The Bobby-Soxer

by Hortense Calisher

  Just then Knobby came up the stairs with my grandmother’s afternoon tray. Once upon a time there had been buzzers all over the house, connected to a church-shaped wallbox in the kitchen, inside which the little flags had gone up on signal, each slotted to a room. Knobby had reactivated the ones to and from the third floor. He and Mr. Peralho nodded. They might already have had a midnight session. My grandmother had first dined with us the night before.

  Mr. Peralho twirled a hand toward my mother’s shrouded door. For her?—his eyebrows inquired. Watanabe pointed toward the third floor.

  “Ah na na na,” Mr. Peralho said. Reaching, he took over the tray. Holding it, he bent to my mother’s door. She had hung from its top a voluminous drapery I vaguely remembered as once worn by her. Of darkest navy, too curved for a door, it hung disconsolately, good neither against sound nor dust. Mr. Peralho wagged his brows again. “Cashmere.”

  “She’s always liked luxe,” my father said.

  “And you do not?”

  Knobby had vanished down the stairs again. There would be plenty enough of that handmade china my grandmother fancied, for him to furnish up another tray. Unlike the inherited hand-painted stuff in half the better cupboards in town, which had been done on Bavarian blanks shipped for that purpose, this set had been made from scratch, in heavy brown and blacks I liked.

  The two men had forgotten me. I hid in thoughts of china, like a child.

  My father had not answered. He still had his noble looks, though two newly pouted lines framed his mouth under the tan.

  Mr. Peralho saw that too. “Those with her trouble, they need liquid by the liter. Other liquids. And my dear, dear man”—the two dears spat out like shot—“they need to have the first tray.” Then, holding the tray waiter-style in one hand, he rat-tatted on the door and sallied in with his deerstalker’s stride.

  We waited, but there was no sound.

  “Is he a doctor?”

  “A—medicine man. Without portfolio.”

  “Is that where you went? To him? When you were ill?”

  “So you know about that,” my father said. “No. I knew him from before.”

  The questions were backing up in me, pouring out with the mud like the pebbles do when the dams of childhood break. “Like—Leslie Warden? From the time when you knew him?”

  I meant that to come out like shot.

  Why didn’t he crumble? In those days I thought all you had to do was to ask the questions, for the arks to slide. Like Babel in the Bible.

  “So you know about him too. Yes, from when I knew him.”

  He looked at the door. Still no sound.

  “Let’s go down,” my father said. “I find I want my tea, too.”

  Neither of us moved.

  “Who made all that china? Like in that kiln, in the garage?”

  “One of the aunts.”

  In family parlance, that meant one of my grandmother’s sisters, all dead. His own sisters we called by name.

  “The one—who lived upstairs once?”

  “When she did, yes.” His eyes brimmed, not with tears but with story, though he did not go on. Perhaps he thought I had had enough. Or he waited.

  Do houses breed habits? Or do the habits of a family breed the houses? Had we as a family always gone upstairs and shut the door?

  I had one more question. Why had they left the farm? I was about to ask it.

  “You should take Leslie’s money,” my father said. “He meant it kindly.”

  “No,” I said. “I wanted yours.”

  Haylofts are fine for a beginning. Soft and prickly, jocular, with a cushiony golden light even when there is no longer any hay. Innocence seeping out onto the floorboards. But that can’t be repeated. That nothing can be quite, is the first lesson. We tried.

  The loft was different. Lying on the floor afterward, I already knew why. At my side, Bill Wetmore seemed not to. One glance at the desk where Craig Towle had worked, his chair, his daybed, was all it took. We had an audience.

  “You’re so thin, all of a sudden.”

  “Too thin?”

  I have small breasts that lie flattened against the chest like lappets. Many girls have them, but it is a shape ignored. Beneath them my body is narrow, with hardly any indentation at the spoon-shaped hips, so that the long, long legs seem scarcely separate. I am soon to find that shorter and chunkier men go mad over such a body, and also, that since clothes hang almost in their own folds on such a structure, such a body is not surprisingly the ideal of the fashion trade, where so many men like that are the moneybags. Gossip blames the gentlemen designers for wanting women androgynous, but one ought to remember that the sexual sanction of those other men enters in.

  I still thought I could never bear to copulate with a shorter man. I knew nothing as yet of the attraction whose very violence comes out of inbred standards departed from.

  Bill Wetmore was the standard choice for me, as our schoolmates and even our elders were prone to emphasize. Tall men do as they please sexually. I was to be the grateful one, and I was. He covered me well, the head and toes extending beyond me, the cave of the eye little more pronounced than mine, the feet only slightly less arched—but the square-bladed shoulders satisfyingly alien.

  “Too thin? For art?” We had already had this tease. But now I cast a look at that desk, so sequestered with its chair.

  “Uh-uh.” He liked to be applied to as an artist. “But it changes the drawing.”

  “You saw me only last week.”

  “I know.”

  We held each other. Nakedness was the only real seeing, back then.

  “When you called me, you were crying.”

  “I know.”

  “Why?”

  “Don’t ask me. Now I’m not.” My tongue licked his breastbone. How safe I was. “I hated waiting. Why did you make me?”

  “I was—thinking … and believe me, that house is no fun to be in.”

  “No other reason? Why you never ask me there?”

  “Why should there be?”

  So there was, then. But his reason wasn’t what I silently imputed to him—the thought of my mother tripping those cobbles once, a few houses down. Or of Phoebe, once my friend. No, his house wasn’t good enough for me, now that he had seen ours. But that sort of shame has to be lived with, before it shows.

  We all but fell asleep, in that lulling amity which would never come again.

  I was the first to sit up. “I have to leave.”

  Other women will tell you that more often the men, married or single, lovers or not, are the ones who do the leaving. And of how they, the women, loathe being left behind. But it would be a long time before I came to that.

  I stretched, yawning, deeming myself in full command. Perhaps, in a way I was. Certainly he saw me as so. “Wish I had a horse. All the way over here, I was wishing it.”

  “Instead of a Lincoln. Of course.” He leaned back on the pillows we’d taken from the narrow daybed, his mouth wry. To him, I and mine were the impracticals who always landed money-high.

  “No. Instead of anything.”

  Horses are health to me, and a way of being in woodland. So they were to my father, too, who had taught me to ride. To him too horses were for riding, not for ownership. To me as an adolescent, also perhaps a chance at being in command. I’d never minded our having to rent or borrow them. But to Bill, even to wish for one was a matter of class.

  He was still leaning back. Youth integrates some faces only briefly. I can’t swear that I even then saw, in what he called his Philadelphia face (as if to him all Philadelphia had only one) those flint-shaped peasant eyes. Yet I saw something, or heard it. “Well—you have the boots,” he said.

  I got up, still nude, and went over to them. They were lying on the floor near the desk, where I had discarded them like the properties we tossed around the stage before a tryout or rehearsal at school, or else carefully arranged. I had shed them before I rightfully knew where I was, in the dark of a space
once so much my own stage.

  They lay in what my brother had high-voicedly pointed out as “all their amaranthine beauty.” Gifts excited his stinginess, as porn must do the impotent. The spurred ankle of one boot lay across the other’s calf. The bootmaker, he said, had thought from the size ordered that they must be a man’s.

  I turned on the desk lamp, a plain brass gooseneck. A pocket of manila envelopes, a clutch of yellow pencils in a rubberband, a stapler, and a box of typing paper lay on the desk top. The center drawer, opened, had one typewriter ribbon in it, used; the file drawer was bare. The chair was metal, and pillowless. The daybed cover you could buy at any dimestore, and looked unused. How could this small array have put so much intent into a room? Putting the room itself into another history entirely, which even in the evening’s new air smelt of its own mulch.

  “Has he gone for good?”

  “Don’t know. He took the typewriter. He said to get rid of any stuff, if he didn’t come back.”

  I sat down on the splintery floorboards. Soft, camel-colored socks had come with the boots. I slid them on, conscious that Bill was staring between my legs, at what he had told me was undrawable. Once he had had me shave down there, in order to try. This had been just after the Chicago Institute, posted one of Bill’s drawing books by an instructor of his, hadn’t bought it but had held onto it for a respectable time. Illustration had then still been a dirty word to him. I had sat for hours with my legs akimbo. No, I can’t, he’d finally said. It still looked like a Hasidic’s mouth to him. Impossibly vulnerable. Impossibly arrogant. Put it away. Oh he could be fun, when he had still been Bill Wetmore.

  I sat on the chair to draw on the boots. What purpose had sat here for so long in our town, where now my own buttocks rested? I was remembering Craig Towle’s sweat and the jut of his nose. And his cool throwaway promise. To pay me nothing. For what nothing could pay. He must be much more than solvent. But he would understand my father, down to these boots.

  “So he took the typewriter.” I thought of the man who could gather up his intent and take it away with him, maybe all over the world. Through all towns, all wives, all deaths. Not a fair man, probably.

  I stood up. Yes, I still had the boots, gift of my father. “I’m not crazy. But I am loyal. And I’m going to go on being.”

  Bill would have to count that in, I meant. If he kept on hanging around us.

  He got that. But he asked anyway: “Loyal to whom?”

  “To—everyone. To Knobby, even.”

  He reddened at that. “What an aristocrat. But then—you know who you are.”

  “No, I don’t. Not—all of it.” I found I didn’t want to tell him more about us, about what until today I had thought of as the mystery of the farm. Now that I had seen the farm modern version, was the mystery once there even more alive, having migrated past our third floor? Past my father and brother even. The family mystery, migrating on, even to me.

  I stared at him, aghast. There waited for me matters I didn’t want to tell this person to whom, it seemed only a minute ago, I had wanted to tell everything. It was a bad loss. The bottom had dropped out of that safe place in his arms.

  “You know who you are—as much as I.” I wanted him to stand by his own folks: the woman Francie, his mother, and that vague outline, the old workman, his stepfather, to whom he was unrelated, yet through him linked to all his own working forebears here on Cobble Row. And the old nurse, that witch of the winding sheet, of whose death, in its common stench, he seemed ashamed.

  He would even sell this house, if he could rid himself of it handily, and be glad of the price.

  America is full of people like Bill—the man to whom I would one day try to explain Bill Wetmore and my quarrels with him—would say to me in this same loft. Elective orphans—the West Coast crawls with them; no history on their backs except what’s new. Or there are the selective orphans, this man would say, with his hooked smile. Those who keep a few picked ancestors around, for show. That’s the other Coast. Ours. Like your Bill. William Wetmore Storey—would he have been your Bill’s sculptor great-uncle? Or perhaps a cousin?

  Cousin—I would say. Yes, he turned out to be only a cousin, several steps removed. You see too much.

  For, as that man would tease me, I was an aristocrat—but only in the common way. I romanticized other people’s trials, along with my own. To that, he said, the stage would add its own exaggerations. In the end, if I and the audience were lucky, we might both get hold of the truth.

  But right then, what I said to Bill was childishly direct. Schoolgirl-style repartee—I’m not sure there isn’t a place for it.

  “You’d sell this place, wouldn’t you. Just to hang on to your father’s baby clothes.” I flung out my arms. “This place.”

  Under the riding moon the hayloft lay around us in rumpled shadow.

  “You buy it,” he said. “You have the money for it.” He got up from his lounging, always his ultimate gesture even in the pad in town, and turned on the loft’s solitary bulb, flicking off the gooseneck lamp. Maybe he’d sensed that audience after all. “Only one way I can pay you back. I’ll draw it for you. What you’re hanging onto.”

  There was paper on the desk, pencils handy. Materials for that brand of explication always are. I leaned over his shoulder as I often did, fascinated by the streaming leadpoint or pen nub which bred people in lightning outline, never seeming to lift from the page until the last dot. Then the instrument would uncover its brood, hatched in a style half fairy tale, half caricature. As their maker would one day tell a newspaper diffidently: one made them just askew enough to be recognizable.

  He had already drawn three heads when he dropped the pencil and picked up another, then another, scowling at the numbers on them. “Eversharps. Too soft, really. Or too hard. But they’ll have to do.”

  In the end he used both hard and soft. I had already identified the heads: Mr. Peralho, my father, and my brother. At first he populated page after page with their three figures, in what I took to be at random. Then seizing on the stapler—oh, he was always quick to make use of what was at hand—he fastened all the pages together in what I saw was a progression even before he slipped the whole length of cartoon on a line of wooden wall pegs next to the window, in whose center the moon had risen, after all almost full. He had numbered each page of the cartoon.

  On page one my father appeared, downstage front, neat as a pin, the way he had been in his commuting days, and about to drop to our platform from the train. A few heads were behind him, all women. In number two he was alone, walking stage right. Mr. Peralho, slightly rubbed in outline, appeared on number three, behind him a map of Brazil. Number four, they met, feet planted on that map. Then came a succession of sketches—coffee plantations, the harbor of Rio, bars, and evening parties, the figures of the two men gradually nearing, then linked, often hand in hand. Then, as my brother appeared, my father, though never disappearing, faded backward, until, in a similar progression, Mr. Peralho and my brother were linked. Except for the clasped hands, neither couple was seen any nearer to each other than lolling side by side on sofas—these however enormously stuffed or torturesomely elegant, and in a mise-en-scène of increasing vulgarity. There was only one page one could call obscene—on which the three heads, drawn with the fuzziest thick-leaded pencil, shared features indiscriminately, seemingly to be one person, one sex.

  “Do I have to title it for you?”

  I couldn’t speak. One goes mute. Or I do, once a thing long borne, even admitted, is phrased. In the same way, when one finally leaves a man one has lived with, one may do it silently. Everything will have been said.

  He was talking in my ear now, in the earnest way people do when they prate of what they think the general world disapproves. Special friends, he said. That was the fancy French phrase for it. I would have thought better of him if he had produced an unfancy one. Our house stank of it, he said. Probably that was why my mother was as she was, he said. Possibly that was why my
grandmother, even. Things went backward, and forward too. I must get out of there. For good.

  I found my tongue. “Houses that stink. You seem to specialize in getting out of them.”

  A ring of moths was circling the bulb hanging at eye level between us. They kept passing, freckle-colored, between his face and mine. Light beaded his blond evening beard. Two nights without shaving made him a vagabond. Behind him the sashless window had its casements wide, framing the dead factory two streets beyond, across alleyways rarely frequented. Anyone looking up could have seen us, framed in its low-silled triangle.

  “They’ve weaned you,” he said. “In a few weeks.”

  No, he had. Bill Wetmore, become Bill. He’s whatever he says. You begin to remember it. As you look at him.

  “Haven’t they. From our whole time together.”

  A miller moth flew in, bumped the line of stapled pages, and clung. My shirt and pants were on the peg farthest from me, unreachable. The sweat ran down my bare legs. I reached.

  “No you don’t.” His long arm, gaunt with drawing muscles, barred the cartoon.

  “I wouldn’t. Tear it up, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Sure?”

  The moths hypnotized me, not one of them yet burned. I had come here to be safe? Here? I flipped the miller moth from the page it was pressing against, fluttering vainly. It ricocheted the room, thumping the walls, then joined the circle. The cartoon jiggled at us. None of my father’s letters to me were indicated in it. Or my brother’s hurt. Or Mr. Peralho’s generosity. And we three generations of women—in this account of our house, where were we?

  In his own way, this soul mate of my summer streets was farther from me than those he had drawn, no matter what their sins were, either against me or all the squared-off households of the world. His were sins of omission only. But those are the ones their owners never can shake.