The Bobby-Soxer

by Hortense Calisher

  Now we are there. The screens that Knobby so tenderly arranged are behind us. We are in my childhood. We are in that room as it was in Leo’s time.

  Leo, if there, follows us like that shadowy black crew Knobby saw at the Osaka Bunraku, who moved the great ten-foot puppets, everywhere at once. The rocking chair is stilled, and will remain so throughout.

  We—Towle and I—are the cleverest. Where I’ve brought him now, one has to be made entirely of artificial light. Where, as I have been taught, the true word is that much more true.

  He is hunting the books. He finds them. I say nothing here. I found them so long ago. But if he asks me again, as he did once, whether it is my opinion that Leo when up here alone always dressed like a man, I will not now be too shy to answer that women do not find the trouser as comfortable—that it would depend upon the crotch. Or that women clench with the physical, whereas men in some non-somatic way exalt it.

  Yet I must honor him. Somewhere in his absence he has come to the conclusion that outreaches either of us, rearing over us like a puppet come alive.

  How is it we have got to the captain’s walk? I did not intend ever to bring him there, even in dream, for he will ask me what I see when I look out there at the town, and will I want to say? Even if awake? On the ugly floor there are now no dead flies; perhaps it is not the season, or else someone has swept. No ghost, only Knobby—yet what shoes am I wearing? Pointed, high-laced, brown leather, marked Sorosis—Size 10? The size happens to be the same as mine, but I am not fit to wear those.

  “What would Leo see,” he keeps asking, “—when standing here?”

  “Or, pacing,” I say. Leo would pace.

  He’s waiting as he so often did in the loft, or as one used to see him in his earliest street exchanges on a town curbside, or in the hardware store. Listening, the way a deep-sunken well seems to, luring yet remote. I am not—am I?—going to cast myself in.

  Wake!

  I am awake. And will remain so to the end.

  “I see the town lanes,” I say. “And their crop.”

  It’s then I see the inner light of a face like his when it opens—the light that makes him Craig Towle. He and I standing there are one day to be mere holographs of bodies remembered, but this was—ever will be—a light.

  “So—we have no more quarrel,” he says. “You’ve seen that too? The one creature we all are? In whatever shape. And a Leo—only that particular shape.”

  Then the face closes, and we are onstage again, that much farther inside my door.

  “But if I’m to play myself—won’t my own life creep in?”

  “I’ll see that it doesn’t,” he answers.

  So that’s all I’m to play, I think, standing there in the only clothes I keep by me here, my worn old yellow sweater and skirt of teal blue. Only the narrator—one of those roles that the students in the greenroom scorn. “Then—who’s to play Leo?”

  Either of those two actresses would be a draw, but neither will do as well as I can by now, as he must know. Then it comes to me: why did he never talk of it? He’ll do as old Will did for actresses. He’ll have a man play Leo. Opposite the narrator. Me.

  Just as I’m about to speak he answers me.

  “You. You’ll play both yourself—and Leo.”

  Then he cries: “Don’t move!” For I have finally understood him and I am creeping away from him and from Leo, away and out of that corner, back into my own life.

  He comes downstage after me, with that wooing directorial whisper the school is teaching us to obey. “You’ll play both. Sometimes you’ll be a womanly Leo, sometimes a manly one. But always—the creature we all are.” He looks me up and down. “With a capital C.”

  Nobody says that in a dream; it has that everyday ring. This is not a dream then.

  “Not the monster,” I say, quick to his cue. “With a capital M?” I have never really scanned his body before; the head and face are always so intent.

  “Only the ordinary monster we all are.”

  How is it we are nearing this bed, with no curtain to halt or hide us—not even a scrim?

  This is the nurse’s mattress I’m using, I tell him; it has been scrubbed. But has he no bed of his own, five doors down?

  He has come straight here. To warn me and all of us here of how our circumstances are now entangled with his. “The lawyers—they’ll get at all of you. Or they would have.” But he has outwitted them. We need say nothing.

  “A whole town?” I say. “Need say nothing? How?”

  “Except among yourselves. It has been done before.” And he sets the briefcase with all of Leo in it on my bare floor. “It’s my town too, though it may begrudge me that.”

  “And how will I—say nothing?”

  He comes closer. The footlights shine harshly up, on all of him. “I thought of you all the way down. How week after week you were there with her, with my young wife. How you must have seen—watched—what I do. Yes!—people are variation. I can’t help that I see it. That it enchants me. And is all mine to use. I should never translate that into personal action. But I do.”

  How has he outfoxed the lawyers?

  He has admitted to the charge.

  He has admitted to the charge.

  One must move on, he says. He is moving on.

  “This old mattress—” he says. “That old nurse, my landlady. All my working nights over there in the loft, I think of it. How she wrapped Leo for the grave. And all she would answer—when I interrogated, pleaded, was: ‘One wraps.’”

  I sit naked on a divided stage. Would one use number eight, that deceiving rose red?—for he too is shedding his tired, experienced costume. Above us the old wooden beams hold up piously. He was born on the Row, under their like.

  There is no size now to either of us.

  “Think of it,” he says. “‘One wraps.’ And I even offered her money. Well—now you know what I do. All of it.”

  Then his forefinger traces down my right cheek. He is staring at both of us.

  But in the dim aisles just beyond us, who are those two, sitting as audience? A woman not yet sleeping her life away? A live girl?

  Master of the ash-heaps, how he bells all of us along.

  “Craig Towle—” I say in the soft voice of all the women of our town “Craig Towle. We understand the apportionment. Without being blind.”

  I am to be his privacy—for one night.

  Then at last I will rise against him, knee, crotch, breasts, neck, mouth—crying my one line, rehearsed since the day he met me, a small duenna stumbling down our stairs in her new plaid skirt—“No. I am the bobby-soxer. I.”

  His face is a well. I see a light at the bottom. I cast myself in.

  The doorbell rings. He has already knocked. Once again, I open the door—as in years to come I will open it, over and over, now that the dream dreamt too well has become memory. God—isn’t it wonderful, not to be waiting?

  We both know that it is he who is dreaming now—and that anything I say will be a lie.

  “Come in—” I say. “You will pay nothing.”

  TIME TO SPEAK IN THE full, grown voice. Nothing less will deal with it, with Towle, with us all. Today, after so long, we are all of us together again, like players from the original cast of some sturdy old vehicle, now met again somewhere on the road. Except that all day we have been in the exact place where we began, with all the town foaming through the doors. Some of our group are still in the town and of it. Some who were once with us are absent, each in the way peculiar to them.

  This is the day my grandmother’s debentures come in. In fact, whatever she was holding at such high risk came safely due a year ago, but she kept mum. Our informant is Gilbert Walsh. “Actually what she bought were ten-year bonds with a Dun & Bradstreet rating lower than a baby’s bottom, but at an interest rate higher than an angel’s. And with about as much chance of maturing. Have to hand it to the old girl.”

  What has incensed him most, now that he is our mayor, is that
the town has had a centenarian without knowing it. Almost missing its opportunity to celebrate the pure air and customs which have made her possible, plus a good crop of others in their late nineties, now crowding up.

  The story sent to the metropolitan dailies will make no mention of Cranberry, her birthplace; Gilbert has property rights here, in every direction where real estate values might soar. Nor does it say precisely why she hid her age—this smart old bird who doesn’t paint or quilt. “Plays the market right from here”—the mayor is quoted—“from a bedroom only one and three-quarter hours from Wall Street. At the age of one hundred and one.”

  It is rumored that when Edward Evams, head of the town board, was read this draft, he said: “Strike that ‘only,’” even though he himself is in real estate.

  However, the depot now has a fleet of cabs.

  Today strangers have used them, getting off buses and trains with the simple urge to see another town, any other, for the day. Also that rookie reporter from Philadelphia’s Main Line—sent out to see what town in our state could possibly be not Amish, not Pennsylvania Dutch, and still be quaint. Gilbert had sent out flyers only to banks, country clubs, suitable churches, and the like, but a Grandma Nessa’s Day is hard to keep high class, even when discreetly engraved.

  “Age isn’t high class”—Bill Wetmore said. “Neither is it quaint.” Nevertheless, he did the drawing for the flyer. Nessa looks quite nice. All his drawings do; people always look a trifle better in them than they could achieve on their own.

  I have accepted that this will always be the case, as well as the reason why. His sour tongue comes from that underground Bill who will never be comfortable with what he is; any sweetness runs to his so successful pen, which endows people with what they too can never be born to, or buy. He never draws me. On my part, I no longer bother to make any distinction between a Bill and a Bill Wetmore.

  I still feel the loss—of not bothering. Yet, so far, no one has superseded him. Not to our surprise, the full sweetness is in the children. We live like many, on the divided stage of parenthood. Though we do not have to do it all in one house. He lives in the city, with his drawings. I live with the theater, in and out of this town as it takes me. The children live with that other entity—us.

  Today all of us, children with their parents, families with their town, even strangers, are running toward the world. Our own townspeople walk proudly on foot as able, from open house to open house, unleashed for the day to check for themselves on whatever may only have been gossiped, although the ladies organized by Gilbert into the welcoming and clean-up committee, have been, as he says, indefatigable. And always rewarded. For by the custom of such committees, its members have revolved all the livelong summery day, no lady under the onus of having to welcome in her own establishment. What a joy, even to the happy or the house proud: for the day, every man jack and jill freed from the melodrama of one house.

  Except for us, the group standing in the hallways of the main house, its niches now filled with public flowers, the kind that will wilt as they should, once a ceremony is over, meanwhile remaining neutrally alive. A few of the ladies are carting off these bouquets, casting brave glances at our group—known throughout the day, as in funeral homes, as “the family,” though we number more. When they catch our eye we nod back majestically; today everything here is theirs, including us.

  Tim is down from Harvard. Bill’s sister Phoebe, at his side until a moment ago, ever nervously humming over her Boston deanship, and most so with me, hasn’t waited for her ride back with him but gone on, with a parting lip-curl to me: “I don’t begrudge you owning our house; I couldn’t wait to leave. And so convenient for Bill, isn’t it? When he bothers to come.”

  I won’t correct her—on who bothers, him or me.

  Nor did I check her when she boasted to her students—as she did the time I accepted her invitation to perform for a night at their new theater, that a “famous” actress now lived in the house where she herself grew. To introduce me as “not obscure,” which is how I feel, would not have interested her. Those characters who play the smaller parts in our lives never alter; it’s we in the major roles who must show change.

  Bill is here from the city as I am, though separately; if he wishes to stay over in my house here he may, and I will not necessarily leave. I understand better now how things might go—in a house in Dorchester.

  My mother is here, and awake. Though temporarily not in the hallway, she will return. My father, here with her from Brazil, is standing with Mr. Evams. I can call him Edward now. Two men who have had losses, they seek each other’s company now like those odd-men-out uncles one sees at all such celebrations.

  My grandmother’s day is over. She is upstairs, maybe even alone, though of course constantly attended, and more delicately than she has been in years. Etsuko and Watanabe are here from Japan.

  We have all paid our personal devotions to her, but will not quit here until all strangers are gone.

  Luray Walsh prowls over to me. “Those flowers those gals are picking off … Don’t they know any you bring home, a dinner dance, a wedding, always die the next day? Even in the refrigerator. Florists don’t send their best, these affairs. Gilbert has to watch all his official tributes.”

  He follows behind her. I appreciate him more now. Born in the Row, not ashamed either of that or of bettering himself, he has kept a kind of rude mental health, based on his inner contentions. That’s not my estimate of him but Mr. Peralho’s, who liked to dine at Walsh’s occasionally and to talk with its host. He would be sorry to hear that Gilbert is thinking of giving up the restaurant.

  “That was a lovely corsage you presented Nessa,” I say to him. “In spite of what she said.”

  We all laugh, but it’s Tim who snickers it aloud. “‘Plant it!’” Nowadays, when Tim has trouble with his effusiveness he uses a handkerchief to quiet himself, pressing it on his mouth against another explosion. Which is a pity. My brother, whom some once thought a repellently pretty boy, is not a handsome man. But with curls set as close to his head as are his ears, and that fillip to nose and mouth which comes of routes exhausted and even conquered, he is often a beautiful one.

  “My mother’s arranging her death,” my father says. “Just as she arranges everything.”

  “After what she said to that reporter?” Luray says. “No way.” She means to console, not to contradict, but Luray always overreacts, and especially with him. I used to think her vulgar. The young are so refined. Now I see a vigor refusing to give in.

  Maybe my father does too. His once prematurely white hair is now in better tune with his age. “That poor rookie. He went green at the gills.”

  Ma’am—he’d said—Ma’am, why’d you hide all that good money for a year?—and she’d answered: “Because I didn’t want to die.”

  A whole town, sitting in its community center, had risen to its feet to applaud. If they didn’t know about her bet with herself, they could imagine it. And could chortle over her antics later. But then she turned on that young fella—I heard half a dozen tell later—“and said: ‘WHY, BUSTER? THINK I WAS SAVING IT FOR YOU?’”

  “And I hear tell that at her request Edward here is teaching her braille.”

  Gilbert, after all these years, is only now first-naming Mr. Evams, who takes it in good part. People adopt a certain familiarity with the bereaved, Edward Evams says. Or are only then able to. And if the bereaved are smart, he says, they will take balm from it.

  As for grandmother, whose glasses are now as thick as the cataracts they replace—it was I who put her onto studying with him. Braille is almost like another sense, I said to her. It tells you things beyond the words. And she answered in the eerie way she sometimes does—though I can never pinpoint the remark that will elicit it: “Ah my ewe lamb—I always did what you said.”

  Mr. Evams now says, “Well, I have things I must do for myself, I ought to go.”

  They all look respectful, not suspecting he may only be bore
d with them or with the occasion, in the normal way. He contends that people are often sense-confused about the blind. “Some talk as loudly to us,” he said this morning, “as if we blind are also deaf. I shouldn’t be surprised if some find it remarkable that we eat.”

  These days I’ve caught him wincing when he says “we.” I have observed on my own that if he refers in the most ordinary way to the sexual life, men in particular find this strange. He usually never speaks of these matters to me. Nor is it easy to catch him wincing. Though his face is never blank, or not to me. Rather, it is a fine obscurity, well-guarded.

  The last of the ladies’ committee sidles past us, pausing regretfully over the large palm in the columned niche just inside the doorway, but after a whispered confab leaving it behind.

  “Who sent that one?” Luray asks me. “I have that kind myself.”

  “Dad and I.”

  My father and I smile at each other. All the niches are now filled.

  “Bet she gets a lot of flowers for free,” she says to him. “All those plays, gee you must be proud.” She turns away from him, to me. Her left profile, when arched, is boldly good. “That last one. Loved your outfits. But whyncha ever be in a musical?”

  Tim has to use his handkerchief.

  I say, “Nobody’s picked me for one, so far.”

  The last stragglers are emerging, from corners we thought emptied, some via the back stairs. Among them are the two gentlemen from the farm, who have been upstairs to pay their personal respects.

  “Hoping not to intrude!” they chorus.

  They are assured that many do come nowadays—and Nessa loves it.

  “Beautiful!” the younger of the two says. “Of course, we tried not to remind her we come from the farm. But at home we so often think of her … Why, Tim! Long time no see!”

  My father and I won’t let on that she as frequently refers to them—as That pair of matched bays. Who let the farm go to grass.

  I haven’t seen them in years. “You two look exactly the same.” They do, both their shaven pates only a little dustier.