“I haven’t told you what was on the box that did go to the dump,” he says. “In that old-fashioned writing they used to call ‘Palmer script.’ In black crayon. Ha. On yours too, eh. But first—what did your box say?”
“Not mine.” Any more than that other box, all those boxes, wrong, or belated, opened or bound up again—were his.
But he could wait; he knew what he wanted. I didn’t have that advantage. And that’s when we give in, move with the tide, even marry. Hoping we’ll learn from the tide itself what we want of it.
So I tell him.
“Ha. Just ‘WEDDING-DRESS. NESSA’S’—eh? How the womenfolk used to mark things, in the old days. Even the stuff in their own dresser drawers. As if they knew all the epitaphs beforehand.” He bends toward me and takes my cold hands in his. My extremities are colder than normal. Tim, my brother, used to tease that the blood had to go so far—until I found out that his hands are as cold. My profession warms mine. His is no good at that.
But no matter. Craig Towle is talking to me. And will not stop. “Those boxes, those bundles at the dump. They are yours. And they are mine. Don’t forget, I come from this town.” He let go my hands then and said low, like a creed: “We inherit them.”
The hayloft window frames him. What do we inherit, what did we acquire? This window—how divide it? If the moon comes up I’ll leave now, I think—I’ll take myself out of his grasp. But the moon did not rise.
“The boxes would have been marked and mixed up at the same time,” he says. “Maybe at some crisis.”
At once I knew what day that had been. Glinting down all our lives, even mine. Why don’t we go see the farm, girl? Because we came from it.
“What?” he says sharp. “What?”
“The day they left the farm. For here.” And then I give up. “Okay, tell me what it said. On Leo’s box.”
“It said, ‘Not a Wedding Dress. Mine.’”
I am looking at him from a long, long distance. I am leaving the farm, with them. Am I crying over that box? For her?
“Yes, yes, yes—” he said. “Come sit down. And let me tell you a story.”
For the first time I think of him as a man with children, the ones we in town never seemed to see. My father, when a very young one, used to say that very phrase to me at bedtime. Although his stories were always about the little girl who was me, I never accused him of want of imagination, indeed helping him fill in. And now tell me about being a little boy, I said once, startling him. About when you were one. He never did. Perhaps that was kept for Tim—who would never say.
“Any story,” I say, hardening. “As long as it’s not mine.”
When this man is about to make a killer remark, he telegraphs it with the slightest lift of chin. Fencers do that, almost as if they want to. Craving the rhythm, not the kill. “Planning to avoid yours, hmm. By marrying?”
So he pulled out like a thorn what had been drugging my days, puzzling my nights. “How do you know?”
“That you’re marrying young Wetmore? Heard it at Walsh’s. Everything’s on the menu there.”
“I mean—why I am.”
“You just now told me. You’re avoiding—something else.”
“Did I?”
“But you yourself—hadn’t caught onto it?”
“Not really.”
“It’s a common enough cause. For marrying.”
I toed the floor. The workmen had cleaned well. “Yours too?”
Few beard this man on his own motives, I would find—he being the professional grandee of motives; I saw him hesitate because of that. And speak the truth because of it. “No, I did it to find out. That’s what I do.”
So I find out from him early. How the animal hides in the professional.
“Well—” he says, “aren’t you ever going to sit down?”
I leave the window slowly. I hear the breath drawn between his teeth. “The same fairy-tale gawk, it would be. The way you move. I can see it. I got in as deep as anybody can after thirty years—but maybe I’m not done yet.” He watches me sit. “I knew it when I saw you. I could write a line for each one of your bones.”
“But I am not—like that person.”
“I guess not.” Did I hear though that he had had a wild hope? “But—with what you are—and with what I could do—perhaps you could be.”
It takes me a minute to understand he might be offering me the part. That sometimes did happen, even to beginners, in some agent’s grubby office, or in the producer’s dreamboat motel. Otherwise—it would be tryouts for tryouts, showcase theater for the lucky ones willing to work for free, and the gossipy grapevine at the unemployment office. At school we were all coached on the odds.
“Oh”—I say—“Pygmalion.”
“Christ Jesus,” he says. “Education.”
“No. Movies.”
He laughs. “You’re a worthy—”
“Opponent?”
Only a phrase, tapped out in the rhetoric class at school, along with “mortal enemy” and “fast friend.” But it told him, he said later, that I too watched language.
“Collector.”
He watches me examining his desk, no longer bare, as I first saw it, stacked now with typescript at one end, a typewriter at the other, and in the middle, retreated to a last stand, a long yellow pad scrawled in a black as heavy as subway graffiti, and a felt pen.
“I play Russian roulette with those pens. I seem to be able to buy only one at a time.”
But has squandered two years, he tells me, tracing Leo everywhere. Town records. Town newspaper. One photograph—at a flower show. “Of the winning plant only.” A music society that by rumor once sang for a year or two here but had no history. Two ancient shopkeepers, now retired, who remembered the best customer of their apprentice days; the grocer who recalled most a telephone voice; and the past owner of the bookshop, who supplied a list.
“How do you describe a recluse the whole town knew?”
Who baked cookies with rosewater, but once ordered a whole sheepshead in order to taste the eyes—cooking it according to a Turkish recipe—and read Milton’s Areopagitica.
And wore men’s underwear ordered from Switzerland.
Who gave handouts anonymously, the source being known to all, but must never be thanked—which induced a shyness almost hysterical. Who once traveled, it had been thought, but thereafter never would hear news of the world—only of the town. “Yet who did not faint at the sight of blood”—once rushing from the house to pick up a child seen to fall from a neighbor’s window—and once taming a young bear that had wandered in from the Poconos and was scavenging the garbage cans. “Who—according to the minister of the Dutch Reformed Church, whom I tracked to his nursing home in Reading, was the happiest person they all knew, and not at all strange?”
He reached behind the desk. “Then at last I lucked in. Those old biddies and geezers Nessa began bundling the effects to—they’re not Nessa’s friends. Poor old war-horse, she may have none but me. They were the music society.” He brings up a couple of framed pictures, cabinet-size, and holds out one. “The old Austrian says Nessa gave it to him. More likely he sneaked it. Nessa had them all up there this year, he said, one by one. They’ve never seen the place. Asked me not to tell his wife about the picture, which is why I have it. He had been in love most with Leo’s voice. But his wife would never forgive. Ah God, know them? They must be in their eighties.”
“They come to grandmother’s for tea. She’s younger. And eats without speaking. Nothing in common with each other—and it has gone on so long. But they still act out their domesticity. Scary.”
I see I have thralled him. He’s slow to hand me the picture. “Yes—scary.” Then comes that shift—a professional screen dropped—which even his children when grown will never learn to anticipate. Tarquin, who often comes to stay with me these days, especially.
“Well, my dear, here you are,” says Craig Towle. “In 1923.”
Yes, the dead ho
ld very still for interpretation. The heavy cardboard that even then maybe only provincial photographers still used makes it easier. Am I looking at myself three years ago, but long-skirted instead of short, calico instead of my tartan, in the background a barnyard instead of a riding stable, hair cropped close instead of my new bob? They say the twin always looks different to the other twin. If I could see the hands I would know how far likeness can go—surely no two people have the same hands, but these are thrust in the pockets, ungirlishly. I used to do the same. Farmyard boots.
“The hair was cropped because of scarlet fever. Then, Nessa let drop once—for a while Leo wouldn’t let it grow out. The old guy had never seen it like that.”
“No?” But I might have done the same. You are fifteen, and you don’t know what you are, much less who. At the same time you are full of life. The only people you know to have a crush on are other girls. Every day your features vary, seeming to grow on different days, the nose your mother’s, a small woman’s, the chin—your father’s, as a youth. Let’s cut your hair mannish, says Phoebe, who has been taking a mail-order course in beautician stuff. Then let’s go in the bathroom, and fiddle. The nurse isn’t home to catch us, but later, when she sees my hair, she crosses herself, then comes to twitch my cheek. “Any spots? No. Creatures like you don’t get spots, even at the age they should.” And I’d thought she meant diet—the lamb chops and beef juice they didn’t get on Cobble Row. Granny says not to hang around girls like you, Phoebe says next day, fiddling, her face hot.
And all the time, the person you are in love with is yourself.
“See anything?” he is saying.
“So what if I do?” I have to swallow, though. “Leo looks like a modern girl.”
Maybe it’s my expression makes him hand over the second photo so silently. The music society, taken in the downstairs hallway of my grandmother’s house. The young women are all in dark surplices, the men wear flowing ties. The Austrian has high color and light wavy hair.
“They all got a copy of this one,” Towle says. “He had his tinted.”
Leo is in the center, leaning against a niche from which palm fronds spill. It is a pose in which divas of that era used to let themselves be “caught,” as if staring at a basilisk from which they cannot look away. The gaze is deep, the lengthened eyes lucent enough to compete with their jewels, and in the best of them the brow is broad, the cheekbones well planed and easy to highlight, the mouth mobile. Leo has no jewels, only the structure of a face I know too well. Though mine was not destined to attain what Leo’s already had—gone past a girl’s curve or a boy’s narrowness to that questionable human marble which unites. Leo’s hair, superabundant even in the pulled-back 1930s coif, keeps the question alive.
Nowadays my own face is my dear machine. Make-up battered, speech-inflected to the smallest muscle under the skin—I watch it daily, but only for age. It is mine; I have earned in it. But in those days it was only what had been given me. Down home had been the first to approve of it, though dismayed at my other growth. Behooves you to keep yo-seff mo-ah a lady than most, heah?—the dear sweet ladies said. The Evamses had approved of my face almost as if for good conduct—and it had helped me get into drama school. Seeing Leo’s face did not scare me. I felt myself safe from that kind of beauty. Or if safe is not the modern word, say then that my body had already declared what its intentions were. What I felt, looking at Leo, was awe. My face, too, would someday be mine alone.
I turned the framed photo over. On the manila-papered back all the names had been inscribed above the date—May, 1932, and in a young hand the name of the taker too.
“Do you sing?” the voice at my side asks. I shall resist letting the man who owns the voice become more than that.
“I have no ear.” Such a good strong instrument, our school impresario said, holding his head. And listen to her shift key twice in ten bars. “But I can imitate—even opera singers, for a bar or two. It’s not really singing.”
“Which singers?”
“You’ll laugh.”
“Try me.”
Oh I would, again and again. What I wanted was for Craig Towle never to come near enough to drop out of the myth that the town, and I too, had made of him. Never to become an ordinary man, in a room with me. Or even an extraordinary one, unimaginably near. And I was afraid that I wanted him nearer.
“Chaliapin.”
He didn’t laugh. “Where from? Boris Godunov?”
“No. I don’t know that. ‘The Volga Boatman,’ just the Yo-o-oh’ part. And Kirsten Flagstad. Not the Valkyrie cry; it’s too sustained. But the first bars of the Love Death—Mild und leise, and a few words on—I can do that. And John McCormack’s ‘Jeanie with the li-ight brown hair’—not always, but sometimes. That’s the hardest.” The Evamses, though they couldn’t take opera in performance, had a wall of old records I was free to play, and had listened to me with glee.
“Tenor—” he said. “You have quite a range.”
“It’s not singing. It’s like—talking. But from the diaphragm. And with what they call timbre.”
“Do one.”
“Uh-uh …” I give it that down-home lilt. You can snow people with Southernism, if you’re good enough. From me, it surprised him. But he caught me looking in my lap anyway, and looked over my shoulder.
“Why—your father took that picture. That long ago.”
“Wasn’t that long ago. Or not for him.”
Then he does laugh and laugh. “That you—should have to tell me.” He sobers. “Maybe I’ve been thinking too much that way. Of a period. I don’t want a play to be that; I never do. Yet even my own early life here seems to me out of a family album. It’s the town—and the reason I left it. Still forty years behind.”
“No!” I say. “It’s not.”
We sit as if over a chessboard. At the window is the town I could never paint as it should be. “It’s not like that,” I say, in a deeper voice than I have ever before let myself find. And deeper yet: “Not at all.”
What an old trick, dropping the voice with each repetition—but I didn’t yet know this. All the tricks were passion once.
“I’m the one who bought this place,” I say, with the same alto joy. Now that I see why I have bought it. To own what you love—and can’t get away from. As people do, never sure of which comes first. “That’s why there’s nobody living here.”
Has he heard me? His head is cocked—he might be one of those students the Evamses crave most, who at the height of practice appear to be listening to decibels beyond the ken of the sighted. He isn’t yet sure of what brand of creature I am.
A flush creeps from my neck to my temples. Old-style actors in the sticks used to hold their breath to turn themselves red, we were told—and were applauded as they reddened. But this crept of itself. If he wasn’t sure what I was—I would never tell him.
“Leo wore gloves half the time, claiming an allergy. Know any reason why?” His tone is strange.
I hate him for it. “Kid in my sixth grade, white kid, her arms were all liver and pink; said her mother was frightened by a stoat in her sixth month. But that’s just the town, eighty years behind.”
“Your round,” he says—and seizes my hands.
They are comely, and small for my size. “I have my mother’s hands,” I say. And I’m a bitch. Let him know that.
He puts my hands back in my lap, slowly. “The part’s yours—Portia. Now—let me walk you through it, though. That a deal?”
How will I feel when I inform them at school, I wonder—proud or shamed? Answer: I will know what bribery is.
“And then—you’ll walk me through it, my girl. With every thing you know about it. Or feel.”
Why do I tremble, like a prisoner offered a cigarette? Answer: because you are savagely learning more about the business of life than you have it in you to confess.
“So—you’re my landlord.”
It was my window, even if I couldn’t make the moon rise in i
t—the same limits under which the rest of the town owned its property. The Row will buzz no more than it always has about me and mine. He leans toward me, a shorter man than he seems. The crown of his head hasn’t lost a hair. He doesn’t gossip; he takes one into the ways of the world. The back of his head is not as well-shaped as Bill’s.
I face him squarely. Again I hear that intake of breath, and this time I know what I have done. I have assumed that pose. There are divas who must go to school to become one. There are those who come out of the town.
He tosses a key in my lap. I let it lie. Then toss it in the air and catch it. Then toss it back. I will hear his story to the end. As he gives it, I will add to it, until at times it will seem that I am playing all the parts in this family. In many voices. The voice of young Nessa, grandmother-to-be, and the harsh crank of her when old. The twanged Boston of old medical records never resolved—and how should they be, when nature itself has refused to?
“Some facts I’ll imagine,” he says. “Some I know.”
And will it also be the other way round? Some I will imagine, and he will confirm?
Through the air the packages will come flying toward us, under the glare of an ashheap sun.
As he begins, both our faces are incredulous. He has given me the part. I have inherited it.
THE DAY WE LEAVE THE farm, the men who come to move the tractors, all men from the district, say the cows already know. All machinery is being cleared off as a condition of sale. This is not a dairy farm; the herd is a small one, personal. It too will be led away at four o’clock, by which time we will be gone. The furniture, when auctioned off, may have been shamed by the low price set on its dignity, but most neighbors have much the same stuff, and no call for new. Only the grand white icebox remains in the parlor to greet the purchaser like one of those huge, retarded hired girls who around here are sometimes included in such deals. The buyer, our leading banker, is coming to take possession, denying that he is acquiring us for the sake of our fields. “That barn is chestnut,” he said. So perhaps there’s hope. A lot of the household stuff is made of that wood too—no point in saying it. The newspaper has congratulated him for saving the finest farm in the township. The township is Cranberry, New Jersey, but that kind of bog tilling—half nature’s and half raucous bands of pickers and babies made in the bushes—is not what we have ever done. That morning, the slightly acid smell of potato fields stretches as far as the low-level brown horizon, as if it always will.
The Bobby-Soxer Page 17
