“Aren’t you,” he said indifferently. That could scarcely be settled here.
I opened my eyes.
“Yes, do,” he said. “It must be harder to keep them closed.”
Oh, they could be marvelously arrogant here. It was wonderful though, to be hedged in with them temporarily. People who got what they wanted daily because they had to.
“Watching the town,” I said. “I can’t stand to any longer. College is my only way of leaving it. Is that all right?”
“We’ll have some tea,” he said. “Turn on the light.”
It was manners for them to let us do that. And it taught us what we were being given back.
Once, when in the dark at the end of a lesson he had instructed someone to turn on the light, a sighted student had said, smirking, “It is on.” You can hear a smirk. He had never been allowed back.
Mr. Evams always made the tea, in the way the man of a couple will make the drinks. He handed me one of their Nippon cups, ugly in pattern but thin and light. The sofa was nondescript but quality-soft. The whole room was like that, an antidote for the show-off poisons, a narrow wisdom—pooled. I trusted it.
“What can’t you stand about it?” he said. “The town.”
“What they’re hooked on.”
“And what is that?”
I knew he would ask. The blind have to. I wanted him to, though I couldn’t think what to say. Then—I said it.
“Their ways of keeping up.”
He didn’t answer; he often didn’t. We rested so, while what I had said sank into me and out again, draining the sore.
“Would you like to see what I’m working on?”
The book was on his table, an old brown calf-bound volume, the kind that doesn’t give in.
“Read a page,” he said.
I washed my hands at the only tap I have ever seen in a library, dried them on the roller-towel, and sat down, waving them dry. It’s best to sit, for braille. The paper can be so thick that turning the pages can make a current. One gets to think of that air as like thought bubbling up, released.
These pages were so thin my fingertips felt coarse, and the marks were warped, like print under water. “I’ve forgotten it. Everything.”
“No, it’s French. Old French. Ronsard. The first ever printed for us.”
“Why—we had him, second term. I learned one poem by heart. Or almost. Quand tu seras—”
“Page trente-six,” he said.
I read it out as we did in French class, translating line by line—only with my eyes closed. “Quand tu seras bien vieille, assise auprès de feu—When you are quite old and seated by the fire” … I could hear him listening, tranquilly breath-clocking the rhythm. My voice expanded, toward the finish almost baritone; oh, if this could be a vocation I would know what to do. “Ron-sard m’a celébré, au temps que j’étais belle … Ronsard did celebrate me, in the time when I was—” I hesitated; “beautiful” was too many syllables. There was no English word that fitted.
“—‘Young,’” Mrs. Evams said, arriving soundlessly behind me. We all laughed.
She accepted a cup from him. “Our new neighbors don’t approve of our dark. They say it is an invitation. To bad characters. And downgrades the block.” The cup rattled in her hand, her anger sifting up. “They were watching over here. They approved of you two. They want us to light normally. Like now.” She turned to me. She always wore all gray clothes in winter, all white in summer; that way there were no awkward mistakes. Though once, when I had knitted her a navy-blue sweater, telling her how it would go with either, and how becoming it was, she had worn it incessantly. “You’ll tell us the truth. Are we? An invitation?”
How could I warn them? How could I not? Hadn’t I kept away from them, knowing I must? I thought of the white cameo of their bodies, ovaled against the pale furniture, Mr. Evams’s mother’s, which did entirely match both itself and them. I thought of Gilbert’s hand on my knee and on my mother’s, of his pudgy, inquisitive eye. Yet if I told them, I myself would break the spell forever. For them.
Opposite and up a flight, I could see our landing window, honorably shrouded ever since that night. Over this weekend the drapes would come down, not to be replaced. The Walshes liked a view, they said, and liked giving one. A good business habit, my mother had said, which must come from running that kind of restaurant.
I stood up. In this cued house I was afraid to open my mouth. Movement was only a deferral; no pretense was safe here. How they listened. How could I answer?
It comes through the body first, gesturing for the mind. All my life long I had watched that attitudinizing. Externalize.
I walked over to the nearest lightswitch and turned it off. They could hear the click. The voice coming in after had better be true. “Your dark—invited me.”
You begin with truth. After that you can lie.
You can lie, even to the blind. The warm currents tell you, streaming from their taut audience, supporting the magic they crave as much as you.
“Of course, there’s Brenda.” I made my voice rich with mirth. “When you’re gone, she tends to leave all the lights on downstairs. But once or twice when you were not. And once the curtains were left open, too. Only in the dining room. But probably you’ll want to keep tabs now.” Lying breeds saliva. I swallowed. “I loved seeing you.”
So I found my vocation, in the theater of their dark.
Mrs. Evams put down her cup. “Luray said we depressed her. ‘Like a vacant lot,’ she said. ‘On a first-class street.’” Her laugh tinkled. Then she kissed me, my sweat and all. I was pouring with it.
I wasn’t sure I had gone over that great with him. He was an experienced theatergoer.
“I’m going away—” I said to him. “Would you two like to feel my face?” They hadn’t done so in a long time.
Mrs. Evams went first, scarcely brushing my head with her astral shaping, then feathery over my whole outline. “My dear—dear. You’re a goddess.” Like always, she turned to him, as to the once sighted one. “Is she the beauty I think she is?”
His fingers planed my cheekbones for their wide angle, smoothed my eyeballs to a statue’s stone orbs. He did the nose in one dash, then lingered on the lip points, and the lower lip’s center infold. He curved his hand to cup my chin, tapping its cleft. “Your brows are dark, aren’t they.” He traced their flung frame. “Darker than the hair.” At the ears, he grunted. “A flaw, thank goodness. Ears slightly jug. But the braids mask them.” He breathed in one of them. “Ah, noble Hera. Yes, you’re a noble girl,” he whispered. No, I hadn’t fooled him. Then he kissed me on both cheeks and gave me back to myself, his hands leaving me. I can still feel their sad, precise geometry.
But then, Bill Wetmore came back. He was just getting home from school on the incoming morning train, while I was only taking the outgoing one in order to register for summer school—but though the railroad had revved up its schedule as new city arrivals pushed into our hills, nothing much could be done about the two narrow yellow-brick platforms, from the scarred opposing sides of which two people who seemed to themselves inordinately young and hopeful for these parts could frantically semaphore—and later call it fate. “If you hadn’t decided to go in that same morning—and if I hadn’t missed the last train out the night before,” we said to each other over and over, would say forever. He had spent the previous night in the Dixie Hotel near Forty-second Street, high-mindedly sketching from memory a couple of prostitutes who had accosted him, and the two men running a shell game scam just outside the bus terminal door. Both sketches we later framed and hung, just as that vivid night would later hang in our small talk, almost as if I had shared it, too. That night I had been washing my hair, as I did before all adventure, and had fallen asleep choosing which sweater outfit to float to Columbia in. It had been my last night in the old house, and I had taken the early train to avoid the moving men.
Would we ever have met again otherwise? He was slated for a summer session also, but down at Wa
shington Square, a world away from Columbia Heights, and with plans to hunt for a Village pad to share. Truly we might not have encountered each other in the town either, each of us slopping about the house, lazy and alien, in the way students tend to do before they are reslotted. Though I would have heard he was home I would never have put myself in his way, instead, avoiding him because I still thought of him. And maybe proud because I was not as my mother was. While he, though he hadn’t forgotten me, had never meant to start up again.
“Then I saw you.”
Then he saw me. It became a canon in our tender conversation for him to describe that, and to credit his own presence of mind in yelling “Call you! Call you!” across the track, just before my incoming train blotted us out. Even the stray witnesses on the platforms, townspeople until then not known to us, were from then on enshrined, later to be puzzled at our shyly cordial nods. We were on that brink—remember it?—when everything is to happen in the appointed way, and will appear unique.
New buds often fuse out of an excess of their own honey and wax. Marriages can be made of this, or still later aborted because of it. You never tell the children anything of this. They, and the sketches, are what survive.
When I found out Bill Wetmore was illegitimate, did that add the final touch? They say that at times all young people wish to be that, or even imagine they are. Not me. I never dreamed of disowning either my family or the town, whether or not I left them. I meant instead to grasp them for all they were—if I could find that out.
At home, it was to be a hard summer for both him and me. His grandmother wasn’t failing in the decent, elderly style which still blessed so many inhabitants tottering along the town’s streets, but in the intense hospital agony with which more modern people ended their lives, a mode of dying to which as a nurse she had special access. As the head nurse at the local hospital, she was the focus of every possible medical angle and already had been fractured on many. In their own small house, to which she now and then remanded herself, her bedroom, filling with vials of sucrose or darker medicament, respirators, catheters, and other anonymous metal and rubber, became a paragon of what could be done at home. Solicitously never left alone in either place, in the Cobble Row house she queened it, waking to her own torture, to give her attendants gasped advice for more of the same.
He came home weekends. Phoebe had a summer job as an au pair girl with a family on Cape Cod. “She’ll never come home again to stay,” he said—and indeed she never did, becoming a zealot Bostonian, a dean somewhere, and not marrying. “She’s the legitimate one. I suppose she has to prove it.” His long, quirky face was all expressiveness. Later troughs would make it equine, lovable the way horses are. In his crop-headed, glinting youth he looked to me like the Arrow Collar ad of the 1930s, which he thought his father had maybe looked like, and in the sketches of small-town America, which Bill was doing for a drawing class—and later would become known for—I could see that both the fathers and sons looked like that too.
His father had been a Harvard boy who worked two summers at Pruyn’s—the factory responsible for the workers’ houses in Cobble Row. “He was related to some Pruyns, though not very closely.” Which was why Bill Wetmore himself had a small trust fund. The rest of his father’s identity had been lost in a sea of divorce. “I don’t go to see them anymore.” A couple of uncles and aunts, who lived between Philadelphia and Wilmington. “They showed me pictures of him in his baby clothes. Which seemed to be all they knew of him.” And had sent the big desk in the Wetmores’ loft. “He and some other kids were killed in a crash on the Saw Mill Parkway, on the way back to school.” The word “kid” hit us like a pellet scuffed up from that roadway. It wasn’t even the best way to Boston anymore. Bill’s mother, the sugar-faced townie, already pregnant, hadn’t known he was dead for three months. “I suppose he was weak. But how can one tell? Moral: drive back to school very carefully.”
Bill himself hadn’t gone to Dartmouth after all, but to the Rhode Island School of Design, where he was studying to be an illustrator. I saw that the idea of sculpture had dropped from him, as too heavy a stone. He was surprised that I remembered it, or that I asked about his mother. She had married the older worker from Pruyn’s who had later fathered Phoebe, moving on to Detroit with him, where he died, from which city she had sent Phoebe back here at the age of three, to join Bill, already here. For a while she herself used to come back. “A thin woman I called Francie.” He sketched her for me, a factory worker herself by then, with something of the town’s Polish in her. “Then she didn’t anymore.” Now she was middle-aged and dead, with all her interim life invisible to him, though he didn’t seem to care.
“Was she weak?” I asked, cupping his head up from the scruffy pillow on the floor of his Village friend’s pad. That so well-shaped back of the head, still his best feature, and so cupped with promise—how my palm remembers it.
“I never thought about it.”
“Because she was a woman?”
“No, I don’t think so. Any more than you’re only asking as one.”
We lay back in the perfect equality of bodies just after joining.
Honey and wax, we had to meet at least once a day, traveling our dreamy train and subway miles between town and city, uptown and down, to touch or to know we were going to; otherwise we felt halved, the summer suddenly bottomless, its glow gone on to others. Unaware of how little this had to do with us personally, between us we balanced the world, each of us paying out to the other the history behind us.
“Grandmother managed it all,” he said, letting her shadow cross us because she was dying—and was managing it. We had forgotten his mother. But what I see now is all four of us, she and his father, he and I, he and his father nineteen, she and I a little younger, all of us lying there, ready to be chosen by their issue to come. He had chosen most to resemble his father, and to doubt him. Whatever the genes plot, I believe we choose the family we can bear to have.
“Oh—grandmothers,” I said. That kept him and me in hand-fast too. Mine now dowagered us from that third-floor realm I had once glimpsed—which only Watanabe was allowed to enter. My mother and I—“you two heiresses,” as she now called us, had the rest of the house below—two august floors, a ground floor, and a second, in which only our own bedrooms seemed human. Watanabe was in the servants’ quarters off the kitchen, which, too, we never saw.
Our own furniture, once it had been insinuated, had been lost to further reckoning. A sense of my father remained in the two guest rooms, the larger of which he had had as a young man, the smaller as a boy. My brother had lived in the latter while here—but from boyhood on he has never left much of himself behind. He and my father were always supposed to be coming home soon, but hadn’t yet. Gradually, we were becoming correspondents only, my brother and grandmother in long letters on his part from which she read only the factual bits to us, my father in letters to me, cleverly short on description, sternly determined on love. I could sense there were lines to be read between, but couldn’t decide which they were.
Once a week, Watanabe served the three of us a formal tea in the downstairs sitting room, for whatever exchanges were needed. My grandmother was more polite, as if she had schooled herself to this, now that we were in the house. She went out rarely, though she still looked too powerful for the sitting room’s heart-backed chairs. When Watanabe came downstairs from her rooms with his pastes and his mops, he would exclaim “Ah—ee that fruitwood, and the desk, inlaid, she says, with zebrawood and white holly!”—but reflectively said nothing when he came down with her trays, after what I suspected were the times she talked to him. “What does she say to you?” I said, cornering him in the pantry. He flicked her napkin out of its silver-and-ivory ring. “Nothing she expect me to understand.” But what did she do up there, beyond telephoning her lawyer and financial advisor, or a few town ancients she called her charity-friends—and once every two weeks, my father.
“She has a companion,” he said. “W
hen she wants.” He tapped the side of his head. “Who? How can I say who? Ninety years to choose from, she can afford to change him. But I think it is only one.”
In the upstairs hall my mother called the gallery, my grandfather’s state photograph, silvery clear in the old style, showed a clean-shaven, shrewd-featured man with a mouth pursed like my brother’s—nobody much to inhabit my grandmother’s majestic head. Their wedding picture, when he was over sixty and she on the way to thirty, showed him as shorter and narrower than she. In the nearby picture of him in his office he looked more regal, his staff of men receding behind him in wooden-railed enclosures, each man decreasing in size, like a lesson in perspective.
A bachelor railroader who had gone into land sales and allied brokerages, he had lodged with her family before their marriage, and had continued on so as her husband, in her family homestead. The family had been New Jersey potato farmers, land-rich or land-poor as the times might be, of the breed who had Revolutionary teaspoons in their plain pine coffers and the new white refrigerator pridefully in the front room. Trenton had been their metropolis.
This was what my father had ultimately gone to Yale from, and not on a scholarship. One yard-long picture, taken well before he was to be born, showed the entire family of my great-grandparents’ day ranged in a line on the porch of their almost octagonal hump-windowed farmhouse, always he said painted the yellow with fudge trim then considered a step up from Colonial white. My grandmother’s parents center the line, staples also of their time, the huge farmer and his miniature wife, she soon to go down the birth-drain with a late last-child-to-be. Two spindly boys, my grand-uncles, flank her, one to fall in a war, the other to be the black sheep. Four daughters of the house flank him, all handsome and almost father-size. Two moved West and are lost to history. My grandmother, the middle sister in the picture, by age as well, is standing with her arm around the last-born and already looks to be the head sister. But that might be because I knew her now.
In that picture, my grandfather does not appear. Perhaps he had been still gathering his powers for the marriage, and for the long years ahead as consort in that house—not yet knowing of their eventual move away, to here. That happening had changed my father’s college life, for it had given him a new background. “It was a bankrupt’s house, got cheap with all its goods. For years I couldn’t get over the notion that bankrupt meant beautiful.”
The Bobby-Soxer Page 8