by Amy Bloom
Gerry said, “Enough about me.”
My cami and my knickers were only a little cleaner than my socks. Gerry’s gaze was curious and pleasant. I wasn’t sure what lust looked like. I tried to imagine how I had looked at Lottie or even, and my face got hot, how I’d felt when Mrs. Miller hugged me. Gerry pulled on a pair of pink silky knickers.
“Let’s pretend we’re both girls,” he said. “I’ve never been a girl with another girl.”
I figured that meant he’d tried all the other possibilities and my head swam.
I lay down and sat up and lay down, like a kid with a fever. Gerry sighed and sat up with me.
“It’s okay,” he said. “I thought it might go okay. I thought I saw…not like this.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I would—it’s like you said. I would like to be a girl with another girl.”
“And I’m not a girl.” He shrugged. “Well, you’re right, I’m not. But, hey, let’s look at the silver lining—now you know for sure you like girls. So you don’t have to marry a man. Y’know, by mistake.”
I sat up. Gerry sighed again. He put his arm around my waist and held me still.
“Here’s what I’m thinking. We get comfortable with each other and then we try to do a dance number. You do like me, but in reverse. Build up your left side, use my dumbbells, get a suntan. Maybe a half mustache, glued on. We’d keep one side as girly as possible. So then, we could do a tango and trade parts. I’d be the guy, you’d be the girl and then—whammo—other way.”
I didn’t want to perform. I was no more going to tango than fly and I didn’t want to be half boy and half girl. I didn’t think I was such a terrible girl that I should just give up being one.
I wanted to cry. I wasn’t a true freak. I didn’t have a talent or a deformity that people would pay to see. I was a rube and rubes were the worst.
“No tears,” Gerry said. “Forget it. We’ll just take it easy.”
He wrapped his kimono tightly and put his hair back, on both sides.
I lay back down and pretended to sleep. I studied the quilt. Gerry arranged and rearranged us. He spooned me. He rolled me on my side and made me spoon him. He guided my hand down and moved my hand the way he wanted and through it all, I pretended to be asleep and he pretended to think I was asleep. After, I wiped my hand on the underside of the quilt and sat up, rocking in misery. I missed that bacon biscuit and the early part of the evening when I thought dawn was going to come and find me and Gerry still talking and laughing.
Light broke and we heard the rousties taking down the poles and folding up the big canvas. I’d forgotten it was moving day.
Gerry said, “Maybe you don’t make the move with us. Maybe you head out. You head east and we head west and never the twain shall meet.”
I sat on the bed, tugging at the stitching until it opened and the thin stuffing came out. Gerry slapped my hand.
“Oh no, I’m not having that,” he said. “It’s time for you to beat it, sugar-pie.”
By the time I stood up, he was dressed and waiting for me to put on my shoes.
* * *
—
Gerry walked me back to my wagon. He stuffed my clothes into a small leather valise. He held up three dollars to show me, and put that in a green silk coin purse. He patted me on the shoulder. “I don’t want to see your uncoordinated ass still here when the sun comes up. Bus is a mile down the road and coming in one half hour.”
* * *
—
I skipped over Gerry entirely, for Eleanor. I said that I’d joined a circus for a few weeks and learned to type. I said that a man had made advances and I rejected them and that I caught the bus away from all that to Chicago for high school and on to Battle Creek and the beginning of Lorena Hickok, Girl Reporter. Eleanor said, as I hoped she would, You’re just so interesting.
* * *
—
I told Eleanor what I could. Chicago wasn’t terrible. My Aunt Ella was kind. I ran through high school in no time, trying hard to catch up. I overshot and got to college on a scholarship that didn’t cover food or clothes, and I did what smart, poor girls do. I cleaned houses. I ate the leftovers off other people’s plates and I read other people’s textbooks when they left them out on the library tables. I went to any party I could find and I was first at the bar and first to dump a bowl of nuts into my pocket. I slept under my coat. I didn’t smell great. The life those college people had, the cashmere sweaters and winter gloves, the lined boots and pert hats, were not for the likes of me and I didn’t have the nerve or the discipline to stay.
I went to Battle Creek and got a job at the newspaper, thanking Lucius Wilson for teaching me the who, what, where, and when.
I told Eleanor I got my first bylines, writing about people headed for the Kellogg sanitarium to eat breakfast cereal and get cured of what ailed them. I stayed just long enough to move into an apartment with a nice girl and her cat and I didn’t mention the girl or the cat to Eleanor. I kissed the girl and went to Milwaukee, to start my next life.
* * *
—
More, later, Eleanor said.
Longing Is Like the Seed
I hustled for the train. Eleanor was already there, waiting for me, sitting very straight in the middle of the seat. She’d kept her hat and gloves on. She looked tired and her face didn’t change when she saw me. She sighed.
I said that the Potsdam diner was a delight. She said that after the funeral there was corned beef and cabbage and homemade beer. She said the service was Irish Catholic and heartfelt. I hung up my coat and made a show of taking out my notebook and doing my job, and asking about her husband’s ambitions. People said the governor seemed to have a knack for climbing the ladder, regardless of how he’d done on the lower rungs and I repeated that.
“You’re very sharp, with your observations,” she said.
She looked at me, with those extraordinary eyes, light and clear as a Maine lake, speckled with deeper blue. I didn’t mean it, I thought. I don’t care. I will praise your husband until my tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth. I will pretend not to know about the actual duties of Missy LeHand. I will see only what you want me to see. Suddenly, she put both hands on my face and I still have no idea what she said about Franklin’s ambitions.
We both leaned forward.
“Thank you for listening before,” she said. “Thank you for talking.”
“I’m not done,” I said. “And you can tell me anything. It’s off the record.”
“Let’s have dinner and I’ll tell you about the beginning and end of my education,” she said.
The steward brought dinner to our compartment: boiled pork on a bed of watery peas and for dessert, two slices of canned pear, faintly green at the edges. I said it sure was Depression Dining. Eleanor said that she approved, that there was no need for frills, that frills would be abhorrent, now, when so many were suffering. I ate my canned pears and thought, Eleanor, you have never eaten food like this in your life, except when you wanted to. We’ve told our sad stories and what is remarkable is not how alike we are in our dead mothers and tragic pasts, but how different Orphan looks, from your life to mine. I went out for a cigarette and looked out at the dark-blue shapes and deeper shadows racing past. The yellow lights of the train showed more trees, more fields, more track.
I came back to the compartment. The plates were gone and Eleanor had pulled down the shade.
“No one here but us chickens,” I said, and thought that if I could just gag myself, this would go so much better.
“My greatest teacher looked a little like you,” she said. “She was not as tall as you. She was not…willowy. Mademoiselle Souvestre was planted. She had the most magnificent head, like a goddess. White wavy hair, always worn back, like you wear yours. Strong brows. Beautiful, fearless eyes. Bright, Prussian blue. You really do look a little like her. I was living with my grandmother, my brother Hall and I, with her and all our glamorous aunts and uncles. I locked my do
or every night when my poor uncles were on the warpath. And, my Aunt Tissie heard about some of the problems and she must have dropped every aristocratic name she could muster, to get my grandmother to let me go to Allenswood. You know, all the Strachey girls went to Mademoiselle Souvestre and the Barney girls, and my grandmother gave in. I was fifteen. It was beautiful. It was in Wimbledon Park and it looked just like Somerville College, at Oxford. It was my Oxford.”
I barely understood anything she said, except about the wild uncles.
“I bet you were lovely,” I said.
“I think most fifteen-year-old girls are,” she said.
I didn’t argue.
“I have never been so happy in my life,” she said. “Ever. I was a favorite. Actually, her supreme favorite. I cannot believe I’m saying that.”
I told her I’d been a favorite too and she grinned.
“You know. I got to sit next to her at dinner. Every night. I had wonderful friends too. We all sat together. If you spoke English, a single word, that was a crime and you might have all of your belongings dumped on your bed. But my French was quite good. Still is. My Italian was passable. Abbastanza buono. My German, well, furchtbar. Terrible. She thought my clothing was dreadful. She did say that. She had a very sharp tongue. She was wonderfully witty but not always kind and she had a real temper, which I thought would terrify me, but it didn’t. I had a friend who couldn’t stand it, she was scolded so often, and she left. I watched her go from my window, and I felt for her but mostly I thought, How can you bear to leave? It made me work harder, to please Mademoiselle. She could shred an essay. She ordered a beautiful red dress for me, burgundy, really, for parties and dances. She ordered it. For me. She said I should be proud of my height and dress like a woman, not a baby. Oh, I loved that dress.”
Her face lit up and I saw the girl, complete.
“Mademoiselle was fierce, she could strip the paint off the walls. She encouraged ferocity. She had no patience with docility. See, just like you. And she took us through a classical education, and critical analyses of text, and history, and the languages and literature. If you couldn’t make an argument, you had no place there. And there was no shirking and no laziness. She admired effort and ambition. I am carrying on, I’m afraid.”
I loved her showing off, tossing around the foreign words, letting me see all the pleasure she took in her once giddy, delighted self. I am done for, I thought.
“She took me all over France, during the holidays, sometimes just me. Oh my goodness, it was such a privilege to travel with her. She knew everything. She believed in beauty, in knowledge, and in social justice. She believed in fighting for what was right, even if you lost, and she believed that her girls had a moral obligation to make the world a better place. Marie Souvestre made me,” Eleanor said.
She put her head back against the seat.
“I cried for a month when my grandmother dragged me home for my coming-out party. Mademoiselle argued, I argued, but we lost. We corresponded until she died, two weeks after my wedding. Two weeks after. My wedding gown was pretty but it was nothing to that burgundy dress.”
“I would have loved to see you in that dress,” I said, and she blushed and I leaned forward and thought, And we’re off.
PART TWO
Heart of My Heart
FRIDAY AFTERNOON, APRIL 27, 1945
29 Washington Square West
New York, New York
I’m making tuna salad when the phone rings.
“Hello? This is Anna Roosevelt Boettiger, Mrs. Roosevelt’s daughter. Is that you, Lorena? What are you doing at the apartment?”
No one else she knows sounds like me. I sound like the hayseed I am and the smoker I was and the drinker that I expect I’ll continue to be. Anna asks to speak to her mother and I say she’s sleeping and Anna says, Could you check and see if she’s awake? When I don’t bother putting down the receiver and pretending to walk down the hall to check, her voice tightens.
“Is ‘she’s sleeping’ code for she doesn’t want to speak to me?”
It could be code for that. I certainly wouldn’t be opposed to using code like that.
“She’s actually asleep, Anna,” I say.
There’s a long pause and if I’ve been wondering how Anna will ask me, who she despises in the most genial terms, to smooth things over with her mother, who she has betrayed, I don’t have to wait long.
“I was worried. I’ve hardly heard from her since the funeral. That’s not like her.”
No, it isn’t. Eleanor is the one who calls, the one who cares, the one who sits by the sickbed all night. Losing her mother and father and being raised by a bunch of rich crazies, who couldn’t find their way out of their own fern-and-statue-stuffed cuckoo’s nest, made Eleanor fierce about attachment and control. I wish I’d known her when we were girls. I wish she’d traveled in Europe when she could, with all those glamorous French lesbians and sensible Englishwomen, and studied everything she’d wanted to and not just come home, like a good girl, to meet and marry Franklin, who was nothing special at the time. I wish she hadn’t had so many children and lost the one she loved the best. (Some nights, she woke me up, crying for him. Franklin Junior was eleven pounds and the biggest, most beautiful baby in the world, she said. His smile, she said.) I wish she hadn’t had to stand by, mute and miserable, while a parade of Sara Delano–trained nannies and Sara Delano herself spoiled and scared the children, undermining my darling at every turn. Franklin said that she was lucky to have a mother-in-law who pitched in.
I know Franklin was fun. The children all remembered when he could walk, playing Hide-and-Seek at Campobello or giving piggyback rides through the Hyde Park woods, and no one knew more about stamps and coins, if you like that. Even for me, his reading and reciting aloud at Christmas was a treat. Once, at a family party (two big Scotches, which is how I usually managed), I recited “Casabianca” (“The boy stood on the burning deck…”) and Franklin and I did the last stanza together, him roaring in with an English music hall accent. Everyone clapped, in surprise. He gave me a seated bow, and I gave him the same, from my chair that was always too close to the fire but faced Eleanor.
I don’t blame Franklin. He wanted what he wanted, when he wanted it, like the rest of us, and children get in the way of that. Even when I got to know them, as grown people, the five of them were still asking for the moon, looking for handouts and praise and treats, every morning. He loved them when they looked good (often) and when they did well (not often) and I don’t think he minded when they all fell short, because everybody in the world understood exactly what they were falling short of. The boys watched Franklin, like there was a trick to becoming president and they could master it and get there, but Anna knew that nothing like that was going to happen to a girl. She studied both parents and Franklin was the happier one. She saw him roll his eyes, when her mother came in with a request, an opportunity to help someone. Never mind that he’d sent Eleanor to research the request, to find the opportunity. Never mind that Eleanor made him look good on the left, and gave him wiggle room on the right, his whole political career. (Oh well, that’s my missus, he’d say with a wink to some angry cracker in a white suit.)
The only thing that mattered to Anna was being bathed in the sunshine of her father’s love and I don’t think that made her worse than the rest of them. If her father were Stalin, Anna would have been cheerfully counting up dead Jews and chilling the vodka. Eleanor’s love was like some shabby old footstool. Everyone used it without wanting it and no one ever gave it a moment’s thought.
* * *
—
“Well, Anna, your mother and I are going through a lot of condolence letters.”
I hope that sounds like code for We are balling the jack, little lady.
She sniffs, chilly and disappointed. That sniff is the way she’s most like her late grandmother, my least favorite person. I would rather have sat naked in a steam bath with Franklin than had tea with Sara Delano Roose
velt.
“I’m sorry you weren’t able to come to my father’s funeral,” Anna says, and her voice rises a little. She isn’t entirely sure I wasn’t there. In all the hustle and bustle, the comings and goings of ambassadors and presidents and friends and enemies and more lesbian civil servants than you could shake a stick at, I can hear she’s worried that she just didn’t see me.
“Well, I was very ill or I would have been there. And I’m here now.”
I’m giving up subtlety. It’s never done anything for me.
“This is such a difficult time. How does my mother seem to you? I mean, she and Tommie tore through the White House, packing up like nobody’s business.”
“You know your mother. Give her a list and Tommie’s help and she’ll conquer the world.”
We both laugh. Once, Anna and I snuck in mile-high corned beef sandwiches, and ate them where Eleanor couldn’t find us. Anna carried two bottles of Coca-Cola in her bag. I had a tub of potato salad and a flask in my briefcase.
Years ago, when I was a young devil, I was good friends with a girl, a painter, and had hopes of sleeping with her honey. The honey had come to my place out of sorts and looking for a good time. She prepared for the good time, drinking three shots in a row and slamming them down the way amateurs do. She passed out on my bedroom floor. I called my friend and she came over. We stood over the passed-out girl, two women of the world (as we thought then) and, as mad as she was at me, and as ashamed of myself as I was, we shared a beer and laughed.
