by Jess Gregg
“I never knew Joan Crawford well, when I was a girl in Hollywood,” Agnes mused. “My mother and father didn’t approve of her—Joan was a starlet in those days, and you know what that meant! But when I was raising money for the ballet company recently, I wrote her a note, reminding her that we had been girls together, and she phoned up the next day inviting me to drop by—”
She seemed to relish each detail of Crawford’s huge two-story apartment in New York. “—clear plastic slip-covers over everything, my dear, like a provincial bordello—” “—couldn’t see a toilet anywhere in her bathroom, until it occurred to me that that ruffled hoopskirt in the corner might be—” “—and her bedroom! Oh, God, it was incredible! So bloody pink! Not an ordinary baby pink,” she added. “Not rose pink either, but the color of—” She searched the distances for the exact shade she had in mind. “—the color,” she said suddenly, “of cheap dentures!”
My favorite evening there occurred when Jan Peerce, the grand old tenor of the Metropolitan Opera, phoned to remind Agnes that she and her party were coming to his opening at some big Catskill hotel that night. “I’d forgotten all about it,” she confessed when she hung up. “Really hate to disappoint him—but—”
I understood her hesitation: these openings were ritually gala, and the clothes I had brought along were scarcely fit for a picnic. I urged the rest of them to go without me, but that was too much like surrender for Agnes. “We’ll all go, or none!” she stated. “My God, what am I known for, if not pulling rabbits out of hats?”
The attic yielded up a dinner jacket from her late father’s wardrobe. It fitted me in only three places, but Agnes let down the sleeves as far as possible. As moths had made off with the trousers, Walter volunteered some navy blue slacks. They were too large, but “you’ll be sitting down most of the time anyway.” I borrowed a dress shirt and tie from Jonathan, which left only shoes to be extemporized, and we finally dyed a pair of maroon leather bedroom slippers with India ink. Nobody suggested that the conglomerate look would revolutionize men’s wear, but I had a wonderful time. Peerce was magnificent, the crowd was jeweled and jubilant, and by the next week, the India ink had finally worn off my feet.
Yet even the relaxed atmosphere of Merriewold could not exorcize Agnes for long. The memory of some injustice would suddenly spur her into recrimination, a savage eloquence that was exhausting to her, and a strain on the listener.
Once this began, she would end a friendship before she would change the subject. It was she, one realized, who was eaten alive.
Typical was the anger she directed at Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II. “Did I or did I not make a notable contribution to those shows?” she would demand. “It made them millions in royalties. Millions! And what do they toss me in appreciation? Loose change! Nickels and dimes, so that I have to scramble around and beg people for enough money to keep my dancers alive.”
Eventually, I asked her if she wasn’t afraid such recurrent anger would finally destroy the lyric quality that was her greatest gift. She tossed her head. “For all you know,” she retorted, “that anger is my lyric quality.”
They lived side by side in her, the madrigal and the jeremiad, the voluptuous and the chaste. She was often in love, and yet as far as I know, never strayed outside her marriage. This delicate balance was unconsciously achieved by falling in love only with young men who could not quite reciprocate. Her romance with a handsome, but totally paralyzed English boy is legend today. So were her infatuations with male dancers, good looking and intelligent, but gay.
Ironically, she was very antagonistic to homosexuality, and I found her constantly trying to find out which side I stood on. In an effort to preserve our friendship, I became increasingly guarded. This, however, offended her almost as much as an open admission—the very act of holding something back seemed either perverse or unnatural. I barely escaped with my life, one night, when I took her to a play of mine off-Broadway, Shout from the Rooftops. After the final curtain, while we were trying to hail a cab, I asked her how she had liked it. According to my journal, her answer was succinct: she didn’t.
I laughed. “Love your tact, dear.”
“Tact is your strategy, not mine,” she retorted. “Read my books, hear me lecture, then ask what I spare even myself. Do I try to pass myself off as sweet-tempered, gentle, or even gentile? Do I hide my failures, my pressure, my impossible drive? No! Every wart is there to be seen, every card face-up on the table. Can you say the same?”
I was silent, and she moved closer, her voice passionate and persuasive. “Caution, diplomacy, tact—they have no place in creative people. A writer should use his fear instead of hiding it. He should make everything work for him, bring it all out in the open—anger, failure, shame! All of it!”
I knew what she was addressing, and for an instant was tempted to own up about myself. However, my arrest had made me distrustful of straight people—they had used my honesty as a weapon against me before, and I was not about to repeat that mistake. Instead, I stepped out into the street, and shouted at a passing car, “Cab!” Being a private vehicle, it did not stop, but the suddenness and stridency of my voice broke the tension and successfully changed the subject.
However, she always brought it back, and our rapport began to suffer. Suddenly it fell apart. One day, I mentioned one of her dancers, the beautiful Betty Low, for so many years my closest friend, and abruptly Agnes wheeled on me. “Why did you never marry her?” she demanded. “Why have you never married at all?”
“My God,” I cried, “you’d think you and I were married, the nagging I put up with.”
My voice was too loud, my face too close. She drew herself up with towering dignity, and as she turned away, blindly plowed into a little table, knocking it over. That did it! My reply she could dismiss or even top, but no one saw her make an awkward move, and lived.
Betty Low in Agnes de Mille’s Bloomer Girl.
Our reconciliation was not easy. That same year, I began spending more and more time on the east end of Long Island. Occasionally, I wrote Agnes a note, and occasionally received a reply. She sent me some tickets to a gala concert in which she was to appear in the City, but our plans changed suddenly with the news that she had had a stroke. I drove to the hospital at once, bringing some lilies from my garden. I was not allowed to see her, of course, nor were the people who knew her far better than I. She was alive, but the word in the corridors was that death would be kinder for someone who lived so intensely for the nuance of movement.
Yet Agnes would not be written off so easily. I followed the progress of her recovery, although it was a long time before our actual communication resumed. Once in a while, we spoke on the phone. Each time, the slur in her speech was less noticeable; but healing was slow. It was not for another two years that I actually saw her again.
She had invited me to lunch. Her apartment, at least, was the same as ever. Waiting for her to be brought in, I traced my fingertips along the row of bound theatre magazines I had never had time to open. The little porcelain Bacchus I had once mended was still on a shelf. Then I heard her call from an inner room, peremptorily advising her luncheon guests, “Don’t anyone help me!”
In she came, clad in a great coral-colored caftan, pushing a light metal walker in front of her. It was indeed Agnes, damaged but indomitable, a perambulating sibyl, carefully made up as if for the stage, her thinned white hair drawn back by a green chiffon bow. As she made the round of her guests, her glance was keen, and she was cordial, but she did not smile. The hand she held out to me seemed boneless, the consistency of a breast.
Speaking as precisely as ever, and as unceremoniously, she led the way to the table. No one was allowed to do anything for her. Although her food had been prepared so she could eat it with minimal effort, she still favored her left hand. As always, she dominated the conversation, and only once seemed at a loss for words. This happened when I passed around an old snapshot I had found in a Kensington curio shop. It was
of Agnes in Algerian costume, taken when she was a young dancer struggling to make her name in London. She examined the photograph searchingly, so silent that others at the table became silent too, and I thought I had made a mistake in bringing it. “Yes,” she said with sudden vigor. “The Bazaar Girl. She was one of my best—a characterization I did at concerts and private parties, back then. Not really a dance at all—it was acting too, and singing.”
“You sang?” someone asked.
To prove it, she raised her voice in a loud, completely unmodulated Algerian street song, as much a come-on as a lament. There was nothing here of de Mille, the self-guarded monument. Sitting at the head of the table was an unwashed Moorish baggage, clinking with bangles, her bold kohl-encircled eyes punctuating her song with quick, hard glances at the passersby. Even when the wail of her words ended, she loudly hummed her own accompaniment, and, never moving from her chair, delivered the requisite undulations. Chewing betel nuts, sometimes spitting, her eyes half-closed, she wove her arms about, serpent like, and by pressing her palms together above her brow, formed the outline of a mosque dome, in which her head smoothly slid from side to side. I suddenly realized that, deeply absorbed in her characterization of the girl, Agnes was unconsciously using muscles the doctor had pronounced dead. She realized this at the same moment, and our eyes met in astonishment.
I winked at her, but this moment was too special for her to share with anyone. She turned her head toward the housekeeper, once more rigidly inaccessible. “I think you might bring in the dessert now,” she said.
16
A CREDIT TO SOCIETY
My younger sister, Noo, cried at the wedding. She didn’t know the bride very well, but the groom and most of the guests at the reception had been her friends at school, and she seemed determined to introduce me to each one of them. Their names had all begun to sound alike by the time she presented me to a solemn man in a morning coat. Dexter was all I heard, and it seemed to echo.
“Who was that?” I whispered, as we walked away.
“Father of the bride,” Noo said. “Why?”
“No reason,” I said. Yet a moment later, I had to ask, “Is Dexter his first name, or last?”
“First,” she said. “Is he someone you’ve met before?”
“I’m not sure,” I told her. “I think when I was little, he lived at the end of our block.”
“Want to go back and ask him?”
Wanted to, yes. Just the same, I didn’t. If he was who I thought, what could I say to him? You can’t just go up to a man at his daughter’s wedding reception, and ask, “Was it you who sexually molested me when I was five?”
I was too savvy to believe that, except for him, I might have grown up straight—after all, his delinquency had apparently not altered his genetic direction—yet the impulse to kid him about it persisted. All the next day, I entertained myself by picturing his reaction to my blockbuster question. Sometimes he backed away in confusion, sometimes his nostrils flared dangerously, and he ordered me out of the place. In my more realistic fantasies, he looked at me vacantly, without the faintest idea of what I was talking about. The fact was, I had only a foggy recollection of what had happened, myself. Parts of the image would start to take shape—the sullen expression of his eyes, for instance—and then fade out just an instant short of certainty.
There had been a lot of half-remembering since I had returned to Los Angeles after so many years—a constant and thwarting sense of déjà vu: faces I almost remembered, names I nearly recalled, streets that were familiar, yet led nowhere. Even when my hunches turned out to be right, time had already cancelled them. The day we drove along Santa Monica Beach, for instance. “Am I crazy?” I asked Noo. “Didn’t there used to be a big sugar loaf of a rock here? We called it Charlie Chaplin’s Rock, or something.”
She nodded. “Castle Rock, really. Only it was declared unsafe a few years ago, and they dynamited it.”
Actual confrontation with the past exploded things just as effectively. One afternoon, I happened past the grammar school where my older sister Sharlie had gone to first grade, and it was not at all the intimidating brick fortress I remembered, but small and rather faded, with paper cut-outs pasted on the windows. And on the day after the wedding reception, when I obeyed an impulse to find the house my family had rented during my early years, I couldn’t even recall how to get there. Yet surely, I reasoned, if I had sat beside my mother as she drove home from market every day, long ago, the directions must still be in my head. Putting myself in neutral, I just kept driving about, susceptible to any hint, waiting to be shown. Suddenly making an unexpected turn, I found myself looking down a street I didn’t instantly recognize, but which identified itself by the rush of sensation up my spine.
This quickly changed to disappointment. Only the street sign was the same.
I remembered the number of our house—3944—but the building at that address was now a top-heavy modern duplex whose upstairs windows flaunted orange curtains that would have made Bauma, my mother’s mother, roll her expressive eyes to heaven. The oaks that lined the boulevard were still there, but the monumental peach tree I used to climb was gone, and the Saturday smell of backyard incinerators had long since been outlawed. The entire frame of reference of my early childhood was suddenly threatened, and in an effort to re-establish it, I parked the car and walked up the block, peering about for substantiation. Brown iris still grew in our neighbor’s yard, though I had not recalled them as being so ugly. The dark, genteel residence where The Society Lady (as we used to call her) had lived was still standing, but was weathered now, with a For Sale sign stuck in the lawn. The final house on the block was white instead of the gray it once was, and the two-car garage behind it had been rebuilt. A curious clash of childish alarm and curiosity authenticated the site: this is where Dexter had lived. Suddenly, his last name flashed through me. Hasbrook. Dexter Hasbrook.
The other facts did not shoot into place so spontaneously. While the general picture swept over me now like a silent avalanche, most of the details only sneaked back when I was thinking of something else the following week—lying on the beach, having lunch alone at the Farmers’ Market, waiting in some agent’s outer office. Nothing was in chronological order, and much of it was wildly irrelevant. An earlier cadence began to fill my ears, and all of it, even the most inconsequential, still seemed charged with the excitement of a five-year-old boy knowing something that the grown-ups didn’t.
This secret had been so big, I was scarcely able to move without spilling it. Trouble was, none of my family was around to spill it to. My sister Sharlie had abandoned me for the first grade. My dad left for his office in downtown Los Angeles right after breakfast every day, and my mother rested a lot—she was making a nest under her heart, Bauma said. Even Bauma herself was too busy to listen to me, this being her day to make gingersnaps. I hopped around the kitchen on one foot, getting in her way until she had to notice. “What is it, Buddy?”
I tried to tell her what had happened, but now that I had her attention, I couldn’t find any of the words I needed. Usually I had no trouble telling anyone anything. My dad said I was the all-time standing-up sitting-down champion talker. He called me J. Bud Jabberjaw because I had so much to tell. Like the day I found the dead gopher. Or the time I was brushing my teeth in front of the mirror, and suddenly realized I was alive. That had been hard to explain, but not so hard as this. So I kept talking about everything else first—my cousin Billly’s visit, and the tree house I wanted to build. Finally I managed to tell her about wandering down the block and climbing up the barrels in Dexter Hasbrook’s garage. Except the new batch of gingersnaps was ready to take out of the oven just then, and Bauma turned back to it. She gave me a cookie still hot, and told me to run along and play.
So I went upstairs. I nearly always did what she wanted, because she was my favorite person. Or anyway, next to my mother, she was. Her eyes were bright, and she was soft to sit on. She wanted me to grow up to be a
credit to society, and an architect. Bauma was more fun than my other grandmother, and wore a long string of amber beads that she said were tears a tree had wept for her. Another reason I liked her was the look on her face when she’d ask which hand do you want. Even better was the way she sang the song about the girl who hid in a chest on her wedding day, and wasn’t found till she was moldering bones. Bauma was a natural-born actress, my father said. He liked to tease her by saying terrible things so she would react. When I was born, he told her I looked like a baked potato. She drew the air up her nose, and said, “Why, that’s a beautiful baby!” My dad said the look on her face was a doozer! It was a word he said a lot, but Bauma didn’t like me to use it. She said it was slang, and gentlemen didn’t.
What gentlemen did was very important to Bauma. Gentlemen kept their hands clean all the time, and told the truth, and wore their garters. My cousin Billy didn’t have to wear garters, and called me a sissy. I didn’t like him much. We had a cedar chest in our hall, but I couldn’t think of any way to make him get into it and molder. Anyway, I cut those old garterrs with Bauma’s fingernail scissors, and told her they had fallen apart.
She didn’t believe me. She found the garters in the wastebasket, and told me they had not fallen apart at all, but had been cut. I could not understand how she had figured that out so easily. I began to wonder if she knew everything else I hadn’t told her. I wondered especially if she knew what had happened in the garage up the block.
In case she already knew, I said, “I went into Dexter Hasbrook’s garage.” She said “Oh?” and asked if Dexter Hasbrook was someone I played with. I said yes, But I did not say that Dexter Hasbrook was grown up.
He wore long trousers and slicked his hair straight back, and went to junior high. He did not get mad when he found me playing in his garage, but he did not smile. I had never talked to grown boys before. Or rather, they had never talked to me. Except Dexter Hasbrook didn’t really talk, he just whispered, and looked back over his shoulder. He took out his thing, and wanted to put it in my mouth. I didn’t want to. So he sat down on a box, and pulled me onto his lap. He opened my pants and rubbed my thing with his handkerchief. It did not hurt, but after a while I got tired of it, and went home.