by Paula Fox
* * *
My grandmother described the row of wooden stocks she had seen on a walk with my grandfather in Cienegita. She asked him what they were for, and he replied that they were formerly used to punish slaves. Unlike the neighboring plantation owners, he abhorred slavery and had no slaves. He died in the last days of the Spanish-American War, she implied of a broken heart. When she first arrived in the United States, she had settled in Freehold, New Jersey, partly because a banker who had had business ties to her husband lived there.
She had been left with little money, some valuable jewelry, and what was left of the land, which was useless after the war, more or less permanently occupied by carpetbaggers.
One day, before going on an errand in Freehold, she took all her jewelry from the box where it was kept and spread it out on her dining table, intending to sort it. One of the children called her, and she left it lying there.
She went from child to errand, and when she returned, the dining room window was broken and the jewelry gone.
She treated her children with the same carelessness. She went away on unexplained trips, leaving them in the charge of her eldest son, Fermin, already cruel at fifteen. He once ground out a cigarette on the back of Elsie’s hand. He bullied Leopold for years. Finally, when Leopold was twelve, he turned on Fermin, chasing him up and down the streets of Freehold, brandishing a long kitchen knife whenever Fermin looked back. How I would have liked to have seen that!
When she was nearing adolescence, Elsie awoke one morning to find blood on her bedclothes. Her mother had told her nothing about menstruation. She thought she was dying. Terrified, she went to her mother. Candelaria put on her coat at once, saying she would speak with her later; the bleeding was nothing; she was due at the bank or the doctor’s office, or an emergency required her to buy cough medicine for one of the boys. She went out the door of whatever place they were living in at the time.
So I envisioned the scene after Elsie told me about it, with her habitual tone of unsparing irony that diminished the meaning of everything.
When her mother left the house that morning, Elsie returned to her room, yanking at her long black hair in despair, “like someone in a mad scene from an opera,” she told me. Then she stood in front of a mirror, still pulling at her hair. She wanted to watch herself, to see how tragic she appeared—so she reported, with strained gaiety.
I too found blood on the sheet when I awoke one morning, but I kept it to myself. I had learned a few things from girls in school. I asked my grandmother for money to buy what I required at the drugstore, referring to movie magazines. She must have known, somehow, what I was going to buy. She handed me the money without questioning me as she customarily did.
* * *
Across the street from school was a Dutch Reformed Church, which I joined during a brief reawakening of formal religious feeling. The church once held a lottery, toward which I gave a dollar. Elsie, visiting her mother one day and hearing from her about my contribution, asked me if I thought my dollar would make a difference in the world. I did, and I said yes. She gave me a derisive look.
I left the church a few months later, when I discovered chewing gum stuck between the pages of the hymnbook I used, and I saw a fellow choir member, a boy, grinning with a trickster’s glee.
* * *
I knew both my parents were seeing other people. Perhaps in an effort to justify his interest in Mary, Daddy told me Elsie was “gone” on an editor in a New York publishing company. Still, he and she went together to New Mexico to write a movie script they hoped to sell because they were “broke.” The trip was a bust. Going to New Mexico had been a dramatic gesture. They quarreled continually. After a few days, they returned to New York City, where they went their separate ways.
Soon after he came back, I met my father in a bar in the city. An editor, Maxwell Perkins, was with him to talk about a novel Daddy had written.
As he drank, my father became ever more ingratiating and expansive, gesturing and speaking oratorically. The bar was empty except for the three of us. Mr. Perkins and I were talking softly beneath my father’s roaring. He asked me questions in an avuncular voice, and I answered. I had brought a small suitcase. Daddy was driving me to Pennsylvania, I informed Mr. Perkins. He said, as my father fell abruptly silent, that he hoped I would find it pleasant there.
* * *
I stayed with some of Mary’s relatives in West Pittston. They lived in a large house on the banks of the Susquehanna River next to a cemetery.
Baby, Mary’s cousin, was a large middle-aged woman with an abstracted, kindly face. Her hair was streaked with gray, most of it gathered in a bun at the nape of her neck, but with a few strands always drifting loosely over her features. Her husband, Henry, was tall and gaunt, heavily wrinkled, with a patch of brown hair that rested on the top of his head like a bird’s nest.
Their son, David, was home from college. He had a sly, wary look. Once he tried to kiss me. His saliva was rather sour and left a part of my cheek and lower lip wet. It must have been summer; I went to bed on a sleeping porch. One morning David drove me to a Princeton track meet. His father was an alumnus. I saw Jesse Owens, a black man, win the main race.
After we returned to West Pittston, I wandered into the yard and sat down on a swing. David followed me and pushed the swing. I felt a sudden, searing pain in my belly, then another. Henry drove me to a local hospital, where a doctor examined me and diagnosed acute appendicitis.
Two or three days after the operation, Daddy came to visit me. The moment he walked into the hospital room, I began to laugh. A nurse crawled under my cot and pushed up the mattress to help me stop. I only laughed harder, clutching my incision. Daddy left.
He came back in a few minutes, and I was again seized by laughter. By his third entrance, I wept and laughed at the same time. He muttered, “For God’s sake,” and I was undone.
When he returned the following day, I greeted him soberly with only an occasional ripple of laughter. Each time he heard it, he raised his eyes to the ceiling in mock solemnity.
Mary brought me an edition of The Brothers Karamazov. I can still see an onion-domed church through the hospital window, replicated on the book’s cover.
After I’d recovered from the operation, Mary paid for a few piano lessons in Pittston given to me by a tiny old man, heavily mustachioed, a former student of Leopold Godowski, a noted musician of an earlier time.
In his small studio in the boardinghouse where he lived, I played scales and studies for beginners at his upright piano and listened to his exasperated criticism, made in a voice that crackled with irritability. He showed me a photograph of one of his other students, a young girl with long black hair, whom he praised extravagantly. “She is the one,” he said, smiling at the picture.
But after my last lesson, he gave me a powerful hug. I heard and felt his tiny bones clicking beneath his musty-smelling blue suit as his mustache brushed my cheek.
* * *
The summer passed. In the first few days of September, I don’t remember what day, Mary drove her friend Thweeny and me from West Pittston to New Hampshire.
Mary liked night driving. The dashboard lights lit their faces from below, and they were speaking animatedly to each other in soft voices. I was in the backseat and couldn’t catch most of what they were talking about.
Mary had rented a house in Peterborough—my father was to join her later. Meanwhile, Thweeny was to stay with us. I could feel my childhood slipping away as we crossed the Berkshire Mountains. I listened to the Smith girls laugh and talk together. I was fourteen.
New Hampshire
Peterborough, New Hampshire, was a pretty New England village, comfortably ordinary, but given a certain glamour by a summer estate that had been owned by Edward Alexander MacDowell, the American composer. His widow, Marian, fulfilled his wish after his death and turned it into an artists’ colony. A noted visitor had been Thornton Wilder, whose novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, I had read a
year earlier. I wanted to see where he had lived and worked.
The estate was in the woods half a mile or so north of the high school I attended and, in winter, could be reached on snowshoes. My father had given me a pair for Christmas. I trudged through the hushed woods, silent save for the whisper of the snowshoes.
When I came upon fieldstone buildings, I forgot my purpose and felt only apprehension. I breathed in the gelid air. It was still except for the soft slide of snow now and then from tree branches to the ground. I peered through a mullioned window into a room already dark in the early fading of daylight.
As I strained to see deeper into the room, a vision slid into my mind of a narrow rope bridge across a deep ravine in a far-off country. All those people, the villagers of San Luis Rey, falling through the air to their deaths, conscious as they flailed their limbs when the bridge, and time itself, gave way.
* * *
The house Mary had rented in Peterborough was a replica of an Italian villa. It stood on the bank of a wide stream. Most of the windows overlooked the tumbling water. A formal garden, parklike, was on another level below the house. The stream became a waterfall there and could be glimpsed behind a line of poplars. There were iron-work benches to sit on and gravel-covered paths.
The interior of the house was a continuing surprise. The front door led directly into the living room from the street. The floors were laid with terra-cotta tiles, and the walls were surfaced with rough white plaster, both of which imparted a spare, calm loveliness to all the rooms. At the end of the living room was a large cathedral window. A corridor led to bedrooms with their own balconies overlooking the stream. One bedroom was mine.
For the first time in my life, I spent more than a few days with my father. It was what I thought normalcy to be. Mary had told the owner of the house that she was Daddy’s cousin. They could have belonged to the same family, the resemblance between them was so strong; both had blue eyes and fair curly hair.
I was happy for a while. Sometimes I paused on a road that climbed a steep hill where I could look down upon the village. Standing there on winter afternoons, gripping an iron rail with a mittened hand, I watched the last violet light of the setting sun, the streetlights came on all at once like a word spoken in unison, and I felt touched by an ecstatic stillness.
* * *
An English teacher, Ilya Tracy, who wore a red silk necktie with a white shirt, cultivated my primitive love of poetry and prose. In freshman class, we memorized sections of Milton’s “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso,” Gray’s “Elegy in a Country Churchyard,” Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, and Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
One afternoon, Miss Tracy took the girls in the class on a hike. Was it in the Green or White Mountains? I forget, but I remember how, in that happy troop, I strode on pine-strewn slopes and laughed without reason along with the others.
I was on the basketball team. I had two suitors and a best friend, Beryl, who wrote poetry. One of her poems had been published in the New Hampshire State Anthology. My father said it was a fair imitation of Edna St. Vincent Millay. I admired that poem and her love poems about a certain senior whom I looked at curiously when we passed each other in the halls. Was he the one she embraced in a cabin by the lake where he took her in winter? Was he the one she had seen naked? Did they kiss and caress each other? Had he, as she had written, penetrated her soul and body?
I admired her so much that she managed to persuade me to give her a role I had been assigned in a play. She told me her heart would break if she wasn’t on the school stage in the spring when the play was to be presented.
Carl, one of the boys interested in me, was the pharmacist’s son. He left sodas in my locker that tended to tip and spill over my gym shoes. He was very short and bullet-headed, and he had a careening walk, going forward, then lurching to the side like the knight’s move in chess.
The suitor I took more seriously was Jerry, a senior, a handsome Irish boy with a narrow face and crisp black curling hair. He lived north of the village in a working-class neighborhood of attached row houses. Sometimes he smelled very faintly of ketchup, perhaps because there was a ketchup factory not far from his house.
One evening he came by with two friends, Stanley and Richard. My father made a brief appearance in the living room, spoke with stately good humor, looked the boys over, and left.
They forgot me and began to talk as if I were not present, ardently, gravely. They spoke about life, about what they wanted to do in their adult lives. To be a fly on the wall was an old wish of mine. Richard had written the play with the part I had given to Beryl. Stanley wanted to be an actor. Their conversation was itself like the opening of a play.
I had a conversation with Jerry in which something besides sex held us in its grip. We were in his father’s car, driving back from Keene after seeing a movie that had frightened us both. We were talking about fear.
The moon seemed to be watching us from the top of a black ridge that threw silver shadows on the road. For a moment, I wondered if my face was as guileless as his, as engrossed with what we were talking about. Love had its pretenses, its periodic withdrawals, its lies. As something to talk about, fear was safer.
* * *
I was a reed in the Christmas presentation of The Nutcracker Suite at the Peterborough Town Hall. Frank, a senior, known to be another senior’s lover, domesticity already dawning in her eyes, ran his hands up and down my thin brown costume as I and the other reeds darted off the stage and into the wings. “Nice,” he remarked, grinning.
I wondered how he could have allowed himself to have done that. I had thought him attached like a limpet to his girlfriend. I felt a tweak of triumph.
A plump dark-haired sophomore with enormous breasts was everyone’s girl. She would rest up against a locker after school and all the boys could have her.
* * *
Mary came to my room some evenings. We spoke about love and sex. She wore the pink linen housecoat I was so fond of. We smoked and speculated about sexual intercourse. She was nine or ten years older than I was.
When my father and Mary were together, their topic was usually books. An Englishman, H. W. Fowler, had written a dictionary whose definitions amused them. A series of books about the Dinsmore family might be the subject; they laughed when they spoke about the heroine’s father accompanying her on her honeymoon with Mr. Trevelyan. I decided it was their form of courtship. But I didn’t know whether to begin the series or not.
Daddy was working on a novel. When he was unable to write, he drank heavily, leaving the house directly after supper and returning late. Sometimes Mary drove the car down the steep hill to a bar he frequented and brought him home, protesting loudly or nearly passed out.
One night he came into my room and woke me. “I’ve got plans for you,” he muttered. It was after midnight. His words sounded menacing. I turned on the light. His crippled stance, his bleary eyes, suggested to me that whatever held him upright was leaking away. I pitied him. He misread my expression. “Calm down, calm down.… I’m going to send you to a Swiss school … white feather beds, pure air … the sun striking sparks from the Alps all around you.… You don’t believe it, do you? I’ll show you!”
And he lurched away, out of the room. It took me a long time to fall asleep. I swung between belief and doubt. I’d heard these “plans” before, but I wanted to believe them.
* * *
Daddy would suddenly ask if I was having a good time, demanding that I confirm some notion of happiness he had for me. “These are the good old days,” he would say. I had no wish to reassure him. Perhaps I wanted to get even with him for his claiming to hear what I was saying beneath what I was saying, a cause of growing division I felt in my own nature. I was becoming aware of being aware.
“One word is worth a thousand pictures,” he said once, portentously. Then his tone changed into a ragging, derisive roar that made me burst into laughter.
One day I brought home a stick to
y someone had given me at school. A tightrope walker balanced on a string between two pieces of wood you worked with your hands. He took it from me and imitated a witless person, looking at me with dazed booby eyes and then slowly, shakily, lowering his gaze to the toy and back to me, an imbecilic smile on his face.
He read somewhere that the actor Will Rogers had said he never met a man he didn’t like. “What a horse cock!” Daddy exclaimed.
We had moved into the house in early autumn. Sometime after that, a hurricane struck. The stream that ran beside the house flooded the cellar and the garden below and blew down a giant tree at the end of the narrow street the house faced. The roots seemed to glare at me as I passed them on the way to the center of the village.
The wind raged for days. School was shut down. One night my father didn’t come home at all. In the small hours, Mary drove all over Peterborough, finding him at last sleeping on a bench, his cheek on his joined hands. The bench had been carried by the floodwaters and deposited next to a bar.
* * *
The school principal had asked me to baby-sit for him during the fall. When I arrived at his house, he opened the door and welcomed me with a smile. His son was six.
In March, when he summoned me to his office, he wore a different expression. His voice grew harsher and louder as he spoke. “You people’s ways are too advanced for us. It would be best if you left the school.”
Years later, when I was about to matriculate at Columbia University and my transcript was needed for my brief time at Peterborough High School, I was astonished at how good my grades had been. Ilya Tracy had given me an A+.
I guessed at the reasons for the principal’s asking me to leave the school. My father’s drinking had escalated that spring. The local people had seen through the pretense that he and Mary were cousins.