The Bobby-Soxer Read online

  “Nevertheless, they got divorced, he and his Venice,” my father said, joining all at the porch railing. He was against divorce. So must my mother be, though I had never heard her say. “By mutual consent, I understand. And no property settlement. On either side.”

  “Class,” Gilbert muttered.

  My mother turned to him. “Maybe she was a woman of ideas, Gilbert. Her family dealt in them.”

  No one had caught on that my mother had started to say that Venice had been taller than Craig Towle was. Weeks back, when he had come to see us, I had been home upstairs, comfortably in bed for the first hours of my period, not sick, but on my mother’s advice cosseting the rhythm of it, settling in to being a woman in the right way. I suspected I was being taught her own rhythm as well, but felt able to correct myself when necessary, meanwhile alternately copying a small Tiepolo drawing and sketching a bowl of real ivy, while enjoying the cool of the newly laundered blanket cover, the smell of wax and all the extraordinary couthness of our house. Over the past months there had been bad rows about the condition of our furniture, descended to my father when he married, and my grandmother, who blamed him, had been having a housekeeper sent in.

  My father was in the city, with the lady. Perhaps she had no furniture, only pillows. Although in the city he played squash, a sissy game I had heard him twitted for when he and I went to the hardware store where our townsmen hung out on Saturday mornings, I thought of him always as seated in one of our high-backed chairs, his tanned face and thick white hair, not so premature as it once had been, sticking out over the top. He was taller than Craig Towle, and handsomer, as I was about to find out. Whenever I was tomboyish, rebelling against my periods, it was clear even to me that I was taking after him, though at the moment I was only five foot eight, and unaware that one day, when past eighteen and in full growth, I would be able to look him in the eye. That would be a day. Today would be another. One gathers them in later, the days that tot up.

  “Honey—” my mother called, “can you come down?” Though she was not an affected woman, all the street had a company voice. “Mr. Craig Towle is here. He’s come from grandmother’s.” How quick she was. She always prepared me well.

  I slipped out of my housecoat, jammed into my new plaid skirt and white saddle-shoes, and went bed-woozily down the stairs, my flesh heavy and sensitive. Perhaps that’s why I learned so much. I’ll be brief about that, while admiring the fact. In one’s forties, where I am now, reflection begins to drag the pace of learning down.

  Briefly: my mother was in one of the wandlike dresses her home dressmaker down South still copied from Vogue and sent up to her, the dream-client whose measurements always stayed the same. Though she was slim enough to let waistlines rise and fall as they might, this dress winningly had none, and she had just been trying it on, in one of those lonely, self-gathering intervals when women do that. She was in luck therefore, for drop-in company. She had truly not expected him, at least not that night. But these intervals I speak of, when women try on and try on, rousting out the wardrobe of their expectations, do not come without reason. She and Craig Towle had met before. I had been called down in part to be duenna—though I think now that my mother herself may not yet have known this.

  Craig Towle’s brown-eyed, pleasantly hooked face was hospitable, yes, but to facts more than to persons. When you are truly genial yet truly remote, then you are hard. I could see no trace of the Pennsylvania miners he was said to come from before his more recent forebears had descended to factory furniture, neither the Polack Catholic mother nor his father’s Scots. When you see a face that much on its own, take it as a sign, or a warning, of what may not be bad but is extra; When there is no trace. This she had no time to tell me.

  He was too short for my romances at the moment, but his scrutiny was like a well that pulled on you, making you eager to find your own face in the depths down there. Women would cast themselves hopefully in; apparently, even my mother’s ninety-year-old mother-in-law had succumbed. He had gone to her, my father’s mother, as to the patrician of the town’s lore, and already knew of our six-month feud. He said he had also met my young brother in her house. No doubt our grandmother had introduced my brother as “My son-and-his-wife’s-reconciliation child”—a habit she refused to drop, though my parents had never really been parted.

  “The little devil—” my mother said. Her smile was luminous, not only with motherhood. “We thought Tim was sleeping overnight with Pat Denby. So that’s where he goes. Well, he’ll learn there not to kick the furniture.”

  So had I, and had hated that house for it. All families have these divided allegiances—and in my brother and me ours has two differing historians.

  “He sits there entranced,” Craig Towle said—and turning to me: “I saw your painting.” He had asked whose it was and was interested to hear now that I already knew in what way it was bad. I saw he would not forget that, nor my brother either; we would be ready in his head like old shrapnel, until some needed surgery got us out. As for my mother, he had indeed really wanted to talk with her about his wife Venice, as soon as he heard the two had been schoolmates. I went back up the stairs then. Their glow, which they would soon begin to explore, was already visible. Perhaps I had seen it because he had been sitting in my father’s chair.

  Upstairs, I tried to decode this jumble of the perhaps and the happened, which was so much deeper than gossip, but I could not. I was not old enough to want to be a well—and I see now that I have not been brief. The scene would never again be that pure. Reflection had entered in. But without it I wouldn’t have sensed what I had. It came through that wooziness and cell-breakage going on inside me. He too had a process whereby he sloughed things off. Mine, just beginning, had been alerted, though to what, I could not phrase, as I do now. Craig Towle found his privacy in women. They were the privacy he took on the sly. From now on, I thought, he had no power over me, even no charm, now that I had seen how it worked. For even a young girl could see that his process never would stop.

  After that day I wasn’t to see him again for a year of the three he stayed on in the town. He telephoned her at first; later she telephoned him, neither hiding the fact nor obtruding it. But after some weeks, I one day said to her: “Why do they, why do all the women call him Craig Towle, never just Craig?” Even she did it, when she had to mention his name.

  She smiled uncertainly. She really didn’t know, hadn’t noted, and now never would. Women such as she had to find their public in their lovers, and he was already that.

  Now back to us at large.

  Shortly after that day, my grandmother, majestic on the arm of my eleven-year-old brother—as if, though he had no license to drive her limousine, he could still squire her—came to visit us, to break the feud and, we thought at first, to check on the house-cleaning. Standards had already gone down; my mother relaxed servants, too. But the high fervor in my grandmother’s age-masculinized cheeks had to be otherwise explained, and shortly was. It was “Craig” this, “Craig” that; she had come back to us in order to talk of him. “He brings me out in the world.”

  They had gone first to one of those “nasty” big New Jersey restaurants where they serve you steak and lobster on one plate, then to several others, increasingly better and farther afield, that, she wouldn’t further identify. Though she was no recluse, there had never been any question of our taking her out anywhere. Her house was where you went when asked—family being no guarantee—to large, discriminatory dinner parties, where the conventions of her youth were rolled out one after the other, on a par with her silver chafing dishes. She would avoid senility to her end, at one hundred and four, by refusing it her house. But still it was a shock to my father, whom she had derisively called “Sir” since his majority, to hear his past ninety-year-old mother say of a man younger than he: “He and I have a relationship.”

  My brother had gone with them to some of the restaurants. What did they talk about? For that was surely what they would have d
one, my grandmother plucking at the discreetly flowered skirts that humanized her old bones, in order to sink the more lightly into that soothing depth across the table. My brother would not tell me. Years later, Pat Denby did. My brother had been sat at a small table apart. “Towle had him sent a fake Manhattan with a cherry in it. There was no disliking Towle. But Tim never heard a thing.”

  In payment perhaps, if not apology, Craig Towle one day took my brother to a restaurant along with Towle’s other children, a pleasant act, if not the man-to-man talk my brother had hoped for. Craig Towle had not chanced to tell my mother about this, but there was nothing strange about that, though years later, hearing of it, she was surprised. We all of us, the town too, were continually surprised by the number of people here Craig Towle knew personally, and it would seem exclusively—though one always forgot this, they said, when his face fronted yours, one shoulder politely aslant. He had even been to the blind Evamses’. “He has a hard face, but a good one,” Mrs. Evams, who had been allowed to feel it, reported. Her husband said: “He listens abstractly. He could almost be blind.

  We had all humbly and correctly diagnosed Towle’s relationship to each of us, but it would seem that our own gossip, in which all roads and all nerves were interconnected, had kept us “from really taking the man as a whole into our consciousness.

  As was never clearer than the night my father brought down his own house with his soon verified report of the bobby-soxer, Craig Towle had a larger life.

  And now we had heard that larger-life echo, in our own house.

  “—married a bobby-soxer” my father said.

  Before supper that very evening, my father had given my mother a gold bangle, very handsome, but as she and I had already exchanged in a glance, too heavy for our tastes. Some fathers never gave to the mother without giving to the daughters too, but neither he nor I would have cared for that—wanting not to dilute what he had it in him to give to her alone. The bracelet was one of those whose embossing seems to spell a name but doesn’t. I felt it would never spell hers.

  A rose silk shade shaped like the Taj Mahal hung over our dining-room table. There were several of those around town, meant to soften the harsh outlines of the day. What ours did was to influence for life my idea of dinner conversation. Under the lamp’s cast, I could chew the gristle of some heartache and appear only to be concentrating, or my brother could creep to table with his latest secret safe in those daylight-blue eyes which could not otherwise hold back. My mother, who never stooped to hide anything of value, merely indled more quietly. My father, who conducted his life on some theorem apart from us, seemed neither to need that light nor to notice it. Men are not as subject to home shadow.

  “A—bobby-soxer?” my mother said. She might have been asking what that was, though I sat before her, in the new penny-in-the-slot leather loafers which had overtaken saddle shoes, and ankle socks. I was seeing how even the Taj Mahal could not hide the dark red shock of life-surprise.

  My father reached out to grasp the wrist with the bangle on it. He was a man who liked to see that houses, and the lives of those in them, kept themselves up, and that night I wondered if he wasn’t helping her at this, under the rose radiance of the dining-room lamp. I wasn’t sure why they stayed together, but I wasn’t one of those children popularly held to be afflicted by fears of impermanence. I always knew they would continue as a pair.

  NEVERTHELESS, SHE AND I LEFT FOR Greensboro the next morning. Once a winter she and I went to see her parents, now removed from the small manor farm which had been my maternal grandmother’s inheritance to a tiny white town house, where I was able to learn the real etymology of indling, or the temperament, and how breakfast on a tray could still be managed for all, even on a small pension, if you still had an in-coming black. Up North, my mother had simply kept the temperament. That winter, although we had come on such short notice, we would stay longer than we ever had. “What with one thing or another—” my mother phoned or wrote my father back home—though she never said precisely what, we would not return again until well through spring.

  On the train down there, she was restless; she had forgotten her chocs, she said. That alone would have shown the power of the distress under her neat suit, toque, and fur. But I had picked up a box on my way to the car. Father of course had driven us to the station.

  “Honey, I’m so touched,” she said to me, once we were in the train. “You have the memory of a Southerner.”

  “And we can buy chocolate bars from the vendor who comes through,” I said, basso with responsibility and praise. “Soon as we get beyond Philadelphia they still have them. Vendors.” I was already remembering what you had to remember if I was to be as my mother had said. Napkin-rings all round, not just for babies. Bibs on the babies. Parties with old ladies at them. If the babies and the small children were there also, a “dawky”—a word my mother said I was not to say, would be there to take care of them. Whether or not I said it, the girl would be there. My other grandmother, a fine contrast to my severe Jersey one, would feed us up “as if our livers are to be made into pâté,” my grandfather would say, proud. After that, his free-to-coarse speech would be curbed, at least at table. The women loved to. We two would have a round of obligations, attending to which we would acquire the fierce, if temporary local opinions which made it easier. Any eccentricities I had, if interesting and not too troublesome, would be praised as individuality. In return, I would have to drawl, not cross my knees in company, and giggle when there were boys. Compared to Phoebe Wetmore’s brother Bill, they would still be boys.

  “Have a choc,” she said.

  I took one, careful as always to take the nougat she didn’t much like, though when she caught me at it she would make me take a truffle creme, not suspecting, I thought proudly, that I didn’t care which.

  She took one of the pink bonbons she usually left till last—often saying they melted on the tongue like leisure itself. The train made our wrists brush. She was wearing the gold bangle.

  “Very distinguished—” she said, “twenty-two carat. Not eighteen.” Might this mean the mistress was given the eighteen-carat stuff? But was that the only reason she was wearing it? She rarely wore her own good jewelry, substituting the odd little bits of Bakelite now known as Art Deco. She only liked to have the other by. She caught my eye. “Your Greensboro grandmother will be pleased to see this. It will make up for our not having a maid.”

  We munched, while the last pig-towns of Jersey raced backward, unable to hold us. I would miss them, yet still be full of new delight. Father would miss us too. But he had New York. And the lady.

  “I think—I think he gave it to you—for you.” This was daring.

  She sat up. “Why?”

  Because of the bobby-soxer. But, looking at my own legs, the accordion-pleated skirt, the whole outfit—I found I couldn’t say it to her. “Because—you’re you.” And that was true, too. We never lied.

  She sat too formally straight for the fields of smashed cars and other rusted iron we now were passing. She even closed the chocolate box. “Tell me. Do you think—you know too much?”

  That depended. Had she noticed last year in Greensboro that I no longer giggled at men—even at uncles? Did she know that Bill Wetmore no longer regarded me as merely his kid sister’s friend? Or that when we lay upstairs in the loft of the old outbuilding, once a hayloft, that now served them for garage, while he spoke of his great-grand-uncle, the Beaux Arts sculptor he meant to emulate, and I of the painter I wanted to be in spite of absolutely no background for it—that we had no longer merely nestled? Or that I had stopped going there altogether, the day after Phoebe, who had only a grandmother to inform her, had told me what she said no one else but them knew—that my mother visited Craig Towle in his nearby house? To tell me had seemed for a minute still friendship, if misguided, or—in the arcanum of what the Wetmores already knew about us—even an ever deferent old-town function. Until Phoebe had added, lip retracted, “Maybe these da
ys, for what both of you come down here for, she could give you a lift.”

  “Take your time,” my mother said. “Or don’t answer at all. Or not yet.”

  I thought of all I knew because of her—which was what she was asking. How, at the rare times we went to New York as a family, I lost myself in fancy on the side streets of where I meant someday to paint all streets, and to be the mistress as well of somebody who had no wife. How, in the very scene we lived in, I would never have sensed the layers of things, even to the small, severe still-life judgments between truffle and nougat. Or to the way the lip retracts in jealousy, even on an otherwise nice young girl. Without my mother, I would never have had the hayloft courage to do what I had done with Bill Wetmore, which I did not regret then, and do not now. Even at this moment, she was teaching me the difference between fast and slow.

  If the parents don’t burden us, they cannot teach us. I didn’t know that yet, but I answered, and joyously.

  “Never. I can never know too much.”

  She smiled. That’s my girl. She whispered it really, bowing her head. “Your father would not agree.”

  Though I was desperately fond of him, here he seemed an intrusion. I did not mind that he thought as he did. Though I would never fault her, he was the brake. Because of him, I had an inkling I would one day do as she had: I would marry well.

  But at the moment, her mention of him confused me. Was she running away from him, or from Craig Towle?

  Perhaps she saw my state. Her way was to confuse me further, but always one step ahead. “Would you like to know something I know about you?”

  If she saw my scare, she also saw I was ready. To be told I was illegitimate? Or destined to suffer a rare hereditary disease? No—this she would have managed to let me know. But suppose she had seen that I was not going to be able to do what I thought I was fitted for?