The Bobby-Soxer

by Hortense Calisher

  “So are you—” she said. “An heiress. Three quarters of the money is in trust, for you and your brother, as each of you attains twenty-five, or at the discretion of the trustees. And it’s a lot.”

  “Not through Grandpa, then? The money?”

  “No, poor dear. Though he sends you his love.” My other grandparents did well enough on their pretensions, which included some fancy relatives, but the pension that allowed this would die with him. “No. No connection of his.”

  “Then who left it?” Who was this Leslie Warden?

  She was plumper. I had just noticed it.

  “Your father’s—friend.”

  Who all these years, apparently—though who could be sure—had parlayed my father’s support, and maybe his gifts, into the divers stocks and bonds which had been bequeathed. Or so my mother had been told—whether by the lawyers only or by my father as well, she did not say. It may be that she was told nothing, except that the money had been left.

  There was no need to say why. “What a horrible act,” I said. “You’re not going to take it?”

  She was not as quick to agree as I had expected.

  “At least if it had been left to him—” I said. Returned, one might say then. Even if threefold.

  “The jewelry’s been left to him. There’s quite a lot.”

  That was the second time I had heard that phrase.

  “What tact!” I said. The morning sun was streaming in, showing us his empty dressing room at the bedroom’s far end, shining with his special furniture, given him as his mother’s wedding present, which Knobby had made lustrous once more. I had never before spoken to her that way. Last evening had left me with a feeling of success I couldn’t localize. “Well, at least he never even wears a signet ring.” On her silence, I turned. “Mother. You’re not going to. Wear the stuff.”

  “For God’s sake no,” she said. “What do you take me for? He’ll sell.”

  Then she came forward, in her furry morning gown. Last night when I came up the stairs, we had just embraced, under her “In the morning, my darling,” and had fallen toward our beds. Bounding up early, with a zest I ascribed to her homecoming, I had gone for a walk, dressed in the jodhpurs and other rig bought for the promised horse we had had to flub buying last year after all, and had then brought her up a tray, knowing it took her days to divest herself of the South. Sun always made her blink; she was for later hours. “Feel as if I’ve—never seen you before … I haven’t. Darling, you’ve gone and grown again.” She’d never minded; she was old-fashioned only by whim. “How much is it now?”

  “Six foot three.”

  She mused. She was thinking of my brother. When you don’t love enough, your own disaffection still leaves an emptiness. I myself might one day know that for a husband, though never for a child.

  She now surveyed me, her manner a cross between the grooms at Tipton’s Livery down home, where we could ride for almost nothing, and Miss DeVore. “Handsome indeed, you are. In the new mode. But now it had better stop.” She lifted a hand to the top of my head and rapped it smartly with the flat of her palm. “Stop, do you hear?” She listened, head cocked, the way we had crouched in the grass and listened for leprechauns when I was four. “Stop.”

  Then we laughed and kissed.

  And do you know, I did stop. I believe you can talk to the genes to a degree, about their apportionment. Or they lie in wait, for what comes.

  At the moment, I snitched a piece of her toast. “Well, I’m not planning to accept that money.”

  In her almost amused glance at my nibbling, I saw how I had always been provided for. Still, my flesh crept at any change in her stance, until then gallant to me. Like the autumn hills which surrounded all our meannesses. “You won’t then? Refuse.”

  “I doubt if it’s to be done that way.”

  Whether it would signify anything much, she would have meant, though I wouldn’t have seen that, then.

  I said I doubted I would want to live on that lady. “Even if the money did come out of us.”

  The phrase made my mother giggle. She had brought back with her even more of the South than I thought. Or I was now more critical of her.

  She saw. Whether or not she later went along with my notions of honor because of her own, or because of the delay her own windfall would prove to undergo, I do not know. She stared up at me almost flirtatiously from our now so different heights. “My God, how we’re going to be able to dress you, my darling. And not from Miss DeVore.”

  When she sold our house to Gilbert, the town was not surprised, only analytical. In a place where all were so defined by their houses, any new turn of ownership shook those foundations first, and gossip might dwell on the buyer as much as on the seller—as happened here. Significantly, no one assumed my father and mother might be getting a divorce. As had long been clear, my mother and father were not the sort to ratify private changes of heart publicly. In the same way, though our family did not attend church, no minister had ever dared solicit us.

  “She never did care much for your house, did she?” women neighbors murmured to me, in case I should need consoling. Meanwhile, as rumor of some inheritance reached them, they were more forward with me about Greensboro than they would ever have dared with her, probing me for description of our “plantation” there. When I said we had none, and that my grandfather had been a cotton factor, now retired, they smiled knowingly; we were also the sort whose prospects of wealth would have been kept from the children. “Is Warden on your father’s side or your mother’s?” one did ask, with the impudence of a person inside our house only because of the tag sale. My mother, gliding by just then, smiled, speaking one more word on the subject than she had to our real neighbors. “Both.”

  “Well, they’re sure not selling any of the good stuff,” the woman said to her friend, after. “And that’s one in the eye for Gilbert Walsh.”

  Gilbert himself, with his wider horizons, may well have suspected my mother’s inheritance had some dark non-family root to it, since, besides reading the New York papers cover to cover, as well as real estate journals and maybe even notices of wills at probate, he did know some of the details of the dissolution of my father’s firm. Whatever else he did know he kept to himself, just as, even though he had not got my grandmother’s house, he no longer spoke of wanting the house in Cobble Row. By buying ours he had moved up a step, and in our town one did not do that lightly, especially not a restaurateur, who had to be liked, and wasn’t quite. As Gilbert himself said, “I have to go along with everything.”

  The last night she and I were in the old place, he and Luray and we were once again on the porch. Mrs. Evams was there, too. Mr. Evams had sent his regrets; he was involved in deciphering and authenticating an old manuscript in braille for a university library and didn’t wish to leave it alone in the house. The usual things were said about intruders, though no one here had as yet experienced any, except for now and then a late-night trash-vandalizing at Walsh’s Inn, as it was now called, and even that might have been the work of dogs.

  On the porch, I no longer sat back behind the others; there were now not enough of us. Besides, I no longer cared to. My father and Mr. Evams, though never close friends, had between them kept up an unspoken balance beyond which gossip did not go. I realized now that I had enjoyed watching this, the way one watches a vanished handcraft. Instead, tonight I was the one being raked over.

  “So the money for the house is all going to you,” Luray said brashly. “No wonder your ma insisted all cash. Looks like you already begun to spend it.”

  They joshed their own child that way, but my mother bristled, though only I could see it. No one had ever called her a “ma” before, either. “Lord & Taylor. They had a late spring sale on cashmeres.” She wouldn’t say to them as she had to me: They have the only tall girl’s shop where you should ever buy. She had put my name on her charge account, and the sum for the house in a trust Mr. Evams would be managing, with an allowance for me.
/>
  “It’s for college.” I held out my arm for Mrs. Evams to feel, adding softly, “Yellow. And the skirt is kind of a teal.” Though she had never known color, she liked being in on the names of it.

  “Well, you can sure afford a good one.” Luray had wanted Gilbert to press my mother harder on the price, reportedly saying that there was no reason to treat grass widows as if they were real ones, but Gilbert had known better. “Which one you going to?”

  “I’ve applied for three in the Boston area. But I’ll go to whichever gives a scholarship.”

  “Scholarship? With thirty-seven thousand dollars in the till?”

  “Can it, Luray,” her husband said. “Girl has a brain, no reason she has to be poor to get paid for having it.”

  Mrs. Evams hovered a hand over the tea and coffee pots. “Which one of these is tea?” She knew perfectly well. She was only trying to change the subject, which she did, if not for the best; the blind can’t know everything. Or perhaps, with all the loopholes in our family life, there was no best.

  “Well-l, you can summer in Rio, then,” Luray said—“in’t our summer their winter? Sure be educational. A plantation.” The town had determined we must have one.

  “Dad and his associates don’t grow coffee. They only deal in it.” All my mother and I really knew was that my father and brother shared a flat with a Mr. Peralho, a longtime friend and one of the associates.

  Luray served herself. “Well, I sure do relish a good cup of it.”

  Gilbert had his own irritations. He held out his cup to my mother. “You could have knocked me over with a feather, though. When I heard you were going to live with the old girl.”

  Since my father’s installments of money seemed to be at his associates’ whim, my mother, receiving her own new money in the nick of time, had applied some of it to my grandmother’s costs, offering to go on doing so. She now bent forward with fine effect, pouring from the pot but also looking into Gilbert’s face.” My mother-in-law and I have an arrangement. I’ll support her in the house for her lifetime. That way, she can be sure of leaving it to her grandson.” She was telling him that he would never get his hands on it. But it was Luray who made a little telltale moaning sound.

  I saw that Gilbert already knew. Sometimes I wished I owned a restaurant, for all you could learn there. Or that I could work at Gilbert’s. But this my parents would never allow. Even in summer, none of the waitresses were college.

  “I hear she’ll make an upstairs apartment,” he said, his face red. “That’s desecration, the old Tartar.”

  “Why no, there already is one,” my mother said. “They had it built when they came here. A sort of dower-house for the future. Families did that, then.”

  I saw that the Walshes, as recent arrivals, hadn’t known.

  I put my oar in, as my father would say. Inside our house, where his presence had been so infrequent, I forgot him, but outside here on the porch, in the shadow, all his savor, remote and careful, came back to me. “I wouldn’t mind living up there. It’s the prettiest part of the house.”

  I had chosen the wrong word. The rooms up there, as handsome as the downstairs though without any of its Victorian uglinesses, had that extra fillip, or strange rightness, which enclosure sometimes gives. I had only seen them once, and then on the sly.

  “Oh, our Rosalie’s already spoken for your attic,” Luray said. “And her own phone. We would almost do it for that alone, I’ll say. But then you can make an attic so cute.”

  Our own house attic was nothing. But I smiled to myself, seeing their tubby Rosalie trundling around among that other third floor’s high armoires and gray-green leathers, and with her teenager phone propped on that altar-high desk.

  Mrs. Evams said: “Those three servant’s rooms off the kitchen here, that’s what our Brenda envies. A real little flat.”

  “She could have a room over here,” Luray said carelessly. Brenda was a treasure. “Scads of room, even after we redo. Then she could run back and forth to you.”

  “Thank you.” Mrs. Evams never used contractions, and finished off all her syllables. These were what she had to spare. “We prefer our solitude.” Her pale eyes and doll-fringe were pointed uncannily straight at Luray. I wondered what that domed forehead of hers would be like to touch. “In fact, no one over here has ever seen us as their responsibility.”

  “You bet,” Gilbert said. He raised his hands in a shrug to my mother and me, ignorant of how, in our tight fivesome around the old wicker table, the airflow would tell Mrs. Evams that. “Anyway, these girls have everything worked out, don’t they.” He put one hand on my mother’s knee, one on mine, and leaned heavily. “Boston. Seat of education … and medicine. By the way, Craig Towle’s wife’s gone back there to have her baby after all. Hit a snag. You heard?”

  I’d never believed that party would take place anyway—the one she’d promised me. I saw my mother hadn’t heard anything of this news either—though you would never know.

  I stood up. I was just learning the power of my height. Gilbert, still leaning forward on us, was in one of our old wicker rockers. He went over backward.

  I turned to Mrs. Evams. “May I go say hello-goodbye to Mr. Evams? I may go to Columbia Summer School.” I had just then thought of it.

  “We’ve missed you,” Mrs. Evams said, her face lifted tranquilly to all these rushes of air.

  As I went down our steps, Luray was helping Gilbert up. My mother was looking deep into the matching handkerchief Miss DeVore made for all her dresses. We made fun of them but never discarded them. When Gilbert had settled she said: “I know you hoped for us to let you have a lien on my mother-in-law’s house. She’ll burn it down first. But she’ll do anything for our boy. And a girl going to college needs a background to come home to.”

  “She’ll need a big one, your daughter,” Luray said. “Don’t lean back, Gilbert. I was going to offer for this porch set, but now I don’t know.”

  “Don’t bother,” I called up to her. “Nothing of ours will fit.”

  I knew it was childish of me. Time I was leaving though, before I knew everything—which at that period I thought possible. Even that it wasn’t me my mother wanted a background for, but herself. Why else would she ask me to stay, even for only summers and holidays, in the same house with a grandmother who avoided looking at me, though no small woman herself. Just because I wasn’t my brother. Or he wasn’t me.

  Why would my mother put herself there? Some women might get a mean pleasure from bailing out such a mother-in-law, but my mother would never waste her life enjoying a grudge. I wanted not to think of what she might be wasting her life at. From my father I knew only too well what a man looked like, talked like, when he was separating himself from more than a woman. From a life. Craig Towle had talked to me like that. If he was leaving town for good, then what was it in my grandmother’s house that would draw him back to it? Where my mother would once more be waiting, for him to pass by.

  No person had yet made me focus as she had on him. But now that I had seen it happen, I could be afraid that I might do the same.

  At the Evamses’ the porch light was on. In the glass transom over the front door I could see my face. Though I could scarcely find the face or the rest of me as amazing as others often seemed to, when a girl is tall enough to stare into transoms, then it is good that she can take some pleasure in staring. I rang the gong. Then I took the key from its hiding place, as the students did here, and pushed the door in. From then on, it was a game we all knew.

  I took one step forward, and waited. Then another, and again a pause. Finally, a third step, which—unless a foot or a shoe had somehow lost its characteristic, was the telltale one. I waited, forlorn. Change was my devil, these days. Then I heard the familiar cough—and held my breath.

  “We missed you,” Mr. Evams said.

  The grace of it washed over me. I was admitted to the comfort of being blind.

  Here, even before we were taught alphabet we were taugh
t something of that comfort. I took off my right shoe. The prehensile foot has more than a knowledge of floors. I kept the left foot shod, so that it might feel how much it missed. It was now the sighted one. Just so, we had been obliged to wear gloves of kid, then of surgical rubber, until at last we were allowed to touch the braille-blistered pages with the true power of skin. Watching the reading Evamses play that endlessly mute piano, I would swear their fingers did not touch the page.

  Eyes closed, I moved forward and sat down, inserting myself between table and chair without bumping the table’s curve. My body had remembered the space in a kind of measurement. My thighs contracted now to the wooden mold of these chair seats. I knew where I was, in a way that with the light on and my eyes wide I never would. I could smell his shaving soap. For sure, he would smell the curdled sweat in which I had left our porch.

  “What’s wrong?”

  He had a good teacher’s voice—like a key turning.

  “Oh—it’s all right,” I said, realizing that now it was. “But I am leaving. Or I will soon.”

  He nodded. I could feel it.

  We were silent together. With the eyes mutually closed, or as good as, silence is a live thing.

  “Why do I only know what I’m going to do, or what I feel—when I say it?”

  He chuckled. “You have quite a voice box, you know. Perhaps it’s that?”

  We considered.

  “Too good?”

  “No. Some are. But that’s elocution. Or opera.”

  We both laughed. Opera was too much for her and him.

  “A good speaking voice listens,” he said. “Yours does.”

  “Maybe that’s all my vocation is? Listening?” They knew I wanted one.

  He laughed. “Oh no. You’ll certainly speak.”

  “I’m sure not a painter.”