With the one ancient calabash that had somehow escaped the deadly pull of the ocean, and with Claire, whom Mamie convinced Mary to let go one year early, Mamie left Waimea for school in Honolulu. Both girls were very happy there.
II
FIVE
Aunt Alice, or Alysse (accent on the second syllable) as she now preferred to be called, decided to give a small dinner party the night of Mamie’s arrival in New York. She always did things on the spur of the moment. It was one of her own favorite character traits. She thought it made her seem headstrong and that this made her seem young.
It didn’t occur to her that Mamie might be tired after her trip from Los Angeles. The truth was, Alysse was regretting just a tiny bit her invitation to her niece. After all, she had not seen her in nine years, since McCully’s funeral. Because of her mild regret, she could think of no reason to delay Mamie’s debut. The dinner was, in fact, a little test.
She had the idea from her second husband, who had once said, “I don’t know if I should, but I judge people by their picnics.” It was a trial that worked well for Alysse. You might have ordered the saturation bombing of small, neutral countries or made your fortune selling missiles to an African government or, on a less dramatic level, you might enjoy having sexual intercourse with persons no longer living, but if you could hold your own at one of Alysse’s dinners, and by that is not meant anything so elementary as knowing which fork to use, you became a dear friend.
Mamie, a little pale, was shown into the red library. Alysse was on the telephone. At first glance, she seemed like an alert, blond bunny. She was wearing a pink angora sweatsuit. A big pink ribbon held back her pale curls. She had not as much hair as she might have liked to have, and the loops of the ribbons stood up on her head like rabbit ears. She gestured excitedly to Mamie and pantomimed her boredom and impatience with the speaker, but she did not end her conversation. There was a strong smell of orange peel and clove in the lacquered room.
The maid, Lydia, stood impatiently in the doorway, holding Mamie’s bag. Alysse, pointing and waving exaggeratedly, finally made them understand that Lydia was to take Mamie to the guest room.
She said, with a sudden shriek, “He’s the most eligible married man in New York,” and Mamie turned back because she thought that Alysse was speaking to her, but Alysse was standing at the window with the telephone, looking down at Park Avenue, laughing.
Mamie followed Lydia. Her room was at the end of a narrow, winding hall. The curtains were drawn even though the sky was still blue and full of light. Mamie sat on one of the beds. Lydia began to unpack her bag. The curtains and chair material and bed coverings were a blue hydrangea-printed chintz. There were horticultural watercolors on the chintz-papered walls, each gilt frame hanging from a moiré ribbon attached to the ceiling molding with a big bow. There were Chinese pots of pale blue hyacinths in the empty fireplace and their thin smell, too sweet, hurt Mamie’s head.
“I’ll do that,” she said to Lydia. Lydia looked at her in satisfaction, as if Mamie had committed her first mistake. “I prefer to,” Mamie said, smiling with embarrassment, and Lydia shrugged.
There was a bottle of mineral water, for aware French women, it said on the label, on a silver tray on a table. There were little hard pillows in the shape of cats and pug dogs in the corners of the chintz-covered chairs. There was a blue-and-white plaid mohair blanket on the arm of a chair.
“Do you need anything, miss?” Lydia asked.
“No. No, thank you.”
Lydia refolded the mohair blanket and turned around one of the cat pillows. Mamie wondered nervously whether she was supposed to tip her, but before she could reach for her handbag, Lydia was gone.
She looked more closely at the watercolors. They were very beautiful—grapes and yellow pears, signed Withers. Mamie was bending close to the watercolors, studying them, when Alysse rushed into the room and took Mamie forcefully into her arms.
“I am so glad to see you at last. So happy. So pleased.” She was not so tall as Mamie so their sudden hug was awkward.
Mamie was aware that she was being studied very carefully, quite in the same way she had been examining Mrs. Withers’s Duchesse d’Angoulême pear. I’m not as good as the pear, she thought.
“You’re seated next to Mr. Zimmerman tonight,” Alysse said. She beamed. “Lucky Mr. Zimmerman.” She thinks me good enough, at least, for Mr. Zimmerman, Mamie thought.
Alysse whirled around and around, looking for something. She stopped when she saw Mamie’s suitcase.
“I have all the clothes in the world, all of them, although I’m not quite so tall as you, even without those shoes,” Alysse said. She was looking at Mamie’s feet.
Mamie looked down at her zebra-skin high heels. Her mind seemed not to be working with any speed. It had not really been working in its accustomed way for the past few months. Her aunt was moving too fast for her. Even the maid had been moving too fast. “My shoes?”
“You can, and must, borrow anything of mine you need. Coming straight from college, you must have nothing but kilts and cashmeres.” Alysse was pulling clothes out of Mamie’s open suitcase.
“They wear jeans now.”
“Of course they do.” Alysse said. “I wear jeans.”
She threw Mamie’s clothes across the bed.
“There are two other bags downstairs. The doorman said he’d send them up. I’d feel much better if you went through those, too.”
Alysse turned slowly to take another look at her niece. Mamie was smiling. Her face, which had looked tired when she arrived, was a little flushed and her eyes were clearer.
“Well,” Alysse said, shutting the suitcase. “I can see you’ll do just fine.” She came closer to Mamie and she, too, smiled. She had a big, beautiful smile. “You’re not at all like Mary, are you?”
“Mother is smaller than I am.”
“Yes,” said Alysse, looking at her through shrewd blue eyes. She snapped on a pink-shaded lamp on a little table. “My guests arrive at eight-thirty and we dine at nine-thirty. The way they do in Europe.”
“I like the pears so much and the grapes,” Mamie said quickly.
“The pears?” Alysse looked around.
“The watercolors. On the wall. They are very beautiful.”
“Are they? Willy Russell-Davis gave me those years ago.”
“Uncle Bill?”
“You can’t remember him.”
“He was with you on that big boat when you came to Waimea. None of us had ever seen a yacht before. Claire still tells the story of Uncle Bill and the moray eel.”
“He wasn’t your uncle. Your mother made that up.” Alysse, clearly not interested in any tall tales about old lovers and eels, went to the wall to look closely at the lovely watercolors, possibly for the first time. “He always did have wonderful taste. His awful wife gave everything to the Museum when he died. Just to spite me, I’m sure. These are good, aren’t they?”
She took one of the paintings from its moiré ribbon and tilted it to catch the light. Distracted by this find in her very own guest room, she wandered out, leaving Mamie standing there. She took the watercolors with her.
Mamie had to fight up to the last minute to wear her own dress, a pale lime green voile of Hungarian embroidery, rather than the dress that Alysse wanted her to wear, a fire engine red taffeta with big black pom-poms that made Mamie look like a rather intimidated Carmen. Of Mamie’s own dress, Alysse said dismissively, “at least it’s eau de Nil.”
During dinner, Mamie won a wide smile from her aunt when she made Mr. Zimmerman, an investment banker, laugh out loud during the first course, a Roulade au Fromage. Mr. Zimmerman was very interested in what he called the “real Hawai‘i,” his experience being limited to the Kahala Hilton and the nightly Korean call girl. He had an idea that anyone whose family had lived there for generations was rich and aristocratic, and Mamie, who had never thought her family to be either, amused him with a description of going to see her Aunt E
mma.
As a McDougal on her mother’s side, Aunt Emma was the possessor of as revered a local name as it was possible to inherit. Aunt Emma lived in an enormous, wood Victorian house in such disrepair that it was considered dangerous to walk on the second-story floorboards in 1920. She refused to leave the house and downtown Honolulu had been built around her six filthy, entangled acres. She told Mamie and Claire that when she died the land would belong to them. Mamie and Claire were not fond of visiting Aunt Emma.
“She is very boring and she smells bad,” Mamie said to Mr. Zimmerman. “We’re given weak tea and stale Ritz crackers.”
Aunt Emma confined herself to one crowded room, and it was not unusual to see a large black wharf rat (the docks were at the end of Ward Avenue) trot boldly past on tiptoe, hugging the moldings more out of custom than fear.
“Aunt Emma always watches the rat calmly and says, ‘Those rats first landed here with the ancient Tahitians who sailed due north in their huge double-outrigger canoes, as big as longhouses, searching for new islands …’ Once she begins one of her lessons in Hawaiiana, it is awfully hard to stop her. Claire once said that the rats in Aunt Emma’s room must have been very, very old.”
After dinner, Mamie was left on the sofa with a beautiful red-haired woman. Alysse whispered to Mamie that the woman, Dodo Hennessey de Santiago, had been the most famous model of her day and Mamie was surprised to learn that “of her day” meant only a year earlier. She had not realized that Dodo was six months pregnant until Dodo said, “I’ve never had tits before and it’s the only thing that makes this bearable.” Even though she was wearing a tightly cut dress, Mamie could barely make out a swelling stomach through the Lycra sheath.
Mamie asked Dodo all of the polite questions as she passed her a demitasse and cream and English rock sugar.
“Is this your first child?”
“And last.”
“Are you hoping for a boy or a girl?”
“It doesn’t matter, I just want a healthy baby.”
Despite Dodo’s optimistic remark about her new breasts, Mamie was not really prepared when Dodo casually said, “I’m having a Caesarean delivery so as not to stretch my vagina.”
“How sensible,” Mamie said, sipping her coffee.
“I thought so,” said Dodo, and asked the butler for a tequila.
In her aunt’s mirrored bathroom, mirrored toilet and walls and floor and ceiling, Alysse asked Mamie about her dinner partner, perhaps in the hope of catching Sid Zimmerman in an indiscretion, and Mamie was able to say, with a clear conscience, that it had been very interesting.
“You say that a lot,” Alysse called out from on top of the mirrored bidet.
“Well, it is interesting,” Mamie said. “It’s not like having Sunday dinner with the headmaster.”
“What?”
“That used to be my standard of worldliness. Sunday with Dr. Fox.”
“Dodo finally got smart,” Alysse said, drying herself in the mirror. “If she didn’t have this kid, all the dough would go to the younger brother. She’s so smart she’s even naming it after the grandfather. Walter. Such a bad name. And for a child, too.”
“But she doesn’t know if it’s a boy, does she?” asked Mamie in surprise.
“She’s known it was a boy for months. She had that test. Dodo did not get where she is just on her looks, you know.”
Mamie wanted to ask Alysse just where it was that Dodo had got to, but she stopped herself when she realized that Alysse might think she was being sarcastic. She was right to stop herself. Mamie, an apt student, was beginning her course of New York lessons, and while it cannot be said that Alysse was the teacher one might have wished for her, she was the only one available. At her best, Alysse, in her impatient and practical way, might have been a tonic for Mamie. Alysse could keep Mamie afloat, as long as she held Alysse’s interest, and she could make Mamie, at least in her terms, a success.
Mr. Zimmerman found Mamie perfectly charming, or so he told Alysse, with whom he was sleeping later that night. Alysse was relieved. Mamie had passed her first test.
When Mamie told Alysse that she wanted to stay in New York and that she was going to look for a job, Alysse was, in her own words, “très, très delighté.”
“And find an apartment,” Mamie said. “I can’t live with you forever.”
“At least until you’re organized,” Alysse said, reassuring her. She opened a bottle of champagne to celebrate Mamie’s decision to stay and the two of them settled girlishly into the green velvet sofa in the library to discuss Mamie’s prospects. Her prospects were limited, for despite the genuine charm of her dinner conversation and her intelligence, she had no particular accomplishments.
“You have to graduate from Harvard to get a job sharpening pencils at one of the magazines,” Alysse said. She regretted now that she could not telephone Carter Schmidt, who owned one of the networks, but she had, she admitted, accused him of giving her a local infection and he probably would not take her call.
Mamie was unaccustomed to the sweet, cold champagne. She liked the taste of it very much. “I can handle a machete,” she said. “I can roll a cigarette.” She laughed. “I can graft an orchid. I can do a back dive. I can talk a little bit about books. But that’s it. Not much to go on.” In the course of reciting her talents, she had managed to discourage herself.
“You don’t understand, Mamie,” Alysse said, pushing the loose brown hair back behind Mamie’s flushed ears. “What good would typing do you? You’d only have to type. What we want to do is make a list of everyone we know, and who owes favors, and who will be willing to help and who won’t. You leave it to me.”
Mamie leaned back against a needlepoint pillow and drank her champagne. Perhaps this is what I need, she thought happily. It had been a long time since she had taken for granted, as do most children, that everything would be all right, that there were grown-ups out there acting busily in her interest. Alysse’s seductive confidence was misleading to Mamie. She did not know that conviction, on its own, did not necessarily mean wisdom.
“You just leave it to me,” Alysse said again, terribly excited at having the young woman in her care.
Alysse did not bother to tell Mamie that as one of Deardorf’s best customers she felt it only right that the most expensive women’s store in New York take on her niece as an assistant lingerie buyer. Nor did she tell her that she had given Mr. Deardorf a very thorough, as thorough as Alysse could be, account of Mamie’s family connections in the islands. These social attributes of Mamie’s were not seen as handicaps to selecting satin bedroom slippers and terry-cloth bathrobes. Generations of barely educated, well-born young women had skipped across Deardorf’s elegant floors for that awkward two- or three-year period between college and first marriage, and their sponsors—wealthy grandmothers, fathers’ mistresses, trust fund executors—had been relieved and lucky to place them there.
Mamie believed that she was fortunate to have been given the job. She resignedly gave up any individuality and passively placed herself in the plump red hands of the head saleslady, Miss Magda. She never complained or imagined that there was anything else she would be able to do. She understood that there were things she could do, such as work at a publishing house as a reader, but she had no idea how to even find a job like that. She walked during her lunch hour, unable to afford lunch in a restaurant and too self-conscious to eat alone in the noisy store cafeteria with the other solitary women. She willingly fetched vanilla yoghurt from the corner delicatessen for the middle-aged, middle-European salesladies who ordered her about; tirelessly replaced on satin-padded hangers the silk crepe nightgowns dropped carelessly to the floor of the dressing rooms (she was not yet trusted with the keys on the pink grosgrain ribbon used to lock the customers into the dressing rooms); and conscientiously sorted out, at the end of the long day, the size-five panties from the size-six panties and returned them to their “proper drawers,” as Miss Magda called them, seemingly unaware of the b
ad joke she had made. Mamie decided that it must be Miss Magda’s unfamiliarity with the idiom, even though Miss Magda had lived right on West Fifty-seventh Street for the last thirty years, a fact she pointed out to Mamie nearly every day.
She made friends with a very pretty blond girl named Selena. Selena’s mother, a baroness, had moved to Calcutta to work with an order of silent nuns for the poor and dying. Selena had none of her saintliness, if, in fact, it was sanctity that had led the baroness to impulsively leave everything behind in Munich.
“She hasn’t given it up forever, you know,” Selena said irritably whenever Mamie asked about Calcutta and the nuns. “It’s just what she’s doing now. She used to live with a cargo cult in New Guinea.”
Selena wanted to marry. She lived with her rich grandmother in a big apartment on Fifth Avenue. Her father, an extremely handsome businessman who was divorced from her mother, often came to New York and took Selena to lunch. For those occasions, as well as for her many dates, Selena stole her clothes from Deardorf’s. Selena told Mamie that it was not really stealing, because she sometimes returned the clothes the next day, although Mamie once refused to take back a red satin corset that Selena sneaked back badly stained and slashed. Mamie would never have reported Selena, but she did not want to steal clothes from Deardorf’s. Selena was irritated by this, especially as she disapproved of the way that Mamie dressed. Mamie, by choice as well as by economy, found her clothes in second-hand stores. She wore one of the printed muumuus from her collection of silk aloha shirts and sundresses, cinched around the waist with an alligator belt. If it were a chilly evening, she added one of her elaborately beaded cashmere sweaters from the 1950s, her favorite being an ivory-colored cardigan embroidered with pastel insects. Selena could not understand why Mamie refused to take advantage of the extraordinary opportunity offered by Deardorf’s open racks. When Mamie tried to explain that she liked the way she looked, Selena accused her of being “deeply out of it.”
The Whiteness of Bones Page 6