The Bobby-Soxer Read online

  So—he had married all of them. It must have been like marrying an anagram you only kind of remember from your own freedom time, I thought almost jealously. Our age—he married it.

  “Why don’t you ask them all back?” I saw how she needed them.

  We were now closing each door, to save on dust. “No, no. They’re too many for him. Too many young.” I heard how she quoted him. “One of us is just right, he says.” She closed the last door. He never lied to her, she said. But I wondered how much she asked.

  I had to give her something of mine. I told her about Bill Wetmore. That he had existed. That he still hung around in my head. “Very destructively,” I said, applying second-quarter psychology, letting first-quarter logic go.

  “I knew there had to be someone, for someone like you. Is he tall?” Sharp-eyed from solitude, she’d alleged that I was growing between visits, and measurement had proven her right. Hadn’t I better see someone? Good looks were no guarantee. Six foot and some over was enough. As her own cousin Venetia, kept too long from what could be done for you, had found out.

  “He’s a sculptor.” And yes, tall, I said, amused. Though that didn’t count with me.

  She dismissed that. “Oh good. Then he can model you.”

  I remembered now, how that had been my own hope. Sacred nudity, he’d said to mine, and such a stretch of it.

  I sat up suddenly. “Venetia?” And taller than Craig Towle?

  She was sharp. “No, his wife was named Venice. I’d never met her. They were already splitting. He’d met the whole crowd of us. On Brown’s Beach.” The crowd had grown up together on that Boston enclave, from the age of tin dippers and pails. “He and his children—theirs—were staying with friends there.” And little Tarquin had come along the beach, crying and lost. “We brought him back. Little Tarquin.” She wrinkled her nose. “Her idea. Of what went with Towle.”

  “Did you ever? Get to meet her?”

  “Once,” she said. “She called me up.” She seemed about to say more, then clammed up.

  “She was a woman of ideas.” I half-parroted it, intent on that group, cool as native plants on that strip of sand. We here had heard of it.

  “A—?” She couldn’t sit up further, the weight of the baby’s water already grounding her like a sandbag, but her hair swung, silkier now that I had washed it. “How do you know?”

  I felt my flush, my only legacy from my mother. Or the only one that could be seen. Avoiding her in one way, we had come round to her in another.

  The girl herself saved us. “He’ll never talk now about his wife. Not a word. Only his older girl will—she hates it here. If we have eggs—‘My mother never boils them … My mother wears only white in summer … Believes we should do this … Does not allow us to do that.’” She broke off, then said under her breath, “‘And hopes your baby has two heads.’ Craig’s banished her for that. I spoke up for her. No, he said. I never saw him so—so absolutely chill about anything.” She lifted her head in pride. “‘No—’ he said. ‘She’s reporting on us.’”

  His other children now and then came and took over the new wing, and left their evidences.

  “And Tarquin?” I said, curious.

  “He never says anything at all. But he comes.”

  Perhaps she and Towle could take the baby into the old house, small as their room was, I said. “In there it would be more unique.” She ignored me.

  “So they come here,” she was saying. “Dozens of them.”

  “Dozens!”

  “Three. I like them, actually. Even that girl. Or could. But the minute they get here, they feel to me like dozens. Or their mother sees to it … How do you know? About her.”

  I had my alibi now. The old one, the permanent, it slips out easiest of all, from porches eternal. “You don’t know this town.”

  “Don’t I—” she said. And struggling up, she lumbered to the front door where my hat and jacket hung, and jammed on her head my hand-me-down slouch hat.

  Why do women signal with clothes like that? Bracelets. Even candy boxes—that whole silly repertoire. If we knew why, we would tell you; it might be sad. The signal is always for oneself; I know that much. The hat kept my mother with me. I had brought her along.

  The hat sat grotesquely, vying with the bobby-soxer’s belly. Neither seemed hers.

  After a while I said, “Keep it on if you want to. But let’s get out of here. We’re out of beer.” Her Volkswagen convertible, new when she married, shone through the window. “Put on a coat and we’ll go to a bar. I know one near.”

  She didn’t move.

  “How long is it—since you left the house?” I said. “I know it’s hard. You get stir-crazy, yet you can’t.” I got that way myself sometimes, down in Greensboro, I told her. When you are in an inharmonious environment, I said.

  Or sometimes when the old one comes up in your throat. I didn’t tell her that. It hadn’t happened yet.

  But finally I wormed an answer out of her.

  “Since the night everybody saw me. At the station. And—and saw you.”

  Us. She couldn’t say it.

  “Does he know why?”

  She wasn’t sure. She’d never said. Nor had he asked. “But he usually knows everything.”

  I thought of him in the hayloft, working away at Bill Wetmore’s great-grand-uncle’s rolltop desk, which was too big for the house. Working on us, the town.

  While Phoebe’d got away, all the time quicker than me. With less to go on. Nor did I have to think hard on how the girl here had learned what she had, when there was Phoebe to talk to, with her lip rolled back.

  After a while I said: “If you’re thinking of wearing that thing until he comes, he never saw it, that day. Or us.”

  “He sees what he wants.” But she took the hat off.

  Now it was I who was staring at it.

  After a while she said: “You must look like your father. I never—got to see him.”

  “He goes away. He always goes away … Yes, I do look like him, they say. In Greensboro especially.”

  She didn’t ask what Greensboro intended by that. She was deep in.

  So was I. I had come at seven, to stay until twelve. Soon their cuckoo clock would strike. Nine. Her crowd had sent it to her, from the Tyrol. Far places.

  “He’ll not come back, I think. My father.” I stole a look at her. We were both so hemmed in.

  The clock did strike.

  “Please, could we go out?” I said. “I’ve never driven in a Volks before.”

  So we made it, the both of us. I got her dressed, pointing to a sweater and skirt out of the many that hung in her closet, when she stood mute. She really hadn’t gained that much weight. Getting into the car, we even marveled at that. She drove.

  Nobody was in the little bar near my mother’s garage. The factory hours were long over. We sat at a table. Two men came in, salesmen by their talk, from the nearby motel. Soon they sent us drinks by the barman, who set the whiskies down with a flourish. We had ordered beer, as the men could see.

  “What’ll we do?” I whispered to her.

  “Accept it.” She smiled. “And if they get porky, I can just stand up.”

  I looked over at the two men, who were well-dressed but dumpy. “And so can I.”

  When they started over to our table—after all, we had drunk their whisky—we did just that, exiting without a look behind us, she with her stomach grandly before her, I rearing my neck. I was now taller than her by far. I drove the car back. I had left the hat in the bar.

  Entering that house again was a downer for both of us, but I could afford it; I’d decided I wasn’t coming back. Almost having a friend gets to you. Maybe she thought so, too. It’s different from having a crowd.

  “I’ll walk back on my own.” I still had on my jacket. We were in the tiny vestibule.

  She nodded, slipping off her coat. Absentmindedly, she began to pull off the yellow sweater, too.

  “Oh no you don’t,” I
said. “Please.”

  “Okay—” she said, after a minute. “Thanks.” The fire in the inglenook was out. She poked it, leaning over with her skirt hiked up. If you don’t exercise, the pregnant behind sometimes gets as big as the front. But she was still strong, only nineteen. She reached over, tipping the heavy table toward the fire, and swept the whole jigsaw in. “And you—you know what? You can have him if you want him. I’ll help.”

  “Have who?”

  “Don’t pretend, you noodle. Your Wetmore. I’ll write Julie at Dartmouth—she’ll find him.” She put her face to the fire. “I’ll get the whole crowd back. Flopsy and Mopsy too. My sheepdogs. And get in some cats. Cats don’t suck babies’ breath. Though that’s not why they’re not wanted here. They’re incessant movement—that’s true. But babies love that, don’t they? And they like noise.” She picked up a last piece of the puzzle and tossed it in. “Anyway, we’ll have a weekend party that’ll—and invite your Bill.” The poker fell. Turning to the room, she tossed her head so angrily that the tears whipped from it. “You can get him if you want him,” she said through a stream of them. “Just be totally—.” She hunched in, saying it. “Like me.”

  I put my arms around her. I’d just remembered something. I likely would not be coming back here anyway. My mother was returning. On extraordinary business, she’d said this morning. I could hear the whole of Greensboro listening. I had better keep it from her that I had ever been here at all. “Okay. But promise me something.”

  “What?”

  “Just—promise me.”

  “I do.”

  I couldn’t say what it was. My own tears were streaming, and not only for her. “Please—” I said. “Please.”

  “Say it.”

  “Please—keep yourself up.”

  She put her arms around me. I could feel her belly, but it seemed to me that even my mother was in the circle, also my father, and all our joint households—except Craig Towle. Together we breathed in the sorrows of the unrecorded world.

  Down at the bottom, I saw our two sets of saddle shoes.

  I was almost at our doorstep when I saw the light on upstairs in the master bedroom, a term my father made fun of. For a minute I let myself dream that the figure up there was his, but I knew better. My mother and her extraordinary circumstance had come home. Knobby’s room under the eaves was dark.

  Then I heard the car creeping to a stop behind me. Neither we nor the Evamses had one. At this dead-end hour it would be the men from the bar. I stiffened my long neck, which as the armature of my height is my defense and my weapon, though men are inclined to say No, it is the eyes. But when I turned I saw the car was only the Volks. Had she come after me then to spend the night, as unmarried girls do?

  It was Craig Towle. They always paid me my five dollars tactfully, in a white envelope. I could see it in his hand. He beckoned me. I went.

  “She says you’re a breath of outside air. Thanks. I was afraid she wasn’t going to be able to hang on. But now she will.” He still held the envelope. “She’s a lovely girl, you know.”

  I might be some man he was saying this to. I had no way to respond.

  “Who’s that up there?” he said.

  The shadow behind the thin draperies, in what would be its tattered old dressing gown from Paris, was walking up the length of the room, and returning.

  “That? Oh—.” She was going to miss the hat; she tabulated her life by clothes no longer worn. I was glad I wasn’t wearing it. “That’s—our Japanese butler. He sometimes irons up there.”

  “Ah. Didn’t know they ironed. Never had one.” He stared at me as he first had at their door, absently toying now with the envelope. “Remarkable. How you do resemble her.”

  “Who?” He couldn’t be saying this to me.

  He shook himself. “Your—grandmother. Who else?”

  No one had ever said that.

  He saw I hated the idea. “Disregard that. Perhaps it isn’t true.” He was still staring at me. “There’s a group picture she once showed me. Of the family when she and your grandfather first moved to town. She was going to give me a copy. Now I expect she won’t.” He handed me the envelope.

  “I don’t want it. Buy the baby something with it.”

  He glanced up at the house. Had my voice been too loud? No, the figure was still pacing. It couldn’t see us.

  “Our hedges prevent,” I said. “Seeing out.”

  “You are—remarkable,” he said. “I might even explain. You see—I’m not a lovely girl. I merely acquired one. While—hanging on to something else. It’s true she won’t buy for the baby. I wish I didn’t know why.”

  “Maybe because it’s low class to trip through the stores for layettes and stuff.” My grandmother’s voice sure enough, though I was mimicking. “You’re supposed to have it all in the attic. My brother was practically born in my father’s bassinette.”

  I wanted to wound him. That’s the first hint.

  I’m sure he saw. “And what about you?” he murmured. Not really asking.

  We both held very still. I could smell the work-sweat and the pearlike starch of his shirt. The cap of his hair, dark and silky, was some barber’s triumph over bristle born on Cobble Row. Where they had no attics, but many a beaked nose like his, Englishy or Pole. Invisible wings of other revelries and knowledge stretched like a fay’s from his shoulders. And had brought him back here.

  Would it have been the same to someone from Brown’s Beach?

  So this is the womanizer, I thought. The word suggests a cockatoo, moving its head forward, and in. But this eye—I fixed on one in the starlight—is remoter than that. Any girl with him will move questward, in the arms of that remoteness. Or drop by the wayside.

  “Look up there,” he said. “At that bedroom. You have to.” He hadn’t touched me.

  Up there perhaps the figure was only putting its clothes away, but it went back and forth still.

  “People mostly don’t marry for who the other person is, but for what that person is. With rare exception. She up there—did it about as badly as anyone could. Other than me.” He stepped back, into the shadow of the hedge. “I expect I’ll soon be moving on.”

  “Then—you’ve finished your play?”

  He froze. “No. I’ve scarcely begun.”

  “But that’s what it’s about, eh? About what you just said.”

  “I don’t do domestic plays. Marriage ones.” His face was a scowl of distaste. “Nor leukemia ones.” I remembered the newspapers the waitresses at Gilbert’s had pulled out of the wastepaper basket after he left.

  “Sorry—” he said. “I take advantage of you. Of your youth. And I just may do it again.” He moved to the car. “Maybe I’ll write about you.”

  “Not if—you’re leaving.”

  “Hmm, that may be just when.”

  “Ah, you wouldn’t—” I threw out in scorn. “Be writing about me. Not if you can say so.”

  “No. But how can you tell.” His glance strayed. He had had exchanges like this before. “So that’s Gilbert’s house, over there. Two lots extra to itself. On either side. Yet he wants mine.”

  “He won’t get it,” I said confidently.

  “This town. This town. My God, how it knows itself. No, he won’t. But maybe you and I should collaborate.”

  “It’s unfair. For someone like you to talk that way to me. Why can’t you stop?”

  Knobby’s room lit up.

  “She’s called to him,” I said. “About where I can possibly be.”

  “Out being a breath of fresh air,” he said. “Yes—why can’t I stop?”

  He means his plays, too, I thought. And yet—he’ll move nearer. The comprehension was so heavy that I thought I would cry. Instead I broke out into a sweat and stood tall, hoarding my armpits. When he did come close it was like our doctor did, his breath cool and reserved.

  “Sorry—” he said, “but if I asked, you wouldn’t let me. Just a bit of research.” His forefinger travel
ed down my right cheek, steady, not a caress. Then he slipped the envelope into the breast pocket of my blouse, his hand lingering for a second, and quickly stepped back. “Apologies.” He said it twice. Then he was in the Volks, leaning out. “But if you ever want to talk—about the town—let me know. I promise—to pay nothing.” The car started. Back of us, the porch light went on. “Ah, the butler,” he said under his breath, and drove off.

  So he and I finally met on our own. I had not known I wanted to. All the imaging and hearsay I had witnessed was true, yet now he was both more than that and less. I could think of half a dozen names to call him, words to describe him with, but no one of them alone would do. That was why the town called him Craig Towle.

  The landing light went on now too, but I didn’t need to look up. I had been doing that all my life.

  MY MOTHER WAS AN HEIRESS. Legal notification—that all the property, excluding personal jewelry, of one Leslie Warden of New York City, had been left to her—had arrived the week my father had said it would; a New York bank’s statement and confirming instructions had only now followed. In token of that, Greensboro, which during the interim had stood at hand to help her cope with any doubt about acceptance, had sent her off with a corsage now in an etched glass on her dressing table, rosebuds and stephanotis, in a frill stuck with a pearl pin.

  “I hated myself for carting it along but I couldn’t help myself.” Except for weddings, funerals, and proms, our street, which grew its flowers for free, thereby achieving two kinds of grace, was stingy about bought flowers, and so always kept them overlong. My mother had never before done that. I mark it the first sign of her decline as a heroine of the sort I and some others would still take her to be. A woman of style—but style merely—has to rise continually, even to a bad end. Otherwise, there is so little place to go.