by Kate Walbert
“Your sister did beautifully,” Daddy said. He lifted the ends of his napkin and dabbed at some horseradish on his chin. Betty reached over and snatched the napkin out of his hand, loosening it from its tucked-in place and handing it back to him, whole.
“Thank you,” Daddy said.
“Don’t mention it,” Betty said.
Daddy smiled; he adored all of us.
Betty looked down at the plate that had been set before her. “You’d think they could heat something up.”
Mother shrugged. “You’d think someone could have made a point to be on time.”
“Someone,” Betty said, her mouth closed but full, “had to work until two A.M., and then someone had to take a train.”
“Please,” I said.
“You do not have to work until two A.M.,” Mother said. “Nor do you have to talk to your mother that way.”
Betty put down her fork. I looked to Daddy but his face had already adopted the expression it reserved for when Betty and Mother were fighting, as if he had resigned himself to the fact that the two were like cocks in a ring and, depending on the weather, the sleep the night before, the conditioning, one would eventually take the other down. I, usually silent during their sparring, must have felt particularly adult this day, or particularly desperate. I slammed my hand down so hard the glasses shook and water spilled onto the table, wetting the tablecloth.
“I mean it,” I said, as if I had previously said something forceful. The two looked at me; I’m sure I flushed in the way I always do whenever I express an idea that might be met with some resistance. The white dress Mother had sewn for me must have set off my flush in a startling contrast. I felt that everything I would have truly liked to have said, about Betty and Mother, about missing Rita, about Daphne, had clogged in the too-narrow passageway of my throat.
“Fine,” Betty said. She wiped her mouth and set her napkin on her lap, punctuating the closure. Mother looked at me and smiled. “Delicious roast beef,” she said. To which I, stupidly, replied, “Thank you.”
• • •
I had seen Daphne just a few weeks before. She had, since March, been sending me your father’s letters. She would tuck them inside a larger envelope and include a note of some sort, studying like a goddamn dog, etc., never anything too detailed. No mention of Gideon, the Russian history professor, for instance, or the Enchanted Forest. She sent your father’s letters unopened and would often scratch out her name in the address and write in mine, or something funny, like Debbie Reynolds, or J. Edgar Hoover, or Sister Clarice, who was the president of Saint Mary’s. Everything about Daphne felt slightly blasphemous and I remember worrying that the letter addressed to Sister Clarice might somehow find its way out of my possession and into a letterbox, arrive on Sister Clarice’s desk, and I would be forced to divulge the whole story, the entire lie, as she sat there listening, her thick fingers already clasped in prayer for my hell-bound soul.
But the last letter came with a longer note, one that suggested, by its tight, cramped script, lines between the lines. She wrote that she had to go away for a while, that she in fact had to leave before Bryn Mawr’s graduation, though who cared, really, she wrote. Her father was still in California and wouldn’t be able to make it; her mother, God knows; her aunt, infirm. Anyway, she wrote, I’ve asked that all my mail be forwarded to a P.O. box off campus.
A tiny silver key had been taped to the inside of the envelope, along with instructions as to the number and location of the post office box. It seemed odd to me that she wouldn’t have mentioned where she had to go, or why something would be so important that it would necessitate missing graduation. I knew that Daphne didn’t take much stock in ceremony, but I also knew that she would have wanted, no, relished, the opportunity to stand when her name was called as the winner of the history prize, to nod to the applause. I knew enough about Daphne to know that.
I took the trolley that afternoon, changing three or four times until I had finally found the right route. I’m not much of a traveler, and in those days, certainly, I believed because Saint Mary̵7;s was where Mother and Daddy had deposited me, Saint Mary’s was where I should stay. To simply buy a ticket and step on a trolley elsewhere felt reckless.
I arrived at Bryn Mawr near dinnertime. Girls were everywhere, streaming from the various buildings toward what appeared to be the dining hall. They seemed different than the Saint Mary’s girls, not more sophisticated, as you might guess, but smarter; they looked like they had books in their heads, foreign languages, historical dates, theorems. I remember walking by what must have been the library, a boxlike contemporary building constructed primarily out of glass where girls hunched at reading desks, the light from inside the glass box yellowish, warm. I pictured myself among them. I could have been. I certainly had the grades. But when the time had come to apply for scholarships, Mother and Daddy wanted me to go somewhere smaller, Catholic. No one in our town had ever gone to a place like Bryn Mawr; it seemed too far away, though it was no farther than Saint Mary’s. Funny how certain things turn out.
Anyway, it took me some time before I finally found Daphne’s dorm and asked the proctor, a well-dressed woman in her thirties or early forties, for Daphne’s room number.
“Daphne?” the woman said.
“Is she at dinner?” I asked.
The woman looked up at me from the newspaper spread across her desk. She tapped her nails against the oak top.
“Why are you looking for her?” she said.
“I’m her friend,” I said, feeling ridiculous; the woman seemed suspicious in a way I could not understand, as if Daphne were an inmate, or a princess.
“Sixteen East Oaks,” the woman said, looking back down. “She moved off campus in January.”
“Off campus?” I said. I had never heard the expression.
The woman looked up again, and squinted. I felt as if I had Saint Mary’s tattooed across my forehead. Were Bryn Mawr girls mind readers? Did they never ask such obvious questions?
“Walk to the west gate, turn right, second left is East Oaks. It’s not far,” she said.
“Thank you,” I said, and, hesitating, turned toward the door. “Give her our best,” the woman said as the door closed behind me, which at the time I didn’t recognize as odd.
Off campus, I thought. Off campus. Second left, I thought. Second. Her directions seemed to be a test of my intelligence, a test of my ability to follow instructions. I wanted to return to tell the woman that I, too, could have gained admittance to Bryn Mawr, I might be here right now, that I, too, might be off campus, or in the library sitting high above the passersby reading, oblivious to their looks, oblivious to everything except the words on the page, that I, too, might have earned a scholarship to Radcliffe to study Russian history, or comparative literature, or philosophy, even.
I found the west gate with little difficulty and turned right, as instructed. Off campus consisted of a neighborhood of Victorian houses, primarily faculty houses and some stray departments. The Department of Child Study, I remember reading on a bronze plaque on one red-painted door.
I turned left on East Oaks and looked for 16. The numbers were quite high, the walk farther than the proctor had indicated, perhaps eight, nine blocks. The houses, too, had begun to change. Several had mangy dogs chained to stakes in their front yards who sprung to their feet and lunged as I walked by. Guard dogs, no doubt. I ran a little, passing a tree hung with Easter eggs of various colors, faded a bit from the rains. I would have stopped to take a closer look—I had never seen such a thing—but I felt frightened, off-kilter. Who was Daphne, anyway? A Communist. A girl I had twice met. Someone whose mother had lost her mind. She was no one I knew, no one like me: she made love in a motel called the Enchanted Forest with a married man. She used words I had never heard.
When I finally reached 16 I had worked myself in to a kind of terror. The yellow house had a front porch with two rocking chairs and a couch. A calico cat balanced on the railing and looked
out to me, somewhat welcoming. I took the steps and knocked too loudly on the front door. An old man in a bathrobe answered and for a moment I thought I might run, that this might be Gideon, the Russian history professor, that I might have caught the two of them in the middle of a rendezvous.
“I’m looking for Daphne,” I said, realizing, abruptly, that I couldn’t remember her last name. I tried to picture one of your father’s letters addressed to her, but all I could picture was Daphne’s own handwriting: J. Edgar Hoover, Champion of the Human Race.
“Jesus Christ,” I heard. Daphne stood at the top of the stairs in the shadow of an upper hallway. I couldn’t see her that well but I knew, somehow, that she looked terrible, that something had gone horribly wrong. “It’s okay, Mr. Rawson.”
The old man opened the door wider to let me in; then turned, wordlessly, into a door off the foyer. I started to laugh, I am sure out of nerves.
“I thought that was Gideon,” I said.
“Gideon?” Daphne said. “For God’s sake, give me some credit.”
She stepped out of the shadow to halfway down the stairs, and she did look terrible. She had on a baggy shirt and socks, her face so gaunt I thought at first that she still stood in shadow until I realized, stepping in, that she simply had dark smudges around her eyes, as if she’d been crying for months. She wore glasses, which I found curious, because the other times we had met she had not. They were heavy black-framed glasses—the kind more typically worn by a man, an Eastern European or some other immigrant intellectual—that made her seem frail, dwarfing her face, exaggerating her gray eyes to the point where the gray seemed all behind the thick glass, her face a smear of white, her hair as straight and black as charcoal lines. I found myself wishing for Gideon’s sweater, something to add color.
“I know,” she said. “I look like hell.”
She reached the bottom step and hugged me. I could feel her ribs, the thinness of her arms. “Thank you, anyway,” she said. She pulled away and pushed her glasses up with a nail-bitten finger. “Do you like them? I’m blind as a bat but vain, too. I bought them last month. I don’t know, I think they’re very Lenin.”
She smiled. She really did have a beautiful smile.
“Mr. Rawson said he thought they were sporting. That’s what he said. ‘I think they’re sporting, Daphne.’ Isn’t that wonderful?”
I nodded, suddenly aware of the smell of the house: dampness, cats, a smell I associate with certain types of buildings—the ones closest to railroad lines and highway overpasses whose windows are often boarded with plywood, whose front doors have grates. I followed Daphne up the stairs. A faded wallpaper creased the wall and I noticed a line of grime at shoulder-height similar to a collar stain. Daphne remained temporarily cheerful; she told me that Mr. Rawson was actually a fine old goat and that he had given everyone in the house a pair of mittens last Christmas, mittens he knitted himself, having taken up the hobby when his wife died three years ago. Mrs. Rawson had been a painter in Paris before the war; Mr. Rawson was on a ship that had docked somewhere in the south of France, or something, she couldn’t get his part of the story straight, it was her story, Mrs. Rawson’s, she loved. Originally from New Orleans, of the New Orleans Tates, Daphne said. Or that’s how Mr. Rawson put it, as if everyone would know who the New Orleans Tates might be; she, the soon-to-be Mrs. Rawson, never wore the same color shoes, always wore one red and one black, or one black and one yellow, and that wasn’t even extreme, Daphne said. Somebody else in the arrondissement had a pet cheetah.
Anyway, Mrs. Rawson, or Constance Tate, wouldn’t give Mr. Rawson a second look, so the only thing he could do was return to the little gallery she had set up along the Seine every morning and pay her to draw his portrait. He did this throughout his entire leave, and then the days following, since he couldn’t bear to get back on the ship and never see her again. At forty-six portraits, she agreed to meet him for a glass of wine; at fifty-three, she invited him to the room she shared with a poet from Harlem; at sixty-two, they were in love.
Here Daphne stopped on the stairway and turned toward me; we had actually been climbing quite a while. It turned out she lived on the top floor, in a one-room studio with tiny shed windows. “That’s how he always says it,” she said. “‘At sixty-two, we were in love.’” I looked up at her and saw that her glasses had slipped again—they must have been quite heavy—down her nose. She turned back around quickly, continuing the climb. “He’s got all of them, the portraits, lining the walls of his crummy apartment,” she said. “They’re terrible, actually. Which makes the story even better.”
She opened a door one would have imagined led to the roof and I followed her in; the studio was impossibly small and bright. There were tiny shed windows, as I mentioned, and I instinctively went to one to look at the view: the gothic spires of campus above the tree line.
“You can see school from here,” I said, as if she wouldn’t have ever noticed.
“Exactly,” she said, “why I need shades.” She plopped down on a sofa covered with a piece of corduroy and I sat on a folding chair beside a tiny wooden table. There were carvings in the tabletop and penned doodles; on the windowsill a banana, flooded in sunlight, rotted.
“I went there looking for you,” I said.
“And what did you find?” she said.
“Smart girls,” I said. “Smart girls studying.”
She laughed and reached for a pack of cigarettes balanced on the arm of the sofa. She lit one and gave it to me, then lit another for herself, standing to walk to the window I had just looked out of, jimmying it open. A breeze lofted our smoke, though everything else remained still. Light shone through a row of green-glass wine bottles. Dust waxed the table; I divided it with my finger.
“How’s our lieutenant?” she said, still facing the window.
I blushed. “He’s fine,” I said. “I mean, he tells me, or you, he’s fine.”
She turned to me and blew a few smoke rings. “Glad to hear it; the last thing we need is a dead lieutenant on our hands.” She crossed the room and stubbed her half-smoked cigarette into a clogged ashtray. “I’m sorry,” she said.
I shrugged, though I doubt she saw me. “I’m not myself, really,” she said, sitting down on the sofa again. She drew her legs up to her chest, her thin arms clasped around them, locking hand to wrist. “Or, I’m more than myself. Or, I don’t know, beyond myself, beside myself.”
I waited. My cigarette burned in a little porcelain saucer I still so vividly recall. I suppose I felt that if I looked at her she might stop talking and so I watched the long, cylindrical ash of the cigarette, its nicotine marking the porcelain brown. Ivy vines twisted around the saucer’s rim, leaves outlined in a staccato gold. It had the air of something once grand, valuable, someone’s heirloom carted to the street or to the consignment shop, where surely Daphne had found her furniture, her dishes; or perhaps this had once belonged to Constance Tate of the New Orleans Tates; Constance certainly would have approved of porcelain dishes, crests, teatimes taken beneath the cedars.
“I’m pregnant,” Daphne said, or rather, exhaled. For an instant, borne to France the way I had been, I thought I might have imagined these words, that she might have said nothing at all.
“It’s Gideon’s,” she continued. “Everything is. Gideon’s. Everything. He doesn’t want to have a thing to do with it. Not now, anyway. At first, I don’t know, he said he’d help.”
I looked at her. You have to understand: In those days to be unwed and pregnant was the end of your life.
“He’d heard of some nurse who would meet you anywhere. He arranged it. Last week. The Enchanted Forest, of course. He waited in the goddamn car. I mean, it’s not like he could have walked me in, waited. He said, no. He said he couldn’t bear the smell of blood. Gideon, the Communist. That’s what he said. So he waited. I was in the room with the dirty screens and the pillowcases in yellow plastic. Did I tell you about it? I can’t remember. I lay there staring at the spruce
outside and the nurse knocked and I thought maybe it was Gideon having changed his mind and I said come in. She didn’t look like a nurse at all, she just looked like, I don’t know, somebody’s nasty neighbor. She had this little suitcase and inside were what looked like bits of rubber hose. I could see because she held up one and then another as if measuring and I wanted not to look, I wanted to concentrate on the spruce outside but I couldn’t, really. I couldn’t.”
Daphne rocked a bit as she spoke, her arms still wrapped around her legs. She was talking to no one in particular, certainly not me. “The nurse said she’d have to give me an internal to check my size and then she’d put one of these things in. She didn’t tell me. I asked. She wouldn’t have said a word. She said one of those pieces of rubber would get it going and it might take all afternoon and it would hurt like hell and if anything went wrong I should not go to the hospital because they’d arrest me. They will arrest you, she said, measuring one of those pieces of rubber like somebody’s garden hose cut with bad scissors. But don’t worry, she said. We’ll get it going. Where? I said, and I think she thought I was making a goddamn joke because she crossed her arms and said, This isn’t funny, and I said, No, it’s not, and then I walked out. I told Gideon I couldn’t bear the smell of blood and he said he didn’t find that amusing. Everybody thought I was being so funny.”
She looked up at me and pushed her glasses back against the bridge of her nose. “He paid for this dump, said it would be more discreet than on campus. Now, I don’t know. I haven’t been to any classes. I haven’t heard from him.”
“What are you going to do?” my voice sounded wrong, too earnest.
She stood and walked over to a desk shoved beneath one of the windows. In the top drawer she found an envelope that looked, even from where I sat, important. “Four hundred dollars,” she said. “My father sent me a graduation present. Pearls. I’m sure he felt guilty because he made no effort to be here. They were beautiful, really; worth twice as much.” She put the envelope back in the drawer. “I’m going to Europe. One of the girls here said her sister went to Yugoslavia, said the doctors will do anything for cash.” Here Daphne shrugged. “It might even be legal there.”
