Borrowed Finery: A Memoir

by Paula Fox

  I followed him across the corridor to another room. He threw himself down on one of the twin beds, still smiling. “Well, dear little one. What shall we play?” he said, and promptly closed his eyes and fell asleep. Even if it had not been his purpose, he had rescued me from two incomprehensible people. I looked over at his pretty sleeping face in the other bed, and I was overcome with an emotion I had no word for—a kind of love for that stranger.

  I put myself to sleep with pictures of everything I could envisage in the Balmville house, the way I felt its walls around me, and Uncle Elwood, coming and going; the animated spirit of it all.

  * * *

  It seems unlikely that I would have been allowed to go unaccompanied on a train to New York City, yet in the winter of 1928, you could place a child safely in the care of a conductor or a porter. In any event, several months after the Visit of the Dropped Tray, as I named it in my thoughts, I went to the city on the train and was met at Grand Central Station, not by my father but by a married couple, actors, who took me to their tiny apartment, which they shared with two enormous dogs—Great Danes, they told me. A large window in the living room looked out on Central Park.

  They both had roles in the play Animal Crackers, and except on matinee days they were always at home during the day. They expected my father to “turn up” at any moment, as they smilingly told me. I spent two nights with the actors, going to sleep in their bedroom, carried into the living room and deposited on a sofa when they were ready to retire.

  During the day the dogs kept watch over the two rooms, pacing restlessly the length of the living room or sleeping sluggishly in great canine heaps.

  My father came to get me on a matinee day as the actors were on their way out the door. “Thanks, dear pals,” he said to them. He told me he had lifted a few too many glasses two evenings earlier and had not been able to meet me at the station. “I was—ahem, ahem—indisposed,” he said, with comical exaggeration, and I, without comprehending what he meant, smiled up at him. Now we were going to take a bus to Schroon Lake, New York, in the Adirondack Mountains, where he and my “sainted mother” had rented a cabin. I puzzled over his words about Elsie for a while, then gave it up as another mystery.

  He looked tired, as though the glasses he had lifted had weighed too much for him. His water-color eyes were bloodshot; his voice, usually so deep, so melodic, as though he were always on the point of breaking into song, had a cranky, querulous note; and his words, usually so finely cut, were blurred.

  He slept on the bus, falling against me as it lurched. I had not seen him since he had dropped the supper tray out the window, and I felt wary and nervous. As he slept, I investigated his face, his hands, one of which held an unlit cigarette, his trembling eyelids.

  After hours of traveling, we arrived in the hamlet of Schroon Lake. My mother and a friend, a slender, spidery, dark-haired man, were waiting in front of a general store, a dusty, cheese-smelling, dark space in front of which stood a single gas pump. Nearby was a beat-up little car that apparently belonged to my parents. As I stepped from the bus, the spidery man’s eyes widened with amusement. “Oh, she’s a one!” he exclaimed to Elsie.

  We drove several miles and turned off the paved road to a rutted lane. Soon a small cabin appeared. Behind it was Schroon Lake. A pale strip of shoreline was still visible, but it vanished as night spread over the water. The cabin was meagerly furnished; the smell of old fires emanated from a stove that stood at one end of the living room.

  Recalling the evening in the hotel, I said nothing about meals, although I was hungry. My father fixed me supper with particular effort, noticeable effort, as if he too remembered that evening and was determined to erase it from both our memories. He laughed and talked ceaselessly. Now that I think of it, his movements and gestures might have been a dance of contrition.

  The next evening we drove to the hamlet of Schroon Lake, parking the car on a country road across the street from a wooden building that served various community purposes that included movie showings. In the one that we saw Warner Baxter played the lead. When the film was over, I walked beside Elsie into the small anteroom that served as a lobby.

  I startled myself by asking her how babies were made. The spidery man on her other side burst into laughter. After a moment, she replied, in an impersonal voice, “Sexual intercourse.” At that moment, we reached the car. She drove, with my father in the passenger seat and the spidery man and me in the rear. She spoke animatedly about other matters. No one mentioned the movie or my question and her answer.

  * * *

  Suddenly, as it seemed to me then, my childhood years with Uncle Elwood and his mother ended. Plans of which I had been ignorant came to fruition. My father, who was living in California, sent for me. I found myself on a train with Aunt Jessie bound for Los Angeles.

  Outside of Albuquerque, New Mexico, a dozen or so cowboys galloped alongside the train, slapping the flanks of their horses with their broad-brimmed hats as they yipped. The train gathered speed and the cowboys fell away, one by one, their cries fading gradually as though blotted up by the vast sky.

  One night the train slowed as it passed through a village. Through the window, I saw a tree-lined lane lit by rays of a street-lamp. I longed to be walking along it past the shadowed houses, on my way home in the silent dark.

  I spent a year or so in California. When I came back, it was winter in the East. There was snow on the ground when I returned to Balmville and Uncle Elwood.

  It was to be for only a few more months. I held on to the transient safety. I knew it to be a lifeline that might slip out of my hands at any moment.

  One gray winter afternoon before I left for good, my friend Lucy and I went to skate on a small frozen pond not far from the Balmville tree.

  Out of cold blue shadows, from beneath tall leaning ice-stiffened reeds, a boy emerged with a hockey stick held diagonally before him. Another boy appeared behind the first, then another. They looked like medieval warriors. As Lucy and I watched from the pond’s edge, a black puck flew out from under their skates like a crow, and slid along the thick pearly ice.

  Hollywood

  Sober or drunk, my father spoke dismissively about the places he had lived in over the years. After downing a few drinks, he would fall in love with his own voice, theatrically honeyed, filled with significant whispers and pauses. He was in thrall to his voice; his thoughts stumbled behind.

  From fragments of sentences that fell from his lips, I understood him to be claiming that he’d been on his way to his true and noble destination when he was sidetracked by women. He himself, he asserted, would have been contented with an unadorned life, a roof over his head to shelter him from weather, a cot to sleep on, a stove to keep him warm when cold winds blew, and upon which he could prepare spartan meals.

  All men aspire toward the mountain peaks, but women drive them down into valleys of domesticity where they are ambushed by family life and other degrading and petty tyrannies.

  As we drew near to his rented house in the car he had met us with at the Los Angeles railroad station, he gestured toward it, saying disdainfully that it was furnished with “yard upon yard of Spanish junk.” The road we were on ended a half a mile farther among bare hills. At their summit rose a gigantic sign: HOLLYWOODLAND.

  When I recall the few days I spent at the house, I’m always outdoors and it is nighttime. The dark is thinned by stepping stones of amber light cast on the sidewalk by streetlamps. The house is large, its windows partially hidden by elaborate ironwork grilles. An outside staircase reaches the top floor. Big shadowed houses stand back from the street, separated by extensive gardens and trees unfamiliar to me.

  Aunt Jessie, her task to deliver me to California completed, departed after a week or so for the East and her mother, whom she’d left in a housekeeper’s care. On the evening of the day she boarded a train bound for New York, Daddy and my mother went out to a party, leaving me on my own.

  In the long dusk, I wandered throu
gh doorless, cavelike rooms with beamed ceilings and rough white plaster walls, turning on lights where I could reach a switch. A chill rose from the red tiles of the floor. Tables and chairs were made of some dark wood. A plump pink sofa squatted in the center of one of the larger rooms. The sudden barking of a dog startled me, each bark like a gunshot.

  I came to the front door, opened it, and stepped outside. It swung shut behind me. I tried the metal handle. Even as I moved it back and forth, I knew I was locked out.

  The dark tightened around me, and for a moment I couldn’t draw breath. It was as if the night were a black sack into which I’d been dropped. I listened. A faint breeze rustled the leaves of the trees; a car suddenly speeded up with a grinding of gears on an unseen street. There was the steady splash of a waterfall at the back of the house. I tiptoed toward it across the grass.

  It fell into a shallow pool like a serpent sliding from a tree branch, the water shimmering in the lights from the house. In the pool swam a few torpid goldfish. I had spent hours beside that pool, and one morning I had fallen into it.

  A man appeared suddenly a few feet away. His head was cocked at an angle as though he too were listening. When he saw me, he said—and his voice surprised me in a world only seconds ago empty of human life—“I’ve made the same mistake before. I think I’ve left on my lawn sprinkler. Then I find out it’s the sound of your little waterfall.” He waved toward it.

  “I’m locked out,” I told him.

  He nodded in agreement. He seemed to know that no one was home. He said, “We’ll go to my house. Are you hungry?” I said yes, though I wasn’t. He held out his hand and I took it. We walked a short distance to his house.

  In the kitchen, his wife sliced a banana into a bowl. I ate it at the kitchen table, observed by their grave, friendly faces. When I’d finished the banana, I was so sleepy I could hardly hold my head up. The wife led me up a staircase to a spare bedroom, unused since their son had grown up and moved to another state to live and work. I crawled beneath the sheet in my underwear, and she drew up a quilt over me. I was nearly asleep when she whispered she had made the quilt herself.

  It was warm, bright with color. My last thought was of Joseph’s coat, which I’d heard about in Sunday school in Uncle Elwood’s church.

  * * *

  Early the next morning, I walked back to my parents’ house and climbed up the outside steps to a door. It was unlocked. I opened it, at the same time calling, “Daddy!”

  From one of two beds, a blanket rose into the air like a large animal getting to its four feet. Suddenly my father was holding me like a rag doll and running down the back stairs. His pajama top was unbuttoned. I glimpsed patches of pale skin as we entered the kitchen where a black maid was ironing. He seemed unaware of her presence as he whirled about looking for a chair. What he’d wanted was to get me out of the bedroom.

  I knew it wasn’t my mother in the other bed. I’d seen yellow hair on the pillow.

  He lighted on a chair, put me across his knees, and began to spank me.

  “Mr. Fox! That isn’t right! It isn’t fair!” the black maid protested.

  My father looked up at her as if surprised by her presence. I was astonished that she had defended me and lifted my head from his knee to stare at her. Years later, when I thought about her—and I thought about her often—about how much she had had to overcome in the way of an enforced and habitual discretion, how a sense of justice in her had outweighed the risk—I realized how brave she had been.

  A decade after the incident, my father told me, in what he deemed to be a comical voice, that that night he had pretended to be a childless bachelor and had “brought home a girl from the party.” Then I had burst into the bedroom at a heathen hour of the morning, shouting “Daddy!”

  I never discovered where my mother had spent the night. Nor did my father ask me where I had been before I opened the door to the bedroom.

  * * *

  A few days later, my father drove me to Redlands, a small town thirty-five or forty miles from Hollywood. He left me there in the care of an old woman, Mrs. Cummings. She kept house for Sophie, her enormous daughter, who ran a summer camp for girls in the Big Bear Mountains.

  * * *

  One morning before I went off to school, I had just sat down on the edge of my bed to put on my shoes when the house shuddered, tipped forward and backward, and pitched me to the floor. At that instant, Mrs. Cummings called out, her voice sounding like a cat’s cry of distress. I crawled to the front door. It had been wrenched from its hinges and lay upon the narrow wooden porch. In the middle of the street, in front of the house, smoking with clouds of dust, a deep crevice had opened. No one was out of doors. I stood up and ran to the kitchen, where I found Mrs. Cummings crouching beneath the kitchen table, looking straight ahead with a crazed glare. “Get under here,” she muttered.

  We sat beneath the table, our knees touching, the closest we’d been in all the months preceding the earthquake. There was another great shake of the house; for a few seconds the walls undulated like cloth.

  Gradually, as the silence deepened around us, her expression grew focused. It conveyed that there was no language to describe what had just occurred. For moments, the world’s heart had stopped.

  After minutes—it could have been hours—she crept out from under the table, revealing her pink bloomers to me as the skirt of her dress tangled with her legs. Human cries began to reach us from the street. I went again to the porch. Families, solitary people, dogs, stood in front of their houses staring down at the great wound in the street from which now issued several muddy, slow-moving streams of water.

  I wondered if the chameleon Mrs. Cummings had given me a week earlier had survived. The last time I had seen it, a few days before, it was pausing in front of a mousehole in the kitchen baseboard, staring at it with its right eye. When I looked back a minute later, it had vanished.

  Since then, I had thought about it constantly, its sudden stillnesses, its skittering about, its tiny clawed feet on my skin, the way it turned the color of what it was placed upon. “I hope it finds something to eat,” I said to Mrs. Cummings. “It’s fine,” she replied. “Living in the cellar … eating flies.” I didn’t believe her but didn’t say so.

  * * *

  A terror of leprosy leapt into my soul. I looked under my bed every night in case there was a leper sleeping there. Leprosy was the most awful thing in the world. Tidal waves ran a close second.

  * * *

  I sat on a high stool in front of the kitchen sink, staring down at an egg I had broken to find out how its inside got inside. The orange yolk bled into the drain; a gelatinous white mass followed the yoke sluggishly. Mrs. Cummings entered the kitchen and began to reproach me for wasting an egg. I wasn’t listening. I was recalling the way I had cracked open stones on the long driveway that led up to the minister’s house on the hill. I grew weak with longing to be in the downstairs hall where we had all gathered during storms, to see old Mrs. Corning; even Auntie; most of all, Uncle Elwood.

  * * *

  Sophie was director of a camp in the mountains called Tamarack Lodge. One weekend morning in early spring—though I couldn’t tell the months apart in that country without seasons—Sophie and Jay, the man who did the maintenance work in the camp, drove to the lodge and took me along. Jay was heavy-set and looked unshaven by midmorning. When I saw him, he was always wearing a plaid shirt drawn tightly over his big belly.

  The campgrounds were silent. The shuttered main house, the swimming pool emptied of water, its bottom covered with evergreen needles, a line of boarded-up cabins, and the boulder- and rock-strewn thickly treed hills that rose all around had a thrilling look of desolation. Jay and Sophie talked in low voices as they walked about, pausing in front of various buildings, their faces serious.

  A decade later when I returned to California from the East, one of the first things I did was to take a bus to the village near the campgrounds. It was December and chilly, and patche
s of old hardened snow were on the ground. I didn’t know if the camp would still be there. I walked from the village on a narrow road until I came upon a gravel driveway that led beneath an arch with the camp’s name on it in rustic letters. I wandered around for a while. A stream, full this time of year, formed a natural barrier at one side of the camp. It tumbled and sang in the silence. A memory slid into my mind.

  One summer day when I was six, I was riding in the open back of a camp truck and, egged on by the older girls, I hit a child smaller than I was. She was odd-looking. Her lips were nearly invisible and her teeth protruded. I didn’t have a reason—there never is one—except the illusion that I would thus gain favor with the others. She cried out; her hand flew to her cheek. At that very moment, Sophie, sitting in the truck’s passenger seat, glanced back at us through the dust-streaked window.

  When we reached the general store where we would buy fruit and sandwiches for our picnic, Sophie led me to the bathroom at the back, sat down on a toilet seat, and placed me across her lap, all this without a word. She spanked me, and I welcomed the punishment as much as I could. I had committed a bully’s crime.

  Years later, I told my father that I had returned to the camp when I was sixteen. He said, “Ah, well … people who’ve been parceled out and knocked around are always returning to the past, retracing their steps.” He spoke distantly, in a detached voice.

  It was during that same exchange that he told me what my mother had said—after I’d spent a week or so in Hollywood in the house with the waterfall—which had resulted in his leaving me in old Mrs. Cummings’s care.

  “She gave me an ultimatum,” he began. “She said, ‘Either she goes or I go.’” He shook his head ruefully. “I had no choice,” he said, in a faintly self-pitying tone of voice.