Lion House,The

by Marjorie Lee

"Hey, watch it." She smiled. "You're at Wingo. At Wingo Freud is God."

  Gretchen, the Fives teacher, walked over then and changed the subject. "Petey's doing beautifully," she told Frannie. "Made the Fall adjustment like an eight-year-old. You should have seen him at Circle Time the other morning. Told everybody about his summer in Bermuda." She turned to me. "Frannie has the most incredible kids," she said. "I had Stu and Blair several years ago before they switched to Llewellyn. They're all terrific. Don't quite know how she does it...!"

  "I wanted them," Frannie murmured with a simplicity which barely hid the reciprocal barb.

  Gretchen had no children of her own; nor, for many reasons (of which Brad was foremost) did I.

  I was to meet the Brownes en masse the following Friday evening. Frannie called the night after the playground episode and though Brad had a salesmen's meeting to attend on Friday evening he said he'd duck it. His status at Maclntyre Printing, Inc. was wobbly as it was, what with hungover mornings and midnoon homecomings, and I suggested we make it for another time. But Brad insisted.

  "Here we go again," I said in the car on our way over. "Henry Bradford: Boy Lochinvar."

  "You're out of your mind," he said with a smile. "What is she? A little kid with big glasses and bitten nails."

  Frannie met us at the door wearing khaki shorts, a tattersall shirt, and the same torn moccasins. Marc stood behind her, and I felt immediately that we would be friends. There was a clean niceness about him. His face was long and thin with a receding hairline on either side of a still stubborn forelock that made it seem even longer. His nose sort of swooped, veering off-center a little, giving him the look of a Modigliani. The rest of him, though, was decidedly masculine: his arms and his legs in their gray flannel shorts were tanned and muscular and covered with a dense blond down. (It's funny how a woman's limbs are impossible with hair, but a man's look like hell without it.) I saw Brad give him an envious once-over. In spite of a face that had launched a thousand female ships, Brad was built frailly enough to look better clothed than not.

  "... and this is Marc," Frannie was saying with a pride I couldn't help but notice. At which point the brood came sailing down the stairs. Petey, I knew. Stu was a larger version, handsomer, less elfin, with, beneath the social surface, a hint of dark moods not unlike Frannie's. Blair, a girl—though I shouldn't have guessed by the name—was charming: half-colt, half-Nereid, she reminded me of meadows and translucent seashells.

  At the start of things I saw in Frannie the same closed shyness I'd seen during the first moments of our meeting at the Wingo dinner. But here, on home ground, it took no more than one gin and soda to open her up. When that happened she turned on a record player that had speakers in every room of the house, including the downstairs John.

  The Brownes had two sets of recordings: His and Hers, as Frannie put it. His was long-hair: symphonies, concertos, chamber music, and a deafening supply of what Frannie irreverently called Wopera. Hers consisted of the songs of the Thirties, rendered by Ella Fitzgerald, Lee Wiley, Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughan, and a few others: Dorothy Carliss, for instance, who, to me, sounded too refined to live; and somebody else I'd never heard of named Mabel Mercer, who seemed to be going through the agonizing process of losing her heart, soul, and voice all at the same time.

  When Frannie began Mabel's Little Girl Blue for the third round, Marc put his foot down.

  "I've got my own troubles," he said. "Let her go tell it to her analyst."

  "She probably has!" Frannie countered with a loyalty one might have displayed in defense of a dearly beloved relative.

  Then, having got through half of her second gin and soda, she folded, Turk-sit, on the floor.

  "You're so materialistic!" she said to Marc, knitting her brows in a critical frown. "Or maybe I mean—representational. Just because she can't sing—you think she can't sing! You know what I mean?"

  Nobody seemed to, quite.

  In any case, we did listen to it all over again: Old girl, you're through. You might as well surrender. Your hopes are getting slender. Why won't somebody send a tender Blue Boy to cheer up Little Girl Blue...? On which last phrase Mabel gave up the ghost and wept.

  "Now, doesn't that just do something to you?" Frannie insisted.

  "Yes," Marc answered. "It depresses me!"

  I found it a bit depressing myself. After twenty-three years in a marital harem, having now reached the questionably mellowed age of forty-six, I was in no condition to be reminded of old girls who were through.

  "You got a sick-identification," Marc told Frannie. "Anybody suffers, you have to get right in there and suffer along with them!"

  "How come all women?" Brad cut in.

  "What?"

  "How come all female vocalists; no males."

  She thought a minute. Then, with her own brand of earnest patness: "A person always favors celebrities of the same sex; on the deepest level, that is. Residual education-need: return to the original source: girl babies learn how to become women through their mothers; boy babies how to become men through their fathers."

  "Where'd you get all that?" he asked. "You been head-shrunk?"

  "Uh-uh," she answered, rattling her glass to get more coldness off the ice cubes. "Not me. It's just an armchair hobby of mine, that's all. The idea of actually lying down on an honest-to-God couch turns my blood off. If I go to a party and find there's an analyst there I make up a headache and leave. I've got this feeling I'm running wild in a pasture and the whole damned bunch of them are after me with their butterfly nets waving..." She shuddered.

  "Poor Butterfly..." Marc chanted in the Puccini manner. "She has flit from the Voo... doos..."

  Which must have reminded Frannie of the threat of His collection; so to stave him off she jumped in with five different versions of I Get a Kick Out of You. "I'm studying it," she said. "You know—like some people spend their lives interpreting Hamlet? Take Ella: she does it sort of masochistically. But with Ethel Merman it's a whole other thing: she does it like she fully intends to kick him right the hell back! My Funny Valentine—that's another one. Mary Martin worships the guy; but Mabel's full of pity. You get the feeling she may be singing it to Toulouse-Lautrec..."

  "You amaze me," Brad said.

  "Do I really?" she asked, crinkling her nose in utter disbelief. "Do I really?"

  It must have been nearly midnight when the others came: Jeri and Len Perloff, and Marian and Jeff Deitz. Drop-ins from Meade's Manor to Llewellyn were, in spite of distance, nothing in the Browne circle. I did wonder, though, why, since most of their friends lived in Meade's Manor, the Brownes had chosen a house so far away. Later I decided that this was due to Frannie's need to keep at arm's length from anything which might serve to link her with a circumscribed group of any kind. Freedom from molds was one of her favorite phrases,

  Marc, born in Boston, had come to New York when he was two and had spent the better part of his premarital leisure on the Number One Course of Westchester's Mill Pond Country Club. His affiliation had lasted until Frannie appeared on the scene, presenting in rather unminced terms her views on snobs and social segregation. This, added to his own inchoate rebellion against a rock-solid background, had led to the break.

  * * *

  The Perloffs were, hereditarily, Old Meade's Manor. Len was, anyway. Jeri had trekked the social mile from Caulfield. You know how some people say: I don't care about money per se, I just care about what it can do? Well, I think that's how Jeri felt about Meade's Manor. Unlike a good many other residents, she didn't need it for spiritual sustenance: she just liked having it there in case. Pragmatic and purposeful beneath her carefree exterior, she played both sides of all teams. At the moment she was doubling between hausfrau-and-mothering and account-executing for one of the large advertising agencies in the city. Never one to slip up on a chance for personal development, she had fast become, through the influence of colorful colleagues, a collector of lithographs, a reader of Partisan Review and Peanuts, a bosom pa
l of four stage designers and two Zen-Buddhist painters, a near-authority on progressive jazz, a student of the recorder, and patroness (emotionally) of an Irish-American bullfighter.

  A slave to fashion fads, she could be glimpsed during any sunny lunch-hour in town, swinging down Madison Avenue in a costume right out of a circus poster by Dali. She was a beanpole redhead, and a short blue sheath over a pea-green leotard was apt to garner attention. It was said by Jeri herself that on attending an exhibit of avant-garde sculptures by craftsmen well known throughout the world two young male spectators had circled her silently and then, turning to each other, had whispered simultaneously: "Whose is that?"

  There was less to be said of Len. Len was a Very Sweet Guy. He had to be.

  The Deitzes were sprung of other seeds. They had a great deal in common and most of it was trouble. Marian was Dissatisfied. Marian was Dissatisfied with Everything. Particularly, Marian was Dissatisfied with Jeff's income. Three top-flight analysts had attempted to point out the presence of the Bluebird in her own back yard. Still, Marian saw nothing but crows.

  Jeff was, I felt at first meeting, the kind of man who might well be earning thirty thousand a year. Instead he was working for an uncle in the construction business at far less than he deserved.

  "But why?" I wanted to know; and Frannie said, "Remember Willy Loman? 'You have to be well liked'? Well, Jeff isn't."

  "I like him," I told her.

  "Wait," she said. "You won't. He won't let you."

  And she was right. Jeff was a Sneerer: when his car broke down and you offered to lend him yours he called you a sucker; when he heard you'd just spent eighteen dollars on theatre tickets he told you the show was lousy; he got his off-brand Scotch at a special discount and the Highland Nectar you poured and handed him wasn't worth the money; and when you walked into a party dressed to the teeth and ripe for gaiety he asked you why you looked so tired. He was handsome; he spoke well; he knew a lot. But deep down inside of him, installed by long-forgotten devils of the past, there was a small, insistent mouthpiece that kept on yah-yah-yahing.

  I was far more fascinated by the relationships between Frannie and the female halves of both these duos. With Jeri there was an easy friendship going. "How could I fail to love her?" Frannie asked. "She's the only girl alive who's as full of bull as I am. She knows it; I know it. We're safe."

  It was true. At the onset of each wild adventure, career-wise or domestic, Jeri would telephone Frannie for the borrowing of a non-judgmental ear. And she'd get it. With, to all external appearances at least, an ego the size of Texas, Jeri bowed to no one but Frannie—for the simple reason that Frannie expected her to bow not at all.

  The relationship with Marian was harder to figure. Mangy-cruel as two pack rats, people were constantly wondering why either of them bothered to bother. But here too the basis of union was a kind of acceptance. Four years of on-and-off couch-hopping had given Marian, if little else, a truth-bent psyche. And Frannie, though a non-pro, was well up to meeting the challenge.

  Marian, like Frannie, had a stunning young mother who was still running neck-and-neck with the Borgias and Medicis for the Heart of Gold Award.

  Their friendship, they both agreed openly, was merely a matter of playing Bad Mother roles for each other.

  "You sound just like mine," Frannie would tell her at the end of some devastating exchange. "Your obsession with money cripples your emotional eye to the point of total blindness."

  "And you," Marian would retort, "are the image of mine. You both walk with your feet turned out like a couple of God damned ducks!"

  "How can you stand it?" I once asked Frannie, being made of less durable stuff myself.

  "Therapy," she explained, diving into a flagrant mixture of metaphors. "It's constructive to concentrate your venom on one particular dart-board. Shooting all your hostile eggs into one basket prevents you from beating on the rest of humanity. At the same time, through Acting Out, you mitigate the traumas of your poisonous beginnings... And anyway, Jo," she added with a slightly condescending smile, "hate isn't the worst thing in the world, you know. Hate's even healthy—when it's honest."

  That evening (possibly because Brad and I were new members in their midst) things went off rather smoothly. Len, at the time struggling against the might of Panda and Hallmark with sophisticated greeting cards, got into a discussion with Jeff on the national economy. Marc, with painstaking patience, was attempting to enlighten Brad on the complexities of forensic psychiatry. And the rest of us spent a good while hashing over the merits of Wingo's nursery school for Marian's four-year-old.

  "It's worth every nickel," Jeri encouraged. "Dickie'll never get anywhere else the kind of thing he'll get at Wingo."

  "Oh, I don't know," Marian said. "Next year he can go to kindergarten, and the suburban public schools are getting more progressive all the time. Frannie told me herself—they make fudge at Llewellyn."

  "Yeah," Frannie sighed. "They make fudge. But what good is it? They use a recipe!"

  At about two a.m. Frannie, somehow having dropped ashes into her glass, left the room to get a clean one. Then, quite suddenly, Brad was missing.

  Walking casually into the kitchen, I found him being absolutely true to the old ice cube alibi. There he was, struggling with a trayful between his hands. His struggle with the tray between his hands, however, was more likely necessitated by the presence of Frannie—between his arms.

  "You were great," I said to him in the car on the way home. "Just great."

  "What?"

  "I'm tired," I said. "That's what. I'm tired of playing towel-girl to a half-baked Casanova; tired of wondering who'll be next on that sexy little roster of yours; tired of digging you up out of all the damned kitchens of all the damned wives of all the damned world. What do you suppose she thinks of you? Of both of us? I like them. I want them to like us. But can they? Will they have a chance to?"

  "I was helping Marc," he answered blandly. "The drinks were getting warm."

  "You mean you were."

  He smiled. "You floor me, Jo," he said softly. "You positively floor me. I told you. She's nothing but a little kid with big glasses and bitten nails."

  CHAPTER THREE

  Though not especially given to little kids with big glasses and bitten nails (except in their correct chronological age-group) I found as the weeks went by that I was growing closer and closer to Frannie.

  Remembering now the initial flush of our friendship I confess to a feeling of ambivalence: (what, for instance, of the kitchen scene?) Yet, there must always be some small smudge of doubt at the onset of any new experience; one moment at least when there is question and the desire to withdraw. Still, the simple truth is: I wanted her close. In all my years of moving from city to city for Brad's ever-changing jobs I had had to forfeit the possibility of lasting relationships. Never before had I been given the chance to lapse warmly and securely into the natural nest of female consortion.

  Now: here was Frannie, ready, willing, and able to fill the void. And in spite of the huge black frames behind which she seemed to hide and her hands which were definitely those of a self-gnawed little girl there was an adult side to her that was strong and stimulating.

  I began to see how it was possible for a spiritual oak of a girl like Jeri Perloff to bend before Frannie's subtlest zephyr; and also why one like Marian Deitz fought for her individuality against it. I soon found myself listening over and over to Frannie's records, trying my best to sound intelligent in my analysis of lyrics and deliveries which until now had seemed nothing but inane. And I read the books she told me to read because they were, she said, essential. Essential for what I didn't quite see, but the urgency with which she presented them was enough to swing me into line.

  Her literary taste, along with her choice of music, was limited to the contemporary: it ruled out the past completely, almost compulsively, and stopped just short of the avant-garde. At times it seemed that if it weren't for life-savers like Carson McCullers
, Truman Capote, and J.D. Salinger she might have perished of cultural malnutrition altogether. But then—who was I to criticize? Aside from my concern over Wingo's young enrollees, a smallish interest in Leftist politics, and the constant re-evaluations I was called upon to make in order to stay married to Brad, I hadn't had a provocative thought since college.

  Coming across an old faculty report on her which had been stuck into a book I borrowed, I was not surprised to read: "Frannie rarely comes to class prepared with the assigned material. Instead she makes up her own facts as she goes along. I would not know how to grade her if we did use the grade system here; but she has been most interesting to the group and to myself."

  When, on returning the book, I handed her the report and kidded her about it, she smiled. "That was Hadley," she said. "Taught a course called Today's Classics. She was terrific. Five-feet-eleven, can you imagine? I mean without heels."

  "Just what," I asked, "did her height have to do with her competence at teaching?"

  "Oh, nothing, I guess." She sighed, falling suddenly into a meditative depression. "I wish I were tall," she mused. "I wish I were so tall I could watch a parade over the heads of everyone else in the world..."

  "Well," I consoled, "when you get right down to it, how many parades does a person have to watch in this country?"

  "Oh, Jo!" She grimaced. "You know what I mean!" And of course I did—that time; but there were others when I didn't have a glimmer.

  * * *

  One Saturday afternoon I drove back from a shopping trip in town to the little carriage house Brad and I rented and found her convertible in the driveway. It gave me a great lift to see it there. I honked a tattoo on my horn so she'd know I'd arrived and then flew in, grinning from ear to ear. She was lying on our second-hand sofa, head on one of its threadbare arms. Beside her on the coffee table there was an almost empty gin and soda and an ashtray spilling with butts.

  "You been here long?" I asked.

  "Two hours or so." She swung her jeaned legs down and stood up to stretch.