by Paula Fox
In the middle of the Brahms Piano Concerto in B Flat, a short man in a shabby brown suit raced down the central aisle of the concert hall, his hands waving frantically in the air. He clambered up to the podium, grabbed the conductor’s arm with great force, and whispered in his ear. The music ceased.
“La France a capitulée!” the short man shouted, as he stared down at us all. Madame Duvernoy turned to me. Her hands flew to cover her ears, and there was an expression of horror on her face. It was June 22, 1940.
* * *
We spent three weeks in Nova Scotia in a woebegone little house whose front door opened to within a few yards of a twenty-foot bluff. A dusty train banged and rattled through the backyard twice a day on its way to and from Lunenberg, a nearby fishing town. A local woman came to clean the house twice a week, and there was a nearby village where we could buy groceries.
Except for the few days in Florida, it was the longest time I spent alone with my father. By the end of the first few days, he had gotten to know nearly everyone in the village, and we weren’t often by ourselves.
He and the local minister introduced me to fishing for salmon in a wide stream. He gave me a few shooting lessons, which drew the attention of a Canadian Mountie, first to the rifle we had used and then to me. His resplendent uniform gave him an air of gravity and the law, but he shed both in the kitchen, where he offered to show Daddy the location of various illegal whiskey stills.
That evening, accompanied by the Mountie out of uniform, we stopped by a few of them, and my father had some samples. Then, with the Mountie at the wheel of our car, we went to a billiard parlor in Halifax.
In a back room, plump middle-aged local women cavorted like aproned elephants. The laughter was strident, and my father, close to passing out, crawled around on the floor, barking like a dog. The Mountie and I stood behind one of the two billiard tables in the front room, I watching my father with anguished helplessness, the Mountie watching me with what Daddy had characterized as “hot” eyes.
The next morning, Daddy awoke, ashen-faced and weak. He had, he said, “the humblies,” and would I shave him? He struggled to get into the bathtub and lie down in his sour-smelling clothes while I did my best with the razor.
Afterward, when he looked in the small bathroom mirror, stretching out his chin to see what I had wrought, he seemed to catch sight of himself, lurching through his days and nights. He was silent most of that day, grim and depleted.
But the next day his mood changed. He recited bits of poetry: “‘Ah, yesternight, betwixt the roses and the wine, there fell thy shadow, Cynara, and I was desolate and sick of an old passion.’” I responded by quoting Tennyson: “‘Come into the garden, Maud,/For the black bat, night—’” and he said, with comical emphasis, “I’ll Maud you, you little spic.” And so it went on, he irreverent, I laughing helplessly.
He told me bits of gossip, fragments of what he considered wisdom: Men fight wars to get new women; actresses always fall for the clowns. Gabriele D’Annunzio took a lobster for a walk, a green ribbon attached to its claw; Charles Laughton and Elsa Lanchester had married each other to disguise their homosexuality. When Laughton grew tired on the set of whatever movie he was making, my father said he began to camp. I asked him what that meant, and he replied that it was a way of exaggerating and at the same time mocking the female side of one’s nature.
I wondered if Leopold camped. But Daddy said Leopold was a Spanish puritan and punished himself for his homosexuality by devising an agonizing condition for himself, tic douloureux.
He continued the long lesson that had begun in Peterborough: economy of effort. Instead of making a number of trips about the kitchen, he taught me to bring together everything I needed before I began a task: soap, scouring brush, drying towel. It was the only kind of order I saw in him.
Toward the end of the last week, we had a serious quarrel. I have forgotten the cause, but I recall the occasion. We were sitting in a rigid wooden swing connected at the top with two slanted benches across from each other.
Suddenly I called him a third-rate writer. I regretted it instantly when I looked up at his face. We were each other’s prisoners in the swing. He held it still and stepped out and went into the house. I had wounded him in the only way I could think of.
* * *
We packed up the car, Daddy adding to the top of the luggage a tricycle for the housekeeper’s son, whom she had spoken of often, referring to him as “little Johnny.” She was coming the next day to clean up the house.
On our way to the Boston-bound ferryboat, we stopped by the hamlet where the housekeeper lived to drop off the tricycle. As we parked, she appeared on the porch, behind her a dwarf who looked at least thirty. She clasped her hands then waved at us, while little Johnny ran down the walk to claim his gift.
We drove away, both of us appalled and bursting with laughter at the misunderstanding. In the midst of merriment, we forgave each other for what had happened between us in the wooden swing.
Later, I had to use a bathroom. He said we could stop at anyone’s house. I protested that I couldn’t ask strangers for such an intimate favor, I’d just hold it. He finally persuaded me, saying he’d be “charming.” I said, “Don’t be too damned charming!” That amused him more than the dwarf and the tricycle.
New York City
Daddy took me to the Barbizon Hotel, in those days a female-only accommodation in New York City.
He stood at the registration desk, smiling at the woman clerk, ready to oblige her in any way he could, presenting himself as the spirit of geniality, still handsome, though alcohol had begun to erode his face. She gave him a form. He took out a pen as he looked it over; he found a snag. The hotel required someone to vouch for me besides him.
But as was usual then, he had a solution for any problem. He had said to me that if I ever needed him, to send him a telegram: SEND OUT THE TROOPS.
He telephoned a cousin I’d not met, Faith Baldwin, in her Connecticut home. She refused to vouch for me. Instead, she lectured him about the perils of my staying in a hotel at my age. It was a long lecture. He hung up the telephone, and we slunk away from the hotel desk.
Years later, a good friend said to me of Faith Baldwin’s novels, “When you’ve read them all, you’ve read one.”
* * *
Daddy performed what seemed a miracle. He got me into the Juilliard School of Music, then on Claremont Avenue near 115th Street. The same day he registered me at International House, a large hostel for various students, many of them foreigners.
He was skilled at lying to officials and in elaborating hugely on a theme as small as a grain of rice. I never heard remorse in his voice. But I didn’t hear self-admiration either. My father lacked the vanity side of pride; he made fun of it, saying the human animal had nothing to be proud of.
I once lied when I accompanied my cousin Natalie to her convent school to pick up her homework, which she’d forgotten to take home. A nun asked if I was a Catholic. I said yes. When she left the small anteroom where I waited for Natalie, I picked up a booklet that featured lurid drawings of hell. One crudely drawn scene depicted bodies toasting like marshmallows over flames—the punishment for liars.
* * *
Juilliard was threaded by white corridors along which were practice rooms. The muffled sounds of the various instruments made a blurred, discordant rumble and squeak unless you were in one of the soundproof rooms. There were also classrooms where one could study music theory and harmonics, and a small theater in which the students gave concerts.
I went several days a week and took lessons on the piano in a windowless, claustrophobic room, its space dominated by the black wing and keyboard of a much-used baby grand.
I had moved my scant wardrobe into one of the rooms in the female section of International House and on my first day found a kind of louche society there, or so it might have seemed to an outsider.
The toothless younger son of the owner of a chain of clothing stores play
ed chess with me; an adolescent piano student, Paul, from El Paso, became a friend; a small plump Spaniard studying hotel management, a subject also pursued by all the Swiss students at the House, spoke Spanish with me and made me laugh with jokes characterized by Spanish irony and its almost exalted irritability.
Then there was Burl Ives, who had a weekly radio program on which he sang folk songs and played his guitar. He was a big redheaded man, kindly, except when he got into a barroom brawl, which he did regularly. One evening he cried out in the cafeteria, “I hear them snakes hollering out on Riverside Drive tonight,” and beckoned to me.
We took a taxi to the radio station and drove there through Central Park. He played his guitar and sang for the driver and for me in his light, mellow tenor. We arrived at the station with two minutes to spare before his broadcast.
* * *
Mary paid for singing lessons. My teacher, Harriet, lived on the top floor of a Riverside Drive apartment house. One night I stayed for supper, and although the singing teacher’s face has faded from memory, I can still see her plump adolescent son, dressed in a kilt, piping in each supper course she brought us. It mortified me, though I can’t think why. Perhaps I imagined Elsie was watching us with her magic telescope.
* * *
Elsie told me about a wealthy South American relative from Colombia staying for a few weeks in his Sutton Place apartment, a kind of pied-à-terre. Although I was unaware of the desperation that drove me to telephone him, of its force in my life, its contamination of nearly every feeling I had, I convinced myself it would be a joke to meet him. I would make a story of the visit to tell people—and myself. After all, I would hear it too.
He sent a black limousine to International House for me. It was not the enormously lengthened sort of limo that howls throughout its swollen length of the wealth and celebrity of the passenger. It was a more mannered cry.
My cousin lived on a high floor. While I was visiting, he made a series of telephone calls, to Paris, Berlin, and London. While he was speaking to London, I heard the clanging of Big Ben’s clock as it rang out the hour. He showed me a few gold artifacts, most of them elaborate nipple covers that resembled thimbles, discovered in the darkest recesses of his mine by his workers. They were thousands of years old. Shortly after, he brought me a dish of dried fruit. When I said no-thank-you, he speculated aloud about whether or not I enjoyed sex.
I left shortly, and though he offered me the black limousine to go back to International House, I said no to that, too.
* * *
I saw my mother twice during the autumn I was a Juilliard student. I can’t imagine that she requested my company; I must have gone to see her on my own the first time.
“Come in, Paula,” I hear her say, a half century later. It sounded to me then as if she’d said, “Go away, Paula.”
Was it she who always imposed a painful formality between us? Or by then was it a collaboration of the two of us? As some people are inclined to do in such tense circumstances, she simulated frankness and told me personal stories about herself, more detailed perhaps than she intended, or else a certain brutal self-revelation was her specialty. Perhaps she didn’t know any better.
She smoked constantly, lighting one cigarette from the end of another.
The second time I saw her was when I was taken by taxi to her apartment accompanied by my El Paso friend, Paul, and another acquaintance from International House. My face was red with fever. She was expecting me. Friends had telephoned her to tell her that I was ill. They half carried me up the stairs.
When she opened the door, I saw she was dressed in a coat. An open sack of oranges sat on a table. She waited until my friends had gone and then said to me politely, “Take care of yourself,” and left. Harmon was gone too. I spent the night there.
Perhaps to atone for what even I could judge as utter neglect, she invited me a few weeks later to a concert conducted by Arturo Toscanini. I had a date with a Columbia University medical student. I told her I had an engagement that night. “Engagement?” she asked lightly, with sardonic disbelief.
My life was incoherent to me. I felt it quivering, spitting out broken teeth. When I thought of the purposes I had tried to find for myself the last year, to show my father that I “wanted” something—piano, voice lessons, sculpture, none of the least use to me—when I thought of the madness of my parents where I was concerned, I felt the bleakest misery.
* * *
A middle-aged woman named Kay, an acquaintance of Mary’s, lived on the other side of the Susquehanna River across from Mary’s cousins, Henry and Baby.
Her life had unraveled. She was giving a few piano lessons to a few children, and playing the Ouija board to encourage in her a sense that she had a fate. My father persuaded her to take me to California. I never doubted my father’s powers of persuasion.
Mary bought us a second-hand convertible Chevrolet and gave Kay some money. One winter morning the two of us, lots of Kay’s luggage, and her little dog set out for the long drive that getting to California entailed in those days. At least, in that rakish little car, we didn’t look like refugees from Tobacco Road.
California
The first day, I discovered Kay was an alcoholic and that most of the driving would have to be done by me. Drunk or sober, depending on whether we’d stopped at any roadside taverns, she took what she called “monkey glands.” They were good, she said, to help delay the ravages of age. She talked in fits and starts, first voluble, then silent for hours. From gnatlike clusters of words, I gathered that she knew Delores Del Rio and some of the Barrymore family.
Now and then she had me stop the car in empty stretches of road so she could get out, fall to her knees, and pray to whatever god she had momentary faith in.
We stopped in Dallas and I telephoned my roommate, Dorothy, from Sainte-Geneviève. She was astonished to hear my voice. I arranged to meet her that evening, along with her brother, at a nightclub. I left a sodden Kay in a small hotel on the outskirts of the city.
There was a dance contest in the club, and I won the second prize. An ancient lady, the sentimental favorite with the patrons, won the first, dancing a waltz with a professional dancer hired for the occasion.
Then the spotlight fell upon me. People applauded. I stood up and walked toward the pro. He whispered fiercely to me as we tangoed—“Turn now! Left! Right! Backward dip!”—while he beamed at the audience. What may have appeared to the audience as a couple lost in the rapture of the dance was really an intimidated girl and a man tugging and muttering, his strong stringy arms guiding her.
* * *
In the desert, a few miles before the Rocky Mountains, we paused for fuel at a desolate gas station and its small, nearly empty lunchroom. After the car’s tank was filled, just before I turned the ignition key, a tall lean fellow emerged from the station and asked us for a ride to a mountain settlement where his wife was about to give birth to their first child.
Kay was sober that afternoon. We hadn’t passed any roadhouses in miles. She looked him over and judged him trustworthy as he stood there, a petitioner, his cowboy hat in his big reddish hands.
He squeezed himself into the back of the car and we took off for the mountains. He was a cook in a nearby work camp, he told us, provided for by Roosevelt’s National Recovery Act.
The road was rarely traveled then, a narrow blacktop clinging to the slopes and rises of the Rockies like a vein of coal. “Ma’am, can I drive?” he asked. I was glad to relinquish the wheel. It had grown dark, and he switched on the headlights. We passed no one.
He leaned over the steering wheel, his long-fingered hands gripping it. His hollowed-out cheeks and eyebrows, his whole face in the dashboard glow, looked old. I guessed he’d married a young woman. Now he was flying toward her like a devil, or an angel.
We arrived at a small settlement in the middle of a range of the mountains. It sent out a dim light among the trees like a weak flashlight. What looked like a small community center w
as a walk-in clinic, a single bulb hanging from its roughly carpentered porch roof. He stopped the car and, extricating his long legs and feet encased in cowboy boots, thanked us and said goodbye.
“What’s happening?” asked Kay, who had fallen asleep. As I drove away from the settlement, I could see the tall cook in the rearview mirror, waving to us from the porch, and then he opened the door and disappeared. Soon there was nothing but the living darkness around us; our headlights seemed always on the point of being extinguished.
* * *
On the outskirts of Los Angeles, we stopped for the night at a large stucco house owned by a friend of Kay’s and Kay’s long-dead husband. Edwin came from a rich polo-playing family often in the newspapers; he had three ex-wives.
He was short and round, and his skin was the color of a mushroom. Although he was a contemporary of Kay’s, he looked ancient, dried up. After Kay retired, he chased me around his patio for a few minutes. I suddenly stopped running and looked at him. He stopped too. I realized his mind was not on me; he was only following an inane ritual that he must have felt he owed to his reputation. I went into a bedroom off the patio. He followed, limping. We both lay down on the covers of the bed, and he fell asleep at once. For a person of his years, he had had a lot to drink that evening.
I slid away from him and walked down the corridor to another bedroom, where I undressed and got into the bed. When I awoke, hours later, a Mexican servant was staring at me from the door. I hesitated, then said to her, Buenos días. She heard my accent—someone had told me once that it was recognizably Antillean—and smiled warmly. For many years, I preferred the company of servants, finding comfort and acceptance among them.
We had a breakfast with Kay’s friend before we left. He behaved with a foolish effort at dignity, never looking at me. But it was too much. Kay asked, as I drove away from the stucco house, what had gone on during the night.
* * *