Public Life (2): Return to the Molly
Leaning back in her office chair, Edith said that she would not, not, not go back to the Molly Club. Standing against the filing cabinet, hands in the pockets of his tweed suit, without his jacket, his waistcoat affecting fob watch and chain, his regimental cuff links visible, Ambrose stared out at the snow slush in the Palais courtyard.
‘That I appreciate. And consequently, you’re “parade exempt”, Edith. Attendance not expected. I thought that you should know about the meeting, that’s all.’
‘How did they contact you? How did they get your name!?’
He shrugged. ‘When I went back for the coats there was a notice. And Follett, the owner, talked with me.’
For no good reason, Edith felt that what Ambrose said sounded like an evasion. She had no reason to think it was evasion. He had no reason to be evasive. What did she care if he had been back every night? But when it came to this matter he always sounded evasive. He had explained the two ‘sisters’ from England as having been part of his old gang from London which meant that he had indulged his predilection before her. Perhaps she considered Ambrose inherently dubious, in the deepest sense. If his sexual rudiments were unstable, did not all of him become questionable? No, that was unfair. It was because of the loathsome incident which made the Molly Club and anything about it seem to her so murky. She felt that much more was going on than she was being told or that she understood. The loathsome incident had stirred up a nest of spiders in her mind.
Anyhow, it was his peculiar mania. She simply shared his secret and participated in it in their private life. She did not really belong in his darker covert life outside the bedroom. If, indeed, he had one. If it wasn’t all in her distraught head. But she continued to wonder whether he’d been back there without her, and if so, what he’d got up to there.
It was that she was jittery and moody about it all. Nothing sat well with her at present. Her work was scrappy.
He went on, ‘We — those who have been to the club — we, they, feel we should stand up to them.’
‘Stand up? We? I thought you had been to the club only that once.’
‘Oh, you know, go on as usual, I mean, but with a little more precaution.’
‘It doesn’t need me.’
‘Quite right. They feel that to bow down to them would be giving up too easily.’
She nearly said, harshly, that the Action Civique were just trying to clean up the town, to keep Geneva decent. Not that it needed to be much cleaner. And it probably needed a little indecency. With effort, she curbed her antagonism and reversed her first sentiments and forced out a joke. ‘I suppose Geneva needs all the indecency it can get.’
Ambrose gave a short laugh, but coloured. ‘Indecency?’ he said, as though he’d never thought of his behaviour as indecent. He glanced at her to see if she might not also have been sarcastic. ‘I suppose it does.’ He regained his humour. ‘And we’re just the people to maintain Geneva’s sense of indecency.’ He also forced out a laugh.
‘Indeed you are.’
The thing she found sticky and displeasing was that all this had nothing to do with the League. She wanted no outside untidiness or demand in her life. The League was too urgent. She had no time for other things, let alone messy and murky things.
‘It’s a matter of standing up to them,’ Ambrose repeated, trying to sound righteously firm, ‘to go peacefully about our business.’
She sensed then, that for all his releasing of her from the matter, he was still trying to persuade her to be involved.
‘One day you must explain to me what precisely that business is — that the Molly Club goes about.’
‘If only I knew, dear. Words fail.’
He looked at his watch, came over and kissed her, and said he would be off. ‘Don’t you worry.’
After he left, she went to the window wondering if it would snow again. A snow-covered European city was still a wonder to her and it made her feel she was living inside a toy village. She watched the smoke tumbling lazily from the apartment chimneys. But the snow denied what happened in the buildings that it covered with the false white innocence of snow. The snow was oblivious of her hurt.
She found it bewildering that she shared the indignity of that night only with the shadowy incognito people of the Molly Club who she would never see in daylight. Or see again. Or maybe she did see them. Maybe they worked here at the Palais, maybe she saw them in the mornings stamping the snow from their shoes, brushing it from their shoulders. Maybe she passed them daily in the streets and byways of Geneva because, truth be known, she would not recognise them without their costumes, the cloak of inversion, and heavy make-up. She paused, but they must recognise her, she had not been disguised on that evening. She didn’t know what to make of that thought.
She saw how a few natural women, like her, were permitted, chosen maybe, to be a court to their behaviour, to be an affectionate, indulgent audience of natural womanhood, to sanction them in their play.
Approached from another position, maybe she had a democratic obligation to go to the club and stand up to Action Civique. The Molly Club was not part of the toy town. It could be argued that it was all very well for her to be fighting for world order and peace with letters and memos. What about the threats of disorder now, here and now, in her own life or at least, in Ambrose’s, her friend’s life? In the town in which she lived. But which was the disorder? The travesti who contradicted their nature? Or the Action Civique? If Ambrose were there she would have made a joke about it. The difference, she forced herself to note, was that there was no violence in what Ambrose and his effeminate pals did. It was the arrogant young men in uniforms with clubs. The other night at the Bavaria, Herr Stresemann had told her that duelling in student corps was fashionable again in Germany in the Borussia Corps and so on. Getting their cheeks slashed to prove their aristocratic manhood. Stresemann himself had slashed cheeks but he was a man from another century. Even Bernard Shaw, whom she usually admired, had seen something impressive in Mussolini and his uniformed youths.
She saw that if she continued to think like this she would have to go to the meeting. Didn’t she already give enough to the bloody world? She again felt close to tears as waves of recall from that night at the club passed through her.
Throughout the day she felt she was dodging the moral dilemma of attending the Molly Club meeting by hiding behind her personal hurt. She was then more annoyed that she should be troubled at all by it as some sort of moral dilemma.
What would it be, this meeting? Would the meeting be businesslike or would they all dress up again and carry on? But for the first time since the dreadful night she recalled the other ungruesome parts of the occasion. Her fears about her fur coat. The two Englishmen dressed as sisters, preening and giggling, and saying some very funny things. She remembered the younger one getting the cocoa at Ambrose’s apartment when they were safely home, and how close they had all felt that night. And then the naming of the river. She became tearful again.
Curse it. She would call Ambrose and say she would go to his stupid meeting.
And again she helped Ambrose with his costume and make-up at the dressing table in his apartment. He sitting there in stockings, suspender belt, knickers, and chemise, enlivened by the clothing, delighting in the application of powder, lipstick, and mascara. The painting of his nails.
She had groaned out aloud when he timorously told her that he was going to the meeting dressed as a woman. He explained defensively that it was considered essential that they go to the club as they usually would go, and not to bow down in any way by dressing in everyday clothes.
She had again questioned his use of ‘usual’, but without pursuing a reply.
‘I take it that they don’t know about the meeting — the Action Civique?’
‘I doubt that they would. I don’t see how. It’s a private meeting. It’s hardly likely to be written up in the Journal de Genève. At least, I hope not.’
‘I cannot see how they could possibly know. And there will be precautions.’
‘What precautions?’
‘Doormen and so on.’
‘Why are you dressing up, then? Won’t that be provocative?’
‘I am not going to parade through the streets. Nor, I doubt, are any of the others. We are dressing up as an act of self-respect.’
She refused to allow herself to see that it had to do with self-respect. The contradictions defeated her.
He turned away from the mirror and took her hands. ‘I speak as a doctor and I think that going to the club again might be good for you. It might be what is known in psychology as cathartic.’
‘What is “cathartic”?’
‘It might help banish your phantoms from that horrible night. By challenging them, they go away.’
She wasn’t so sure. Couldn’t it also revive the phantoms?
He went on, ‘I don’t mean confronting the Action Civique — I mean confronting the place where it all happened.’
She could see that he was being brave. She knew that she should also be brave. ‘It’s all right — I’m coming with you.’
‘Thank you, Edith. I mean that. Thank you.’ He stood and kissed her cheek.
He sat down and turned back to his face, back to plucking his eyebrows. ‘Back to the important things,’ he joked.
She managed a smile. ‘I agree with the amber bracelets, rings and earrings. They will work well.’
‘I think so — with the green dress.’
When he dressed as a woman he wore a reddish wig so that he could take advantage of her wardrobe and jewellery.
‘I’m curious about something, Ambrose,’ she said, as she stood behind him, fitting his wig.
‘Yes?’
‘Do you really feel desire in your rectum?’ she said good-humouredly.
He smiled back at her through his reflection in the mirror. ‘As a matter of truth, Edith, I do. Just here.’ He touched his rear. They both spluttered with laughter.
‘What do you really feel?’ she said.
‘Oh, it’s rather nice. I would rather like to think it is what you feel.’
‘I suppose we will never know if it is like what I feel.’
‘We do know one thing. We know it’s satisfied by the same shape of thing.’
They both laughed.
‘Only very occasionally though,’ he added, seriously, ‘do I feel this.’
‘By “very occasionally” do you mean occasionally every day? Or every month?’
He made eyes at her in the mirror. ‘Or occasionally every waking minute. No, seriously, every few months or so.’ He took her hand and squeezed it reassuringly. ‘But best of all, I want you, Edith. That’s the best.’
She also wondered to herself if she ever wanted to have physical love his way.
At the door of the club, the shuddering recollection of the dreadful night went through her and she had to will herself down the steps. Entry was more supervised this time. They knocked, the peephole opened and they were scrutinised. Ambrose said something about the meeting and gave his name to the face at the peephole. This time he did not wear her fur-trimmed coat but wore his own everyday coat and hat over his dress, and they came in a taxi. Ambrose, discreetly, did not talk during the ride in the taxi. The bolt was drawn and the door opened to admit them. In the club the manager-owner, Mr Follett, dressed in women’s clothing and wig, recognised Edith and came over to her. He took both her hands and thanked her for returning and said something about her courage on the night.
Dressed as a woman, he was rather flamboyant.
‘I took what seemed the only course of action. At the time,’ she said to him. And for my distress, she thought, I now have a river named after me, which is one of the nicest things which has ever happened to me. The worst and the best that had happened to her in life so far had sprung from the same sordid source.
‘You did more than that,’ Mr Follett said sincerely.
The club was set up for a meeting with chairs in rows, rather than as a nightclub. Mr Follett seated them and brought them drinks.
She wondered how many of those in the club had witnessed her indignity that night. She knew Ambrose hadn’t seen it and therefore it was likely that others hadn’t seen it, but she would never know who knew and who did not know. Looking around, she saw others in the club who still bore signs of their injuries. Two had arms in slings.
The weirdness of the evening was heightened because of the formal seriousness of the discussion by men dressed as women and a couple of women dressed as men. Again, a few natural women like herself were there as themselves. Mr Huneeus was not present. She found that she was relieved to be in a meeting where, for once, she had no duties, and was almost invisible. Pity it was that she was not fully invisible.
‘We appreciate your presence,’ Mr Follett said, addressing the meeting, speaking with a normal male voice. It was all too bizarre.
‘We made every endeavour to contact those who come to the club. As you would have seen at the door now, we are using the peephole more strictly — in future all guests to the club will have to be identified — and we have a mirror to view the street from the club. And we will have, not one, but two doormen, who will be armed with stout clubs.’
There were noises of approval. Everyone looked to the door and to the two unsmiling doormen who looked powerful and competent in bow ties and dinner suits.
One of the travestis said, ‘I lay claim to the one on the left.’
Another said, ‘I lay claim to both.’
There was some laughter, but the doormen didn’t smile.
‘Please, this is a serious meeting. Some amongst us are in the position to try discreetly to make sure that such a thing does not happen again. And to punish, in various unseen ways, those responsible for what happened that night.’ Mr Follett then gave a malevolent smile, and added, ‘Those so punished may never know they have been punished.’
There were knowing noises from members of the audience, and a light clapping of approval.
Edith was fascinated by this statement. It made graphic the fact that, in life, there were people who made decisions for or against us, who might be acting from punitive or other concealed reasons, about which we would never know. There were hidden gods. There were perhaps many such gods in any one person’s life. ‘For obvious reasons, we do not wish to bring police attention to the club.’
‘I, myself, would be glad to invite any attention I can get,’ said the travesti who had claimed both the doormen, in a stage falsetto voice. He was becoming the meeting comedian. Lessening tension. A few laughed. Mr Follett smiled, and said, ‘Olivia, you get too much attention,’ and then went on seriously: ‘To put it another way, we do not wish to become a police file.’
He suggested that in future people leave the club in groups. Ambrose asked if he could speak. He rose to his feet and said in his normal male voice that it was important the club members show they were not intimidated. They should go on with the activities of the club. However, it was also important that club members not provoke the Action Civique by flaunting their behaviour. Comings and goings, for instance, should be discreet, and he suggested with respect, that patrons leaving the club wear regular overcoats and hats, and so on.
‘Darling, I wouldn’t know how to be discreet,’ Olivia said, drawing laughter, ‘it goes against my nature.’ Edith sensed that the audience felt Olivia was overtaxing its willingness to joke about the matter.
For the first time that evening, Edith also smiled. She realised that the sense of bizarreness which she’d felt up to now had dissipated and what was around her, and where she was, had become unexceptional, almost prosaic.
Mr Follett said he noted and he hoped others noted, and he hoped that Olivia noted, Carla’s point, which he endorsed. Edith was surprised that Mr Follett knew Ambr
ose’s nom déguisée and it awakened the feelings she’d had about Ambrose’s evasiveness. That Ambrose had more to do with the club and everything about it than he’d told her. But she also decided to cease worrying about the club and Ambrose’s murky connections. This was to be definitely her last visit.
Those who had been injured would be compensated from a members’ fund which the club was starting with a donation of 1,000 francs. There were other details.
Free drinks and hors d’oeuvres were then handed around and Mr Follett’s assistant manager announced that a diverting spectacle had been devised and would be performed.
Those club members who were to perform left the meeting to prepare themselves. The chairs were pushed into clusters, tables brought out, and the meeting dissolved into a social evening. The Negro orchestra appeared and took their places. Other people were arriving now, perhaps having chosen to miss the meeting.
‘Can we go now?’ she asked Ambrose.
‘Let’s see the show.’
‘I’m not sure I want to see the show.’ She wanted to leave but remembered the menace which still hung about the club. Irritated, she realised she would have to wait for Ambrose as an escort.
The lights went down and the orchestra began to play. The curtain rose on the small stage.
There were uneasy giggles and appreciative gasps, as three of the cast danced on stage, costumed as Action Civique.
A voice in the audience shouted out in mock horror, ‘Oh no. Who asked for an encore?’
Edith felt a clutching of her stomach as she saw the armbands, the black leather caps and the batons again. Ambrose gave a small sideways glance at her, as if checking to see that she was all right, and he took her hand.
Then on stage danced three pretty travesties who joined with the Action Civique actors in singing popular songs. After the singing, the female performers went into a salacious cabaret routine of grappling, resisting and dancing with the Action Civique, and then baring themselves, offering themselves. Edith was both riveted and chilled. She watched as those dressed as Action Civique went through a re-enactment of the lifting of dresses with the batons and the touching of the genitals with’ the batons, much, much play with batons, but with the travesties circumspectly keeping their backs turned to the audience.
Grand Days Page 30
