Queenie Read online

  The stranger is giving me the once-over, my first. Or the first I know about, from a man like that. Under that eye (all I can see now is that it was hazel) the skin on my left ribcage twitches—a little muscle I’ll come to know well in the next four years. And the belly around my navel is blushing, reaching; like a kid, I look down to see. Finding only the brass buckle on my hip huggers, which I’ve cut off at the thighs, to show body jewelry pasted all over them. A juvenile mistake; good legs never make me feel amorous even when they’re my own, and a girl should push only the parts of her body that do. Half the pushing is for yourself, isn’t it?

  This man doesn’t look at my legs. Not to begin with. The truth of one of Aurine’s countless adages hits me. “The best ones never do begin there.”

  …Dear Aunt, they all come true, your adages, your men. I’ve been watching. Why else must I leave you? I can scarcely bear to have you open your mouth these days; my future’s in it.

  That’s why I wish I could lift my own eyes—in the violet glance you say any dark ones can acquire—and scrutinize that stranger again, giving him the eye from top to toe. In a way I can, turning out his pockets, zipping open that objet from Hermès, warming his watch in my palm, and breathing softly over the gray behind his ear—going all over him, like the expensive little kitten, scratchless for him, that I am being trained up to be.

  But I can’t see him himself, and I’ll never know his face or name. I don’t need to. I’ll know him, whenever I meet him, by all the other stuff I did see—and to hell with the brand of watch. He’s not an important memory; he’s a fact. He’s around, all right.

  He’s the man Aurine and Oscar will be bringing me. Innocent dears, maybe they don’t even know they were doing it that day.

  He’s the man who the world that bore you tries to bring you, no matter who you are.

  What kind of household you start in doesn’t matter; though Aurine and Oscar’s way of life mightn’t go down at St. Bartholomew’s, a man like him is brought in there every other wedding day. He looks different in church, younger maybe. But settled, wherever he is, rich or poor. Our druggist’s daughter married him yesterday—the druggist means his best for her. And she’ll get it of course. Like me. Though I’d have a hard time explaining the similarity. Which way is more sinful let the druggist’s wife and Aurine decide.

  For of course the man I’m intended for isn’t expected to last for life. He’ll come by the half-dozen, maybe, all bearing a resemblance. I won’t be asked to marry him. I’ll be expected not to. But in every other respect, he’s the same as in any village. He’s the man the parents bring you, whoever you are. Or your aunt and uncle do, if you’re me. He’s the one who’s enough like them.

  So how can I tell them that even in memory, or present dreams, I never go to bed with him?…

  Back there, maybe he saw that destiny. For he left, didn’t he, on his own? Smarter than some others have been since. And with a bow to Aurine. “See why you call her Queenie.”

  Poor me, I’m still feeling grateful. So I follow him out to the little foyer we have, three marble steps down and a gold wicker basket to put mail in, and stand there, arms crossed over my bodyshirt, which is maybe the way he remembers me. “Thanks for the village,” I said.

  Aurine comes out after me; maybe she thinks we’re making an assignation. She wouldn’t mind that—“If it’s time it’s time, and you’re tall” she’d say, she’d just want to know about it. But I was already alone, with what I’d never been alone with before. And haven’t yet got a question for. Maybe it’s nameless.

  “Q’est-ce-que tu a?” she says, almost sadly. So I suppose she knows what I have the matter with me. “And where are you going?”

  “Up to my room.”

  “I’ll send up your supper?” This is standard. Tekla and her current man are coming to dinner, and like all her men before or since, he’s a rough one for our crowd. They have him out of loyalty to her, and are always preparing to help her get rid of him. They have many kinds of dinners I don’t share. Though I hear in Aurine’s voice an uncertainty. Standards are changing.

  But the little staircase to my room is just the same.

  Up there, I go to the tiny window, an attic one between lumpy dormers, much repaired, which hold you like clumsy arms. And in the pane’s center is the brown campanile of Carnegie Hall. Yes, my village, and a fine one for any girl to come from, no matter where she’s going to! Sur les toits de Meedtown Neuve York.

  All the rest of the crowd, which means Aurine’s women friends and their men, live over on the East Side, upper of course, in a number of typical residences—art deco, art nouveau or art bourgeois, Oscar says—whose probable incomes, passions and stability I could recognize before I could read. And like Aurine, the men don’t really live with them. I always think of them as the real girls; those my age are just a sample lot for the production line.

  Sometimes they do keep shops too, often only because the day is long. Which is responsible, my uncle says, for God knows how many misguided boutiques. Aurine wouldn’t bother with that; she’s a great business woman on a different scale, Oscar and I are sure of it, with many little nest eggs she won’t let on about. We live on the West Side, and on Seventh and Fifty-Seventh, because as the daughter of the mistress of a certain restaurateur of the 1930s, what better way can Aurine show Fifty-Fourth Street and Ninth Avenue and that same restaurant, how far she’s come? Only a few blocks away, she still has her village, which she goes to by choice on her own well-shod feet, never by cab. But in every other way, it is made to know.

  Once a week, we dine at the restaurant en famille, and once a month or more with all the beauties and their men. Long before Granny, who was Aurine’s and my mother’s mother, died, the place has a new management, but Oscar and I’ve begun to think Aurine has a piece of it. We see more than village respect for her life with Oscar, or even for the jewels she shows there and in the French Church at Christmas, in the way the staff says “Madame.”

  They say it even more so at the yearly party Madame gives them in her house, built on top of the old joint by a gambler of the twenties, whose aging girl sold it to Aurine. Thereby, Oscar says, keeping up the traditions of the original building, which belongs to the belle epoque.

  And we sit on it, he adds, like the cream puff on the dowager. And on a lot of the tenants as well, for the newer they are, the more respectable. The rest of us are in the tradition; we might be anything and usually are.

  Meanwhile, the weekly offers treble—to which Aurine says sweetly loud on the phone, “Our fun-nee ramshackle house, Mr. Mavrodopoulos, why it wouldn’t be near enough good for you,” then hisses over her shoulder, “They’re trying to get together a package for an office tower, you can be sure of it!” Even when that time comes, she mayn’t be on the selling side, for a reason I don’t like to think about. And if I leave, won’t have to. Girls like me don’t get dowries; we are them. So call it professional backing for the pretty package that will be me. A family estate. Meanwhile all Aurine’s satisfactions work out with hurt to nobody. And we adore her for it. Truly. I just don’t want to be one of them.

  Oscar’s case is different. Though he was around Aurine before I was—from before my mother, her twin, died of me—there was of course a time in Aurine’s youth when he wasn’t around her exclusively and other men were; now and then he’s made to remember it. Among the girls, this is called “keeping them up to the mark” and with either a weak protector or a strong one, I myself can see it has to be done. Their recipes for living the life of love have been dinned into my ears since forever; this is the basic one. And the main way it’s done is the simplest. Oscar doesn’t live here. You never really go to live with them. But if you are Aurine, you keep them a few flights down.

  His flat’s much larger than our house—nine rooms for a single man through thick and thin, and he’s had a lot of thin lately. But Aurine won’t hear of his changing; he doesn’t know she’s keeping up his dignity for him. When she
goes in for doing that, she does it all the way.

  “Never do like the wives do, Queenie, bolstering up a man for worldly purposes, and slapping him down for their own!”

  She’s been keeping up his dignity for years now. And hers as well. Not ever letting yourself fall in love with them, that’s keeping yourself up to the mark. How much love is involved in this house is something I try not to think about! There’s more than enough virtue around here as it is, to keep me from getting out.

  At Oscar’s, I’ve learned a lot of it. “Over at Oscar’s,” the most comforting words always. To be sent there on an errand when I was six, to run in to tell how I’d been kept at school, or still later to study in his huge library; it’s been a second home. Which means the place that teaches you all your apples don’t have to be in number one.

  In the days when Oscar is a full-time impresario, the one that people think of along with Sol Hurok, a lot of personalities get used to Oscar Selwyn’s little adopted girl running in and out, and I get to know them well enough to have to be careful to keep them out of conversation later; it’s not standard, even at the High School for Deforming Arts, our rude name for it, to have sat on some of the famous knees I have. I sometimes felt Aurine sent me to Oscar’s on purpose. In the confessions of courtesans, which bulk so large on her one-shelf boudoir library, these ladies, mostly too royal by that time to be called girls, often began their careers by being dandled on the knees of great men. Mostly, though not always, I sat at them.

  “What’s your school, dear?” asks a knee, and on reply murmurs to others in the circle, “Ah yes, the last of the finishing schools classy enough for the déclassées.”

  Later I confuse Aurine by asking if some project or possession is classy enough for us, privately resolving if so to have none of it.

  Giorgio, who once went with me to one of Oscar’s soirees, called it the School for Sotto Voce, and wouldn’t go back. “They’re refining your taste, Queenie. By insulting what you are.” It’s easier for a girl to be a by-blow, even without his classy one-side parentage. I learn a lot there.

  Like having the greatest actor of his day purify my English, and a modern playwright quarrel with him over a construction in it. For what I hoped was forever. Only to see them join arms depressingly soon, to listen to a bull-and-bears ringmaster from Wall Street, a few knees down.

  I learn what Aurine and the girls never gave a moment’s thought to, but women nowadays are so nervous about—how men talk among themselves. It’s what Mile. Maupin, if you remember, dressed in drag and set forth to discover, though if she’d been me she’d not have needed to. If most men talk to each other like the personalities did, it’s not what I’ll set out to see the world for. “There must be something more to men than what they talk about,” I report to Giorgio, who said, “Oh I dunno—that’s what we think about you.” He’s fourteen then, like me, but precocious.

  They talk about us of course, maybe that’s it. At least at Oscar’s. There’s some subtle thing about womantalk that turns famous men commonplace.

  Oscar says if my lot is to marry a commonplace one, I’m to remember that.

  He often slips and says “marry” these days, even in Aurine’s hearing. And once he asked me, finding me reading the Maupin, if I thought all men were swine, and I answered truthfully, “No, only Tekla’s.” After which the separate dinners began.

  I know they worry over how to keep my viewpoint fresh, though they don’t share the same viewpoint on what it should be. One thing they don’t have to fret over: I’ll never be a dyke. The day comes, even for a girl on the knee of the greatest name in Hollywood, when she knows she better get off.

  Oscar’s always been shyer with me than his friends have; after all none of them has legally adopted me. But although Aurine keeps her own maiden name, the restaurateur’s Amidon, he always introduces me proudly enough, “My ward, Queenie Raphael.” His real name. Selwyn is for theatrical. Or sometimes, depending on the man, “My ward, Alexandra Dauphine Raphael.” Not bad, by my aunt’s bookshelf. But I don’t mind; I’ve got a lot of Oscar’s bookshelves inside me by now, as well.

  Giorgio admits he misses the library after he stopped going there; he says he couldn’t use a man’s house in the daytime if he wouldn’t go to his parties at night; he was the most honest boy I ever knew. He said Oscar’s was where we each came to terms with our possible paternities. Only, since he knew his all too well, while I sat reading all the romances, in the dark winter days after school, he read the facts.

  Those winter afternoons, over by the time I went off to school, are like a piano under which we still lie, not touching anymore, building our separate trains, hunting their terminals. Reading all the old novels and confessions I can find, and some accidental history, I see that lots of fathers have died before the kids were born. But not so many mothers have…

  If I’m really Aurine’s child by whomever, instead of being her niece, then she may be concealing my real age by several years, which is natural. On my own evidence, I’ve always felt older than I am, but then girls do.

  On Gran’s evidence, if I’m her other daughter’s child, then by the date Gran seemed to think I was born, my mother was in her grave at the time…

  Giorgio and I go up to Woodlawn once to check her headstone, all in order; she died two days after my birthday, not before. But a whole year before, if I can trust Granny’s shaky reference. I can’t. As Giorgio said, Gran was a wonderful old lady, but there was never any reason to trust her.

  …Since Gran was away at the general time of my birth, taking care of her restaurateur’s last years in Villefranche, she couldn’t testify for certain which of her twin daughters I came out of. And at the end of her life—a little woman with pouchy cheeks, saying “It’s where I keep my wisdom,” sitting at our fireside like a nannie and with a nannie’s name, Em Harrison—she mixes up the two like a pudding made of daughters. And nods like the nursegirl she’d been before the Frenchman took her out of his house to be his cashier—“Whose girl are you, what does it matter? Mine!” She’s in Woodlawn too…

  “What if I was twins, too, really,” I say to Giorgio. “I mean, what if there were two babies, one for Alix and one for Aurine—and one of us died?” I divide the flowers I’d brought and put some on each grave; it’s fascinating when life’s like a confession about you. “Maybe the twins had you together, kind of a Siamese job,” says Giorgio.

  My own final belief is that I am my mother’s daughter, but Aurine is jealous of it, and doesn’t mind anybody thinking I’m hers. Especially since, though my mother was pretending to be married at the time, though not intensely, to a man I’ve no reason to suppose was my father, there’s a rather strong chance, around the time I was seeding my way in from angel country, that I could have been Oscar’s.

  …Which could be true of Aurine also, if I want to go back to that angle; he was sleeping with both of them. Granny’s viewpoint being, “It was all right for Alix, being kind of in wedlock, which is a mistake in the first place. But it was real naughty of Aurine to horn in on it…”

  Therefore my aunt’s jealousy: if I’m Oscar’s, she’d rather I be thought hers.

  I notice nobody ever blames Oscar. Once I carefully ask them, “We girls were discussing in biology—if a man is sleeping with twin women, can he always tell which?” Oscar chokes, and begins smoothing a few homburgs. But Aurine merely picks the top from a bunch of Malagas he’s just brought, and sends me upstairs with it. “The twin can always tell,” she said.

  Let’s face it, Miss Piranesi, we’re a flighty lot, worse than the Polynesians, but I don’t mind. We are a lot. A family unit. I never had to take it on love. They gave it to me. “If that’s the way they want it,” I say to Giorgio as the cemetery darkens, “I live with my uncle and aunt.” It doesn’t make leaving any easier.

  But once I do, Miss P., won’t I be in a position very like Gran at my age, when she left the nuns, over the same doorstep she’d once been found on? ’Twasn’t reli
gion that weighed on her, she said, or morals either; the world socked her with summat more serious. “’Twas that the guff I was brought up on, girl, wasn’t most other people’s guff.”

  …Oh Gran, even if that turns out to be true, you and the girls still gave me the best guff you had! I didn’t hear about the mysteries of life, I got the recipes…

  Like how the hair on that part of a woman should be brushed with an English hairbrush only. Housekeeping, that’s what the profession is really! I learn what’s “good” for my body just the way I learn lemon oil is good for mahogany. And what’s good for me in a man’s, in the warning that the way a man is formed—they never say “hung”—maybe isn’t everything. And—how to thumb a man’s eyeballs if he really means force.

  Or like when Martyne, ex-Martha from Chattanooga, drops by for one of Aurine’s mint juleps, I listen closely: Aurine always gives the recipe. “Jigger bourbon, crushed ice, mint, put the glasses in the fridge for an hour,” this last slower, with the eyes closing. Then breathless, “Jigger of brandy at the last.” Then she opens her eyes, says “It’s the before and the after makes everything,” and I know she’s talking about love—and that she once had somebody from Dixie. She never makes juleps in front of Oscar.

  Bad language I never get from the girls; their tongues have a crook in them like a tea drinker’s pinkie—they’re ladies, not whores. Gran is franker. “Dirty language a man can get from his wife.” And it’s just as hard to learn the baby facts of life as in a normal household anywhere. Only the girls’ temperaments, like their skins, are brighter, their ideas on it not so drear. Cabbage babies or Macy ones?—at six I know better; babies come from Argentina—“Olé!” or from Rio where Giorgio had, or when more workaday, at least from Aurine’s dream-basement, where on a trip there she’d once bought six café filtres with silver suck-straws, and a bain Marie—the Galeries Lafayette. If anything, babies came in bain Maries.