by Edmund White
To: Giuseppe Gullo
ALSO BY EDMUND WHITE
Forgetting Elena: A Novel
The Joy of Gay Sex (coauthored)
Nocturnes for the King of Naples: A Novel
States of Desire: Travels in Gay America
A Boy’s Own Story: A Novel
Caracole: A Novel
The Darker Proof: Stories from a Crisis
The Beautiful Room Is Empty
Genet: A Biography
The Burning Library: Essays
Our Paris: Sketches from Memory
Skinned Alive: Stories
The Farewell Symphony: A Novel
Marcel Proust: A Life
The Married Man: A Novel
The Flâneur: A Stroll Through the Paradoxes of Paris
Fanny: A Fiction
Arts and Letters: Essays
My Lives: A Memoir
Chaos: A Novella and Stories
Hotel de Dream: A New York Novel
Rimbaud: The Double Life of a Rebel
City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and ’70s
Sacred Monsters: New Essays on Literature and Art
Jack Holmes & His Friend: A Novel
Inside a Pearl: My Years in Paris
Our Young Man: A Novel
The Unpunished Vice: A Life of Reading
CONTENTS
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Acknowledgments
A Note on the Author
What had men ever done, to deserve so much beauty and grace?
—Elif Batuman, The Idiot
Paul Valéry said to André Breton that he could never compose fiction because he was incapable of writing the Balzacian sentence “The marquise went out at five o’clock.”
CHAPTER 1
It all changed in the 1950s when our mother, Margie Ann, died and Daddy married a lady nine months later and brought her back to the little house on Elm Street (Daddy called them “e’lums”) in Ranger, Texas. Ranger in those days was a ghost town; the wells had run dry twenty years earlier. Just a dirty old rag stretched across the entrance to the town saying, RANGER—OIL CAPITAL OF AMERICA, and we really had been an oil capital for twelve years. Miss Bobbie Jean, Daddy’s fancy lady, declared she was no ghost, and she wasn’t going to sit in a broken-down ranch house with swamp coolers instead of ceiling fans.
She was a Texas gal herself, from dusty Denton, where her father had been a math professor and written Mental Arithmetic and three nigra joke books. He was the most boring man in the whole world, she said, and he spit chewing tobacco into a spittoon and told endless jokes about colored folks. When someone asked why he was a professor, not a farmer like his brother, he said he wanted a job out of the sun. That was supposed to be funny. His brother, the farmer, was the nice one and he had typed up his life story, “I Sure Am Happy.”
No one much liked the math professor. He’d collar a guy while rocking out on the open-air porch of Brown’s Hotel in Mineral Wells, Texas, where he was taking the cure, and chaw and spit and pause. “Did you ever hear the one about—” And off he’d go. I guess he was smart. He used to tell us he was smart.
Boring. He was the most boring man in the world, with his lean face, his brown teeth, and his sun-creased neck. If an ant had crawled across that neck he would’ve broke his leg. He could tell you how to get up to one-hundred-digit numbers and all in your head. Boring. He was so proud of his mental arithmetic skills. All the men back then wore suits and ties and hats. His suit was brown and shiny and too big for him (double-breasted when he was a single-breasted man), and his tie loud and floral. His porkpie always tipped way back like he was younger than he looked, maybe a reporter in a 1930s talking picture.
Now, Bobbie Jean, who’d had a quickie Reno divorce from her lying, no-count (but handsome by all the pics) first husband, had done a little snooping around and found out that Daddy had millions in oil money socked away in Farmers–First National Bank in Stephenville, Texas, though we lived in that ranch house with the peeling paint and the swamp coolers, a black-and-white television with a screen no bigger than a third-class porthole and strips of colored plastic across it, green where the grass would be at the bottom, blue at the top where the sky might be, pink in the middle for the faces.
Well, Miss Bobbie Jean made Daddy throw out that old TV on the street and the swamp coolers quickly followed. She had big ceiling fans brought in, which would suck air through the windows if you left them open just a slit. A giant color Motorola was installed, a whole family entertainment center, and Daddy was sick when he saw his electric bill quadruple. Before you knew it she’d got herself a candy-colored Cadillac convertible and she’d traded in Daddy’s rusty old Packard, which we called Bouncer, for a black Cadillac sedan that rode as smooth as a hearse and had cigarette lighters in each of the four door ashtrays, as if the corpses needed a light; the lighters were lit up from underneath so you’d never mistake where they were in the dark and they glowed with red coils when you pushed them down and held them up to your cigarette tip.
My sister and I were twins. Our mother had named us out of a movie fan magazine, Yvonne and Yvette, but she was so ignorant she said our names “Why-Von” and “Why-Vet.” By the time we both knew better we liked them and wouldn’t say them proper. We were fourteen and real Texas beauties with our blonde hair, tiny ears, long legs, and high breasts, though our real mother made us cover them up with extra-large blouses. That was 1952 and we even wore girdles to church, though we were skinny little things and our hips were no bigger than a boy’s. Must have been hard to find girdles that narrow, but Mommy special-ordered them through Bacon’s Dry Goods Store.
All that changed under Bobbie Jean. She made us say our names in the proper French way and corrected our old relatives who mispronounced them—“I’m sorry,” Bobbie Jean said, “but we’re not that country.” She bought us tight sky-blue sweaters and threw away our girdles. She drove us to Dallas (not a long ride) and outfitted us at Neiman-Marcus in the latest grown-up Paris styles, but we felt like freaks in our New Look Diors with the cinched-in waists and long wide skirts, prancing around Ranger, when all the other girls in high school were wearing puffy skirts with cute poodle decals or tartan kilts fastened with giant safety pins. We had on high heels while they were bobby-soxers. The girls were so hypocritical—they’d finger our thin wools and heavy medieval leather belts and say, “My word, ain’t you all spit and polish?”
As if our Diors weren’t bad enough, Daddy put us through another scandal. He’d been shacking up for years with this pretty but pudgy fake blonde matron from Merkel, Texas. Once a week she’d drive her powder-blue Cadillac into town, pass the Piggly Wiggly, and park on one side of the road, and Daddy would drive his new hearse and park it on the other side. Exactly at high noon. Everyone saw them but nobody cared.
Well, Bobbie Jean minded and moved in on them like a farmer bagging wasps. And they never tried another rendezvous after ten whole years of sin. Bobbie Jean shot ten bullets into the tin ceiling of their room with her little Miss Derringer pistol, silver and with her initials on it. I did not say “tin,” I said “tin.” They weren’t skinny folks neither
and they pulled their sheets up over their robust bodies like Roman gods in a fountain. They were terrified! Bobbie Jean didn’t say a word, just walked away, blew across the working end of her pistol, and gave a big tip to the astonished old desk clerk. Bobbie Jean sent that lady packing for good back to Merkel.
I took an interest in all this, of course, but sister Why-Vet was totally indifferent. She was in her own world a million miles away. She was a bookworm, even though I told her that “books are only good for pressing to our breasts and propping them up.” She didn’t like that kind of talk. She would wrinkle up her nose like the Christian girls at school wearing their “purity rings” did when they heard nasty words. Or she’d just look away, as if a shadow on a wall or sunlight on a silo was more interesting than the future and reputation of our whole entire family. She was strange that way, our Why-Vet. We were identical in body alone, down to the least little mole, like a bug squashed on a bleached linen sheet, on our right sides, but in spirit—Lord! In spirit we were in opposite land. At least until we got older.
We had our bunk beds, everything pink and tidy as a virgin’s undies, and by the glow of our cute little hamster night-light, we’d talk about … oh, life and love, and I’d bring up boys but she never did. I thought she might like girls, but she never looked at the naked girls in gym class and seemed unaware of everyone’s breast size, though bet your bottom peso most girls that age are aware, painfully aware, are they ever!
I liked to read women’s magazines and stuff, especially about European nobility and Paris fashion, but Why-Vet brought home so many heavy books from the Andrew Carnegie Public Library that the librarians got mad at her until they realized she was helping their circulation numbers, which they could point to down at City Hall, the one where they found a hundred-year-old toad still alive buried between the bricks. Why-Vet would make herself a little picnic lunch and go out to the edge of town under an old creaky windmill, with its rudder turning as the wind shifted, the blades rattling as they turned. She’d find a nice cool mott of wild oak. She’d sit on the ground there for hours in her Dior and read and read. Heavy books, too! All of Shakespeare and Homer. Lots of Pascal.
We had an aunt Bunn who lived in Bluff Dale, Texas, who’d taught elocution in high school and she coached Why-Vet on how to lose her East Texas twang. “You do not say ‘hay-uh’ but ‘hair,’ in one syllable, and it’s not ‘may-um’ but ‘ma’am.’ ” Aunt Bunn lived in an itty-bitty house her daddy had built, with no heat but a single Franklin stove. She had a big white chenille bedspread on a rosewood double bed and lots of little pillars she’d knitted covers for, cute little kittens and rabbits. Yvette soon sounded like a no-gut Yankee, as bland as Quaker Oats. She had a pretty enough voice. She was a pretty girl, no denying that, but her fire’d been dialed down to a pilot light. Yvette was so smart she made the debate team in our little high school. Our school motto was just three musical notes: “B sharp, B natural, but never B flat.” Isn’t that cute? Anyway, Yvette was immediately made the captain of the debate team and she won every match until she was best in state. My, Daddy was proud; he was a strangely competitive man. Yvette didn’t even like debating, having to argue pro and con free trade, because she said Plato dismissed those shenanigans as mere sophistry and an orator should argue only what he or she knew to be true.
Bobbie Jean quarreled deep into the night with Daddy. She wanted to move us all into Dallas. She said we could come to Ranger for weekends, it was that close, but she was surprised Daddy wanted his girls growing up in a played-out ghost town with barely five thousand inhabitants and not one suitable suitor. “Your girls are millionaires and sm-a-art! My, are they smart! You’d stunt their fine minds here and get them hitched to bucktoothed farmers in coveralls and cow shit on their boots, pardon my French. These girls deserve some nice, polite, well-spoken gentlemen. Yvonne should have a debut and Yvette should go to a top-notch place of learning like UT at Austin, she’s that bright. Boy, is she bright. You know how proud you were when Yvette took All State. You remember how you wanted her to get a varsity letter, how you said brain was better than brawn? They’re my girls, too, now, and I’d feel I’d let them down if they didn’t have golden opportunities—golden! Platinum!”
Daddy said, “They’re sweet little things but in Dallas they might get uppity. I’ve seen them spoiled little Dallas gals.”
“You have not,” Bobbie Jean exclaimed. “You don’t know anything about Dallas! You couldn’t even find Neiman-Marcus or the Adolphus Hotel.” And then Bobbie Jean went off into a long complaint about how the head waiter at the Baker Hotel refused to sell her a drink at the bar after a long day of shopping. “He said, ‘I’m sorry, ma’am, no single women here at my bar.’ Then he had the nerve to say, ‘We gotta present a moral image to the world,’ as if I was a common streetwalker looking for business.”
She rumbled on and on until Daddy got impatient and brought her back to the issue at hand (clever strategy on her part!).
Bobbie Jean was very clever. She invited Daddy’s mother along, a dowdy farm woman with a huge mono-bosom and swollen legs, a woman who read out every street sign as we passed it on the highway. If she approved of someone she called her “precious.” If she disapproved she said, “Bless her heart,” as in, “She eats a box of chocolates a day all by herself, bless her heart.” She scarcely ever censored a thought, no matter how dull, inconsequential, or childish. She’d make such dopey remarks that the real estate agent asked in an aside, “Has she been like this for a long time?” with a look of concern that made Daddy mad.
We headed right for Turtle Creek and looked at houses in the $250,000 category—Renaissance palaces and adobe haciendas and an update of Versailles (which the salesman pronounced “Ver-sales”). He wasn’t much—smelled of Brylcreem and wore a wristwatch, which Daddy thought was sissy, and had a mustache, a sure sign of a weakling or criminal, Daddy said.
We looked at a mansion with a circular portico. “Dang, it’s nice if you want to live in the White House,” Daddy said, and I could tell he was impressed but didn’t want to show it. For the White House even his mother got out of the Cadillac and after she stumbled on her thick legs sealed in supportive hose through the Great Hall—or was it the Lincoln Bedroom—she said, “It’s precious, well, I declare.” When Daddy whispered, “How much is this national treasure?” the salesman (who was smoking a cigarette, which Daddy also thought was sissy) whispered something to him, and Grandma held her hands over her ears, since ladies weren’t supposed to know about money. Money was “common.”
We were shown the four bedrooms, the five bathrooms, the dining room, all carved mahogany and gilt eagles, the basement rec room that extended the length of the property. Namaw, as we called Daddy’s mother, couldn’t manage the stairs but an elevator was found for her. If she wasn’t sure if something was precious she’d describe it uneasily as “different.” The elevator was “sure different.” She had a rural fear of sounding overly impressed by something urban, which she laid to rest by calling it dismissively “different,” thereby acknowledging both the strangeness and the banality of anything new.
When Bobbie Jean said the price sounded reasonable, Daddy cursed her with a disgusting word that begins with b and ends with h and Namaw said, “Why, P.M.,”—Daddy’s name was Peter Martin Crawford—“no reason to talk ugly about such a precious house.” She laughed her mirthless country laugh. “I’m going to have to wash your mouth out with soap, P.M.” He flushed dark with rage.
They went on to look at the Alhambra, Sanssouci, the Palazzo Vecchio, and who knows what else—every bathroom, every double oven and warming tray, every winter garden. Ver-sales was being sold fully furnished. The owner had bought Louis the Something chairs and had them copied one and a half times larger, then he’d thrown away the originals. We were shown how the fireplace in the “salon” was insulated behind glass and was guaranteed not to give off heat and could be lit even in 103-degree weather. Poor Daddy, he must have had considerable in th
e bank but the idea of squandering so much on the house—why, who knew where it would all end? He was worn out with all the fancy historical labels (we even saw a moat and a portcullis and Daddy had to ask what they were); finally he said, “Haven’t you got anything up-to-date?”
Namaw had to use the ladies’ room but Daddy refused. He wanted to get this all over with, like it was a tooth extraction, and Namaw squealed, “Why, P.M., you’d have me relieve myself in my shoe,” but in the end she got to use the toilet in one of the houses we were inspecting.
Yvette was practically comatose from all this house-viewing and when asked her opinion, she mumbled, “Any sort of shelter will do, won’t it? Most of humanity is exposed to the elements, which obviously isn’t fair.” Everyone looked stunned by this bleak reminder of how vain and empty were these disputes of Ver-sales versus the Alhambra, this discontent with just four bedrooms and two glassed-in fireplaces roaring away in August. I couldn’t help but think of the Fisherman’s Wife and how she lost everything because she wanted to be the equal of God—until the magic flounder got fed up and returned her to her hovel. Yvette would’ve been happier in our Ranger, Texas, hovel with the three chickens out back, once including her favorite, Biddy Scratch, and the Concord grape arbor over the pathway, the grapes often sizzling in the heat into cracked miniatures of themselves, and the grasshoppers we’d catch. They’d wriggle dry as sticks in our closed fists before we released them. We’d carpeted the garage and we’d sit there in green-and-white metal chairs and sip iced sweet tea. When our real mother killed Biddy Scratch because cousin Brewster was coming to Sunday dinner, Yvette cried for days, especially because chopping Biddy’s head off was a bloody mess and Biddy ran, headless, all over the yard, scaring the bejesus out of us all. If a poor old Negro woman would come to the door with a tin pail asking for food or beer, our real mother would fill her pail with good vittles but send her to work mopping the kitchen linoleum or dusting the living room, where we never went; it was like a museum or a funeral parlor family grief room with its horsehair couch, yellowing lace antimacassars, big freestanding radio with the cloth face over the speaker, and the carpet with faded roses.