The Bobby-Soxer Read online

  Anyway, she put her arm around me, which was rare enough to be valuable. Under her pushed-back cuff I saw that she was wearing another bracelet entirely, a broader flash of torqued silver, the purest, worked with many angled forms of onyx and jade—what must surely be the lustrous Paris progenitor of her Bake-lite.

  We both looked at it, hung there at my shoulder. “Came last week,” she said. “I can’t send it back. That would be bad taste. And they’ll have only that small mailbox out there.” So did we. But out there always meant the old town. I could see the mailboxes, the Towle one not too far down the lane from the Wetmore’s. And the bobby-soxer, going to it. “Bracelets,” my mother said, squeezing her eyes shut. She opened them. “Here—why don’t you wear it.” She quirked at me. “Forgive me, but on you they won’t know it’s real.” She put it on me, kissing the wrist she clasped it on.

  “Is that it?” I said. “What you know about me.”

  “Why, darling.” Her face crumpled. So had mine. “No, never,” she said. “Never.” I thought I heard an echo. “Never” always made one. She put her lips to my ear. Lovely lips—I never saw them retract. I hear her whisper. “I know—that you really don’t like chocolate.”

  Then we embraced, as the train and we flung ourselves forward onto the long green fields.

  WE CAME HOME THAT SPRING much refreshed. Down there I could be smart without having to show it; unlike up North, you could just use it in your daily life. My mother, languid toward new dresses, had been admonished on her duty to the dressmaker—“We owe it to Miss DeVore.” Obligation was different from convention; fewer people—often nobody—could be blamed, either for expense or offense. Gossip, open and catty, was so polite you could mistake it for lessons in etiquette. I learned once again how my mother had come to be as she was, when we talked to my father on the phone, as of course we did—with everybody in the house listening. I tried to be as knowledgeable about him—knowledge is charity—but with him that was not the same. I wanted him to be a mystery so that I could still love him. For the sake of them both, I succeeded in losing the silver bracelet, but Greensboro, furnished with two systems of vigilance, one black, one white, unfortunately restored it to me. Nevertheless, when we came home I was not wearing it. Neither was she wearing the gold one, but that was mere impatience with the object itself. My mother was still a woman with two mysteries in her head.

  The difference that spring was that now my mother would be doubly alone. Father’s mistress was very ill, and in his loyalty—which stretched vainly, like too short an elastic, between the two households, finally took precedence. He slept in the city, spending all his spare time at the hospital. Meanwhile, I was going to a junior college in our neighborhood, in lieu of the real college for which I was eligible but deemed too young. Later, I could be a transfer, perhaps next year.

  It struck me that my family was beginning to make too many substitutes for the real, but in any case I wouldn’t be around home very much. Next term my brother, in spite of the democratic influence of the Denbys, or perhaps because of it—Denby Senior now drank openly inside the garage door, never closing it or sleeping in the house—was slated for boarding school, if he could get a scholarship.

  For it seemed that my father’s mother, though utterly willing, could not pay for him as planned. In a snit over her suddenly terminated “relationship”—since though the Craig Towles at the end of their extended honeymoon, applied to see her, she would not receive his “juvenile wife”—my grandmother, reverting to her customary chain of command, money, had suddenly invested in what promised to bring her a fine return in her one hundredth year but meanwhile left her short of ready cash—which my father must now supply.

  This was the end of the first year of Craig Towle.

  The evening my father was to come back to deal with all this, the train station was brilliantly lit for a town rally over what some posters cried as KEEP OUT URBAN SPRAWL and others as DON’T BE A BEDROOM SUBURB.

  “Seems a developer has been sighted on the horizon,” Gilbert said, nodding to my mother and me on the platform. Some forty miles away there was talk of a convention center. “The protesters will naturally want to call attention to us.” He and Luray, there to pick up an important woman speaker for tomorrow’s luncheon meeting, wouldn’t object to a little sprawl; at least there then might be station-cabs.

  One of the circle of protesters filing up and down stopped to comment: “Yeah, to bring ’em straight to your restaurant,” but it was all quite genial; everyone knew everyone else, and the banner carriers might well end up at Gilbert’s for coffee, although having less than a full meal there was now discouraged. My mother and I had not known the town was threatened. We came so seldom here, as was clear from other platform glances. To my father, these seemed to say, our house was already a bedroom suburb.

  “He coming to pay the old lady’s taxes?” Gilbert said. “Saw in the paper her house is up for them.” I saw Luray give him a nudge. “If he’s pressed, we might work something out. Leave the old lady occupancy till she goes.”

  “Oh, lovely,” my mother said lightly, down-home artifice still with her, “but who’s to say she’ll ever go?” Though we didn’t want grandmother’s house for ourselves, I could tell she was what Greensboro called “spit furious.” Her eyes were fixed on the track.

  “Men who see him on the train,” she murmured, “simply don’t know the pressure he’s under.” That was true. Not bluff and hearty, but tanned and white-crested, he would spring down from the train steps, the first one off, his glance going straight to us, from the larger life. To us awaiting him.

  As I watched that image form in me, I could not believe what it was telling me. No, the resemblance to Towle must lie elsewhere; the two men themselves were not like. I was studying freshman logic, “applied logic,” as it was called, and carefully I now did that. The resemblance, then, must be in the situation, in my mother—and in me, if I didn’t watch out—in that we would stand by, and wait.

  “When he’s on the train,” Luray said.

  He wasn’t. The woman was dead.

  But of course we waited until the train emptied, Gilbert and Luray passing us with their guest, who I saw with my new perspective was merely a person who had spoken at the college some time back, to a very scratch audience. All the other fathers, three or four, were picked off by their waiting wives. The train heaved off, leaving the rally still circling. In the pre-autumn air with the faintly seen hills beyond adding what intensity they could, the protesters did not want to give up their own small opera. Each was swinging a Coleman lantern. So it was that my mother and I first saw Craig Towle’s bobby-soxer, in that jockeying light.

  Almost all the town knew of her was that she traveled in a pack of other young people, all much alike. In the eight months since her marriage that visiting pack had come and gone, come and gone—this mournful repetition being our street’s. Who could live so, here? That rhythm—the open cars swirling the streets, the housekeepers coming and going, the weekend rousings and the weekday dearth—must surely come to a stop someday—and for such a crowd, a stop meant disaster. Craig Towle was now and then seen among them. How did he look—bewildered, lost? No, he never looks that. Pleased—if a little remote? Well—he always looks that.

  As for his own rhythm, he came and went, which was different. We, the town, had almost got used to him—a loss of distinction on both sides. Which the town was prepared to forgive him for, even if necessary to take him back altogether. There was now a school among us, however, which held that we were what he would ultimately reject, once he found out, like many a foolish man before him, that with a young wife one often gets the young crowd as well.

  The difficulty was how to tell, out of all those coltish girls who seemed to be studying how to be wild, yet how never to be caught in any garb except neat-collared sweaters of subtle weave and skirts mostly of yellow or gentian blue—which was the wife?

  “A lack of differentiation—” Mr. Evams, to wh
om I once described them, said. “Yes, at first it’s attractive.” He pinched my fingers, which are large for braille. “Now, I would know you anywhere.” Some of the blind smile generally; to do so over particulars is rarer. Mrs. Evams did neither. “Oh, I don’t know—” she said. “So many of the girls are now over six feet, like you. In the elevator at Lord & Taylor I am often quite overwhelmed by their breathing down.”

  I don’t go on about my size; my generation of girls didn’t, and doesn’t. If many of us look more like our fathers than needed, mine did me well enough. To have one’s first boyfriend an admiring sculptor also helps. Rather, as that ruff-headed bunch of Towle’s visitors rumpled off the first car of the train in their huge varicolored sweaters, it was my mother who moved back, though some of the girls were as small as she. She was wearing just her tan windbreaker and slacks and her one beautiful slouch hat, but only the middle-aged kept themselves that perfectly matched.

  On my part, I saw that over the summer this laughing sleek vanguard, as it came toward me, had made the leap I had only half achieved; they were collegiate now. Though still a pack of a certain sort, their eyes were long with knowledge of the best books proffered, and perhaps slighted, but in an atmosphere of all the socially proper oratorios being sung. A girl went by me, with bones no better than mine but in outline all icy confidence. One by one they sallied past us, some with leonine hair and some doll-prim, but I could never attain that insolently loping air. They were youth in full cry; I was merely young. I had thought myself libertarian. They were liberty. My mother pulled her hat farther over her eyes.

  Craig Towle was coming by on the arm of a girl. As the photographers there for the rally snapped his picture—that was the way it looked. Otherwise, he was the same. She was almost as tall as me, but frailer. They kept on going. He was on the other side of her and may not have seen us. Or, a slouch hat is easier to look away from than a face. A lantern caught the girl’s face, and I recognized her—the pale silver-blonde I had talked to once in the bookstore, admiring meanwhile the arrogant poise of her ballet-slippered foot, parked on the second shelf, adhering to a scale of freedom we outsize ones ought to allow ourselves more. I would have known she was one of the young crowd around Craig Towle just by that foot. I’d been looking for a course book, which she’d handed me; she’d had it once and despised it too. Are you through college?—I’d asked and she’d shaken her head, reserved but still friendly.

  Nice, isn’t she, the bookshop owner said afterward. Was she ever, I’d said from a certain sadness. I missed Phoebe. I could use a friend. Out of town, at a real college maybe, this girl might have been one.

  Now, the reverse thought occurred to me—that I could have been hers. Maybe it was in the way she flinched from our lights, or in the haltered way she walked with him, in her long skirt. She was wearing what were one day to be called granny-skirts and identified with war, drugs, and Woodstock, but at the same time with family and farm, the mode being calico drab if you were communal, but stretching to ochre velvets if you saw yourself in a Tom Jones romance. Or so in later years my brother, who these days is formally said to teach history, would point out.

  “They spent the summer in England, perhaps she picked that up there,” I heard a woman say. “No one else in her crowd is wearing one.” Perhaps she had. In any case we wanted to see her as both avant-garde and in all the magazines, and perhaps she wanted us to, and him to also, for as long as she could make it. What she was wearing was to be a curiously ideological fashion that would get into our Sears Roebuck catalogues long before it ever reached Vogue, and I already yearned after her pink-and-green version of it, as all women alternately do yearn for wide skirts. If she and I had been friends, I thought, as my mother and I walked to the car, I would have had Miss DeVore make one, tactfully of another color, but just like.

  My mother did not speak of what we had seen. We sat on in the car. We had to mention my father somehow. Often I was the one to manage it. “Perhaps it was the Milwaukee client.” Who had delayed him, I meant. A man who usually flew into New York late, required all-night conversation, and had once had a coronary in my father’s car, Mr. Sattick was difficult company to phone from. Too late I remembered we no longer had a second car to meet clients with.

  My mother took me by the shoulders and shook me. She was shaking me out of my long compliance in our mutely held secret. Then she kissed me. “No. The woman’s died.”

  So it was, and for some months my father did not return.

  In the weeks immediately following, my mother did a piteous but dazzling thing. You may think her hard as well. I prefer to think that it took hardness of a sort all women in her condition have in store. Remember too how much of a load she had of which she could not speak—a double one. Her solution was brilliant. Whether or not she got it from brooding on Towle I can’t say or even doubt; I never imagined their conversations. Or their lovemaking. I never bother to dream of sensation in that secondary way. What I wanted were the facts and their meaning—and there my trade school of the intellect, as my father had called the junior college, did me better than grudged. For it seemed, according to my course in elementary drama, that whether in Shakespeare’s times or now, a drama must do what the theater calls “externalize.”

  What my mother did was to join the community. First, she took a job—in our present circumstances quite natural. If she chose the library, where else would a literate woman who had never worked be employable? And in addition she did have the incomplete library degree that in Greensboro had been considered just the right tone of enthusiasm. If Craig Towle spent some of his time there, so did many others. Once employed, of course, she really had to go along with the other staff, to Luray’s Tuesdays. On Saturday mornings, now that we had no man in the house, she might even have to appear at the hardware store, gravitating there along the accepted route of butcher, vegetable store, and baker, formerly ordered from by telephone, and so, after a cup in the tea shop, to the bookstore which supplied her with novels for the weekend, where she could appear in person for orders once delivered. On Saturday afternoons, once shunned as the busiest, she continued her circuit, even switching garages—at last taking umbrage, now that she was a lone woman, at Rudie the garage man’s broad remarks, though the only other garage was at the farther end of town, where Craig Towle kept his car.

  One place she never went near, and that was Cobble Row. Also, the time Craig Towle spoke at a college lecture series, she did not turn up, though since I was on the speaker’s committee she had attended every other one. We did not ever mention this. Meeting him head on was not what she was after. Meanwhile, we began having guests, not always on the weekend, smart couples garnered from a long-gone past I had only heard about—their arrivals and departures always clocked to some inner timetable she had, whereby she could meet them at the station as smartly attired as they, and bubble off with them. It had always been her habit—as my father said, “never to leave the house without preparing to meet the King of France”—and she did not neglect this now. If the guests had driven down, she might take them to tour the little sights of town, where in their midst, nestled in their cars among their furs, she might be perceived to have her own crowd. “If you had only made the effort sooner,” they said happily, as yet unaware she would never make the effort to visit them in return.

  So it was my mother joined the community, with every good reason for it.

  Even to a man as skilled in evasion as Craig Towle, it must have seemed that she was to be encountered everywhere, flitting his surface life, a proud hat at the restaurant table—though she never now wore the slouch one—a perfume and a low voice leaving the library’s front desk just as he entered, her elegant legs still in short skirts; a woman with her past swinging idly behind her and her lips still ripe, her children well behind her, as his were, a woman grown and with a finish to her, in the perfection of middle age. But he would be clever enough to see what she was doing, and this I think was the final attraction, that her rem
oteness, and perhaps a touch of its skill, were like his own. It was the one thing, perhaps, that youth could not oppose.

  As for “the young crowd”—which the town still called them, as if we had none of our own—they had departed. We saw them as seasonal. Last year they had been summer people. This year they would be at winter sports—which we could not provide. But thanks to their absence perhaps, the newest housekeeper at Towle’s reportedly had so far stayed. Craig Towle himself was spending two days a week lecturing on the theater at Harvard, where, spotted in a pub frequented by medical students, he made the newspapers on a rumor he was writing a play about leukemia, which he denied. Since then the newsmen had neglected him, and us.

  So the winter of Craig Towle’s second year with us passed, and my father came home. Officially away on several scores, all true, he had first suffered a kind of breakdown not hospital serious, during which the therapists had advised no family contact. He had then snapped back by means of an athletic tour of some South American clients he had never met in person. Their wealth, until now never really credited, had turned out to be able to pay him all his costs, even to support for my grandmother, as well as what were to be many expensive family conversations on the international telephone—his first remark to my mother when he came home, after exclaiming how well she had kept, being to express his gratitude that she had never given in to shouting intercontinentally.

  To my brother he had written steadily. In hindsight often with real audacity, for what ordinary father would so have trusted a fifteen-year-old boy—or been able to? Though when read to my mother and me in parts, and for the factual report only, the letters had seemed only in the self-consciously manful style a traveling father might adopt for a boy rather small for his age.

  He himself was tanned even deeper, and looked international too; by now I could see that he always had. He told us a lot about Rio, with due respect for its foreignness, but also as if it were, like New York, only the city next door. As he talked I began to see that while my mother was sophisticated, she had had to do it in dots and dashes, as a woman could; he was the genuine article. The conventions of being a lawyer had tended to obscure this. In our biennial visits to his office in Maiden Lane, where his longtime secretary bowed to my mother and called me “Miss” and my brother “Master,” anyone could see that conventionality was in part what he loved the law for. I scared the secretary, I now think. I so much resembled him.