I could see why my father, who never preened himself in our house, could stretch so at ease; even if his fine brown hand from time to time closed anxiously on its napkin ring at some sally from my brother, whose cockalorum manners were the only false note. Once or twice I caught my brother himself casting sheep’s eyes at me, pleading for my understanding. He had it. During dessert, a sense of enclosure momentarily beset me. I listened to my own femaleness, thundering small in my fingertips. Yet I could perceive the quiet attraction, or even the fiercer one, of a world from which women’s agony, even women’s inner entity, were barred. I myself was feeling how that could be. Under the table the dog’s huge russet head made eyes at me, as benign a dog as I had ever seen.
Before we left, they showed us where the pheasant run had been in my grandparents’ time. They planned to revive it.
“But not the refrigerator in the parlor,” I said, and everybody howled, the dog barking at us. My father could not take his eyes off me.
Out on the steps, my brother hung back. The elders were already at the car. Steps make Tim confessive. Or he has to educate. “Sis—.”
I said to him what I said to my mother when she attempted to tell me the facts of life. “You don’t have to explain.”
When we all left, I too was kissed.
On the phone to Bill, I burst out crying. “They were so nice. So terribly nice.”
Emotion can do very well on the phone—especially if you wish to be saved from it. He was spared my real tears.
Meanwhile, I could hear his answer clearer than if he stood before me. “You’re not going to be crazy loyal?”
In turn, a phone voice can’t lie, even to itself.
Though it may pause.
“To whom?”
We were to meet at the hayloft, giving him a couples of hours’ time. His grandmother’s house, emptied of all but the bundles for the welfare and the leftover medical appliances, still stank of bones gone bad. She had left neat directives for the disposal of all her effects except those. The house was to be sold to satisfy the liens on it which had paid for his and Phoebe’s education, as well as to fulfill a memorial bequest to the hospital, although he had been informed that he and his sister could have first-purchase rights for a short period agreeable to the bank and other lenders, unless a hot purchaser came along. My father had advised him that this arrangement, though it had little basis in law, was likely to be honored by small-town decency. But Phoebe didn’t want the house, even if she could have paid for it, and Bill had barely enough money from part-time jobs to live in the city—on hope.
Our house had become his oasis. The day my mother came home from the dump, walking, he had been in the empty house on Cobble Row, ready to go back to the city. His grandmother’s funeral had been two days before. Because of that, he and I, parting in the city and agreeing to meet there on the following school Monday, had not even communicated while in the town. Young live-at-home people, conducting their divided lives, have a fierce sense of those partitions. In my own house I was another person, a totality of my history with the family. For hours I might not think of him. Whenever I did, my lower limbs might swim with our secret unity, but I kept him and the tiny apartment where we met, just as I kept the school and the city’s daring streets—at the other end of our first train ride together.
In the house on Cobble Row that day, he had just flung the old casement wide. The wind we had felt at the dump was still up, a dun, hurricane stealth that bypassed us late every summer, on its way to the coast. Behind him, welfare bundles lay on the floor and the rented wheelchair, oxygen tent, and intravenous feeder waited to be picked up. The Wetmores’ economy had never much needed the dump. He had just about decided to take what food he could to the city with him, and hole up there until Monday, drawing. He never got much done when I was there. He wasn’t thinking of me, except perhaps in that reverse way.
He was about to shut the casement when my mother floated by. Her hat must have been pinned, for she wasn’t holding it against the wind, and her shoes dug from step to step, as if by themselves. The body in between might have been all silk, blow-able. He took all this in with the quickness that was to make him so good graphically, so poor at paint. Her arms were what floated, like scarves. The face, as it bobbed near, had the dedication that madness brings. “She’s beautiful, isn’t she?” he said, telling me. “I never saw that before.”
He jumped out of the low casement into the flowerbed and called her by name. She had a hard time stopping, as if on a vehicle that wanted to roll ahead. He thought she recognized him, and that she perhaps was not crazed after all. When she swayed, about to fall, he grasped her. She held onto him. He said her hold on a man was something that man would never forget. “The bobby-soxer’s dead—” she said. “Everybody knew it except me.”
Craig Towle must have tried to drive her home from the dump, and she must have refused him. Several porch-sitters on the road back to town reported seeing a car like his following her anyway. The section nearest the dump was made up of old wood-frame cottages, the early seedbed of the industrial part of town. Mostly pensioners lived in these, or the bachelor tag ends of old occupations. Watanabe, out looking for her on his own, talked to one of them, a retired signalman for the vanished freight railroad. “Sure, they paraded right by here, him in second gear; looked like he was pacing a greyhound.”
Nearer town, the trail disappeared. What had happened was that she had gone into Walsh’s Inn, where Craig Towle had not followed her. Gilbert and Luray weren’t there, but the barman was, and a few regulars. She told one of them, a veteran Legionnaire whose picture made the Sentinel every year for selling the most poppies on Decoration Day, that she had never been in a bar alone before or at that hour of the day, but that she recognized him. I recognize a lady when I see one, he said. She paid for her own drinks, he said, out of a little silver change purse.
My mother never went out of the house without carrying a handbag. Inside it would have been that chain-silver purse in which she had carried her mad money since she was a girl. All girls of her era, she had long ago told me, had toted such insurance against having to climb out of a car. “On a double date mostly, when couples tended to egg each other on.” Or a blind one, when you hadn’t picked the man yourself. No girl of her acquaintance had ever admitted to having had to use her money. When I’d wondered at that statistic, she had answered in that sudden, ambery drawl which brought Greensboro right back to me: “Reckon they stayed on—in the rumble seat.”
She had had two drinks at the inn, about all that her five-dollar bill and some change would have paid for. Nobody there had dared offer her one. She would have sat on the barstool, sipping like a poster girl, a slim pointed leg hooked on the brass footrail. “I been nipping—” she told them. “That’s what we call it down home.”
Down there, one rarely saw anybody you could say was out-and-out drunk, but Southern company never went without a glass of something, and its lawns and days were crisscrossed with errands and droppings-in, business or household, which on the instant qualified a person to be company. Nipping could become exaggerated, like at the “old-crowd teas” which also served as our birthday parties from the time of our christenings—crepe-paper hats on our blond heads as we grew, and the darkies snickering, not always at us. And old ladies walloping their cars home afterward. You could draw back from nipping “on doctor’s advice,” or lean into it gentlier and gentlier, especially if you were a woman. Though if you were like our Miss DeVore, no one ever saw you more than a tiny bit blank, and you could always cut cloth. “Always go to Miss DeVore in the morning’ was all down home ever said. With the men, of course, hard drinking did not have to hide.
I think people drink in order to be able to tell the truth to themselves. Up to then, my mother had abstained as she could. What she would do, once Bill brought her home, was to hide herself. Where she had been brought up there was one more alternative, if you found yourself sliding too far. You could go away, bu
t not to an institution. Many of the houses down home were just right for that. My grandmother’s, with its two-step drops here and there into separate suites of rooms, much resembled those. As my mother’s separation wore on, I sometimes fancied that even as a girl, come there that party night in her graduation dress, an inner something unknown to her at the time might have seen ahead to the possibilities of that house.
I don’t know whether my mother ever fully realized that the house had already had what one might call a harboring experience. To her there would have been no connection between her plight and that other once-upon-a-time life upstairs, which I would come to know as not hidden, but staged. At any rate, she was never to mention it. From her own wedding day on, perhaps she had been in too deep for other considerations. To me, as I myself grew stagier or was trained to be, plight became the exact word for her situation, so troubledly between the archaic and the real. She had come to that dark room of hers too unfairly, and not through maidenly shallowness.
Taken into Bill Wetmore’s house, once he had persuaded her there, she sat in the only chair left, staring at the old beams and at the Heatilator in the inglenook, sipping at the water brought her as if it were contraband. All the Cobble Row houses are from the same early builder, who knew only one way to set up that stone. Seeing the piled floor and the gear ready-packed, she said: “Ah—clearing for a guest wing, are you?” We would get to know that murmur, made with such effort. Then she saw she was in a wheelchair, Bill said, and sprang up in fright. All those who self-hide are afraid of forced incarceration. She would not enter his beat-up old Volks. “No, I can’t go home in that.”
Nor would she ever enter it in the following weeks, when he and I drove her to various doctors, first at our behest, then at hers, on what we thought were her fool’s errands, until we realized she was stocking her room with vitamins, paperbacks, every requirement for a long indoor siege except the food she knew would always be brought to her. We always had to take the hearse, which Bill drove, and she still dressed for the ride, even on the day she asked to be taken to the police station. “To lodge a complaint?” I said, fearful. I could scarcely hear her answer. “Oh my dear love, against who?”
What she did want, nobody could have dreamed. “I’ve come for a breath test,” she said to the old captain at the desk, so low he had to ask her to repeat, and so imperiously lorn that he did what she wanted. We two helped her unwrap the endless headscarf in which she had encased herself from head to neck and down to her shoulders. It was exquisitely done, Bill said after; did you notice? Like that old Elizabeth Arden ad that went on for years, he said, in which the model had looked to be ready either for surgery or for immortal mummyhood.
While my mother was breathing into the tube the officer whispered: “Has she been driving?” We shook our heads, no. The results were positive, he told her, though the percentage of alcohol wasn’t high. “Ah, I’ve been nipping again, have I?” she said. “I wasn’t sure.” She wrapped herself up again abstractedly, as one put away an article long possessed and known to be breakable, if no longer so cherished as of yore.
On the way out, she extracted from her purse her packet of breath pills, a small box of the lavender-flavored pastilles which used to be sold at the cigarette-and-candy stalls of good New York office buildings. Nowadays I procured them for her as my father had. I had thought of this habit as one of the little city encrustations with which women like her, not quite of the provinces, would flavor their life. In the car she offered us each the purple box; we each took one of the tinted squares. They are seldom found anymore, but I can still build their essence on my tongue. To Bill they were like eating perfume, but he accepted one, for which I still honor him. She flashed a sane look at him. “Tact. You two will live on it.”
Officially we waited for those saner looks; actually we feared them. The orphic insights of the disturbed are the hardest to tolerate. Or to congratulate them on. Yet once inside the house, we always tried to delay her leaving us. “You no longer wear your big hat,” Bill dared.
“Oh, Bill—” I warned. The day he had brought her home from his house he had had to order a cab, paying for it out of the money he had earmarked for his train fare. He was always broke before Mondays. On the way she had asked twice whether someone was not following them. No one was. It was raining hard by then. As he helped her out, the cabby noticed she had left her hat on the seat, and handed it to her. She had ignored him. Bill had accepted it for her. Standing with her head full up to the driving rain, wet to the skin, she had said: “The weather must not be allowed to sympathize.” Running out to meet them, I had seen the cabby shake his head.
That too had stayed with me—and when I had seen her eyes. The soft armor which from that day on coiffed her only made more evident their gaunt stare. Now that other saner look again flashed in them, first at him, then at me. “She no longer calls you Bill Wetmore.” I felt the twinge of surprise one does when a parent gives warning of what one’s inner self has scarcely yet noticed. Then with the side-wave of the hand with which a passenger on a receding boat indicates the elements to those on shore, she went to her room. Picking up the purple box she had left behind her, I thought of the years of her chocolates, and of how long her fastidious habits had obscured her from us.
So that was how Bill Wetmore had become an intimate of the house. Having spent his fare to bring her home, he could not go to the city, though he had not said so. He would borrow from me anyway that next Monday morning. Meanwhile, there he was on our rubber-matted, brass-edged top front step—a flesh and blood figure, bred to me on dirty bedpads and river-park corners never shoddy to me, which I thought I knew as well as my own. We stood there half aghast, spun toward each other from funerals, bad errands, and weekend dearth. I myself invited him in to my other life. To his credit he was reluctant, out of certain doubts. But he entered it.
My father hadn’t come home at once. Though my grandmother had called him in Rio, her story of the dump must merely have borne out what he had expected of her. Or, in my mother’s case, what he did not care to confront. Yet, as could be seen after my luncheon at the farm, when he did come it was in the spirit of having us all confront everything. Bill Wetmore must have done so at once.
Watanabe watched us all with that servant devotion which is the most sophisticated of any. I would have caught on to a lot much faster if I had been willing to watch him in reference to more than Bill. On him, Watanabe and I vied on silently. Though by now our family fluctuations must have exhausted him, and he had been still busy as well with his efforts in anticipation of his wife, he disapproved of Bill’s driving the hearse. He disapproved of Bill and me doing jointly what should have been my private filial duty. He looked sardonically on Bill’s constant presence at meals, and on our table manners when together. After the first meal he brought out fingerbowls, his face smooth with gratification when Bill tried to fit his whole hand in one. After the second, he added cigars from my father’s old humidor, later tut-tutting over Bill’s sadly chewed butt.
When he one day came upon me giving Bill money, he turned a curious shade of tiger.
“Knobby disapproves like a father,” Bill said. Under Bill’s influence, which I, untutored, saw merely as healthy and masculine, for surely a young man so slim and well-featured would not be coarse, I began to think Watanabe outrageously funny, and worse, to show it, sometimes in cahoots with Bill. I do not now think that a servant’s devotion should ever be ridiculed. Though from well before Sancho Panza, people have not agreed.
My father caught onto Watanabe’s sly sabotage at once. “Fingerbowls?” he said, looking down the table at Knobby. “Ah, cigars—” he said, looking down the table at Bill. My brother, sniggering to me, said: “I never much liked either of them.”
My brother reported that my mother hadn’t been that eager to see him. For that reunion he had gone to her bedroom ahead of my father. “And when our father followed me in, she went mum. One would think,” my brother tittered, “that s
he was off men altogether.” He was always to be as monumentally wrong about her as she was about him. But the hurt was eternal. “I see the favorite is doing fine,” my brother then said to me, and went up the stairs to the third floor to see my grandmother, as he would be allowed to do every day of their stay.
When my father came out of my mother’s darkness that first time, to Mr. Peralho and me waiting in the corridor, he came first to me, and gripped me by the upper arms. “I had no idea. No idea.” When he had last touched me we had clasped hands only. I now felt that he had not acted unwisely. What a daughter admires in a father stretches so far beyond the sexual. That fussy Viennese uncle, Freud, on whom the world has so long depended for the key to its sexual shackles, had had his rabbinates confused. What I felt in my father was the holy ark of authority, brought into the domestic cave for all our protection. There my mother was our innerness, but one stretching far beyond the decorative arts, or even those of the psyche. Where he phrased life for us even when reticent, or was meant to, her life worked beneath phrases, even when she spoke. Who they slept with had less power to hurt me, or to inspire me, than what they withheld of those other powers—or gave. And surely he would give me his confidence.
But my father turned next to Mr. Peralho. “He’s bad for her. So am I. Juan—what’s to be done?”
As your parents grow old, you become the authority. But I was not allowed that time-lag. I saw my father, still in his prime, cast aside his own authority like a jackstraw. And not to me. The corners of our upstairs hall, filling with bloodlight, crept forward standing there autonymous. Jealousy is yellow to me. I sink into it like into plush, in my ears its shifty tambourine shake.
The Bobby-Soxer Page 12
