But Aurine’s strength is you don’t have to think about beauty with her; you can relax. “Aurine’s a radical feminist,” says Oscar. “She never stops thinking about men.”
And in this dusky boudoir, no farther from a Marseillaise than I suppose boudoirs ever are, what potion are we burning today, I am wondering—for them? And for ourselves of course, incidentally. In our house we’re against some things, including wives and marriages in my aunt’s case, and things like “the moo-mies” in Oscar’s—his name for what has been so hard on an impresario of the legit.
But against the male, in all his glory that we females loudly give him? Never. How to be against him is what I may someday have to go to college to learn. But at home? Allons, enfants de la patrie! Men is what we’re for.
So, I’m waiting. If my aunt answers my old question about war in the funny Ninth Avenue French that her father, old Achille the restaurateur, and my Gran, his cashier girl out of a convent in Wavertree, Liverpool, brought up the little Aurine their by-blow in—then the answer will be serious. If she answers in her own English—a hint of Granny Em’s limey snark-and-barl, tempered with Bergdorf-Goodman American—it will merely be practical.
Stretching, she flings up and back a marble arm, à la that bacchante statue with the grapes, used to be in the Met. A favorite pose Oscar claims is based half on her regrettable taste in art, and half on her respect for the winter price of Malagas. Then she drops to her knees, all naked flesh-art, rumples my hair to a better curl—“No braids for her, Oscar; she’s to be pretty from the start”—touches my button nose, in the face she has decreed somehow will someday be hers, pulls up my panties, and so having thoroughly shaken up destiny to let it know what it’s to do for me, she stands up to the cosmetic bar where her bookshelf is of courtesans of yore. With one long thumb smoothing the memoirs of the de Lenclos, who lasted past seventy, she answers me—girl to girl.
“Billy been on that, again, has he?” Her thumb continues its caress of old de Lenclos; is she smiling? Or sad? “Billy’s ’ad to give up steeplechase, poor old lad. Poor lad, ’e’s seventy.”
While I’m thinking what steeplechase is, comes her second answer. “Pauvre Billee.” Her contralto moves us both. A finger crosses my mouth. “Shhhhh,” she says. “C’est la guerre.”
Some years later, maybe when I’m twelve, I overhear Oscar say of her to a friend—meanwhile not seeing me doing my homework in the alcove in his library, which is more extensive, “Aurine has a heart without envy. Penis envy.”
Well, that’s fine for her, I think, peering out at the two gents who’ve planted that barb and then settled themselves like clubmen, with a couple of gazettes from Oscar’s table of them. Sneaking out the back way, I decide it can’t be because Aurine’s being saintly about it; she’s just never that psychiatric. Then why does she have a heart without penis envy? Must be because she’s seen such a lot of them
As yet, I still haven’t had her opportunities. What hers as a child were, she’s never said. But since she was a by-blow, just like me, and in a much more formal era, I imagine she grew up much the same. I can’t think the old Frenchman went around in his BVDs when he came to call on her mother. And like Oscar, he didn’t live in the house.
As for Oscar, he’s been like a father to me in most ways. But in the exhibitionist department advised nowadays for girls’ daddies?—nothing doing. He’d no more have walked around in front of babygirl Queenie with his prick showing, than he’d put it on display at the Modern. I’ve never even seen him without a vest.
Not that there can be anything wrong, Father. Aurine would never stand for it.
As for me now, has anybody stopped to consider that in spite of bathroom play at age five, the Museum of Primitive Art at nine, the backseats of cars at ten, and from then on any number of lively arenas and propositions, a girl rarely gets to examine what she’s supposed to envy, in the calm and neutral light of day? Or of night. A girl rarely ever gets to see the male organ in a stable situation. Even in daylight, she has to take it more or less on installment. And the minute she does, I suppose it tends to disappear again. Pay now—see more later.
What I think is: What a woman like Aurine doesn’t want for herself, I can probably get along without. I’m interested in them like mad in a way, of course, but do I really want one for my own?
But then again, I argue, nobody else’s experience is yours either. And Aurine never knew Freud. Can a woman be happy and successful these days, without penis envy?…Chalk up one more reason for going to the brain factory. I have to wait till college to find out.
So every day for two weeks now, I’m hanging on the ad missions letter, each day it doesn’t come, lying here in a deck chair, talking over my anxieties with the clouds. They must know the national girl situation as well as I do. Just being pretty isn’t a score these days. To be in you have to be intellectual; even a model getting interviewed for Hollywood tells you what she reads isn’t just Women’s Wear Daily. It’s Sartre—on Sundays.
But it isn’t only fashion that sends us to college these days, Father. Or even parents, though few are as against it as my guardians. And we sure don’t go there to get married. If Aurine, and even Oscar in a way, can fear this, it just shows how old-fashioned they are. We go, Father, because all over America girls have questions like mine. We’re the generation after the pill generation; now we want the directions that come with it. Something better than the “Go, go, go, straight ahead,” that they had. What’s straight? Where’s ahead?
At least in the old days, when people said “Don’t!”—you knew what to do.
And now at last I have the college’s acceptance letter in my cool, unmanicured little mit. Sometimes, Aurine takes my fist in her own filbert fingers and looks at it. She told the Lord I had to look like her, and he bowed to that; she must have an excellent relationship with the Lord. Nothing to do with praying; something that gives her confidence. Whatever it is, she got it without getting a BA for it. But I can see my hand puzzles her. After all the trouble she took for me—with that hair, those eyes, et cetera, and above all, that waist—aren’t I going to do more with it? The only thing we seem to agree about is our napes.
Dear Auntie, how can I tell her the very real rough nature of the competition nowadays? How can I tell that beautiful pan, still without a wrinkle of its wisdom on it, that all the girls I know, laid or half-laid, are pushing into the think tanks with the same united question, What are we competing FOR? And if it’s a penis, Auntie, why don’t you envy it?
So, it’s time to step inside that terrace window Aurine had cut in the brick so many years ago “to catch the pinkest light with.” And tell the two of them the letter we’re all waiting for is here.
Every afternoon they’re in the salon anyway, at their tea—which is champagne for Aurine, and for Oscar, Carpano—sitting under the remnant of the ikons which in the old days Oscar now and then bought for her at La Vieille Russie. A good investment, she always said, that a burglar wouldn’t know about. Not so easy to pawn, as it turned out, and too easy to sell. Which is in one way or another the explanation for the absence or presence of any of our goods. In the current state of our finances, if I leave home for a dorm, something else will have to disappear. That’s why they’ve been sitting there extra late these past two weeks. They’re waiting for the college to tell me. What life has in store for them.
Letter in hand, I move nearer, around a cornice from which I can see them, a beautiful florid couple sipping almost in still life, in the slanting, interior flush of sun we get up here. Or that they bring to it.
My aunt is sitting under the ikon she loves best, of all those she’s managed to keep. I see now she’s saved all the St. Georges; how come I never noticed that before? Next to her, on top of Gran’s old telly, is a fifty-dollar bill always left there for burglars, as an inducement to take both and run. Other people we know leave twenties, but Aurine’s private style is the same as her public one—Oscar says that’s what the grand
style is.
He should know. His huge outline still has the nobility of the young baritone-bass who once—in Venice, at a festival, in the off-season—subbed a Baron Ochs at the opera house. His ties are still from Sulka, since Oscar Selwyn, worldwide impresario, splurged on more of them than lucky O. Selwyn, who runs a lecture bureau in a hole in Carnegie, will ever need. He is, he says, an amateur in a world he never made—and wouldn’t think of making.
Even in love he refuses to turn professional. My aunt’s cool, shepherdess shoulders, always bared for his visit, slide in and out of their curved draperies with her breath; any moment the chiffon will slip past the nipples’ edge; the eye can’t help measuring the possible fall, just as people do with steeplejacks. Familiar as he is with the forms underneath, he can’t help watching. And though he knows their perfect anchorage. When he leaves, he will kiss her hand, his hat in the other. And twenty years of this happiness have not spoiled his face.
Above them, it’s past six by the Venus with the clock in her belly that Aurine won’t get rid of and Oscar surely didn’t give her; by now he should be downstairs in his own big flat, at those serene bathroom duties which I imagine but have never seen. Afternoons are for his cronies down there, or for what’s left of his business. Mornings are my aunt’s time up here for our household or other projects outside—does she secretly visit him then? Sunday mornings he spends here, but far back as I know, he has never spent the night.
When do they do it? puzzled my childhood much like anybody else’s. Now that I’m grown, my aunt’s rhythms of love have long since been evident; she has a kind of overall blush afterward, pink as the stucco I’m leaning on. But since it can hang on for hours, or start up suddenly, right while you’re watching her, in “a limpid laugh and a liquid eye,” to quote Sam Newber—I still can’t tell just where or when. She has to show her satisfaction of course, unlike a wife, who’s not paid for it. That’s what’s wrong with wives, says Aurine.
…“How’m I ever going to do it on my own,” I’ve often wanted to ask her. “With all your philosophy weighing down my organs?”…But now, letter in hand, I’ve no more hostility—I’ve never had much. I just want to ask the old riddles, get the old answers, and run like crazy out of here. How else can I manage what every loving young person wants to do for their older loved ones? How else can I keep them innocent?
So at last, I poke my head in, hand behind my back, and ask: “Aunt Aurine, why do there have to be wars?”
After all, a live question, no matter who asks it. Or who answers. The game is, in ten years of joking, she’s never come up with the same one.
On the double I get it.
“Countries get angry!” Aurine says. She doesn’t look at me. Oscar’s quick glance doesn’t have to tell me. She’s a country—and she’s angry. She’s having one of her English days, when Oscar says she reminds him of the Queen on the telly, reviewing her regiment….While the audience thinks to itself, maybe, of all the things that great Scotch tartan of a girl has never seen…except Prince Philip, of course. Does she envy him?…
Now my aunt raises her head, and looks at me. Above her, the ikons flame. “Something useful and proper always goes off after a war, Queenie. World War One killed off hats.” Gran’s last lover, a manufacturer of fedoras, bequeathed us this wisdom, plus one other—never trust a man in a borsalino.
And I’m going off. Like a hat.
“Didn’t kill mine,” says Oscar.
Then we three are silent. Wars are what they are, but a family joke has just died.
“Why do you wear that old coral?” she says, with the first motherly petulance ever shown me. “It dates you!”
Oscar gave me it at my birth—a Georgian coral. Which is a baby’s silver teething rattle, knobbed and belled and big as a fist, with an inch-long red prong. I wear it on a chain and tell the kids it’s a phallus. Certainly it’s valuable.
“No harm done, Aurine,” says Oscar. “Since it’s George the Third…Queenie—what’s it you’ve got there, behind your back? A yes? Or a no?”
I don’t have to say.
“All that reading!” says my aunt. “You’ll ruin your chin line!”
Oscar winks at me. “Long as it’s not her eyes.”
Oh, I know the ruin she wants for me—and in what style! Just as I know the worry they have for me. Like the Vatican must have for its new-style nuns: Whatever’s in their pure hearts, their legs are showing.
And I can’t help to conceal from these two loving experts what my free tongue has hid from my classmates. That though technically of course I’m not untouched by human hands, whole regions of me remain unexplored.
There’s a dull word for that sort of female. It will never pass our lips. Not in this house.
“College couples seem to marry each other so indiscriminately,” Oscar says. “Out of nostalgia, do you think, because they can’t stay on? Don’t just marry somebody, Queenie, so’s you can revisit your sophomore year in the evenings.”
“Everybody going to college looks rich and healthy,” says Aurine. “So how will you tell which?”
All a parent really wants is reassurance. On what your temperament is. They just wanna be sure it’s theirs. They can’t wait to know. And they can’t believe you don’t know.
So I do what I can for them.
“Uncle——” I say. “I promise not to couple indiscriminately. Marry, I mean.” I see that his new image of him self—as a pater—isn’t quite happy with this. “Or—I won’t let anybody set me up, unless he has your permission.”
“Child, child, child,” says Aurine. Almost a groan. A wrinkle has actually appeared between her brows. “Do you know your own worth!” That’s the French side of her—she hates waste. But most of all, she wants me to get on with it.
What can I promise her? I think of what Gran said, how in her day the sheets still were examined for the maidenhead. Not in the Middle Ages either, Ducky—in Liverpool. “Don’t worry, Aunt,” I say, soothing. I reach out and smooth away that wrinkle. “Soon’s I’m fucked, I’ll phone home.”
So—ten minutes of apologies. If we don’t say “virgin” much in this house, we don’t say fuck either. Sorry. It slipped out. But how did it come to be there, to slip? Do girls of today always go around thinking like that? No pretense—she doesn’t. I recall Oscar explaining once why the confessions of courtesans are so mincing. “Ladies to the end. Even that end.” But he doesn’t wink now.
“Not always,” I mutter. So the peculiar freedoms of our house, which I know as well as they, are restated. Finesse is all.
Except for money. Now I’m to go, they simply will not accept my plan to pay for it.
“NO!” Oscar says, with a great rise of the watchchain. “That diamond in the vault belongs to you!”
“We-ell——” How do I say it to them? “So do I.”
“NO!” says Aurine. “I’ll hock me.” Meaning, her diamonds….One way or the other, our personalities are a good deal involved with jewelry.
Later, Oscar tells me mine’s worth too much to be any easy hock; the market would rather buy.
And Aurine remembers hers are already in pawn.
But right now, she says plaintively, “Mesdames. Et Monsieurs.” And stops, looking at us oddly. Why does her own generous action embarrass a person? Answer, from Oscar later—because if it concerns money, money’s not a good mixer, money’s as cold and neutral as the universe. Which must be why he can’t make it any more; money doesn’t like to be ignored.
He’s looking back at her. “Oui, Madame?” I realize I’ve never heard him talk French to her before. And what a lot there is between them that I, darling of their house corners, may never know.
She’s quite unable to speak yet. I see a pulse at her temple. A beautiful woman, doing a gracious act that’s difficult for her; shouldn’t this encourage the stars that once in a while humans are worth holding the universe together for? Don’t count on it. But closer relatives are much moved.
&nb
sp; “No,” says Aurine, in the smallest voice I’ve ever heard from her. “I’ll get it. I can get quite a lot of money there….The restaurant.”
So! She does have a piece of it then. Bought back somehow from whoever the old man, whose bastard she was, sold it to? Certainly Gran didn’t inherit the place; she could never have kept it from us.
Oh, if there were a man at the head of it now, Oscar and I could understand well enough how this violet-draped woman, with her bronze hair and non-smile, could get anything from him. But there’s nobody there except the old headwaiter Marcel, and the owner is thought to be a syndicate. She must have a share.
“Cherie, cherie——” Oscar says quick. It means no, don’t do it; no, don’t tell me—probably a lot of things, including, “My dear girl, Queenie and I were always on to you, as you very well know.”
Oscar’s very complicated, but he seldom bothers to be quick. Last year, a young man said to him, “These new Edwardian clothes become you.” And Oscar replied, “Got them in Paris, at a price; you’ll find the mannerisms come with them, for free.” But he was too kind to say that this was all back in 1935.
“Ahhhh…Cheri!” Aurine says in a long, graduated voice, as if she’s stabbing herself just below her pearls. Which are not in hock. She too is much moved. It’s like Camille, like Réjane, like the divine Sarah—before her leg went; it’s like Aurine’s whole bookshelf. But since it’s like her too, it’s real.
“Oh she’s worth it, our girl, isn’t she, mon vieux?” she says. The pearls swell to an arc for him. The smile, from the heart of another girl, whatever’s in it, is for me. But the voice that issues from it, sideways, is pure bourse. “Don’t worry, copain. I won’t have to sell.”
She is the syndicate.
We both know exactly what it costs her to tell. Not just the natural fear of all the girls in her set of beautiful women from twenty to sixty, beautifully kept by men of all ages. A fear which at times takes forms much stranger than stocks or emeralds, or even ace-in-the-hole secondary affairs. Like with Martyne, who’s now spending her take as a part-time bookie, on jockey lessons. And Alba, who every Friday leaves her townhouse and Maserati to go by subway to a law office—“Law stenos get very high pay.” Or Dulcie, who does “something awfully tiring, Duck,” for the government.
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