‘You shone as Celia,’ she said, ‘in that depressing gym, on a dreadful stage, with appalling lighting. You had a radiance nobody else in the cast even approached.’
We were in her studio, which was a separate building to the north of the house, with the entire north wall made of glass. I was sitting for the portrait in the seashell. ‘You have elegant bones. Tilt your head just slightly to your right. Beautiful slender wrists and ankles, like princesses in fairy tales. Bet Cousin Kate envies them.’
I didn’t think Kate envied anything about me.
‘Don’t move,’ Max said. ‘What splendid eyes you have, like bits of fallen sky, and wide apart, always suggesting that you see things invisible to lesser mortals.’
Ursula, coming in with iced tea, heard her. ‘Don’t turn the child’s head.’
Max paused, paintbrush in hand, a dab of paint on her nose. ‘It can do with a little turning. She still underestimates herself.’
Ursula put the tea down and came to stand behind Max, looking over her shoulder at the painting, nodding approval.
Max said, ‘Enough for today, or I’ll start overpainting.’
Playing Celia and having my portrait painted were definitely doing something for my ego.
It was a beautiful painting when she finished. Even if I didn’t recognize the Polly Max saw in the seashell, I knew that the painting was beautiful. Max brought it to my parents.
‘It’s a superb painting,’ Daddy said, ‘but we can’t possibly accept something that valuable. It’s much too great a gift.’
Max smiled calmly at his protestation. ‘It’s little enough. You O’Keefes have made a winter which could well have been the winter of my discontent into a stimulating and pleasant one.’
Daddy looked at her, a brief, diagnostic glance. ‘It’s a beautiful picture, Maxa. We’re more than grateful. Where shall we hang it?’
Well, it ended up in the living room, on the wall over the piano. We keep a light on by the piano because of the beach humidity, to keep it dry enough to stay in tune, so the portrait was well lit, and it dominated the room. The little kids said, ‘Polly’s eyes keep following us wherever we go.’
Xan and Den made rude remarks, which I did not take personally. Kate said, ‘I don’t know why nobody’s ever painted a portrait of me.’ She said it several times, once in front of Max, but Max simply smiled and said nothing.
About a week after the portrait was hung, we had the first really hot weather of the season, so that as soon as we came home from school we put on shorts and sandals. At dinner the little kids were wriggly, and the moment they’d finished eating, Mother said they could go out and play and she’d call them in for dessert.
As soon as they had gone outdoors, Xan asked, as though he had been waiting, ‘Do you think it’s good for Polly to spend so much time with those dykes?’
What?
Daddy paused with his fork halfway to his mouth, looking at Xan. ‘Who’re you talking about?’
Xan looked at Kate, and Kate looked at Xan.
Kate said, ‘Well, some of the girls were talking to me at recess, and I didn’t like what they said about Polly.’
‘Kate, what are you talking about?’ Daddy demanded.
Again Kate and Xan looked at each other. Xan said, as though sorry he’d started whatever it was he was starting, ‘Some of the guys said Polly looked really pretty as Celia, with makeup on.’
‘I don’t wear makeup,’ I said.
‘Well, that’s part of it,’ Kate said. Kate didn’t wear much makeup, but she wore some. I had no idea what she and Xan were looking at each other for. I asked, ‘Why do you two keep looking at each other as though you had some secret?’
‘It’s no secret,’ Xan said.
‘What, then?’
Xan looked down at his plate. ‘You do spend a lot of time over at Beau Allaire.’
‘Why not?’ I demanded. ‘I’m welcome there. I’m happy there.’
Again Xan and Kate exchanged glances. ‘Of course we know Polly isn’t,’ Kate said.
‘Isn’t what?’ I demanded. ‘I don’t know what you’re getting at.’
‘Don’t you?’ Xan asked.
Daddy said, ‘Xan, is this something you really want to talk about?’
Xan flushed a little. ‘I’m sorry, but if Polly doesn’t know people are talking, I think she ought to know.’
‘Who’s talking? About what?’ And suddenly I didn’t want to know.
‘Some of the girls from Mulletville,’ Kate said.
Xan went on, ‘Mulletville’s right near Beau Allaire and you’re always there with Max and Ursula and everybody knows they’re—’
‘Shut up!’
Mother tried to calm things down. ‘Xan and Kate, I’m surprised at you. What “everybody knows” is usually gossip, vicious gossip.’
‘I know it’s vicious,’ Kate said. ‘I hate it.’
‘I don’t like hearing glop about my sister,’ Xan said.
‘You punched that guy,’ Kate said.
Den got into the fray. ‘All you and your friends think about is sex and who has it with who, and who does what. It’s sick.’
Daddy banged a knife against the table. ‘This conversation has already gone too far. Xan, you know what we think about gossip, either listening to it or spreading it.’
‘But, Dad, I thought you ought to know. Polly—’
‘Stop him,’ I said. ‘How can you let him say vile things about our friends? They’re your friends, too, aren’t they?’
Daddy replied quietly, ‘They are indeed our friends. Ursula Heschel is one of the finest people and one of the most brilliant surgeons I’ve known. You’ve always been interested in the brain, Xan. And your father’s a neurosurgeon, Kate, and Ursula’s friend.’
‘And Max is one of Sandy’s closest friends,’ I cried. ‘Sandy introduced us to them.’
‘Sandy makes mistakes, like everybody else,’ Xan snapped.
Den pushed away from the table. ‘May I be excused? This conversation is gross.’
‘Yes, go, Den, by all means,’ Daddy said. When Den had left, he turned back to Xan and Kate. ‘Do you think your Uncle Sandy would introduce Polly, or any of us, you two included, to people he didn’t trust and respect?’
Kate and Xan looked down at their plates.
‘Do you think Mother and I would have them here so often if they weren’t our friends?’
‘I’m really sorry,’ Kate said. ‘Xan and I talked about it, a lot, and we thought you ought to know what people—’
I interrupted. ‘It’s a good thing the little kids are outside. I’m glad they aren’t hearing this garbage. Den was right to leave.’
Mother absentmindedly passed the salad to Daddy, who tossed it. ‘Sandy knew we had a lot in common with Max and Ursula. That’s what makes friendship. Like interests. Your father and Ursula have nourished each other this winter.’
‘And Max has nourished me,’ I said. ‘She’s made me believe in myself.’
‘Sure, she flatters you,’ Xan said, ‘paints your portrait, swells your head—’
Daddy cut him off. ‘Xan, are you feeling well?’
‘I have a sore throat. What’s that got to do with it?’
‘After we finish eating, I’m going to take your temperature. And I would remind you that a morbid interest in people’s sexual activities is as perverse as anything else.’
‘We’re sorry,’ Kate said.
Mother added, perhaps trying to bring this ugly conversation back to normal dinner-table talk, ‘Possibly the high divorce rate has something to do with a tendency to equate marriage with sex alone, instead of adding companionship and laughter.’
‘Ursula and Max aren’t married.’
‘Alexander!’ Daddy was getting really ’angry.
When Xan gets hold of a subject, he can’t let go. ‘Lesbianism does exist. I should think you’d be worried about Polly.’
We all spoke simultaneously. I said, ‘Leav
e me out of it.’
Mother said, ‘Xan, I think you’re feverish.’
Kate said, ‘We’re just trying to protect Polly.’
Daddy said, his voice so quiet we had to stop talking in order to hear, ‘Don’t you have any faith in Polly? Or our ability to understand and to care? Of course lesbianism exists, and has since the beginning of history, and we have not always been compassionate. I thought it was now agreed that consenting adults were not to be persecuted, particularly if they keep their private lives private. We human beings are all in the enterprise of life together, and the journey isn’t easy for any of us. Xan, come with me. I want to take your temperature. Polly, you can bring in dessert and call the others.’
Xan had a fever of 102°. He was coming down with a strep throat. He went to bed with penicillin instead of dessert.
‘That explains it,’ Daddy said. ‘I’d better keep a close watch on the rest of you. Polly, will you come out to the lab with me, please?’
I followed him. He gazed into one of the starfish tanks, jotted something down on a chart, then sat on one of the high stools. ‘I don’t want you to be upset by what Xan and Kate said.’
I perched on the other stool, hooking my feet around the rungs. ‘I am upset.’
‘In this world, when two people of the same sex live together, assumptions are made, valid or not.’
‘I hate the Mulletville girls. They think they’re better than anybody else, and they love to put people down. They didn’t like it that I got Celia in the play, and they didn’t like it that I was good. None of them got anything but walk-ons.’
‘You think they’re getting back at you for succeeding?’ Daddy asked.
‘Sure. I’ve been the bottom of the pecking order. They don’t want me to move up.’
‘Polly, I don’t want this to affect your friendship with Max and Ursula.’
‘Don’t worry. It won’t. It hardly affects my feeling for the Mulletville girls, either. It was already rock-bottom.’
Daddy hugged me and I burst into tears. ‘It’s your first encounter with this kind of nasty-mindedness, isn’t it, Pol? Island living has kept all you kids more isolated than you should have been.’
‘That’s fine with me.’ I reached for the box of tissues behind the Bunsen burner.
‘No, Polly, you live in a world full of people of all kinds, and you’re going to have to learn to get along with them.’
‘I suppose.’
‘And, Polly, I don’t want you to worry about any gossip about you. You’re a very normal sixteen-year-old.’
‘Am I?’
‘You are. You’re brighter than a lot of your peers, you’re physically a slow developer and intellectually a quick one.’
I said, ‘I’m not a lesbian, Daddy, if you’re worried that I’m worried about that.’
‘Sure?’
‘Sure.’ I pressed my face against his firm, comfortable chest. ‘But I wish we were back in Portugal.’
‘We aren’t. And even in Portugal, time would have passed; you’d still be in the difficult process of growing up.’
‘I’ve got some history reading to finish,’ I said. ‘I’d better go do it.’
‘All right, love. But don’t let all of this get out of proportion. Put at least some of it down to strep throat.’
“Sure. Thanks, Daddy.’
Xan did not give me his strep throat, but he had planted an ugly seed, uglier than strep. Talking about Max and Ursula the way he had was a far cry from the remark Xan had made weeks ago, that it was a good thing Ursula was older than Daddy. That, at least, made a certain amount of sense.
But the seed was planted.
While we were little, Mother and Daddy were anything but permissive parents. The little ones don’t get away with much. But once we get well into our teens—and that meant Xan and Charles and me, and Kate, while she was with us—they moved into a hands-off policy. If we hadn’t learned from all they had tried to teach us when we were younger, it was too late.
And what we’d learned was as much from example as from anything they said. Our parents were responsible toward each other as well as toward us. What’s more important, they loved each other. Max didn’t need to tell me that. I knew it. It was solid rock under my feet. And love means that you don’t dominate or manipulate or control.
Xan missed a few days of school. Den was the only one to catch anything from him, but Daddy was watching us all, and Den lost only a day. The rest of us were all right, as far as strep was concerned.
What Xan and Kate said shouldn’t have made any difference. I should have thrown it away, forgotten it. Or I should have asked Daddy when we were out in the lab together if he believed what they’d said about Max and Ursula. But I didn’t ask him. And what’s said is said. Xan’s and Kate’s words were like pebbles thrown into the water, with ripples spreading out and out …
It kept niggling at the back of my mind.
I didn’t want to think about sex. The male population of Cowpertown High was still in intellectual nursery school. Renny didn’t want me to be anything but a kid sister to him. Who else was there?
Friday night I couldn’t sleep. Finally I got up and went into the kitchen to make myself something warm to drink. We’d put away the winter blankets, and the night was cool. Mother was already there, in her nightgown, waiting for the kettle to boil.
‘I’m making herb tea,’ she said. ‘Want some?’
‘I’d love some,’ I said, ‘as long as it’s not camomile.’
‘I don’t like camomile either, unless I have a very queasy stomach.’
‘My stomach’s queasy,’ I said, ‘but I still don’t want camomile.’
‘Why is your stomach queasy, honey?’
‘What Xan said.’
‘What, that Xan said? Xan says a lot.’
‘Xan and Kate. About Max and Ursula.’
Mother got two cups from the kitchen dresser and fixed our tea. ‘I hoped Daddy’d relieved your mind about that.’
‘It keeps coming back.’
She handed me a steaming cup, and we sat at the kitchen table. The windows were partly open and the steady murmur of the ocean came in, and the wind moved through the palmettos, rattling them like paper.
Mother slid one of the windows closed. ‘Xan and Kate are both fourteen. At that age, children tend to have a high interest in sexual activity, because they’re just discovering themselves as sexual human beings. Their interests do widen after a while, as yours have.’
‘When I was fourteen, I hardly knew lesbianism existed, and I wasn’t particularly interested.’
‘You and Xan are very different people. You and Kate, too. For one thing, if you’d heard upsetting gossip at school, you’d have come to your father or me privately. You wouldn’t have brought it up as dinner-table conversation.’
‘Xan thinks anything’s okay for dinner-table conversation.’
‘That’s partly our fault. We encourage you to talk about what’s on your minds. You’ve always been interested in an unusually wide variety of topics. What do you and Max talk about?’
‘Philosophy. Anthropology. Lately she’s been on a binge of reading the pre-Platonic philosophers. She says they were the precursers of the physicists who study quantum mechanics.’
‘Shouldn’t that tell you something?’
‘Tell me what?’
‘Where your interests lie. And Max’s.’
I couldn’t hold the question back any longer. ‘Mother, do you think Max is a lesbian?’
Mother sighed and sipped at her tea. Outside, a bird sang a brief cadenza and was silent. ‘The point I thought I was making is that what’s important to you about Max is her interest in ideas. She’s someone who appreciates and encourages the ideas you have. You might not have tried out for Celia if it weren’t for Max.’
I couldn’t leave it alone. Maybe I’m more like Xan than I realized. ‘But if she is a lesbian, wouldn’t that worry you and Daddy—I mean, that I’m
over at Beau Allaire so often?’
Mother sighed again. She looked tired. Daddy had been off to Tallahassee with Ursula. Mother had stayed home with us kids. Daddy had been promising her a few nights in Charleston, to go to the Dock Street Theatre, to the Spoleto Festival, but there hadn’t seemed to be time. Or money. Charleston may not be New York, but theatre tickets aren’t cheap anywhere. The neurosurgeon Dennys had introduced Ursula to, who also knew Daddy, had offered his guesthouse, which put it in the realm of possibility. It just hadn’t happened. Daddy traveled around, to medical meetings, and Mother stayed home.
‘Polly,’ she said, ‘there are a great many areas in which Daddy and I simply have to trust you kids. We have to trust that how Charles lives his life while he’s in Boston is consistent with the values we’ve tried to instill in all of you, just as Dennys and Lucy have to trust Kate while she’s with us. When Kate and Xan—and you—go to a school dance, we have to trust you not to give in to peer pressure and experiment with alcohol or with drugs you know to be harmful and addictive. We’ve been grateful and perhaps a little relieved when Kate has called us to come get her, rather than drive home with someone who’s been drinking, and I suspect Dennys and Lucy feel the responsibility for Charles as strongly as we do for Kate.’
‘Kate’s got good sense.’
‘And so do you. And that’s why we trust you; and we trust Max and Ursula not to do or say anything that would harm you. Has our trust been justified?’
‘Yes.’ I nodded agreement. This was how Mother and Daddy thought. This was how they behaved.
‘If they were pulling you away from other people, then we’d think that was not a good influence. But you’ve been happier in school, haven’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘You’ve been asked to be in the chorus, haven’t you?’
‘Yes.’ I did not tell her that the teacher who taught chorus went into ecstasies because she said I had ‘the pure voice of a boy soprano.’
‘You’re getting more phone calls from your classmates. Things are generally easier for you.’
‘Yes.’ I’d hardly realized it consciously, but it was true. Except for those snobs from Mulletville.
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