by Gail Godwin
This had taken place in late June. Everyone was surprised when, after that, Mrs. Dibble’s horn sounded regularly outside our house on two or three mornings a week. Becky’s reaction was incredulity mixed with contempt. Aunt Mona’s way of explaining it was that I was a sensible child and knew the value of a good pool on the hot summer days. My mother, who frequently accompanied me out to the car to say a friendly hello to “Babs,” would give me tender, puzzled looks as she watched our strange trio drive off. Finally she asked me if I really enjoyed going over there; I wasn’t doing it, she asked, out of any mistaken idea that somebody at our house had to oblige Joan Dibble because she was the daughter of Mott’s boss?
“No, really, I like Joan.”
“Well,” she said, kissing the top of my head, “that’s all right, then. You go and have fun.” Perhaps she was relieved that I spent more days of the week with Joan than I did riding over to see Miss DeVane on Old Clove Road.
I did like Joan, and I did like going over to her house. The first day, when I had gone there by myself intent on “doing good,” I had found it wasn’t difficult at all to be in Joan’s company. Far from being the poor fat girl I had to cheer up, she was the serene and benevolent hostess who put me so at ease I forgot all about my “duty.”
“You just swim all you want,” she said in her mild, uninflected voice, “and I’ll sit up here under the umbrella and watch you.” For half an hour I swam obediently back and forth in the sparkling pool, enjoying the streamlined sensation of my limbs coordinating in an efficient crawl, pleased and slightly vain about having an audience watching me with such approval. “You’re a good swimmer,” murmured Joan in her jumbo-size suit beneath the umbrella. There was no wistfulness or envy in her tone. If anything, there was the gratified note of the indulged pasha, who had sent out for an elegant young swimmer to watch and was complimenting the performance.
Joan was not stupid. And she had a self-possession whose source I couldn’t fathom. Where did it come from? Was it something she had developed in order to compensate for her appearance, or did she actually draw some kind of mythical charge from her size? I never found out. We never discussed her fatness. We discussed many other topics—gradually I confided to her some of my admiration for Ursula DeVane, after she had shown me her scrapbook of cards and letters and signed photos of famous people to whom she constantly wrote—but never, never her weight. She never once alluded to it or even appeared to notice it, except that, when getting out of a chair or settling into one, she often emitted a half-humorous and resigned groan. Of course I never said anything. Some other girl, even a well-meaning friend, might have broached the subject after three or four visits. (“Hey, listen, Joan. Does it ever … I mean … bother you about your weight? Have you ever … you know … thought about dieting?”) What would Joan have answered? But I had been brought up not to ask: had been brought up, moreover, to feel superior because I knew better than to ask.
She had, in her red-leather scrapbook, letters from Pearl Buck, Edna Ferber, Dale Carnegie, A. J. Cronin, and Danny Kaye, as well as a postcard from Mary Hemingway (answering for Ernest) and signed photographs from Piper Laurie and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. Before she wrote to celebrities, she told me, she looked up everything she could find on them, and read their interviews in magazines. If they had special pets, she was sure to mention them in her letters, just as she always made sure to refer to a star’s latest picture or an author’s latest book. She made an extra handwritten copy of every letter she sent, and when the reply came, she would paste it on the page facing her letter. She wrote in a small, round, extremely legible hand, always mentioned that she was twelve years old, and did not stint in her extravagant praise of her intended correspondent’s achievements. Once she repeated herself, but how, for instance, was A. J. Cronin to know she had also written to Dale Carnegie and Pearl Buck that “you have influenced many people’s lives for the better”? I am not sure whether she had read their books or even seen their movies. But her letters must have made them think she had, because she had some warm replies in her collection. If I were to receive such a fan letter today from a twelve-year-old girl who told me my last performance was stunning and that I had influenced many people’s lives for the better, I would sit right down and pen a friendly, glowing reply. There would be no doubt in my mind that she knew my work. From the small, shapely handwriting, I would probably deduce a small and shapely young person invested with all the mental and physical attributes deserved by such a perspicacious acknowledger of talent.
As I mentioned, I told Joan about my friendship with Ursula after I had been admitted to the red-leather sanctuary of her collection of heroes. I began by saying I didn’t really have any friends my own age here yet, but there was this older woman I had met who had taken an interest in me and whom I admired a lot. I had to explain to Joan who George Bernard Shaw was, and then I told her how Ursula had acted for him in one of his plays and he had said she was going to make a good Joan of Arc, but then the war had broken out. I shared with Joan various selections from my afternoons with Ursula, always tailoring my narratives to make Ursula appear as unusual as possible. Joan’s small, bright eyes gazed on me possessively as I told these stories. She often wore an inscrutable little smile that made it seem she knew what I was going to say next. Then, some other times, I wondered whether she was really listening to what I was saying about Ursula, or whether she was watching me in the same way she liked to watch me swim: as though I were a friendly young storyteller she had sent for, to while away her afternoon, and it didn’t matter much what the storyteller told as long as she went on talking in an engaging and animated way. However, Joan’s silent attention encouraged me to talk. Her huge, quiet, self-contained presence seemed a safe repository for those things I had told no one else. Joan was so different that it was as if she didn’t count as a confidante. She was more like a large, semi-smiling Buddha some lonely traveler pours his thoughts out to in some faraway temple just to keep track of himself.
And so, going to Joan’s was far from being a chore to me. Being there had many advantages: I could talk about the person who interested me most, and Joan would listen for hours; I could plunge, whenever I liked, into that inviting blue pool (such a contrast to Ursula’s country pond, where I never swam, with its invisible generations of swimming and crawling inhabitants she loved to tease me about); I could take an unselfish pleasure in knowing it pleased Joan that I always wanted to come when she called; I could take a perverse pleasure in baffling Becky and making them all wonder at home why I liked coming here so much; I could enjoy Mrs. Dibble’s tasty poolside snacks, which she urged on Joan and me but never touched herself—she disappeared into the house or out on one of her numerous shopping expeditions as soon as she had watched Joan and me heap our plates.
Oh, sometimes when they were driving me home, Joan sprawling serenely in the back, I making polite conversation with the “chauffeur” in the front seat, I felt weary in that way you do when you have been on your good behavior too long. But then I would look down at the deepening tan on my arms and legs and imagine Ursula saying, the next time she saw me, “Just look at you, Justin! You’re so dark I hardly recognized you. You must live outdoors.” A tan was the nearest thing to a transformation I could effect in myself in order to show her I, too, changed from visit to visit. Maybe that’s one reason people value a tan: it makes others look at them afresh and say, “Oh, you’ve been away somewhere. You’ve changed.” Often, as the Dibbles were driving me home, I would realize, with sudden elation, that I had made one more day pass and it was that much nearer the time when I could allow myself to ride over to Ursula’s again.
And so, when Mr. Dibble at IBM, due to some foreign executive’s canceled trip, found himself in possession of four tickets to the most popular show in New York, it was only natural that he would think of the girl who had befriended his daughter; and of this girl’s deserving mother, the sad, pretty widow. And that’s how Joan Dibble and I (Joan this time makin
g space for me in the back seat) and “Babs” and my mother set off early one Saturday morning at the end of July for the matinee on Broadway—stopping for a sumptuous lunch, prepared by Mrs. Dibble, at a roadside picnic table along the way.
The show was My Fair Lady, with Rex Harrison and Julie Andrews, and I was impressed without reservation. It was the first time in my life I had seen a professional stage production with fine actors at the top of their form and all those masterful accoutrements of stagecraft that can create an unbroken illusion for the audience. As a child of the movies, I had been impatient with and critical of the few instances of local “little theater” I had been exposed to. Invariably there would come some intrusion of reality in the form of a wobbly cardboard set, or an actor’s bungled lines, or a wrong lighting cue, or a shabby costume you had already seen in a little theater production the year before. I had concluded that it was impossible to lose yourself at the theater as you could at the movies. But with My Fair Lady came a new experience. I did lose myself, but in a less self-enclosed way. There was a rapport between me and the human beings on the stage: they were really up there now, in the same room with me and all the other people in this particular audience. The performance as it happened today would never happen quite the same way again. On this occasion we were all participating together in a human drama, an uplifting one, suitable for songs, about how people could learn from one another and be transformed. And that these actors, flesh-and-blood people like ourselves, not distant celluloid images whose bad scenes could be reshot and edited out, were able to command our emotions with such superb skill was both mysterious and moving. I loved Rex Harrison especially. It would be nice to have a man like that waiting for you when you grew up. But then I thought of the age difference between Ursula’s mother and father and how that marriage had turned out, and I wasn’t so sure.
The final curtain came down and the lights went on. Joan rolled herself out of her aisle seat with a little groan, and the four of us streamed slowly up the aisle. People were humming snatches of “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face” and “The Rain in Spain” and smiling at one another.
We had reached the foyer when a man in a cotton cord suit pushed his way hurriedly through the crowd and caught my mother’s arm. “Louise, it is you,” he declared excitedly when my mother turned, startled at the touch. She gave the stranger a searching look, then let out a little cry. “Craven Ravenel, I don’t believe it! But what are you doing up here?”
“Same thing you are, I expect. We flew up especially just to see this show.” He motioned to a tall woman in a red dress who was flowing toward us with the crowd but making no effort to get ahead of anybody. She stuck up five fingers and gave us a languid wave.
“Is that … your wife?” my mother asked.
“Yes, that’s Charlotte. She was Charlotte Emory before we married. I’m sure you met the Emorys when you came to Columbia with your mother.” The way he pronounced it—“mothah”—made me realize with a homesick jolt that I had grown up with people who talked like this. He seemed a nice, gentlemanly man, but he was not at all as I had pictured the Craven Ravenel in my mother’s story. That Craven had been young and dashing, with flaring nostrils and ripply hair and a tall, willowy figure and a Greek profile. This was a stocky man who was losing his hair on top; the best thing about his face was the expression of delight and wonder on it as he kept looking at my mother.
My mother introduced the Dibbles and me. As she presented me to Craven Ravenel, she took me by the shoulders and drew me slightly in front of her, like a shield.
“I believe I met you once when you were a little bitty thing,” he told me. “It was at Pawleys Island during the war. I was stationed over at Myrtle Beach for a while.” Then he turned back to my mother. “Is your husband with you, Louise?”
“My husband is dead, Craven.” She said it apologetically, as though she wished she could spare him from having asked. “We live up here now, with his sister. I also have a little boy of six.”
Craven Ravenel looked stricken. “I don’t know what to say. All this time, I’ve been thinking of you living happily in Fredericksburg. And your mother? Is she—?”
“They’re both gone, too,” she told him softly. I felt her fingertips press into my shoulders. “All I’ve got in the world are Justin and Jem, but they are a great comfort to me.”
“I’m sure,” he said. “I’m sure they must be.” He took his handkerchief out of his breast pocket and dabbed at his brow, anxiously scanning the crowd. “I can’t understand what happened to Charlotte,” he said helplessly. “One minute she was there and now I don’t see her. But that’s like Charlotte.”
“I expect she may have stepped into the powder room,” suggested my mother.
“That’s not a bad idea.” Mrs. Dibble spoke up brightly. “Come on, Joanie. Remember, it’s a long drive home. We don’t want to be stopping a lot. How about you, Justin?”
“No, thank you.” I felt my mother needed me right where I was.
Craven Ravenel gave the retreating Dibbles a perplexed frown, looked as if he might say something, but didn’t. After a moment, he asked my mother if my father had been ill a long time, and she said no, Rivers had never been sick a day in his life, it had been a car accident.
“Well, I’m just as sorry as I can be. Look, can you and your … friends … come back to the Waldorf and have drinks and supper with us … if Charlotte ever does reappear?”
My mother thanked him, but explained we had a hundred miles to drive and that she had left her little boy in the care of a nice man on his houseboat. “He likes Jem, but I don’t want to take advantage,” she said.
“No, of course not,” said Craven Ravenel, who looked somewhat crestfallen at the mention of this nice man. Then he took out his wallet and showed us a snapshot of two preadolescent girls. “That’s our daughter Annabel … she’s almost twelve … and that’s Amy … she just turned eight.” He reached in another flap of the wallet and pulled out a card, which he handed to my mother. “If you all are ever in Columbia, please get in touch with me,” he said. “Or if there’s ever anything I can do for you or your family, Louise, I hope you’ll write. Maybe you’ll write anyway and fill me in on what happened to you all these years. I’ve thought about you many times.…”
Then the tall woman in red was suddenly upon us. “Here I go hide in the ladies’ room so he can have a reunion with his childhood sweetheart,” she bantered in a merry contralto drawl, “and when I come out, I find him showing pictures of our children. I don’t call that very romantic!”
“Charlotte, this is Louise Justin,” Craven Ravenel began formally, but then he stopped, looked at my mother in consternation, and said, “This is unforgivable, but I can’t seem to recall—”
“Stokes,” replied my mother, offering her hand to the woman in red. “And this is my daughter, Justin.”
“Oh, I feel I know you,” said the other woman to my mother. “The beautiful girl from out of town who wrote Craven’s name on her dance card because she knew he was too bashful to ask. He tells that story every time he can find a new audience. I think”—and she linked her arm through my mother’s as though they were two conspirators against the man—“it may be the most exciting thing that ever happened to him. Why, after he saw you at intermission, he could hardly watch the show. He kept saying, ‘I’m sure that’s Louise Justin.… I’m just sure that’s Louise Justin.’ Finally I said, because I wanted to shut him up so I could concentrate on Rex Harrison, ‘Well, why shouldn’t it be Louise Justin? She has the right to fly up and see this play, too. Only you aren’t Louise Justin anymore. You’re married now. Where is your—?”
“Charlotte”—Craven Ravenel sent his wife a warning look—“Louise has just told me some sad news. She has lost her husband in an automobile crash.”
“Oh Lord,” moaned Charlotte Ravenel, immediately shedding her jovial, bullying tone. “Oh honey”—she put her arm around my mother—“I’m as sorry as I can be. Crav
en, why don’t you stop me from jabbering so much?”
“Well, darling, you know it’s hard sometimes.” As he said this, he smiled helplessly at my mother and me, but there was also in the air a visible relief between husband and wife: It’s okay now, we have covered Charlotte’s awkward question by our “long-suffering old married couple” exchange.
“I was just telling Craven,” said my mother, who was now casting anxious looks toward the ladies’ room, hoping for the Dibbles’ return, “that we live up here in Yankeeland now. After my husband’s death, in February, we moved up here to live with his sister. Justin and my son, Jem, and I share a house with Mona and her little girl.”
“Oh!” exclaimed Charlotte. “Then that’s who the woman and the … um … plump little girl were … that you all were sitting with. They were going into the ladies’ just as I came out.”
“No, those are just friends,” my mother corrected her. “Kind friends who had extra tickets to the show. Justin and Joan—that’s the girl—have been spending some time together this summer.”
“Oh, I see,” said Charlotte transferring her attention finally to me. “Well, she is certainly an attractive child. Going to be tall. When I was your age,” she told me, “I was already taller than all the boys. You must favor your father, though. You don’t have your mother’s features, at all. Except maybe around the eyes.”
“I think she favors my mother a lot,” my mother said.