The Bobby-Soxer

by Hortense Calisher

  My father shook his head. “Your brother won’t talk to her. As for going South to see your grandfather, who would naturally like to see his only grandson—Tim won’t hear of it, though I would gladly send him. He says he hates the South. How could he? He hasn’t been since he was four.”

  Of course he hated it. It always took her away. And with me. I felt a twinge for my ailing grandfather, absent from the dinner table and with his naughty tongue quieted. “I’ll go down there. End of summer.” I would be my brother’s substitute, as I often had been, as far as down home would allow. I wouldn’t hunt and shoot with my grandfather—he would never have let me, even if he were well enough, but I could ride. Granddaughters were not the same to him, but I would do what I could.

  I gathered up the box the earphones had been in. “What’s that other long box?”

  “That? Oh, that’s for your brother. Army-Navy Store stocks them too. A pulley exerciser. He asked for one.”

  My brother was always trying to stretch his height. People used to say to me, “Why don’t you give him some?” But now that we were grown they’d stopped that out of consideration—for him.

  “What’s that you’re wearing?” my father said suddenly.

  I had been having one of my mother’s sessions in front of the mirror, like when the dresses came up north from Miss DeVore. Only, I had been trying myself on. Nowadays I reminded myself quite pleasantly of the six-foot Trilby in the old illustrated Du Maurier, which had come along with the furniture from the other house. Though I couldn’t sing, I did have her noble foot, the one all the artists in that eighteen-ninetyish Paris atelier raved about—a Greekish drawing of which was in the book. I was thinking that if I swept my hair into a Psyche knot and brow curls, I could be a model too; Bill Wetmore had told me the 1890 goddesses were coming back. I had the foot anyway, and the neck. The onyx-and-green bracelet had seemed to go with them.

  “That’s Cartier, if ever I saw it,” my father said in a tone strange to me. “I know something about those gewgaws. Nineteen twenty, I should say. Where did you ever—?” He closed his mouth, which my brother’s does resemble. Well cut, if scissory.

  “I swapped it. Not for keeps. Down home.” As I looked at my wrist, the gewgaw, as he called it, did seem to have come from there.

  I don’t know where else the lies come from unless from a long way back, and harbored early. And I don’t say he believed me. He knew where the lie came from as well as me.

  “Quite a friend, he must be.” He didn’t ask what I’d swapped for it.

  “Not a he. A she.” My voice was as strange as his. “She looks something like—Bill Wetmore.”

  I think he and I were as smiling-close then as we would ever get. Most of all, he would know when the lies were only fantasies. I would trust him to the end for that.

  He shouldered the box with the pulley in it. Holding stuff that way jaunties a man. “I’m going to take your brother away for a bit. Rio.”

  “But haven’t they—?” Defaulted? I didn’t like to think of him as a bad businessman. I didn’t mind that much about my brother.

  “No—that’s why we’ll go. The money’s there all right. They were just being—Latin. I’ll make him work it out.”

  “Him? How?” Hurt for my brother after all, I wailed it. Though I couldn’t see him as ever close to me, we had been through serious times.

  “Oh, not your brother,” my father said, laughing. “Though he’ll work out well enough.” No—the man who owes me. He’ll take care of us.” His face changed. I thought he had never looked more—sophisticated.

  And so the man did, ultimately sending my brother to college with an allowance fit for an heir—which my brother spent on books, and whatever else would equip him to realize his dream—a history post at Harvard. Where Tim is now, and ever will be, unless he gets in trouble with a boy. Though nowadays perhaps only Tim himself would think that scandalous.

  “You wouldn’t want to move over to your grandmother’s? No, I don’t suppose.”

  “Oh, I don’t mind her as I used. I kind of even like her—” Spirit? Style? “Nastiness.”

  He laughed out loud at that. His mouth could lose its thin line.

  “I could hold my own,” I said.

  “I bet you could.”

  “But she doesn’t—you know? See me.”

  Her eyes passed over me always, in a way that when I was a child had frightened me. As if I couldn’t be there. As if she wouldn’t have it.

  I saw he knew this was true. His own eyes traveled over me. “Well—you’re no poppet.” The eyes drooped guardedly. Finally he put out both his hands to me. “She doesn’t understand, you see. That you’re just a modern girl.”

  He did. That’s what he gave me. I have it yet.

  “Your mother’ll be home in a week.” Again his face changed. Not darkened. Just—changed. “She doesn’t know it yet. But she will be.” He slid the pulley exerciser box under his armpit. Held it there. Clicked his tongue at it—his sound. Looked up at me again. “You’ll be all right then?”

  I saw he meant for more than just now. I didn’t know what dangers he wanted reassurance I’d be safe from. But I knew I would be. “I’ll be all right.”

  We clasped hands on it. As he turned to go he gave himself a shake, squaring his shoulder, the white forelock cresting. He was a father anyone would be proud to take round a campus, and over the years of my scholarship I would hunger for that.

  We never met again in our own house.

  My mother gave no sign of coming home. In our phone calls I did not mention his prediction, and I did not brood on it. Probably it belonged to that general apprehension all the grown seemed to share: once I had a future not tied to theirs, I might escape it.

  Yet during this interval I might have been too much of a loner even for me if I hadn’t found another interest, in the sitter agency our school ran as seriously as a church sodality, and so successfully that the neighboring towns could be excused for taking it for granted that this was mainly what a junior college was for. Boys and girls both were solicited, on the theory that we were being trained for parenthood—as it turned out we were to be, though not solely because of the children under our flashily intermittent care. Since the boys did join up, we were given the impression we were all advanced social thinkers, though in practice the boys were also under order to escort us girls to each household, so that we might jointly inspect it and its owner for lack of infectious diseases, honest intent with no risk of rape from fathers or grown brothers, free soda pop and a working television. If a girl didn’t like what she saw, she could be driven home, the bargain with that household forever dropped. The idea was to make it clear to putative stranglers and other molesters—and to the sitters themselves—that we traveled in twos. Boy sitters were sometimes refused by the parents of girl children, but otherwise flourished. Since family cars were used in rotation, we never could be sure who would drive who, but some pairing-off for cuddling on the way home could usually be counted on, so the sitter service was a kind of dating group, too. One forgets, as the college’s social affairs office maybe intentionally did, that in those years everything points to the sexual. For some of us, of course, it will be that way for life.

  At home it was lonely, but in a way that I loved. Knobby had turned up the woman, not from Tokyo but from Kyoto, who after due correspondence would arrive to marry him. Meanwhile, in awe of the holy place she came from, he now drove all the way to Rutgers University to have a Japanese professor there audit his return letters, which was to work beautifully for both poetic exchange and the marriage, for although the fiancée who arrived would not be according to the picture sent—of the convent-bred daughter of the owner of a geisha house—but would turn out to be the mother herself, she was far more suitable for a man of fifty-five. Knobby, too, at the time was deceiving us, or else our own ethnic innocence had. He was a student, but not a young one.

  My grandmother meanwhile depended on him for news of me,
but never came near, or asked me by. That suited me but horrified Knobby, as did the disconnected state of our family. She had been told of my babysitting Saturday nights, he not being sure it was proper. Though her answer had been, “Well, I’m not going to be sitter to her,” he still was loath. I finally explained to him that I ought to be allowed because I was studying households, which I was. I reminded him that he himself had remarked to me that in the States one could excuse almost any activity if one said one was studying it.

  “What is it ours lack most?” I said one Saturday evening as we were cooking our separate solaces. I knew how sadly lacking he found the two households he commuted between.

  I could see us pass now before that opaque glance of his. Ancient tyrant, but no protectress. Tender schoolgirl, even one so towering.

  “Obligation.”

  He was wrong, but in the newly scoured kitchen this sounded like a sternness we perhaps needed.

  I accepted some frail bits from his evening platter, always tactfully arranged as if it were to be shared. “I shall study that.”

  To approach some house with the coppery glow of life shining from it and ready to be dispensed, to enter another one gaunt with a tension readying itself to ride the evening out—or to learn after a couple of Saturdays in each that I had misjudged and must even switch these views, taught me more than the language of appearances. Unlike some of the sitters, I never opened dresser drawers; it would have been like using the dictionary for a crossword puzzle. That fine moment would be sacrificed—when the pattern leapt to its own logic as if from the recesses of one’s own brain. A strange household, when properly observed, was layered like a street. I was learning my vocation, even before I knew its name. However I was to perform it—if not in paint or words, then perhaps by sacrificing bits of my own flesh, almost in the way Knobby pincered for me a quail’s egg or a minute ear of corn, this observing was the adventure I was fitted for.

  One night, a boy and girl picked me up. They were known to be a couple. He would deliver me, then her, then go to his own assignment, later calling for each of us around midnight and dropping us back at our homes, all in an order that would give those two some periods of time alone. I didn’t mind. The sitter boys seemed to me either louts or prisses, the girls altogether too refined, in what I now knew was the provincial way. Similarly, I put them off, the boys and girls both, by clearly not being ready for what they were so ready for. All of them were itching to construct a household themselves.

  So it happened that the skinny, nervously doting boy who was driving us, all the time bending his fancy mop of curls to the girl next to him, I being the third in the front seat, dropped me off first, and with a fast U-turn made off again, before I had quite seen where I was.

  I was due at a house in a street called “the Arterial,” where the small girl I was to mind, whose mother had phoned me, must never have anything made with wheat. I had wondered whether she thought I carried wheat around in my pockets. But they all had some special stipulation which meant that particular child to them, I could wonder what my mother’s might have been for me, if I wanted to. I didn’t.

  Standing on the crooked path, I saw where I was, on that other girl’s assignment, and sure as well that until midnight that pair, embarked on their routine of time stolen, weren’t about to double back for me. I was in Cobble Row.

  I knew the house. Once again I mourned Phoebe, only five doors down from here. She would have been the only one with whom I could have shared this: how I was now walking up the path my mother must often have trod, slipping on the round stones in those dainty heels of hers, never vulgarly stiletto but curved in. How I knocked now at the witching door, thinking that I had never sat with a newborn baby before, which was about all this one could be. How Craig Towle, the dark man of all this town’s sonnets, opened it.

  I had to bend my head to get in under the door. Once inside, I could straighten up, though barely. The house was identical with the Wetmores’, but I had been shorter then. Over there it had been dirtily sallow, a house handed down and not risen above, beyond a sunporch added on from the grandmother’s earnings as the town’s head nurse. Here, with the short, thick beams exposed, sprigged wallpaper and floors stripped from linoleum back to pine, it was trying to shrink my brain to Revolutionary era size and to ignore the rest of me.

  Craig Towle wasn’t. He was giving me the look older men did on the street. Sometimes a man muttered at me, often a short one, Big enough for you if you want, baby. When a girl my size wasn’t a round-shouldered washout, that’s what she got. Quickly I told him who I was. In case he didn’t recall.

  He did stare and stare. “Good Lord. Of course.” His face didn’t change, now that it knew I was my mother’s daughter. It even came forward, the nose jutting like a guardrail. “How’s that old beldame, your grandmother?”

  How did he already know I wouldn’t mind him saying that?

  “Is that Penny?” came a voice.

  In the room to the left, where the Wetmores had installed a Heatilator, the Craig Towles had had the old inglenook exposed, black iron pots hanging in its niches. Seated at its table, over a jigsaw puzzle, the bobby-soxer got up slowly. Though her name was Nancy, I never learned to think of her by it. “Oh—you’re not Penny. Oh—hello.”

  “This is—” he began.

  “I know who she is,” she cut in. Once she must have been quicker-mannered than him, in the casual ways we young ones were. Now and again this would show. Through the sloth. “I asked the bookshop lady who you were.”

  The silver-blond hair was dog-eared and gone greenish, as that kind of hair does when left to dull. Under the once-charming pink wrapper which she must be too much in the habit of, I saw where the baby was—still inside. Then why was I here?

  He was watching. “Our live-in goes for the weekend. I don’t like to leave her alone.”

  In those days, when there was only one thing to say, I often said it. “Then why do you?”

  He cocked his head. I would one day use that same ploy. Listening for the motive, one ignores the speech.

  “He has to work.” When she stood that straight the baby stuck out. I saw she wouldn’t have herself pitied. She even smiled.

  “Penny and I got ourselves switched. Maybe you would rather she—?”

  “Oh no. Not at all. Tell the truth, she was kind of a trial. I know the names of all the boys on your route. And their characteristics.”

  She had a delicate accent. I wondered how many languages she knew, not having had to wait until college for it. There was nothing wrong-in-the-head about her, I thought. She had fallen into the habits women sometimes did when left too much to themselves. Like me, she was learning the several thicknesses of silence in a house. What would a wife’s silence be, when the man is with someone else? Such a young new wife.

  “I’ll have to have a phone number to call,” I said. “That’s the rule.”

  “Sorry, I don’t have a phone there. That’s why I go.” He was still staring. “It’s a hayloft. Or once was. Five doors down.”

  “Wetmores’!” I said. “Phoebe. How is she?”

  “Off to college, I hear. I’ve never really talked to her.”

  “I wonder where.”

  “Somewhere around Boston I gather. From my landlady.”

  “I have—” the bobby-soxer said. “Talked to her.”

  I saw Phoebe, all scrawn and no great shakes as a scholar, but already in Boston. “Nurse Stevens always wanted her to go. But there was never enough money around for two. I wonder how they managed it.” Under their eyes I heard how I was talking. Like the town.

  “Well, I pay them top rent,” he said. “Canny old bird. Brings me coffee now and then. But I don’t get to use her phone. If you need to, you come running, eh. You look as if you could.” He dropped a kiss on the top of her head, looking up at me. He’d kiss mine, I’d felt, if he could reach it. “See why your grandmother’s kept so quiet about you,” he said.

  Then he
was off. We could hear him scrunching down the path.

  When he was gone she said softly and slowly, “I know who you are.” Then at her direction we sat in the inglenook and had soda pop.

  I went there four times. As we felt each other out, we switched to beer, were girlish with each other but never quite became friends. Even aside from what we never discussed, how could we? She hadn’t finished college, and didn’t give a hang for it. She had already been halfway round the world, if only in play, and expected the other half would soon be coming up. What I wanted to sacrifice for I didn’t yet know, only that I wanted to. I could tell her that, and she wouldn’t laugh, but that would be her best effort. I grew to love her instead, for what she was. The girls in the blue and yellow sweaters—I would never get over admiring them, even for their limitations. Though she would never again be one of them.

  Sometimes, as she went chipping along in the voice of all her summer crowd, I wondered if that had yet got to her. She seemed at times to forget she had a baby in her. I know now that this can happen to anyone so fixed, at any age, and not only with the first. You are maybe sitting alongside the fire, even pleased with what you’ve got and are. Or in a room of cocktail slims, just before your time comes. Suddenly that birth date to come is a bull lowering at you with its upside-down eye. You could have escaped, had you been another kind of matador. For a minute you do escape, purling along in last summer’s voice.

  Other times though, the minute I came in I saw she had been thinking of nothing else but where she was, and why. Like the night she took me to see the wing they had had built onto the back of the house. Four bedrooms and baths for the guests—“Oh, we knew we’d always have them.” Going down the hall which led straight from the old back door into this bright honeycomb, she was almost matronly; it happens with the first furnishings.

  At the hall’s end we came to a large room, bare and unused, built to the breadth of the house. A studio for him, built as a surprise. He hadn’t wanted it.

  “Great for the baby,” I said. She did not reply. She hadn’t chosen the nursery yet, or a layette either. He had bought her another house gown, though, since I came, exactly like the old one, as she had asked. The bedroom she led me back to had the same pale green. “My friend Julie chose it. This room was to be hers.” Softly she named them all, each at a door. She herself had wanted six guest rooms but the plot here wasn’t big enough, even with the extra back alley they’d bought. “He said maybe I would have to choose four. Friends. Choice was a fact, he said.” No sweat, she said, her face alight. “With our crowd, the way we were, we simply doubled up.”