Yet, though he could readily be made to talk about the old farmhouse sold when they moved, and my brother and I could walk its patterns in our sleep, he never talked in detail of his parents’ life there, or why they had all of a sudden come here, to what my grandmother, always interestingly grotesque in her summaries, called her “honeymoon” house.
Verging on eighty by then, my grandfather had died in it that year—at a house party for undergraduates.
I went upstairs to the gallery, to check his photograph. No, he simply did not look as if he could have acquired all that force for her since.
Watanabe came up behind me. “A husband.”
I had to laugh. Knobby had a passion for the ballet, fed by tickets from a niece, a costume girl for a celebrated troupe, who however scorned his wife-getting, and had informed him that “husband” was ballerina slang for a male dancer who was a trustworthy partner but would never be a star.
“What’s it like up there, now?” For weeks my grandmother had been clearing out things from the third floor, not relegating them to the attic above her, but sending forth a stream of packages and cartons as neatly bound as if for holiday mail, which Knobby was however required to deposit at the town dump.
He looked down at the tray he was carrying. She ate well. Under some handmade domed pottery dishes, which had been brought out when she moved up there, the lamb-chop bones would be picked clean, the butter plate blank. A rough sweet-sour came from her wineglass. In a tentative, stealthy unity not otherwise acknowledged between us, we three females were getting at my father’s wines, which had always remained in the cellar over here. A case had even been sent to the Evamses, and I myself intended one day, perhaps at summer’s end, to take a bottle or two to the city. My grandmother still lorded it over these bequests, but in an odd way, as she became more remote in her eyrie, she had become more generous.
“Knobby. You haven’t answered.”
“You can see the hills, from the—what you call it? Cap-i-tain’s walk.”
“You always could.” I loathed that enclosure, reached by a last twist of steps from the third floor. It had murky amber panes and a floor like painted hide, where your steps could only circle and never stretch. I had no desire to see our hills from up there.
“It is like a leaf viewing,” he said. “Only the leaves are gone.”
I followed him downstairs into the pantry. “You know what I mean. The apartment.”
“It has not changed, your grandmother says. It is the same.”
“Then what’s all this stuff from?”
The packages for this week’s dump day were already ranged down along the backstairs which led from up there. That disposal, oddly contested by my mother, would come up on tea day, which coincided. My question was a silly one, what with all the closets and drawers in this old stockpile of a house, and in similar houses here. People on our porches censured themselves every springcleaning for their accumulations, leaning back into these with Cheshire-cat smiles. I had even heard it suggested that people got senile quicker in cities, with less storage space to remember from.
Some of the drawers up there, I thought I recalled, had a tooled-gold line around the keyhole. I couldn’t recall any knick-knacks; maybe there had been none, or none to engage a child. “The same? Like what? What’s it like?”
Knobby had never looked me up and down before. I hadn’t realized a person like him could do that as well as any of us, even if bowing to the privilege. He was going to say something special. He often did—but as I check back now, never with such ceremony. Now he turned to the packages, bowing to them, and then again to me. Somehow it was inserted into my mind that it was an honor for each of us to know the other.
Sunlight from over the sink warmed my hair and fell on his clasped hands. “Very Samurai.”
On tea days my grandmother comported herself like company, often wearing a hat for the drive to follow, for which Knobby, too, put on a chauffeur’s cap. If being without income had made her almost benign, her autocratic public manner remained the same. As she shrank in size, though she was doing it hardily, she seemed to have come into the more spiritual promise of those great-flowered dresses, which now whispered around her with a tuberose perfume so heavy it affected the tea sandwiches. She seemed to be able to look at me now, though still not casually. Often I caught her contemplating me. I always stared back. Though I can despise people in small ways, I cannot hate them. They interest me too much. My stare never downed her. She seemed instead to sink into it almost fearfully.
My mother couldn’t rise to what she called “your grandmother’s act.”
“I don’t think it is an act.” We were waiting for her in the sitting room. Two of the charity friends, very old people also, had just left the house—and this, too, had been going on for weeks. Always they left with a bundle or two. Surely my mother had noticed this, though she never said.
“Ah well, you’re the acting expert,” she said.
My cheeks mantled with red, as the old expression went. At the well-known acting academy to whose summer classes I had transferred, hoping to qualify in the competition for full entrance in the fall, we were collecting these expressions and practicing them. The teacher was pleased with those of us who could blush; I couldn’t do it on command, but some students never had blushed at all. As to the academy—my mother had cheered me on, crying out the minute I broached going there—“Of course, of course—how is it we never thought of it for you?” She had put her hand on my wrist then, just as now. Saying, “But it’s—it’s the person herself who has to think of it first—isn’t it? Or it won’t work.” But yes, she had said, oh yes.
Each yes and but of hers had mounted to true recognition and delight. That’s what I was, an actress. Without knowing it, that’s what they had been fitting me for. All the planes of our family, our street, our town—had contributed. As a newspaper would one day note. But she granted it first.
The hand on my arm was very thin.
“I wasn’t making fun,” she said.
“I know.” I wished she would; she worried me. My mother and the city had collided, though with her usual tact she never went in at the same times I did, and never asked to meet me there. Clothes arrived, from stores with bleak French names. Stark outfits, with sudden spurts of frill. Too much black, even for the suburbs we now were. Swooping hats. She would dress in them and after hours of rapt preparation be unable to leave the house, sinking back to regard herself for hours, wineglass in hand. Dressed like that, there was after all no place to go. Once I heard her say this to her mirror, nodding from her divan, “All dressed up and no place to go.” When in the city myself, I once or twice peered into hotel lobbies where I saw she could belong—but on what errand? The worst of it was that she knew beforehand the dressing up might come to nothing, yet didn’t stop.
Today she was in all too perfect gray, silkily pouched on the vanished hips. She saw me looking at her new stiletto heels. “Don’t worry. I dress for the drive. But I never get out of the car.
A mirror was opposite. The house had many, and she tended to place herself in front of them, not for pleasure. “I used to look like a provincial just a little ahead of the crowd, didn’t I? Or too good for it.” She smoothed the ravages under her eyes and at her mouth. “I always did dress for what might happen. Down home, we do that. But now I look like a widow with hopes.”
Her accuracy made me flinch.
“Yes, it started down home,” she said, giving it home’s inflection. “We attitudinize. That’s so you don’t get too close to our hearts.”
I must have brooded.
She was handing me a glass of wine. “For better or worse, I’ve taught you the same.”
“For better. I’m sure of it.” I was flushed with all the first rose-pinks of the theater, and they had told us we must prepare to be hard.
I was wrong. Attitudes may get you into drama school. But in the end the heart must be exposed. It wouldn’t be Bill Wetmore who taught
me that.
Another old person was coming down the stairs, one of the fading ones from our own street. He nodded in at us, holding up his cane. “Just look at the one she gave me. I’ll leave my old one in your bin.” The cane was an elegant briar, with an ivory grasp. He accepted a glass of wine, but with a gander over his shoulder, as if allegiances must not be confused, and went quickly out.
She laughed, then knit the plucked brows that gave her face an undeserved shallowness. I think she found that useful, or had once. Mine are what hers might have been—heavy and straight. A woman’s face can have too much character for quick luck. But I prefer to leave it so.
“I wish all the stuff went out to those poor dears,” she said. “There’s another load in the front hall.”
“Why do you bother, then?”
“Why indeed. You think I want the stuff, whatever it is?”
“Old clothes, old underwear, Knobby says. Old papers she can’t bear to burn, but scissors up. She goes through everything. Maybe it’s a kind of rite.”
“Maybe.”
“Then why do you care?”
“I promised your father. To keep him posted.” She took a second glass of wine. “Don’t look so amazed.”
I wouldn’t nowadays. The lines of communication can be down but not cut, only sagged from a slow, weaning wind equal to any storm. Yet one still communicates. The one who long ago first wheedled for it, does so once again; in duet, the one who in response long ago promised whatever, again promises—and at times the roles may even be reversed. Where that kind of power is exerted, distance doesn’t count. As every grave-digger knows.
“He said she might well do something strange, if we came to live in the house.”
“Did he say why?”
“He thought her memories may recently have been disturbed by something. She wouldn’t say what.”
“But what has that to do with us?”
She got up and walked about, carefully picking up her sharp heels from the mahogany floor, which gave her the gait of the larger birds who walk so. I would one day use that gait in a part I played, scarcely believing that I would ape her so, would do such a thing—but I did. “I saw you in the gallery, looking at your grandfather.”
“No one ever mentions him. What was he like?”
I thought it was the wine that made her slow to reply.
“A good man—they said later. The way they say it when they mean—dull. He and I only spoke for ten minutes. It was at your father’s college graduation party.” She peered into the front hall, toward the long double parlor. “They cleared all the downstairs for it. Sprinkled rosin on the floor, for dancing. Banked the place with flowers. And after all that—had record-player music. Your grandmother had never heard of hiring a band. A Victrola—from the farm. But we loved it. We thought she meant it to be that way. None of us girls rightly knew your father, you see. In those days it was still mostly girls who gave the parties, and he didn’t know many girls. My school was only what they used to call a finishing school, more for marriage than for college, but we were near enough New Haven to know a lot of Yalies, our senior year. And one of them got a group of us to come. I was on my way back down home anyway.” She looked up almost shyly. “And I had my own new graduation dress.” She and I exchanged smiles. “Linen, it was. Starched to a fare-thee-well. So when the old gentleman gave a funny spurt of a sound, I thought it was my dress crackling, and almost giggled. Old men hold you tight.” She arched a pointed toe along the mirror-brown floor. “Your grandfather died while I was dancing with him.”
Someone was coming down the front stairs. A little old lady appeared, scuffing a package from step to step down the long flight, her fluffy white head bobbing above it. Taller than she, it was apparently light. Like a triangular sail, it bore her out the front door.
“Packages can be strange,” I said, in a deep weirdo voice.
We laughed until we were weak.
I felt better then about leaving her here alone, as I did day after day—even about leaving her for good, as I knew I was going to when I could. She could go down home, where laughter was easier; perhaps she should. Why do people ever leave what suits them so well?
“Why did grandmother and grandfather ever come here?”
Bringing everything with them except the farm machinery. And we’d have brought that—I had heard my father say—if there’d been a way to move it. Even so, the best things here came from the bankrupt. The house we left was the best thing we had.
I answered for her. “I know. They wanted to give father a good background.”
“So you heard,” she said. “Ah, you were born listening. Anyway, that’s how you came to be born. I don’t think your father would have married, except for that day.”
“Married you, you mean?”
“He and a friend were to have gone to be law partners, right in New Haven. That man never spoke to him again.”
She clasped her hands behind her head, swinging from side to side, defiantly. I had never seen her in that posture. “You see, I was sort of—made interesting by the event. They thought I handled things so well. It was just manners.”
I knew those manners—Greensboro’s. Sometimes you didn’t know why you had them, but you went on with it.
“It was thought proper for your father to escort me home. By train of course. They weren’t the flying kind. A long ride. And it was school breakup time for both of us. June. And after that—there was down home. We lived in the factor’s big house, then.”
And the furniture was theirs. And my father liked manners.
“And I’d brought him there.”
She’d dressed for something to happen, and it had. I don’t suppose men ever know that feeling. She was still pushing her toe along Watanabe’s shining floor. Of a sudden I felt mired in what women do, and choking to get out, even if a stage might make it worse.
“There were flowers here, everywhere,” she said. “The aunt who lived with them had an eye for it. Little pots of those pocket flowers, like pansies with the mumps, all down the side of the dance floor. When his father and I fell, people thought we’d stumbled over them.”
My grandmother could be heard now, coming down the two flights. She still had her decisive step. Whatever had upset her memory, it wasn’t mere age. Like many hardy, immovable elderly persons, she seemed less vulnerable to death than the middle-aged—and never spoke of the chance.
“You never told me, Mother. Why not?”
“Women are always exchanging their mistakes with each other. Men never do. You’ll notice that, one day. You do the same as them, hear?”
It was true she had no women friends. “Even with you?”
She put her arms up and around me. “You’re no mistake to me.
Over her head I saw the packages in the front hall. “Hey-y.”
Crossing a finger over my lips, I ran to them and pawed them over. Some felt like framed glass. I chose at random, a small one of those and a soft one, one of several about laundry-package size, and was able to hide them in the boots-and-rubbers closet under the stairs and stand at attention, before my grandmother hove into view. I moved well, the school said.
My grandmother passed me without comment. Behind her, Watanabe carried her car rug, a fine affair of taupe plush. He loved these ceremonials, and often was asked by her to choose their route. In everything but money she was head of the house still.
Knobby brought tea. I always had a lot of it, with milk. That seemed to fascinate her. Her own people, both the huge Yorkshire farmers and the little nimble Irish like her own mother, had been great tea drinkers, with lashings of milk. Tea had brought the two sides together. I heard the story again, sleepily; would it never stop, that family essence ever steeping in one of our two brown luster pots, ever diluted by the hot water in the other?
“You’ve brought her along well,” she said to my mother, approving my skirt. I was not allowed to wear jeans or slacks to go out with her. “Though in my day we wore
sleeves. And—underwear.” I supposed she couldn’t bring herself to say “bra.” If she knew the word. They must have had other names for them. “I hear she’s even—seeing a boy. Is she?”
My mother smiled at me, lounging in her chair. “Are you?”
I smiled back, seeing Bill Wetmore standing before me, red-organed, his eyes intent on that bushy part of me which wasn’t me as specifically. Men always look more specific, to us. “I suppose I am.”
My grandmother’s hands were trembling. Age was nibbling even her. “We didn’t know how to do that. How to bring a girl along.”
“Or a boy,” my mother murmured after her, watching her exit to the car, Knobby toting behind her the first load of castoffs to stow in the trunk.
My mother, putting her hat on, made a fright-face at herself in the mirror. “Nor did I.”
I missed my brother sometimes. Tim wrote every week that he and my father would soon visit. He seemed to believe this.
“I’d go visit them,” I said. “If they’d send me the money.” Tim was working these days, subbing as a teenage jockey at a track. But he would come back for college eventually. My father was the one who had put the family out of focus for me—leaving, yet not leaving. I couldn’t get past him until he became forgettable. I already had an idea that maybe my mother was, or one day would be. Maybe all of them. Tim said we all made him feel flanked in, like a horse in a crowded starting position—but that may have been due to his size. Though I rode well enough, of course I could never be a jockey. Yet big as I was, I felt flanked in by the horse who wasn’t there.
“I could advance you some of your money ahead.” The hat she had chosen drooped gently to her shoulders, framing her in its glossy dark bell.
The Bobby-Soxer Page 9
