by Jess Gregg
Maybe it was accidental, but with Tikki, who could tell? The words seemed to echo around the terrace, and she clapped a hand over her mouth like a child. “Oh, what did I say?” she giggled.
Briney’s face went so red that even his scar seemed suffused. Mrs. Ellison gave an uncertain smile and tried to change the subject, but the Prof stood right up and took the watercolors from Tikki’s hand. “I’m very proud of these pictures, Mrs. Barlow,” he said. His voice was quiet, but there was no mistaking his estimate of her. “Madge and I grew up in view of just such fields, and I think she has caught them beautifully.”
Tikki looked to Briney for help. The Prof’s eyes turned to him too. A prayer swept through me that Briney would just let the matter ride. He didn’t. Crossing the terrace, he picked up a painting and studied it. “But I can see what Tikki means,” he told the Prof lightly. “Freud would flip!”
Then it all disappeared beneath social convention. The guests laughed and began talking again, everyone all at once. Briney went back to passing the iced tea around, and the old man returned to his wife’s side, apparently to admire the sun sinking behind the sea. “I think it’s cooling off,” he told her, after a suitable time. Gracefully, and without haste, they bid everyone good evening, and moved toward the entrance to the lobby. Briney reached it before they did, and held out his hand to help the Prof up the steps. “Oh, I think I can manage alone,” the old man said. His tone was affable, but my feeling was that he passed by Briney without quite meeting his eyes.
Some of the volleyball crowd had trouped onto the terrace, and were calling out their orders. “Six beers coming right up,” Briney called back, and went into the bar. He didn’t return, however, and after a while, I went looking for him.
He was nowhere downstairs. I thought he might have gone up to the Ellison’s room to try and repair matters, but when I listened at their door, I didn’t hear his voice. Going out to the parking lot, I looked for his old Chevy. It was gone, so I crossed the highway and held out my thumb. Nobody slowed down for me. It was a walk of four miles. Sometimes I found myself running.
Darkness had fallen by the time I reached the plywood house. Briney wasn’t inside, although his car was nearby. I kept calling his name, and at last even climbed the hill. He was sitting at the crest, his arms wrapped around his knees, and a slight breeze ruffling his hair. I sat down beside him. In the stillness, I could hear the far-away pound of the surf.
He cleared his throat several times before he finally spoke. “I didn’t have any choice,” he said. “She’s my damn mother, I couldn’t just let her sit there, dying.”
“I’m sure the Prof knows that,” I told him. “He understands.”
He popped his lips gloomily. “Probably’s packing his bag right now.”
“No, don’t worry, he’ll be back,” I insisted. “You’ll see. Next summer it’ll all be the same as ever.”
“The same, yeah,” he said, with a little twinge of a smile. “Me, still a bellboy.”
Whatever I argued made no difference. He just sat there watching the night and surrendering the dream. In some curious way, I had the feeling he was relieved.
8
AM I BROWN?
Yet the same trap that had caught Briney was set for me.
According to Matt, it had already snapped shut. He joked a bit too often about me being “tied hand and foot by apron strings.” It would take an earthquake to shake me loose from home now, he told Miss Brown. What he based this conclusion on was the fact that I hadn’t set out on my own after graduating from college, but had blithely moved back with my parents.
It was what most of my crowd did in the 1940’s—my friend, Raoul, for instance, still lived with his mother, and he wasn’t even young. For me, living at home was just a stopgap until I could finish the novel I was trying to write. However, there is no denying that a year after the manuscript had been sent out (and sent back) I still hadn’t gotten around to claiming my independence—had even forgotten I was supposed to. I was having fun, and it didn’t hurt anyone. At least, not so long as my family didn’t know the precise nature of it. One had to be very careful. Very careful! As yet, “out” wasn’t in.
And anyway, Matt was in no position to criticize me. Although he fended for himself now, he had been passed around the foster home circuit till he was sixteen and still prized the maternal bond so highly, he was always borrowing a sympathetic older woman to provide it. He called his landlady “Mom,” sent flowers to near-strangers on Mother’s Day, and especially kept Miss Brown busy—phoned her every morning, brought her little gifts, and gallantly protected her from her own opinion. When she spoke of herself as being an old maid he got indignant. “I don’t like you to belittle yourself that way,” he said.
“But my dear, it’s the truth,” she said in surprise. “Saying so doesn’t hurt my feelings.”
“Well, it hurts mine,” he said.
I don’t think Miss Brown was prepared for such devotion. She was nearly fifty, an earnest Scot from Edinburgh who, for years, had come to our house every second day to take my dad’s dictation. Matt, on the other hand, was blond and handsome, a promising young contract player at Twentieth Century-Fox. “Matt McCall” was the name the studio had given him, and although our affair had not lasted, our friendship had. He continued to drop in on my mother and younger sister, especially when he knew Miss Brown would be there.
“She heard I was testing for a part in The Green Years that needed a Highland accent, so she offered to coach me,” he explained later. “And then we kept meeting even after I didn’t get the stupid role.”
“Oh, he would have been really fine in that part, if he had only worked on it,” she confided to me once. “But you know how Matt is. He never got around to reading the script—just the lines he was supposed to speak—so he didn’t do much with characterization. When I think of it, I could give him such a scold!”
I could not imagine the scold she would give anyone. She always spoke briskly, as if reporting news for the BBC, but at the mere suggestion of controversy, she vanished into efficiency. Accustomed to her reserve, I didn’t ask her about this friendship with Matt, but I kidded him a little. “What are you going to do?” I asked. “Make an honest woman of her?”
Instead of the laugh I expected, he answered thoughtfully, “She’s already the most honest woman I know.”
I began to watch this relationship more carefully, perhaps a little protective of Miss Brown myself. She had been an almost invisible part of my life since I was fifteen. While I was away at prep school, I began to notice the initials of a new typist at the bottom of the letters my father wrote to me: MIB. Eventually, little messages from MIB also appeared. “Your father did not get around to signing this,” she might say. Or “I enclose a stamped envelope, so you can reply at once.” If these postscripts were longer than two lines, she signed them with archaic business formality, “Faithfully, M. I. Brown.” The M stood for Muriel, I learned. The second initial was for Isbister, a name new to me then, and still.
She was a bird-boned little woman, whose hair appeared to be dyed with iodine. Actually, it went rather well with her clear blue eyes. When we had lunch out on the patio, she always chose to sit in the shade, for her skin was delicate, and already had that faint pucker special to birthday balloons the day after the party. Generally, she dressed as if for a stroll on the moors—tweeds, twin-set sweaters, and little brogues—but when she stayed for dinner, she fished a string of tiny pearls out of her purse, and put them on.
All of us were fond of her, but as a family, we kidded each other a lot, and she got her share of this too. I don’t think she ever understood it, but she was a good sport. “Right you are!” she’d say to the worst of it. She had no patience with complaint. If a problem couldn’t be helped, she consigned it to another lifetime, where things like straight hair or susceptibility to drafts would presumably be readjusted. “Next time around,” she would say. To me, generally caught up in some crisis, s
he offered sound advice, although the British idiom was sometimes startling. “Just keep your pecker up,” she urged.
Only once did she allude to her private life, and then indirectly, after Jabot died. It had been her joy to pamper our overweight cocker spaniel bitch; “Wee Jabsy,” she called her, with such honied approval that the dog sometimes peed in sheer bliss. She heard the news of Jabot’s death stoically, but two days later, while taking dictation, she suddenly pitched forward onto her knees with that kind of wild weeping that almost passes for laughter. “I have nothing,” she cried out. “I have nothing! Not husband nor home, and even Jabsy wasn’t mine.”
My father could do little but kneel there beside her and hold her hand, waiting for the anguished rebellion to pass. As I learned later, he was finally able to remind her she wasn’t alone, that she still had her family. Knowing him, he probably meant ourselves; but her answer suggests she had missed this point. “Then what am I doing so far away from them?” she asked, half under her breath.
Possibly that was when the change began. I would find her watching me thoughtfully in the weeks that followed, and sometimes asking odd questions: did living at home satisfy me? was I content? did I feel I’d sold out? She kept asking my father questions too, mostly about investments, and was quick to follow his advice. “The canny Scot, y’know,” she would tell him, trying to disguise her seriousness with a wink. “‘Put not your trust in money, but your money in trust.’”
It was Matt who eventually told me what she was saving up for. “She’s suddenly got it in her head to retire,” he said. “Wants to go back to Edinburgh where her sister and brother-in-law still live—take her place in the family, and all that.”
Whatever I replied, he interrupted. “It’ll just be a big disappointment to her,” he asserted. “She’d do a lot better to stay right here in Los Angeles.”
“But what’s here for her?” I asked.
He laughed in a kind of abashment. “Me.”
I laughed too, and he picked up on it. “What’s so funny about that?” he demanded. “People do take care of each other, y’know.”
“Matt, you don’t even take care of yourself,” I said. He knew this was true. He was making quite decent money at Twentieth just then, had a great wardrobe, and an attractive apartment in Beverly Hills; yet his life had no shape. Most of his time was spent waiting for his agent to phone, or fretting about the breaks he wasn’t getting at the studio, and the possibility that his looks wouldn’t last. The scotch he turned to for solace wasn’t always the canny kind.
“And there’s another thing,” I added. “Miss Brown’s very conventional. I mean very! Is she aware that you do a bit of embroidery?”
“I’m not presenting myself to her as a lover, for God’s sake,” he exploded. “I’m a friend! I’m her confidant, I’m—” He gestured wildly, distracting attention from the word that must have crossed his mind: her child! “Well, I don’t care,” he continued, mutinously. “I can’t let her go.”
He dropped by for her after work almost every night now, and sometimes asked me to join them. Increasingly, there were others along too. One of them was Matt’s current love, a handsome and affectionate young Mexican dancer named Gaspar. Not that anyone ever called him Gaspar—the inexplicable slant of his eyes had inspired the nickname “Chinguilito.” Somehow, he was able to teach Muriel the principle, if not the abandon, of the rhumba. Calvin, too. Cal, a male nurse who took care of my father’s elderly cousin, was a big shy boy from Iowa, whose shock of straight brown hair hung diagonally over his brow like a guillotine blade. “Now, all together!” Chingie commanded. “One, and two, and—” While he hummed Besame Mucho, Muriel and Cal gingerly waggled.
Before I could escape it, I was part of this closed community. Matt always had something planned for Muriel’s entertainment. If there were only four of us, we played cards; five, we went to the movies, and six, he cooked. These were engaging times—warm, easy-going, full of laughter. I presumed they were a long-standing tradition, but Chingie told me the group had only been meeting since Muriel had decided to go back to Scotland. “It’s all part of Matt’s scheme,” he confided. “He thinks that her belonging to a—y’know—fun group I’ll make her decide to stay on in L.A.”
“Do you think it’ll work?” I asked.
He shook his head. “She is too—” He giggled, and drew a square with his forefinger.
That’s what I thought too. Remaining here as the bosom buddy of a group of young unmarried men was just too unconventional for a fifty-year-old maiden-lady to consider. Possibly Matt came to that conclusion too, for the next time we met for dinner at his apartment, he provided her a more orthodox reason to stay in town: his name was Charlie. Gray-haired and affable, he had been a publicist at Twentieth Century-Fox, and claimed to have discovered Linda Darnell. That was long ago, however, and now he was retired, a widower, and lonely. “But not that lonely!” he told Matt after his first evening in Muriel’s company.
The most I can say for Matt’s matchmaking is that it was well-meaning.
Harold, a lot older than Muriel, took her out to dinner, and called her several times on the phone, but impressed us all as only wanting a free housekeeper. The most disappointing was Duncan, who was the right age, and a one-time Brit; Muriel found lots in common with him, but he was apparently more interested in a quick liaison with Chingie. There were a few more possibilities that Matt invited over before it occurred to him that maybe Muriel wasn’t interested in men. Just on chance, he arranged for her to meet Janet from the studio accounting department.
The whole crowd took to her immediately. She tended to take charge, but agreeably, and although her short, waved hair was graying, and her waist beginning to thicken, she had somehow preserved the look of an errant twelve-year-old boy. The night she first joined us, we went to a driving range and sent golf balls flying into a floodlit distance. Janet performed brilliantly, but to our surprise, so did Muriel. “But why is that strange?” she laughed. “After all, where did golf come from? Scotland! Scotland!”
Janet drove her home that night, and Matt held up crossed fingers. When I phoned him at ten, the next day, he had already talked to Janet. “Oh, Brownie’s a darling,” she told him. “I’m looking forward to seeing her again.”
“Ýeah, sure, but how did it work out?” Matt persisted.
Janet laughed. “Put it this way, honey—she hears the bell ringin’, but she doesn’t answer the door.”
Janet joined us often, that late summer, but the situation didn’t change. Nor did Muriel’s plans for retiring. In September, on the night before she flew back to Scotland, we met at her rented rooms. They were tiny, neat and nearly anonymous, except for the photographs still on the fake fireplace: an enlarged picture of Jabot, a glossy eight-by-ten studio portrait of Matt, and a blurred little snapshot of her Edinburgh relatives. “All the principals of the drama,” Janet whispered.
Over and over, a gramophone kept playing an ancient record that Calvin had brought as appropriate to the occasion—Ethel Waters singing Am I Blue?
There was a big platter of the chilis rellenos that Chingie had made for a late supper, and Matt had provided a couple of bottles of champagne as a going-away present for Muriel. I watched her in the middle of these friends, suddenly noticing the difference in her. It wasn’t just the more kindly color Matt had recommended for her hair, or the less rigid posture Chingie had been helping her adopt. Sitting back in her chair, with her little thimble of scotch, and wholly at rest in the activity that swirled around her, she was downright pretty.
Or maybe I was a little drunk. By midnight, everyone was. Too bright, too brash, too sentimental. By popular demand, Cal stood up and, beaming, stammering, described his famous meeting with Hedy Lamarr at the Hollywood Canteen, back when he was in the army. She would dance with no one but him, and at the evening’s end, had looked up at him through her lashes, and suggested he come home with her. It was a soldier’s dream, and yet he had blushed and b
lurted that he couldn’t, Captain would be sore if he got back to camp late. Everyone at the party fell apart with laughter, except Chingie, who cried out, “Golly, I’d have gone with her just to see how her house was decorated.”
All of us danced with Muriel, and once she was a Muriel sandwich, me on one side of her, Cal on the other. “Am I Blue?” Ethel Waters sang out again. “Am I Blue?” Matt snatched Muriel’s little felt hat off a hook, and, tipping it over one eye, strutted across the room. “M. I. Brown?” he sang, in counterpoint. “M. I. Brown?” Miss Brown answered him back, singing out the next stanza in a clear, droll voice. “Was I gay? For a day—?”
It was the first time she had ever given any hint that she knew our secret, and everyone in the room shouted with delight, closing in on her with glasses raised. “Well, I would be, if I could be, boys,” she cried. “I’ve wished, oh, many times, I could live my life as you live yours—with courage and laughter, daring to be different. Daring, in spite of what people thought. Maybe then, I wouldn’t have wasted so many years alone. But—” She lifted up her glass to us. “—maybe next time around! Cheers, dears!”
Cheer we did, and knocked back our drinks, and when Matt spiritedly dashed his glass against the fake fireplace, nobody kidded him for being dramatic
Letters from Muriel began arriving soon after her return to Scotland—long single-spaced typewritten pages that scarcely left room at the end for her customary pledge of fidelity. “Clearly, she’s very happy,” my mother said. “Her family around her, at last.”
I agreed emphatically, glad to have my own preference for home justified. Matt, however, got a different impression from the letters he received. One had to read between the lines, he said. She never included a word of complaint—passed the whole thing off as a joke on herself—but obviously, he said, she had outgrown the nest. For one thing, attitudes that were quite ordinary in California were simply not acceptable in Scotland. The accent and idiom she had brought back from the United States especially offended her brother-in-law. And not entirely behind her back, her nieces called her “the American.” Her clothes, even more than her independence, worried the family; seemed inappropriate, even pretentious. “Yesterday, my sister accused me of ‘putting on the dog’,” she wrote, apparently caught between laughter and astonishment, “and it was just my old navy blue wool.”