The Bobby-Soxer Read online

  Once he came back to live with us, we were struck by how lopsided we had been without him. He was no mere breath of fresh air; all the old, ingrained habits a family gets were immediately upon us. He was the breath that made ours complete. Yet we were not to keep him. It came about in this way.

  “My mother—” he said to us, when he had returned from seeing her home, after dining us all at a big but disappointing restaurant farther down in Jersey. He always referred to grandmother this way, as if in spite of his four siblings she belonged solely to him. Admittedly the others—three flaccid sisters scattered over the Sundays and a ne’er-do-anything brother, did not count with her. “My mother wants her grandson to come live with her.”

  He stared at my brother—who was not the only grandson. “I said if she would stop calling you her poppet, you had my permission to.” He turned to my mother. He had a black and white stare, not formidable but opaque. “That Watanabe has too much influence.” This was the Japanese student he had got cheap for his mother as houseman before he left, serving her grandiosity—“my Jap butler”—exactly as he knew she would accept, since he had his own share of pomp. At that steak restaurant, though he scorned it, he himself had sent the chef cigars, with his compliments. The dumfounded waitress hadn’t known what to do with them, nor possibly the chef either.

  My mother immediately ordered my brother upstairs. Ever wrong with him, she always did this the minute his needs were to be discussed, although no more able to talk with him than my father was with me. But I had her warm company; my brother had only the letters. Yet, always polite, he got up to obey. He knew that only her conventions opposed his going; the two of them were never mutually fond. When he was halfway up the stairs, though, my father said: “Wait. Do you want to go?”

  My brother looked much as he does now, small of size by his own will, and precise from judging us. Though even then one was never sure whether that judgment was sardonic or flawed. It was he who had chosen the restaurant. “It’s a glamorous house.” He saw my father’s nostrils flicker at that adjective—as we were meant to see. “Besides,” my brother said, “there’s nobody ever around here.”

  I wondered which of those statements my father, in his lawyerish, partitioning way, would choose to answer.

  He smiled. “Ah well, you were always her favorite son.”

  My brother grinned at him. “She can keep calling Watanabe ‘Knobby.’”

  When he had gone up the stairs, my father leaned forward. “My mother doesn’t get any less dotty. She’s now wanting me to—sue people.”

  “Sue?” my mother said faintly. “Who?”

  That never got answered, or not then. From the top of the stairs my brother yelled: “No dottier than us.”

  Next morning, though, before they left, out on the front steps where we had always exchanged our information about ourselves, my brother told me. “Grandmother wants him to sue Craig Towle. Oh, not for what you think.”

  It had been absurd of me—and of my mother, to pretend, as we often did, that my brother was only tagging along. “Not for money?” No one in the know ever gave my grandmother investment advice. “What then?”

  “She claims he sucked her life blood.”

  “She is crazy, then?”

  “No,” he said. “He sort of did.”

  The long old car came for them then, Watanabe—Knobby, at the wheel. Coming for both him and my father, and their goods.

  Yet that evening before, I think my father hadn’t yet decided on his new life. Or on which of his former ones he would resume. Of course, there were matters we didn’t know of yet—to do with money—that he knew would shortly fall on us, and obliquely on him. As well as some matters he hoped we would never know? I’m not sure of that. I think that in the end we hope our children will know everything about us. It helps the burden, on both sides. I look at my own and think—yes, everything.

  Once we were sure my brother had packed off to his room, my father turned to me; he always divided us so. “You’ve grown very handsome.” His eyes traveled my length. “Rio would be astounded.”

  “Oh no you don’t,” my mother said. “One of us out there is enough.”

  “No,” he said, “I won’t. Do that. That market is off anyway, maybe. And my taste for it.”

  We knew all about this, our bread and butter depending on it. He was a good lawyer but could never settle on one branch of the law, as the sensibly ambitious did. Something at the core of him kept confusing his markets with his tastes. After all, he was only finally home, after so long away, because a lady had died.

  We had had early supper, the town custom, and fine for those who had bridge games or civic meetings to keep, but here we three now were, in silence, and fed, the high pre-spring evening descending. We were not a family whom the gloaming brought together; dusk expelled us to our own haunts. But I now had no girlfriend; no boyfriend either. At this hour, Bill Wetmore, who in my memory continued to spoil all successors, was very possibly in bed, in a hayloft if Dartmouth had them, expounding on his Beaux Arts relative to some other girl. For seventeeners, the resources of a town like ours sometimes viciously contract. If I had still been a bobby-soxer—in the true meaning of the word, not my father’s contemptuous use of it—I might have been packed off upstairs too, but that was long ago, more than a year. Now they did not want me to leave them. In the last deep blue light invading our dining room, which had a deep bay, I could glimpse the still frozen garden between us and the Evamses’, every leaf craw and leftover stalk straining to become part of the wind. I had never felt so close to my parents as a couple. It was the “exquisite hour.” I had learned that French phrase for it in one of my mother’s books—yet none of it was for us.

  Something had to be said, but not just anything. Any light remark would be seized and torn. My mother said, “Is that a light on over at Evamses’?”

  Now—we knew our next door neighbors’ routine as we did the seasons, or our own worn decks of cards. One bulb on the porch, on a time set, night after night. The same in the basement and attic, when they were away. Lamps downstairs twice a week for the classes, with intervals when they practiced their pupils in the dark. I was a day scholar, and it was often dim there—thin gray shadow in winter and lustered shade in summer, but I never told them so.

  “Shouldn’t there be?” my father said. “I forget. Though in Rio—all that noise, all that light—I sometimes thought of them. Their calm.”

  The two Evamses, who had met at a school for the blind and had been married from it, were the most equable people we knew. Mr. Evams had once been sighted, she never. Because of known genes, they had refrained from having children. Mr. Evams was in real estate, and went over a property so relentlessly before selling it that people were eager to buy from him. She worked in his office. But their real business was being blind.

  “Not upstairs, there shouldn’t be,” my mother said. “They never have a light there. But at this hour, maybe it’s only a reflection. I hate to interrupt.”

  “They would know what they look like,” my father said. “I suppose?” As well as we do, I thought. Their dark as well as their light.

  Their eyes were well formed, if a little sunken, hers under a formidable ridge of bone that a fringe of brown hair made doll-like. Their profiles, both delicately blunted, resembled. Moving as a couple, they had less of that angelic intentness which so often signifies the lone sightless person. Though they loved the theater—the smell and rustle of a top theater crowd was like a good wine, he said—they did not otherwise particularly hunt organized sound, nowadays seldom playing their records. The radio kept them clocked and informed, but was not constant. They enjoyed ordinary noise, they said, and the varying silences in between, which they now and then absentmindedly named to one another as one might classify cloth.

  “The downstairs should be dark too except for the porch,” I said. “They have no classes tonight.”

  After the teaching, mostly to young persons who would them
selves teach, their great preoccupation was reading, for which they had a huge library, in a house otherwise too large for them. They hated the talking-books provided people like them. Their four hands passing over the braille were like a duet, and they kept the little rulers for reading it always in a pocket. The nicest thing you could do for them, an act of friendship, was to let their fingers interpret your face, and discreetly your body, for which they divided the sexes, exchanging chirps like tailors. “Our vice,” Mr. Evams would say, “is touch.”

  “Maybe Brenda’s been. And left the light on up there,” my mother said.

  Brenda was their daily, though the Evamses could have afforded a live-in maid.

  “They always check, entering and leaving a room,” I said. “At least when people are there.” For they often gave parties, and at Christmas had a tree like other people, and even house guests. Other times, they lived in their comfortable dark. Mrs. Evams even claimed she could feel the presence of electric light on her skin.

  “They said they would be grateful if warned.”

  We knew what my mother was thinking of: old porch conversations. The town had intruders now, like everywhere else.

  “We better go check.” My father included us. We followed him.

  Our staircase landing, a high-windowed bay broad enough to hold a table, two easy chairs and the seven-foot draecena my mother never forgot to water, was our pride. A glass-helmeted light hung on a chain from the second-floor ceiling, hideous with red and yellow bezels but shining on a space always neat and poised. Quarrels paused on the landing; ideas began.

  Darkness had fallen. The bedroom across the garden was brilliantly lit. Brenda must have been cleaning its windows when called away; a rag and a bottle of Windex lay on the sill of a bay the complement of ours, the curtains drawn back. The room, seen by me once or twice, was big enough for both a bed and a fine large chaise I had envied. The Evamses were on it, naked and entwined in a swoon of touch. There was no intruder but the light. Her skin, if it recorded, ignored. I saw how their noses matched, blunted one against the other, and their lips, and all the long line of their clasp, breast to breast, penis to mound, knee to knee.

  I was tall enough to fingertip our lamp. In an act of friendship I tapped it to set it swinging and saw its prism glide over them. It was no sin to watch. I was interpreting them.

  “Come away!” my father said.

  “No, look,” my mother said. “It can’t hurt them. And one could almost wish to be blind.”

  I heard that gentle, baffled click of impatience she so often got from him. He turned and drew our own curtains, heavy draperies, thick with dust. That act couldn’t hurt the Evamses. But I saw how our window, kept bare on our side, had taken advantage of them.

  Our bay huddled now, its view gone.

  “Craig Towle’s wife’s seven months along,” I heard my father say. “They say she came back last fall to have it born where its father was. But for the past four months, she won’t go out of the house. You heard?”

  I didn’t want to look at my mother’s face. It might be rose red again, not from any radiance of our lamps. But I had to listen.

  “Nobody told me.”

  So my mother had got him back again. And the town knew it.

  The heavy old portières at the window hung without a stir, as horsehair does. Once, years ago, when they were last laid in the sun to air, lying on the lawn like a carpeted path to the Belgium my grandmother said they came from, my brother and I, having wrapped our summer-bare selves in those baroque amber and green folds, spent all a wriggling night with their short-cut, invisible hair-sheddings fuzzing our flesh, not knowing what beset us.

  I rubbed my hands on them.

  “Nobody,” she said.

  Upstairs at my own bare window, the bedroom opposite was gone. Perhaps my father had phoned. Too late, for all our retinas. The chaise lay stunned and white, on mine. Telling me that bodies lay everywhere, to be interpreted. I couldn’t go over there for a lesson tomorrow and would find excuses not to go again. Our own outside light was now on, and in the winter garden the stiff weeds were being knocked about, and each time came back to plumb. The net around the Evamses, around us and the Evamses, was larger than any gossip, was invisible. If I were to evade it, how far from our town would I have to go?

  Next morning, as my grandmother’s car drew up, Watanabe driving, my father joined my brother and me on the steps, carrying his alligator overnight bag. This was the way he always left, for near or far. Leaving me, he gave that same click in the throat—like a sop to his gods, which for me was his sound. I can still hear it at will, as one can summon the coughs of the dead, or of those far away; who are not.

  Women were trying to him, I think—but in the way we are trying to ourselves. He deprecated our berserks and our self-betrayals, as we do the gassy moods of the menarche, and saw our frou-frou as we often do, as less than true to our depths. I do not know whether or not he gave men more quarter, or even for sure what tolerance he gave himself. Although our grandmother’s house was only avenues away, I would learn no more of him within the family. For the real purposes of living, my brother and he never came back there. I found I minded the hurt, but not the mystery. He too preferred that. Perhaps that was in part why he went. I looked too much like him for his own comfort, my brother now says, still researching. That is true. There is a picture of the two of us, taken by the ever photographically eager Watanabe, on those steps. My mother did not appear.

  Yet it was she who was to save my grandmother’s house. For the South American market had indeed proved to be off, to the point of default. Meanwhile, my father’s former clients in New York had felt deserted. Financial scuttlebutt of that sort often came true, he said, the day he first came back to visit me. “Like any other.” The town had long thought he wasn’t doing well—and now he wasn’t. Yet our own house, as his marveling glance took in, was looking superb.

  What had happened, of course, was that the day after he went, my mother had once again left town, that is, had run on back down home. She never gave up that option, my brother now says—and it ruined the two of them. Father had had to find a down home, too, or someone to whom he was home. My brother is ever fuller of explanations as time goes on—and ever more needful of them.

  She left almost immediately, wanting me to go with her, which I wouldn’t, though tempted. Normally she took the train, liking to get there gradually, but this time she flew. Summer school would be easier to do from here, and if I plugged I too might have a chance at a real college’s scholarship. Besides, though this I didn’t say—when would she come back?

  “You’re too young,” she said.

  “For what?” She had never taken that line with me; I was to have been like her, intrepid.

  “To handle—the divisions.”

  I knew what she meant. But did she mean only those in our family, or between all women and men?

  Since she refused to leave me in the house alone, it was agreed that Watanabe would move into a room on our third floor, caring for the other house by day, and teaching me how to care for ours, which was why Grandmother had allowed him to come.

  I brought chocolates to my mother at the train, but it was only ritual. I told myself I was no longer that involved.

  “Well, it’s taught you housekeeping,” my father said, that first visit. “You’d never have learned it down there. And Knobby says you help him with his letters.”

  Watanabe, corresponding with a top marriage bureau in Tokyo, craved a true Japanese wife but also an English-speaking one. We understood one another. In a way we were both competing for scholarships—and the marriage-bureau mail was teaching me a lot. I couldn’t stand the fishy food he singed and chopped for himself, much preferring my own glop, which gave him similar shudders. Meanwhile, as one does with the best service, I had almost the sensation of being alone, and yet was comforted. He wrote poetry to his marriage prospects, in which he outlined the measurements of the house he would build f
or them. I thought this an odd combination, but he said firmly not—and indeed, he had many acceptances, none so far to his taste. In turn I thought he might teach me foreign perspective, once inquiring whether he found white families mad. In Greensboro the servants were a Trojan chorus, much quoted.

  “You mean your family?” The walnut half he was rubbing a table with halted. Whenever my grandmother saw him at this, taking off what scratches he could, or tincturing the backs of old mirrors, or boiling up agar-agar pastes to do she knew not what to our reviving Hepplewhite, she said she would forgive him anything, even her irritation that she could find nothing to forgive.

  He discarded the walnut half and started with the linseed oil. “With two houses rike these, why not you use them.”

  By then the town might be thinking the same.

  “Oh, we get on fine,” I told my father. “Only his radio. Woo, woo, half the night.”

  My father dealt with this at once, going out to buy Watanabe earphones, with that air men assume so easily, of supplying the no-nonsense part of a house. I doubt it’s a gene-connected talent, though, or else it’s in mine; left alone with the children a good part of the time, I would one day do that supplying.

  “Heard from your mother?” he said, coming down from the third floor to report Watanabe already using the phones and writing a letter to the tune of them.

  “We talk.”

  “Who makes the call?”

  “She does.” I knew she never called the two of them.