by Anna Shapiro
“You’ll have to come over to my house. You’d love it.”
“Maybe we can trade.”
They could hear the afternoon students arriving and thumping up to the studio, and Nina, Maude’s mother, in the kitchen, telling Ernie where the bathroom was and offering him tea.
The livery car driver was black. The bathroom wasn’t. It was flame orange. Even the ceiling.
3.
NINA LOOKED LIKE a washed-out version of her daughter. Everything about Maude was more: More color, more height, more curve, more electricity. Nina’s straight bangs and ponytail were pale with early gray, and her twittery, fragile-looking form was outfitted in the flattering bohemian uniform of thin black sweater, dirndl, and ballet slippers.
Dropping Maude off at school one morning, as sometimes happened, she got out of the car and stood inside the wing of its open door, looking around. The school grounds too were more: More and bigger trees, sweeping lawns, the mansion that formed the school’s main building; the mansarded barn that was like a mansion, which housed the dance and art studios; and, at the moment, more color, as the maples sprouted the first fingerbursts of autumn vermilion amid the still summery lush green. Students trod winding paths in workboots, jeans, flannel shirts, and turtlenecks, all with long floppy hair, or springy hair that suggested egrets, angora cats, passion flowers. In a few years the look would be legion, but at the time it was hardly to be seen outside rock groups, and even they wore repressive little matched jackets.
“I’m glad you’re going here.”
Maude was collecting her books, piling them against her recently budded chest. “Daddy isn’t.”
Mrs. Pugh dodged this. “Well, I am. I think you’re lucky. I wish I could have gone here myself.”
Maude squinted, not wanting to start up the fight again by reminding her mother of how hard she’d made it for her to accept the scholarship she’d won after secretly applying and getting in. They weren’t a private school sort of family, she had been loftily informed. Now, it seemed, they were. Half of them. (Her brother’s vote wasn’t in because, actually, they didn’t know where to reach him to ask his opinion.)
The bearded, proudly potbellied art teacher came sauntering over, hands in pockets, as if recognizing a landsman by Nina’s art uniform. (On top of this, the car was that emblem of nonconformity, a Volkswagen.) “Mrs. Pugh!” he said heartily, extrapolating from Maude’s presence. “You’ve got a talented daughter.” Irritation prickled like scalding bites along Maude’s back. She could draw, it was perfectly true, and she liked people to notice. But she hated this kind of oozy worship, and she wouldn’t tolerate flattery or praise as a comeon. It seemed to patronize the very seriousness of her intention to be an artist.
“I’m gonna be late for lit, Mom. Thanks for the lift.” She wanted to blow her mother a kiss but didn’t want Mr. Patrick to be its incidental recipient.
The mother watched her daughter blend into the stream of students. It seemed a miracle that this girl, her daughter, knew what to do, like an animal that has an instinct about where to fly in winter, how to perform a mating dance. Everything she did, no one had taught her. It was eerie, almost scary, her apartness and self-possession. Even her drawing abilities. Milt had steadfastly refused to teach her, even when she asked: “Daddy, will you show me how to draw a tree?” “Go out and look at one,” he had answered. She hadn’t done as he’d said, though; she just figured it out somehow. And in that same mysterious way she knew how to be part of this crowd, these children of millionaires and famous people, a Senator’s niece, a movie star’s son. She acted as if it were nothing, in her cheap deep-blue jeans from Penny’s in the Roosevelt Field shopping center—which, however, she had embroidered with paisley shapes on one thigh and a peace sign on the back pocket. But how had she learned to embroider? Nina Resnikov Pugh, daughter of a garment worker, hadn’t in her whole life mastered so much as how to hem a dress.
Nina felt the pang that always meant Seth, Maude’s brother—sick, helpless guilt, as if she had wronged him by producing Maude. Nina couldn’t help hating Maude, a little—as if Maude had wronged Seth by being born. Shown her older brother up. Everyone had always oohed and ahhed over little Maude, precious Maude. With each word of praise for Maude, you could see Seth flinch. She and Milt had been so careful, as a result, not to praise Maude.
She wondered at her daughter’s boldness and ingenuity in applying to the school, and at its having occurred to her in the first place. She herself had wanted it for Seth, if anything. They had always known about the school, of course, in that vague way that you knew about things in your area; the way they knew that pioneer aviators had used Roosevelt Field before it got paved over as vast parking lots, though there were still cracked landing strips in the last grass of the flat field; the way they knew that the antiaircraft plants had come because of the flyers, and the farms started to go because of the highways coming out, serving the plants; and they knew the names of the families, which seemed like families out of Greek drama and British heraldry, by the beautiful lands behind brick fences where the few hills of Long Island rose—the Phipps estate, the Whitney estate, Coe, Woolworth, Pratt, Morgan—and saw the starry denizens in gauzy dresses and sequins on the society pages. They seemed hardly human and utterly inaccessible, a different order altogether, for all that Nina passed their gates when she drove to certain shops and always when she drove Maude to her school. And this new friend of hers—Weesie—Louise, who seemed like a polite, lively girl, apparently she lived on one of the estates. Not in the main house but some house on the grounds, so that it sounded not so intimidating, as if they might be gatekeepers or caretakers. Which they certainly weren’t. Though, in any case, to be a caretaker to such grand people was in itself pretty intimidating.
Nina would never have admitted she thought they were better than she was, would not have admitted it to herself. Justice demanded that they be, if anything, worse.
But it was impossible not to be drawn to the green silent enclaves, to want to follow the narrow lanes that snaked from wrought-iron gates posted PRIVATE and TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED, marked with reflectors so that a forgetful inhabitant coming home drunk at four a.m. wouldn’t crash his own barriers, controlled by electric eyes and other devices triggered out of sight, beyond the fieldstone pillars to which the gates were hinged. It was impossible for Nina not to feel connected to places to which her senses were so attracted, or rubbed that much more raw by the rudeness of the inescapable larger culture to which she was consigned.
And that was why, two summers before, they had pulled onto the winding road that led to Bay Farm: anyone might look at a school, anyone might be a prospective student or student’s parent, however fraudulent or out of place they felt. They had walked the lovely rolling grounds, the gardens no longer elegantly kept but planted with botany projects and provender for cooking classes and preserves sold at the school fair. That was one way they knew about the school: the fair was open to the public and advertised by fliers in store windows or piled on the counter at the cleaners and the stationery store. They always meant to go and always forgot.
They walked into the barn and saw student carvings in wood and stone left half finished on stands, and oil paintings piled against walls, and etchings and woodcuts pinned to the ubiquitous pocked beaverboard. Peering into windows in the main buildings, they saw classrooms. Instead of the usual thirty unconversational desks in grim rows, there were two long tables pressed together, surrounded by chairs—fewer than thirty chairs, for sure. You could see from how things were set up that the students were treated as something precious, not just noisy bothers to be processed and gotten rid of.
No wonder the upper classes had such a sense of their own consequence.
“Maybe Seth—” Nina had begun. Milt silenced her with a look.
But Maude caught it. They thought this place could salvage Seth. The crude way he laughed with his friends; the way he wrenched her arm behind her back until sweat beade
d her face; the way he snapped the back of her bra and said “Littlest Angel,” as if she would wear a training bra. There was his music—but, even so, she couldn’t imagine him here.
From the hill on the far side of the old mansion they saw that they were only steps from the glittering bay.
A blunt-bodied fellow in tennis shorts, swinging his racket pendulum-style, had appeared from greenery that must have concealed courts and came up to the interlopers. “How can I help you?” he had unsuspiciously asked. When they said they were just looking around, he had assumed the then-twelve-year-old Maude was the prospective student and took her hand in his big, sweaty paw. Nina hadn’t taught Maude to shake hands and hoped the girl wouldn’t shame her. Maude, in a dark headband, prebangs, had shown her front teeth and returned a firm grip. The man had said he hoped he’d be seeing her there in a year or two. He was a history teacher, but Maude had evidently taken his words as prophecy.
“Isn’t that funny?” Nina had said. “He thought you were applying.”
Only she did. Without telling anyone, except to ask selected teachers at her two-thousand-student junior high for recommendations to the two-hundred-student high school. Not high school: the private-school people called it secondary school, suggesting that there was something gauche or intrinsically low about high schools. The fact that they were free. The fact that anyone could go to them. No one could be turned away.
The Pughs didn’t know anyone who sent their kids to private school except the unfortunate couple down their street, who had finally put their ten-year-old, a boy like a screaming pre– Annie Sullivan Helen Keller, into a school for the deaf.
It came to Nina that Mr. Patrick—“Call me Rod”—was flirting with her. Feeling vulnerable, Nina reminded herself that a high school art teacher was unlikely to be as successful an artist as Milt. She made a point of mentioning her husband. “Have him come over,” Mr. Patrick, Rod, said. “Maybe he’d like to address Friday Meeting.”
Many students had dinner at the school and stayed for evening programs in crafts or for discussion groups, but on Fridays, staying late was mandatory. The whole school would sing a short work in four-part harmony from Bach or Orlando di Lasso and then listen to some uplifting lecture or presentation. The Sena-tor was scheduled, as was someone’s uncle who was head of the World Bank. Nina always found it painful when Milt spoke to a public audience and felt a familiar dread.
“Maybe.”
4.
WEESIE WAS RIGHT that she would want to trade. Maude gazed around at the splendor that was Weesie’s bedroom—her bedroom: Maude’s whole ugly box of a house could fit in Weesie’s bedroom.
Instead, however, what was in it was a canopy bed. Not some white-painted reproduction such as Maude had once envied a neighbor, and not even the spindletip beauties of historic houses she had been taken through on car trips, but a massive fantasy structure from the Indian Raj, with elephant heads carved into the posts and designs in orange, blue, and gilt: a paean to decoration.
What her parents would call, in Yiddish onomatopoeia, ungapotchkeh.
But it wasn’t overdecorated. With all that space around it, it certainly wasn’t too much, except as the boys at her school brayed the words: “Too much!” Crowing as if, by admiring, they appropriated what they approved.
French windows with a Juliet terrace and printed red curtains that reminded Maude of the richly colored frontispiece in her old edition of Grimm, with shaded roses and leaves so realistic they had holes bitten into them and, especially, glossy beetles with a green sheen that made her not want to get close to the polished cotton.
“My mother used to have to open and close these for me. I wouldn’t touch them,” Weesie said. “They like really creeped me out.” Both girls shivered with the easily resurgent childhood belief in the aliveness of things, enjoying their fear. This was a room full of aliveness, from the tall windows that let in a welcome outdoors—a thick willow as reassuring as a farm horse, lawn, a white stone bench, artfully naturalized shrubs, a glint of bay—to the elephant trunks that undulated over a sleeper’s head.
Softly shining wood floor, oriental carpet in tender, fading colors, a loveseat. Maude had never seen living room furniture in a bedroom before and wondered at the redundancy of upholstered furniture in a room that had a bed. But she didn’t say anything. She wouldn’t expose herself that way. An Empire dresser with mahogany curves like a woman. A pierglass: you could make the room into a hundred different oval-framed pictures, tilting it. Wallpaper that looked like flowers made with cream of tomato soup. Maude recognized it from one of her father’s artbooks—William Morris. Milton approved of Morris, or rather the Arts and Crafts movement, as a precursor to the later, more rigorous German approach to better living through design. It wasn’t that Maude didn’t warm to the idea of better living through design. It was just that she had her own preferences as to design and as to what constituted better living.
“Oh! It’s so beautiful!” she said about everything.
Weesie smiled her crooked smile, flattered, embarrassed—ashamed of her plenty, as she always was—pleased, but a little sarcastic and not wanting credit.
Maude turned to some framed photographs standing in front of books on the shelf. “Oh, my God, is that Mary Jane?” It was a girl in a strapless white evening gown and tiara, from the rather recent days when teenagers already looked older than grown-ups did now.
“Her coming-out,” said Weesie in a voice that seemed to curl her mouth like lemon juice.
A terribly English-looking young man in tennis whites was the young Jock Herrick, now a distant, intimidating power with gray hair, a big American. “Who’s this?” Maude asked about a chubby girl, around nine or ten, with a forthright expression, not quite smiling but looking straight at the viewer as if she could see ahead to Maude.
“The real me,” said Weesie. She laughed. “The fat me. I wore glasses too, but I took them off for the picture.”
It was hard to believe.
It wasn’t the little bit of fat that was so different, though that was different; it was a lack of tension, a frankness instead of the wild tenseness that added a frisson to Weesie’s confident gesticulations, plunging, headlong narrations, and laugh that popped like a cork. She was so keyed-up, every exchange with her was many notches more exciting than with other people. But you never felt you were quite altogether enough to occupy Weesie’s attention. The girl in the picture wasn’t like that.
They were lost for a while in Weesie’s children’s books, which Maude began plucking from the arched bookcase, and then her artbooks, agreeing that Renoir was a pornographer, whereas Modigliani was erotic. They loved saying the word; it was erotic to say erotic. It was almost erotic making these kinds of distinctions, being able to articulate them, and having someone to share them with.
Weesie had the tiny paperback Edward Gorey books, of which Maude had only ever seen one and felt it to be her own private discovery. They immediately made themselves a cult of two, the only initiates, they felt, into the poetry of poverty, yearning, loss, and death made wistful in spidery lines. Like Maude, Weesie had a crumbling paperback called The Beat Generation, with its cheerfully appalling account of insulin therapy (you got fat!), and she had the square, black-banded stapled volume, as-doll.-like as the Goreys, of Howl. It was cool to have it, but they both felt abashed by the poem’s grandiloquence. They had not gone looking for an angry fix and did not, really, intend to. Weesie had a book of lyrics to the songs of the folk-gone-rock musician that everybody worshipped. Maude, who was just learning to love the electrified version of the singer, found the lyrics, bald without their music, not so great as poetry.
“You’re wrong,” said Weesie, folding the oversize paperback to her chest and closing her eyes in a way that was just short of wincing, her silence, as much as the aristocratic ridge of her nose, suggesting she was too fine to comment but that Maude was damned by limitation of understanding and bad taste. Maude was afraid it was all over. But
really, reality resists its curlew wing, it rides against fur-pawed silent woods was kind of . . . ungapotchkeh
Rather than never speak to her again, Weesie opened her eyes and asked if Maude wanted to go with her to the city on Saturday.
On Long Island, “the city” only meant one thing. It was New York, but it was not Brooklyn, the Bronx, or nearby Queens; it was never New Haven or Newark; it was only Manhattan—museums, ballet, Greenwich Village, and restaurants that had meaning beyond food.
They ran down the back stairs, a thing it was amazing to have, to find Weesie’s mother. In her studio.
Mary Jane Herrick looked like a dowager in a cartoon. Not only because of her solid bosom and full waist, giving that ship-in-full-sail effect, but her hair was an iron gray flip streaked with rust, as stiff and disguising as a nun’s coif. And even though, as Maude was breathlessly to tell her parents later, “she was working in oils, for Christ’s sake,” she wore, above a neat, blue, Peter Pan-collared smock, at her pinkly powdered throat, pearls.
Maude felt sorry for her. She was the consummate version of what her father called “lady painters.” And Weesie clearly saw that too. That was why she was so impressed with Maude’s father: he was a real artist.
That was why, to Weesie, his whole house was a work of art, while her mother had only this one room in their conventionally furnished dwelling, and even that was really for plants, a conservatory, glass on three sides, its herringboned brick floor protected by a canvas tarpaulin. This canvas looked to Weesie more like “real” art than her mother’s over-careful, too neat pictures. It was blotched and spattered in random colors under-foot. Gorgeous.
“Louisie-lou,” said Mrs. Herrick, leaving a lipstick kiss on Weesie’s forehead. Louise: Weesie. Maude hadn’t gotten it till that moment. She would never have looked for a resemblance between this mother and daughter, unless that streak of deep rust suggested Weesie’s wavy-to-curly caramel and butterscotch hair. Until they smiled. They had thin-lipped but wide, warm smiles, as if their faces cracked open in a great happy wedge, Weesie’s mouth pale and freckled, her mother’s a bright, conservative, no longer fashionable red.
