The Whiteness of Bones

by Susanna Moore

  “You’re in New York now,” she said. “Not some hokey little farm town.”

  Mamie was not happy at work. She was not unhappy, either. She recognized that it was something she must do in order to earn money, so that she could take care of herself. She received a small allowance of two hundred dollars a month from her mother and she knew that she could not stay at Alysse’s too much longer, but she was worried when she read the advertisements for rental apartments in the newspaper. She did not know how she would make her way.

  Although her mother had never written much to Mamie when she was away at boarding school and college, she now began to write to her every week.

  Dear Mamie,

  I was naturally quite surprised by your decision to settle in New York City. You probably don’t remember but when you were a child, you said that you were going to be famous and Claire said she was going to be a nun. We never knew where she got that, although McCully said it was probably Gertrude, because she was so religious.

  I was in Koke‘e yesterday, cleaning out the wild hydrangea, and I was tempted by the possibility of finding some maile on the path near the Wiliwili Camp, so I lay down my tools and let myself be drawn deeper into the canyon. There was a faint humming sound, like a swarm of mosquitoes, but I could not see them. I spotted, at a height, a tendril of maile, and I pressed against the lehua to which it had attached itself, and I saw that the trunk was covered with hundreds of kahuli, those little red-striped shells which attach themselves to trees and begin to sing, scritch, scritch. It was the humming sound I had heard. I forgot all about the maile in my pleasure of listening.

  Charlie King died yesterday and I must drive to Ha‘ena Wednesday when they scatter his ashes on the reef. I never know quite what to wear for those occasions, as you do get wet in the canoe. A raincoat would look disrespectful, I think.

  I have had an offer from a Japanese hotel company to buy some of the beachfront here to build a hotel. They would have to dredge the beach, but we would retain a beach right-of-way. They wanted to build a swimming park where the palm grove stands, with water slides and lagoons. The minute I heard that, I said no. I don’t think he meant to tell me. He was Japan Japanese.

  Give my aloha to Alice.

  Love,

  Mother

  Mamie was reminded again of her mother’s curious literalness—settling in New York City, Gertrude religious. It made her smile.

  Alysse wondered indignantly how her sister could have turned down the Japanese offer to buy the palm grove.

  “How she can live on that lonely island, I’ll never know. Their idea of a good time is weird Mexican-sounding music and dinner at five o’clock. I remember going down the road with your parents to someone’s house for dinner and they actually served coffee with the main course, the only course, as it turned out. Can you imagine? Always a bad sign, coffee with pork chops. Besides,” she went on, “you’d be rich.”

  “Rich?”

  “Loaded.”

  Mamie did not mind the idea of being loaded, as Alysse put it, but like Mary, she did not like the thought of Chiefess Deborah’s grove being bulldozed for a swimming park. She wrote back to her mother that she thought she had made the right decision in declining to sell the land.

  She wondered where it was that Alysse had been so disturbingly served coffee with pork chops, but she didn’t think she should ask. She refrained from asking Alysse many things and let her talk on in her irresponsible, absolutely certain way. It was not that Mamie accepted everything that she heard (she was still amazed at the inaccuracy of the belief that childbirth left your vagina a vast marshland), but she kept quiet and listened. Part of it was what she considered the polite behavior of someone who was a guest, but part of it was also an astonished interest in her aunt. Although Mamie did not yet understand that Alysse’s seeming sophistication was really a kind of crude expediency, she did see that Alysse was a woman who would get her way.

  Perhaps she believed that she might take on some of Alysse’s audacity during those cozy winter nights when Alysse was not engaged and she invited Mamie into the library and opened bottle after bottle of champagne and instructed Mamie in the fundamentals: “never, ever let your maid work for a friend and do not be overly familiar with the help, for example, you should not have introduced yourself the other night to Mrs. de Coppet’s chauffeur; never sit on any toilet seat, anyone’s, I don’t care whose, besides, it’s great for the thighs to pee three inches above the seat; try to use the old form of a word, looking-glass, for example, or frock; do not ever get caught changing the place cards at someone else’s dinner; do under-dress, it makes the other women look older and vulgar; do, do flirt, with everyone, children, husbands, wives, especially wives as they’re the ones who invite you back; try to remember that having a child is nothing better than giving birth to a living insurance policy, you never can tell, it might come in très, très handy; never, never underestimate anyone—you can never be sure just who they are. You paid not the slightest attention to Louise Hathaway at lunch, but you must remember it was Louise who was singlehandedly responsible for bringing the sport of water-skiing to France.”

  She was really the first mature woman ever to pay any attention to Mamie. Her own mother had never really had a conversation with her. How could she help but sit mesmerized at Alysse’s knee, drinking the champagne, taking it all in? After the drudgery of her day at Deardorf’s, Alysse was funny and titillating. Mamie was flattered by Alysse’s interest in her. She didn’t realize, of course, especially when Alysse began every conversation with the warning, “Don’t dare tell anyone this,” that Alysse had just had the same conversation with her masseuse or one of her best girl friends, and one might say, looking back, that it was unfortunate that Mamie was so naïve as to think that Alysse really favored her, but how could she have thought otherwise?

  Although Alysse was not very curious about Mamie’s life, correctly assuming that there was little there to interest her, she did not hesitate to tell Mamie about her own. She had married a Mr. Buddy Klost, an industrialist from Detroit, with whom she lived in New York and Islamorada, Florida. Mr. Klost, an ardent sportfisherman, set the world record for black marlin, caught in the waters off Peru. He worked hard and played hard and fucked hard; a real man, in Alysse’s words.

  “We were married in an old church in Birmingham, Michigan. It was a very famous church with catapulted ceilings, and I wanted awfully to impress his grandmother, who really ran the show and controlled everything, so I rented the bridesmaids. That’s when I first met Dodo. She was seventeen and I said she was my younger sister.”

  “You rented her?” Mamie laughed.

  “It was funny. But it worked. I just called a modeling agency in Chicago and I picked the girls, and the dresses were made to order, divine white organdy from Dior, with little vine baskets of lily of the valley and white French roses and old Mrs. Klost, who wasn’t too happy about Buddy’s choice, me, took off her famous pink pearls during the reception, you haven’t seen them yet, they’re in the safe, and put them around my exquisite white neck and everyone applauded.”

  On other nights when there was too much champagne, Alysse would succumb to a little sentimentality and sniffle into her handkerchief, careful not to smear her mascara, genuinely moved by the beauty and drama of her own life. Buddy had been beheaded in a head-on car crash in Georgia.

  “All they gave me when I flew down to identify the body was a gold sailfish he used to wear on a chain around his neck. I gave it to him for Father’s Day.”

  “Was he Courtney and Brooke’s father?”

  “Oh, no,” Alysse said. “That was my second husband, Harry Shannon, the handsomest Irishman you ever saw. They were the children from his second marriage. Not mine. Oh, you would have adored Harry Shannon.”

  “I liked his daughters. I hoped to see them—”

  “I met him in the South of France at a party. His wife was having an affair with Betsy Tyndal, the Marchioness of Drummle, an
d he shoved his foot between my legs at dinner. I slipped my hand down and somehow managed to remove his shoe. I put it in my sewing bag, we all carried big tapestry bags then because it was a fad to do needlework after dinner, you know, like Queen Victoria or someone, and I wouldn’t give the shoe back to him. When we got up from the table, he, wearing one patent leather shoe like in that nursery rhyme, followed me from room to room, hopping. It was very funny, because he was considered quite a dandy. You’ve heard of him, I’m sure. He was the one who first wore his wristwatch right on his shirtsleeve cuff, so fabulous, and all the young men at the party thought Harry was setting a new fashion by wearing only one shoe. Several of them turned up at dinner the very next night wearing one black evening shoe. He followed me back to the Eden Roc and stayed three weeks.”

  Because most of her stories were about sex, Mamie thought at first that Alysse liked men very much, but as time went by, she began to suspect that Alysse wasn’t really interested in men, and that she was not interested in sex at all. She had no understanding of pleasure, certainly not anything so unselfish as shared pleasure, and even had she been interested, she would have seen her own pleasure as something that might, to her disadvantage, get in her way. This practical view of romance was a new and not altogether likable one to Mamie. She often felt uncomfortable when Alysse laughed about her husbands or boyfriends, as if she, Mamie, should be defending them, and it wasn’t until years later that Mamie discovered by accident that Alysse had left out entirely a certain Mr. Vic “Big Cat” Cattani, her first husband, who drowned mysteriously off Staten Island.

  “Of course, after Jack Fitzjames had that umbrella duel at the Opera with the man sitting in front of us, I couldn’t possibly see him again,” Alysse said in her slight, careless way. She said about another admirer, “He fought in that war in Spain in the thirties, I forget what it was about, and ever after he insisted on wearing this ludicrous Basque beret. I did everything to get him to change, took him to Lock in London, everything, but he was unnaturally attached to that goddamn hat.”

  “Perhaps someone gave it to him,” Mamie said, sympathetic to the man in the beret. She would have liked to have given it to him.

  “I doubt it.” Alysse said, snorting. “His wee-wee was the size of a thimble. I found that out.”

  Mamie went one night in a snowstorm to have drinks with Alysse’s second-best-friend, Bones Washburn. Whether Mrs. Washburn’s nickname came from her celebrated figure or her ability to stop, with a single shot, a charging rhinoceros at a hundred feet, Alysse did not know. She had never thought about it, she told Mamie on their way up to the hotel suite that Bones had kept for twenty years. Bones was what used to be called a dame, and she was smart enough to be proud of it. She was one of those tolerant women with a raucous laugh and heavy gold charm bracelets who could hunt and ski and fish and drink all night with her man. She was a good sport. As Alysse put it to Mamie, “She could ‘fuck, fight or hold the light.’ ” It was not an expression familiar to Mamie.

  Bones had met Alysse and Buddy Klost in the bar of the Norfolk Hotel in Nairobi. She took Alysse in hand after that first drunken night in Africa, and showed her how to dress and how to order food and hire servants, and Alysse always credited Bones with enabling her to hold on to the restless Buddy. Alysse, fresh from an illegal divorce in Juarez, thought she could never do better than beef Stroganoff and gladiolas. Her idea of shopping was an afternoon at Gump’s. Bones changed all of that, and if Alysse never acquired Bones’s natural talents, she knew better, after Bones, than to wear white python cowboy boots or to pass Vienna sausages as hors d’oeuvres.

  Bones liked Mamie so much that she grabbed her by the hand, right in the middle of cocktails, and pulled her into a closet and filled her arms with a big pile of clothes that she insisted Mamie take home with her—Bones’s driver, Mohammed, an Arab boy she had adopted, would take the clothes for her. Without wanting to appear rude by looking through the clothes, Mamie did manage to spot a leopard-skin cape and a pair of green suede lederhosen. Mamie also noticed a small needlepoint sign hanging from Bones’s bedroom doorknob that read PAS CE SOIR CHERI.

  “Mamie asked me on the way up how you got your name,” Alysse said to Bones. She was drinking vodka and cranberry juice. “It’s very good for your female parts,” she had said confidentially to Mamie.

  Bones was biting chocolates from a box sent to her weekly from Zurich. She did not offer any to Mamie or Alysse. She licked her fingers, then wiped them on her gabardine trousers. Her face was dry and wizened from too much sun and too much drink.

  “It’s short for boners.” She searched for a caramel, poking in the lace-lined box with a big, handsome finger. “I was good at boners,” she said, turning over a piece of chocolate to look at the bottom.

  “You sound like my friend Gertrude,” Mamie said, laughing.

  “You know,” Bones said, “rich men are really shits about money. Turds. They have to be, I suppose, or women would never stay with them. Olympia Lecci had to pawn her watch every time she needed an airplane ticket to visit Senator Guslander, you’d have thought he’d have sent her the goddamn ticket himself, and Princess Francini had to borrow money from Fifi Lewis just to get home, the last time she had a fight with the Prince. Of course, he’s always despised her. He’s in love with his sister. Me, I always believed in cash and boners. It works every time.” She tossed the box of chocolates onto a sofa. “Did you ever have a walk-out with Guslander?” she asked Alysse.

  A newcomer to the world of the rich might be forgiven for thinking that Bones Washburn led a life of irresponsibility and pleasure. Bones had complied uncomplainingly with the selfish whims of every lover and husband. She had paid with every stupefying dinner party; every aggrieved and vicious stepchild; every arduous performance of fellatio (tens of thousands of them); every holiday spent killing scared, hot, plains animals; every perjury; every bad beating.

  She did not complain because she understood that those were the terms of her arrangement. The women who were jealous of her, and said viperish things about her, did not have any idea of the discipline required by Bones’s line of work. They would have changed places with her greedily. It is hard to know if Bones would have changed places with them. She did marry five times, each husband richer and meaner than the last, as she made her way through the hard world. It would be interesting to know, in the end, if she thought that it was worth it. Bones had heart, unlike Alysse, so it is possible that she might have thought that it was not.

  Mamie tried to make her aunt talk about Mary and McCully. Alysse was not particularly interested in anything that did not concern herself. Naturally, this rather personal historical view excluded her sister. She never spoke of her and few of her friends even knew that she had a sister.

  Mamie had noticed about Alysse and her women friends that they did not really seem to have come from anywhere. Nothing from the past adhered to them. There were no regional accents or phrases, no references to bayou or mesa. There were no stories told about family or even childhood. Mamie longed for some clue from them, some slip of the tongue that would allow her to identify and place them; some memory, accidentally released, that would give them individuality. It was not that Alysse did not have an early life, it was that it didn’t matter. Alysse might be from Maine or New Mexico; it was impossible to know.

  Alysse had been fond of McCully, although she described him as “the dull farmer.” When Mamie said to her, without taking offense, that McCully had been neither, Alysse said, “Dear child, he listened to bagpipe music. He wore funny shoes. And his idea of a good time was to hike up that stream or river, whatever it was, in those mountains. I thought I was going to die, really die.”

  “You insisted on filling the thermoses with champagne and one of them exploded.”

  “McCully was quite cross.”

  “No, he wasn’t,” Mamie said.

  “I suppose you could say that I never look back. Is that so terrible? When that sexual hysteric Miss H
enrietta adopted Mary and me, I was as comfortable in that big, gloomy mansion as if I’d been born there. And when she died suddenly and all the money went to those loathsome Christian Scientists, I was here, right here in New York City, in four days. I can’t imagine living any other way. Your mother was the opposite. I don’t think she looked either forward or back—she lived in some incredibly boring present. She never made plans. She had no ambition. Rien.” Alysse shook her head in disgust. It was the worst thing she could say about anyone.

  “I realized the other day that I have never seen her naked,” Mamie said.

  “No, you wouldn’t have, not with the scars.”

  “Scars?”

  “Didn’t you know?” Alysse asked dramatically. She wiggled into a more comfortable position on the sofa and poured champagne into their already full glasses. She was excited by the discovery that Mamie did not know about the scars. “Didn’t you wonder why she never went swimming?”

  “All the time.”

  “When we were little, before we were sent to Henrietta, your mother dressed up one Halloween as a bride. She wore a white tablecloth as a veil and she caught on fire.”

  “Caught on fire?”

  “She had a jack-o’-lantern with a candle inside of it. They didn’t have those wonderful plastic ones in those days. And her costume, the bridal veil, caught on fire. She had terrible, terrible burns all down her back and because we were poor and there weren’t any particularly brilliant plastic surgeons in Boxcar, Oklahoma, she had bad, bad scars. She was the girl at the Senior Prom in high neck and long sleeves. Pale green. Not her best color.”

  “What was her best color?”

  Alysse looked up from the House and Garden she had restlessly opened while she told Mamie about the time her sister went up in flames. Alysse could never be quite sure about Mamie, and because Mamie was quicker than her aunt, she was often able to disguise her true feelings from Alysse. Alysse, with that characteristic belittling of hers that reduced everybody and everything to the same low level, said many things during those few months Mamie lived with her that she would never otherwise have admitted had she known how much the girl would remember.