” Susan said tartly. “Ellie and I can’t stand her. She never washes, and she has B.O. She leaves her clothes in a heap on the floor, and they smell up the whole apartment. I never would have accepted her, but I couldn’t say no; she was Eleanor’s best friend. Was. Eleanor can’t stand her now. And once Eleanor leaves, it’ll be unbearable. She’ll be on my back all the time. Whining.”

  “But what will we have to do?” Tina asked, appalled. “To drive her out.”

  “Anything. Talk to her—endlessly—or don’t talk to her at all. Play loud music, especially classical music; she can’t stand that. Flirt with her boyfriends. Whatever.”

  Tina and Merry gave each other long looks. Was there a hint of a grin under their mournful aspects?

  Susan would help Merry get a secretarial job. She might have to start as a typist, or even a file clerk, to brush up on her skills—she hadn’t used them since high school, four years back. Susan was doing very well now: her boss was a vice president of the agency, and she was earning good money. For a woman. We were impressed with her clothes.

  Tina looked vague when we questioned her, said she had no particular plans. Speaking in a low key, shrugging, she said she’d work as a waitress and take some acting classes, but when these last words came out of her mouth, they felt electrical. In an instant, we knew Tina’s secret: she wanted to be an actress and had since she was in fourth grade. She had never said so out loud, but we realized we had always known. If we never acknowledged it, that was because it seemed so impossible.

  Jerry seemed especially pinched and sad. His grief was the worst, maybe because he hadn’t lived with Mother for nine years. He hadn’t watched her progressive deterioration. Jerry did not talk about himself; it seemed he had forgotten how to talk to us. Sometimes he addressed us like hired help he could order around; other times, he spoke to us the way he spoke to Mother, with reverence and love, as if we were his superiors. He had trouble with equality. We had to squeeze information out of him. He said he was now assistant manager but that he really managed the whole bakery. Under our prodding, he admitted he’d been wanting to get married but couldn’t afford it because of the thirty dollars a week he’d been sending Mother. Now he could marry. He had trouble describing his girlfriend, beyond saying she was pretty and nice and a good Catholic. After everyone else was in bed, I asked Susan why Jerry kept mentioning that Delia was a good Catholic, since we were not religious. Christened in our father’s Lutheran church, we had never set foot in it again until Mother’s funeral. Susan made a face, half grin, half grimace.

  “It probably means she is insisting on virginity until marriage, and Jerry is going crazy with horniness.”

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  I couldn’t get over the fact that for Merry, Tina, and Jerry, Mother’s death was perhaps the only avenue to freedom. The cruelty of this awed me. It collapsed any notion I still had about a divine order that gave meaning to one’s acts by distinguishing between virtue and vice, rewarding one and punishing the other. Momma had given up her life to enabling us to survive. She had been a saint, a martyr, the most unselfish person we would ever know. Yet her life had imprisoned us, her death had liberated us. This fact was unbearable.

  It had freed them all—except me. Mother’s life had centered me: her death left me homeless. I wondered where I would go summers and holidays. I was only seventeen, and a babyish seventeen at that. I felt like the orphan I was. I knew this homelessness was my punishment for being a bad person. I knew I deserved it.

  3

  MY RESTLESS BODY HAD still not managed to sleep when the birds began their clamor around five. It was too late to try to sleep now. I took a bath and packed my things. In Janice Altshuler’s well-run house, coffee, toast, jam, and croissants were delivered to the rooms at six forty-five on Monday mornings, saving the morning people from having to think up conversation at that hour.

  Leo dropped me at my apartment about nine-thirty. It was a beautiful June morning. I waved to Ko Chao over the roar of the vacuum cleaner, opened the apartment windows, unpacked my overnight bag and put things away, then made some coffee and sat down at my computer to work. My current novel had only a half-dozen chapters to go. I worked poorly for a while, until my eyes refused to focus on the screen. Turning off the computer, I lay down on the chaise in my study and slept until nearly two in the afternoon, when I was wakened by Lou, my assistant, announcing a seemingly urgent telephone call.

  It was George. He must have called me almost as soon as he returned to Manhattan. This made my heart turn over with a shudder and a bang, like an old car being cranked up.

  “Hey. How are you? Your trip in okay?”

  How sweet. “Yes, fine. Very nice. A comfortable limousine and sweet Leo’s company—what more could I ask?” I laughed.

  “Who’s Leo?” Was there a bit of a snarl in his voice?

  “Leo Altshuler. The man whose house you were in yesterday.”

  “Oh, the little fat bald guy?” he said with (was I imagining it?) relief.

  “Umm. I suppose he could be so described.”

  “So listen. You want to take in a movie?”

  “Sure. When?”

  “Tonight.”

  “Oh, I can’t tonight. I’m busy. Sorry.”

  “Tomorrow night.”

  This was not going well. “Actually, the only night I’m free this week is Thursday. I’d love to go then if you’re free.”

  “Okay. Thursday. You want to have lunch tomorrow?”

  I laughed again. “Sure.” I had to work—the book was due at the end of the month—but the hell with it.

  “I’ll come and pick you up,” he said.

  I was taken aback. In New York, no one picked anyone up. Ever. People met in restaurants, at theaters, at the concert hall. Picking someone up seemed very old-fashioned. It was far too humane and courteous a habit for New Yorkers. It seemed southern.

  “That will be lovely.”

  If he didn’t exactly act like a man in love when he came to pick me up for lunch the next day, he did act wildly excited. My apartment is on Fifth Avenue and has six rooms, three of which—the living room, the study, and my bedroom—face Central Park. George, wide-eyed when he walked in, put on a country-boy enthusiasm as he wandered from one room to another, whistling low as he went. “What a place! What a view! I thought the apartment Columbia gave me was pretty spiffy until I saw this.”

  After he’d toured the entire apartment, he stopped in the middle of the living room, raised his head like a horse tensing to attention, and said in an urgent voice, “You mind if I look at your bedroom again? It is really something!” And strode off.

  Now, what did that mean?

  He returned bubbling with enthusiasm about the view and the room, and kept it up in the elevator and on the street. But he spoke only in general terms—how great it was, how terrific—and I had little sense of precisely what pleased him. We walked over to a little bistro on Lexington that had good light food. We both ordered salads. George was wearing chinos with a blue-and-gray-striped shirt that set off his blue eyes. I wore pale-green pants and a matching V-neck cotton sweater, hoping they made my eyes look green.

  “You look really nifty, Hermione,” he said, gazing at me with a broad smile. His eyes glittered.

  I thanked him and asked about the conference.

  “Well, it’s the damnedest thing! You know, you come to New York, great liberal city, you expect to meet people who are sophistic
ated about race, religion, gender, but damned if these people in this seminar aren’t the most uptight conservative bunch I’ve ever met—God, we’re more liberal down in Kentucky!”

  “Well, who are they? Are they New Yorkers, or do they come from all over?” I don’t like to hear my adopted city slandered.

  “Oh, they come from all over. A few of them are Brits, there’s an Australian and a guy from Hong Kong. But the leaders are all New Yorkers, and they sound just like the others. One guy had a cut on his head and a black eye, and someone asked him about it at the coffee break. Turns out he’d been mugged last Friday. So they got talking about poverty and cultural deprivation and single mothers, but you knew damned well they were really talking about black people. They talked as if blacks were the only people who were poor, or had babies without being married, or mugged people in the street. One of them even brought up the argument that criminals have a gene that predisposes them to crime. So I asked him if he thought the guys who arranged the Watergate break-in had that gene. Or Reagan and Oliver North. And he acted shocked, appalled that I’d say such a thing. He backed away from me as if he’d just found out I was carrying the plague. If you don’t agree with them, they look at you as if you’re a real subversive. And when they say crime, they mean street crime, not crimes committed by government figures, bankers, brokers. White-collar crimes aren’t crimes—they’re just common practice that had the bad luck of being caught.

  “Even after a black editor, Darcy Meeks—a terrific guy—joined us, they went right on talking that way. They acted as if they expected him to agree with them. Damn!”

  “Yes, I’ve heard that too, the new code, a whole new set of euphemisms for blackness.”

  “The Louisville Herald was the first paper in the South to hire blacks, and for our size, we have the most blacks and the most women of any southern paper today. People still talk about the South as if we were benighted, but I tell you, we’re way ahead of most northern cities.” He leaned back and lit a cigarette.