Who knows what he himself thought he was? It’s no sin to be skinny from music. Or to be skipped by a war. Or not to be from the town where you are new. And no, he never had. Been with a woman. But what that poor goaded man did was to try.
Leo never said where they went. But where else would it have been but the choir loft, after practice? It’s a rich church, and a stingy one. No full-time sexton. Does it for a garden, plus other payment in kind, and holiday cash. The field land rolls almost to the back door. Men and tractors go home early, out a side road that doubles back. These two, Swazey and Leo, wouldn’t have been the first. Close-fisted as the church was, it was always open for Christ.
And for Christ it was—the only one stern enough to watch real innocence, and in sight of His own organ pipes. Leo had on the green dress.
Always wore it when with me, saying it was her best—Swazey told them. But I couldn’t get to her in it. And maybe neither of them quite wanted him to. But the dress was like a maze to which he had to find the key. In the dark. And by then they were both eager. Or so he swore. For Leo had made him strip.
See them, in all that their nakedness meant to them. Leo’s hair, dressed in what then were called “book curls,” came loose from its clasp, mingling with his, Leo’s chest pressed to his narrower one, the hips spread like a swan under him, the long sinewy legs twining with his own. And moving on his face, the big hands, not unwomanly, now ungloved. They were not that hairy, nor was the rest.
If Swazey hadn’t been such a ninny, we would know more. Had there been more than love play? He swore there had been a love act, and what he took for a normal one, for there was blood all right—when his hand, straying down Leo, encountered more than he had bargained for, and he sprang up with an awful cry. Strained my throat, he said. There was only the one light to turn on, above the bench in front of the organ panel. Leo lay staring up at him. “There’s too much blood, I think.” There was; Swazey’s whole hand was smeared with it. But that was not what had affrighted him. Under the blood, to one side of what a woman should be—his phrase—there was more.
In his high school they had all known a boy whose testicles hadn’t properly descended—and whose later marriage had been annulled. That was the closest he could come to what Leo was. Adding to it what his own blood still felt and would never forget: where he had been, if shallowly—its seam still seeping. “You’re not normal,” he said, hunting for his handkerchief. The shawl he’d given Leo as an engagement present did better, the paisley blending with the blood—which after all wasn’t that much, to have had to ruin such a shawl for. But he never could stand the sight of blood.
Leo, so wrapped, looked up at him—he was still naked, you see. “Are you?” Leo said. “What’s normal?”
Hear their voices in that choir—pure gold.
Could it have been that, if they had been left to themselves? Who knows what matches can be made—have ever been made—between those found to be too various?
But hush—all voices except from back then.
That night, those two got Leo safely home and in without notice, thanks to the green dress. Nessa, who always waited up but only called down the stairs, heard the other bathroom going for hours afterward but thought she knew why that might be and kept quiet, maybe with the inner wrench of mothers who think they know what has happened, only worrying the worst, or what to Nessa would be when it went on and on; had Leo had a miss? That bathroom had a woman-sound to it, Nessa said all those years later: you can always tell. Then, after a while, all that running water stopped.
But the next night, the young man came and asked to be “annulled.” Asked for a “conference,” mind you, with Nessa and the grandfather both, Leo being “requested” not to be present. Oh, it was all quotes from whatever fancy etiquette books he got them from—anyway, a far cry from Sunday after-dinner whisky interrogations. These Jersey burghers, with their Frigidaire in the front room where a Hardman & Peck keyboard ought to have been—he had them right where he wanted them. It was quite an aria, what with his venom at his low reception in Cranberry, plus the insulting style that inferior-feeling persons take on when in the saddle—yet over it all, as he wrung his wrists and tossed his head almost awry, the caw of a bird rejected by the flock.
What he told them was that Leo was a man.
Now: the grandfather. Who dealt in land, yes—but those are often brokers in all trades, as opportunity calls. Regret the passing of the type, those bluff bachelor veterans of the all-night hotel and the poker antes as full of blue jokes as chips, who stroll into marriage with a background of pretty nearly everything. And die dancing. But still the kind to step out of his portrait at the right time.
“Now that’s a fair question, Mr. Swazey,” he said. “What is a man? What do they say to that in a town called Tophet, back in your native state of Illinois?”
Gone long since. Swallowed up in steel mills. Maybe never too sure itself of any other music. But as grandfather stepped forward, the young man stepped back.
Subsequently, it was announced that Mr. Ruskin Swazey, Fellow of the American Guild of Organists, had left our church to take on another not disclosed, the engagement to Leo being terminated by mutual consent. It may occur to some that he was paid to go quietly. Hard now to think of Nessa as not aware enough to ask, but she only grew money-wise after they moved.
The black-sheep brother did ask. “Pay off that pretty-boy?” He would have smelled more than a love-spat, and payoff was the way he lived, though restricting it to within the family. Hard to credit that he would imagine the real case. But he was good at suggesting what dirt he’d collected, without specifying. So in the end they had to pay him. They were used to it.
For many weeks Leo was not seen outside the house. Then one day, some weeks after, Nessa and Leo left for the clinic in Boston, to be away some months. Long enough so that in later years the legend grew, as harmless ones will about spinsters who so love children, that Leo, whether or not undergoing psychological treatment, as was let out, had also had a bastard while there. Nobody really came to believe that, since anyone who knew Aunt Leona later knew she would never have left a child behind. Even a dead one—for that too was hinted—would have had its memory openly kept.
As for the clinic, it didn’t do that much, old Nessa said. “They wrote Leo up.” But Leo fell in love with Cambridge and all the learned societies with meetings free even to ladies, and a campus where even country people could walk. Meanwhile, the grandfather had been busy again at his brokerages, and it soon would be announced that Nessa had at last found—and had got him to buy her—the honeymoon house so long owed a younger wife. For this would be the story that would harden around that snob Nessa among all the farmwives she had abandoned for town elegance, and would outrage all the friends of such a fine but foolish gentleman. So Nessa assumed that burden too. If the iron did then enter her soul—as she admitted to her interlocutor in one of the ruby-glow, chalk-green restaurants where he was wooing her old age—“that’s how old women like me are made.”
But who had made the decision to go to Boston when Philadelphia was handier, or indeed to go anywhere medical; who had thought of it?
Leo had. “It was the only way to get the child downstairs,” old Nessa said, the word “child” issuing like a bell from her wrinkled mouth. “After seven weeks.”
For when they went upstairs the morning after the young man had had his conference, they found the bedroom locked and a note slipped from behind the door. Leo wished to be left alone for a while. Would they kindly leave supplies—food, and books to be asked for, in the bathroom adjoining, which had doors common to bedroom and hall, each lockable. “I do beg both your pardons,” the note said. “But do not try the door. I ask you this with sincere love. If you do try, I must kill myself.”
They did as asked. Ever after grateful that they had. For in those weeks Leo was allowed to forge the character such a creature might best have. It was like with the rain on the fields which they had kept b
ut no longer farmed by the work of their own backs. One must have its double season, gloomy in rooms pent with damp, but outside fresh in the nostril.
And the character would be noble. Leo did not leave them to despair. Little notes came, assuring them of health, grateful for supplies, mentioning their quality. Trays, if not eaten bare, were never sent back without something gone. Far as they could tell the closed room remained as clean and sweet as the bathroom did. A note came—“if you hear pacing, it’s just exercise.” No pleas for something special or extra, as from the invalid or the wounded, ever came. Instead, they began to feel that they were helping, and this was a vindication of Nessa, who had set the tone—never to press. My grandfather’s tact came more naturally. Such is ripeness.
About the third week, a note issued asking Leo’s nephew to obtain a list of books. He ran all over for them, even to the state library. Where had Leo got the titles from? Some from the learned societies—Montesquieu, Pascal, and a man named Gide who might still be alive. Books telling you straight out what to think—or diarists deciding. He was instructed to ask the librarians as well, for other books on conduct. After this came a raft of those pocket-size Little Blue Books, which boiled it all down—and after that the dry-as-dust medical ones, heavy in his bike basket, for which permission had to be specially given. Young as he was, how had he got it?—for he had. And somewhere in all this, maybe reading behind Leo like a courier who dares to open the letter maybe containing his own destiny—did he discover what was wrong? One knows only his own later choices.
Once—he did tell Nessa—in an old copy of stories by a Gerard de Nerval, he came on a piece of paper tucked inside, with one word slashed across it: No, and he read the whole book to find out what Leo had said no to. Suicide.
And once, when he came in with an armful of books, Nessa said desperately to the ceiling, “Leo. Leo. Leo. What is it all for?” and stood there, wrung out.
“Leo’s debating,” he said.
“What?” his mother said. “Debating what?”
But he had already gone up the stairs.
I was more of a mother to Leo than to any of mine, old Nessa said.
And still later, once the grandfather was dead, had the awkwardness between him and Nessa come about because he was the only accomplice left?
He was only a boy, old Nessa said. Why did I harden against him? Because—I was hardening.
Then came Boston. For which trip Leo, thinner and with long hair ever after kept so, came down wearing such tweeds from the self-made trousseau as were suitable. At the bottom of the stairs they all kissed. As after a wedding. Leo would never offer to do so again, not even to kiss a child. But would gather other warmths—in the way that young persons do gather their talents.
When they came back from Boston the grandfather met them with the car and drove them home. The ice was thick on the front steps and the sky the color farmhouse sky gets that time of year, as if snow is its sole industry. The house, newly painted in chocolate and gamboge, sat there like a plucked chicken, with only its rhododendron bushes to hide it. Know how that plant’s leaves hang down in points in winter? Leo touched one of them. “Don’t despair.” The grandfather, stomping in his arctics, found his key, and the ladies lifted their skirts and went in.
Inside, he blew his nose. Those big handkerchiefs of those days, they hid a lot of tender men. “Nessa, make us some tea. Leo, come into my den.” Leo was easier with him than with me, old Nessa said. Leo was never as uneasy with men as women were trained to be. Nor as hard on them. And what was said in the den? “I’ve traveled,” Leo said. That was all. But it was when Leo went upstairs again—though they heard the door shut softly and not lock—that he said they must move. If only from under the increasing pile of books alone, for these were all over the upstairs hall now, some in neat piles to be returned, and some bought—though he didn’t mind that. And he didn’t expect this to stop.
But it was as if the books were hunting us up, finding us out, my grandfather said—and of course that’s what Boston eventually did. “That’s handled better in a town,” he said. “A new town.” And from there, the son must go away to school. “Where he can settle his own debate,” the grandfather said to Nessa, with the sole fierceness she ever saw on him. “Listen up there”—he said then. “I believe Leo is opening the door.”
And when Nessa went upstairs: behold—the door to Leo’s room was open. That’s how she thought of it: behold.
Since Leo’s tenure, the lodger’s room had gone through all the teenage stages. Then had come those storms of dressmaking which can crowd a young person with all the patchy fogs of ego—witness that girl who Nessa’s son would one day marry. Now Leo’s room had become the lodger’s again—decent but anonymous. Only one book remained, one from their own Five Foot Shelf of the classics; Nessa couldn’t see which one. Leo sat bent over it.
Nessa was about to tiptoe away when Leo’s wonderful voice came out to her. If a trillium could speak, that would be it. The dark red ones.
“All clear.”
Back there in the hayloft, the afternoon is fading.
Sheets of foolscap-size paper lie scattered around us. He gets it from a kind of homespun cooperative in Cornwall, he tells me. The oat-colored pages mean work to him wherever he is. My own long thoughts seem already to lie among them.
I’ll make tea,” he says. “Toilet’s in the corner there. Ah, of course you know. And I have some stuff to eat, if you like. Or I could take you to dinner.”
“Walsh’s?”
We laugh. And I think, yes, we both come from the town. “No, we can’t leave the farm,” I say, standing at the door of the little latrine I know so well. “I mean—we haven’t yet.”
“You’re an angel.” He sees my scowl. “Sorry. I know you’re not a child. I meant—thanks.”
“I know I sometimes am. A child. What I can’t stand are—”
“What?”
“Ordinary responses. I mean, token ones.”
“It was just a phrase. I pick up language.”
But we are both silenced.
You’re an angel … Be an angel … Do we both hear the bobby-soxer’s crowd?
“You may be too much of a sibyl,” he says after a while. “To be a good actress.”
He sees me droop. Arrogance deserts me fast. “It’s just that in this case, I am your material. We are. My family.”
Candor will always reach him.
“Go to the bathroom, for Chrissake,” he says, and then—“Sorry.”
We laugh. He and I are going to do some laughing, I think. But it will be only about us.
He must scrub the toilet himself. I like these small clean ones where one communes with the ammoniac human smell, with one’s own. My house.
I am becoming part of the town. He thinks he’s wooing me to do what he needs. But it’s the town, all the people back there, back there in the secret life, among the old postcards and tatty lace. One doesn’t expect to find a power there, sitting in that antique dark.
He and I share his cold cuts and beer. It’s not hard to go back. It’s not easy to go back.
Leo is in the deserted barn, with the cats. They’ve never minded her presence; cats don’t care. They are circling for the milk that will never again be here. The herd has left, lowing its uneasiness, the farmhands too, touching their hats. “Bye, miss.” The sun slants in everyone’s eyes. “Bye.”
An empty barn has no more revelations. But for the sake of those one has had here, one might come to say goodbye to it. After the dresses are packed. “Where is that child?” Nessa cries. “Ah, there you are.”
Outside on the front lawn, the banker has come to say goodbye, and to see that the sellers take nothing that now belongs to him. Some people steal their own plants. The last of the machinery hobbles away. The first van of goods has gone on ahead. The sun clings like snuff to the women’s dresses. Leo’s is tobacco plaid. The odors are April lazy. People stand still.
Then my father co
mes out of the house in his new school-blazer and cap, calling: “Leo’s rocker is still upstairs. They left it.”
“Told them to,” Leo says. “I’ve rocked enough.” The voice is rich and amused. Even in the later decline of Leo’s beauty—the nose too noble, the neck cords tensed with song—people will remark on that voice’s positive joy. And now that swelling throatline—was it Greek?—takes the sun like the plaid.
“If I’d thought—” says the banker, who is recently widowed, gazing at Leo and taking new note of Nessa and the grandfather—the gap in their ages. “Still—you all aren’t going that far,” he says. “And Miss Leo—” he says, turning “—you are to take any you want of your plants.”
But Leo has fled.
“Far?” my grandfather says. “Far enough.”
So they leave. Oh, spare me, my old grandmother will say at ninety, but in the end she will describe. How Leo gathered and gathered the plants until it was well past dusk, with each armful asking reassurance. Like a nun going into the convent, only here in reverse, Leo kept asking whether the world outside the farm would have the proper furnishment. Was there really an upstairs in the new house—above the upstairs? “It’s a bankrupt’s house—” my grandfather said “—it has everything.”
“Does it,” Leo says, suddenly calm, and absently adding on another plant. “Then I must burn some things I still have in the cupboard up there. I was going to put them with the plants.”
But on a farm one does not leave a fire burning. So my father brought down a portfolio, and a hamper. “Clothes I bought in Boston, Nessa—that you didn’t know about. Except for the shoes, a monster mistake. But I’ll take it all with me. As a lesson in extravagance.” As this was said, Leo’s voice failed. Theirs was not a world in which anything could be kept private, maybe all the more because of their lack of nakedness, and Nessa, who must have known about the clothes in the hamper—all male ones, began to bawl.
The Bobby-Soxer Page 19
