So he too needs help on this, I thought. Even he.
“What’s that?” she said sharp and sudden. “Who’s that?”
It wasn’t I. No one could mistake who it was, walking rat-tat, rat-tat along the upper hall. No one who had ever lived with my mother’s heeled step.
“It’s your middle age.” My grandmother had got her cackle back.
“People said she was in Rio. Or down South. Or I would never have—. I must go.” A side door led from the sitting room, to the sunporch. I heard him turn the heavy handle.
“No, you’ll stay. And let her do you justice.” My grandmother gave another cackle. “Who would think I could talk like that.”
“The one who taught you,” he said. But he stayed.
Up there on the staircase, my mother paused. Etsuko had awakened her after all, and had told her who the guest was. In spite of Etsuko’s mixed i’s and r’s, and even in the dregs of sleep, my mother had risen to that name, straight-backed from the pillow, Etsuko said later. “Like a ghost.” Where we here have the loose feelings we term personal, the Japanese move by obligation. I had the obligation to let her show herself, Etsuko said. To let him see the ghost he had made.
She had tossed over my mother’s head one of the soft, colorless shifts she had sewn for my mother in the more staid style of her own country, then had whipped my mother’s hair into points on her cheeks and had brought her the high-heeled shoes.
But it must have been my mother herself who put the bracelet on. A woman knows her own paraphernalia, and must keep with it.
As she came farther down the staircase and passed me, I leaned back behind the arch, but those sleepwalking eyes would not have seen me. Then she went in.
At first, I couldn’t hear her or them—as if she had brought her own soft muffle with her. Or maybe nothing was being said.
Then I heard him say how well she looked.
“I slept,” she said.
Then he said that after their last meeting he had thought he better not get in touch with her.
“I am still sleeping,” she said.
To brush a man aside yet hang on. Perhaps the women who do that are ghosts from the beginning.
“You wouldn’t have minded her. My young wife. Nobody would have. That was her trouble. So I had to.”
No answer.
“The young can be like a drug,” he said. “I married her crowd. Then I had to keep that from her. I hope I did.”
Yes, he was just a man. May I remember it.
But also the man who would one day write The Troupe—that movie. Saying to me in the dark of the preview—“Yes, here they are. And I’m rid of them. They were never right for a play.”
“Ah—” he said now, “you’re wearing the bracelet. I hunted a long time for that.”
“He hunts well,” my grandmother said. But from their silence I surmised they were ignoring her. The quiet went on so long that I thought he might have taken my mother in his arms.
I craned forward, out from under the archway.
They were on opposite sides of the table. She stood there, cloudily. He was leaning toward her.
“Perhaps—.” Leaning farther, he took hold of the circlet on her wrist.
My grandmother, sitting between them, stared straight ahead.
“Perhaps we—” he said to my mother.
My mother drew back her arm, leaving the big empty circlet on his upturned palm. “I shall go on sleeping.”
His face. I have to begin seeing it now at my own distance. Inclining toward her, and even at that moment, as it would one day incline toward me, a face with one ear better for a certain kind of listening, saying to me: It’s beautiful and terrible, that moment when the sanity and the madness join.
Then my grandmother cried out, pointing at me in the arch there, where I stood tall as that other figure once had, tending the plants in its armor, the blue-green dress.
Pointing at youth, the double—as Craig Towle will soon tell me, will keep telling me.
The double, rising always the same, yet never quite.
So now we enter the opposing dream. We cross the bar, to the person opposite. Craig Towle.
PART THREE
“I HOPE TO DO all of you justice,” he said as we left my grandmother’s house. Back in the sitting room, my mother had retreated as she had warned, falling like a cloud on Etsuko’s willing breast. My grandmother, fulfilling her own prediction—that she did not have strokes—had listened to his explanation: “Those two dress boxes must have been marked wrong—one for the other—at the time they were stored. The one you sent to the dump had a cream-colored dress in it, much smaller than the green one. I presume—your wedding dress.” Then, making no comment on his maraudings, she had gone up the stairs alone, only leaning heavier on the banister. To me he’d said only, “Change out of that. Into your own clothes. And come. Out of this house.”
As we leave, it seems to me that all the women of our upstairs float eagerly along with us, hovering around his head to be verified. Along with all those before us. “No—” he will laugh, the day I say that—“the woman under present scrutiny will always hold back. She is nemesis. In the same way that one’s latest work effort always is. Until it issues,” he says, his eyes locked inward. “Then it is done for.” And smiles lightheartedly. By then I will not tremble at this issuance of women from his pen, or even from his bed, but I will know better. Men who write about women wear them like laurel leaves in the hair.
But that was late in our exchanges. Or lessons. This is the first of them. He has hurried me to a destination I still cannot believe, though we are chair to chair.
“Yes, that was melodrama,” he says. “And it depended on dress. Women let themselves be humiliated by that, I know. That their lives should so depend. And what melodrama—a switched box! An honorable ruse, but only if set by the gods. I had nothing to do with it. I wouldn’t dare.”
But the owner of that dress I had worn might have. I could still feel its peculiar quality. Those who instruct us, as he was instructing me, tend to forget that the young are not learning solely from them.
“What did it say on the box that did go to the dumpster’s?” I said. “The one with my grandmother’s dress in it?”
He doesn’t answer at once. He is never quick to. “Of course. Of course. I thought what was marked on that box was simply your grandmother being her lordly self.” He leans toward me. “When, all the while, it could have been—what I was looking for?”
What he starts at once is the collaboration. With anyone. It’s his way of looking at the world. Though flawed in him, as in any of us, I still see it as a great one.
See us there, then. The man who holds a person face to face, and if interested will work you over with his pen afterward. Yet to whom—if you have to have your story, you would go as to an internist.
But I had the safe feeling that the story he was after was not mine, or ever to be mine. For the past weeks, spent so much in the company of “The Three,” I had worn riding togs and those boots, half being, if tongue in cheek, what they may have thought of me. But leaving that house, shedding that dress as he commanded me, I had grabbed up the work jeans and T-shirt with the school’s insignia on it that a lot of us first-year students wore. The second year, we were told, is when you achieve your own style, or shed it; wait for that. I had no such needs, and from then on wore that uniform or a plain jumper straight through school. Such clothes keep one from thoughts of costume. The costume is the last part of a role, we were being told. Lack of it may even be a boon to any girl who is thinking herself out.
I thought of the dress I had discarded, lying on the bed back there, breastless but uncrushable. Like a shell waiting to be filled with meaning; Like me. And both of us could wait.
While I look at the floor here, which has been newly swept. The dead moth gone. Then at the desk, no longer hunched in solitude but covered with typescript. Then at the moonless window, vague now with afternoon.
&
nbsp; “I finished the first draft of the play last night. I wanted to do that here. In the town.”
That last phrase has delicacy; the craggy face has a dainty tongue. And an economical one, when moved to tell you more than what it is saying. Acknowledging the town as an entity. Joining the two of us over it. And telling me the play is about the town?
While I am both gazing at him—oh, I shall get his every gesture—and enumerating this place.
“Yes, nice, isn’t it? They’ve sold the place to somebody, I understand. But nobody’s living here yet. I still have my key. Maybe we can go on working here.”
… If I were to jut my chin and neck now, as I did back then? No, after youth one can’t get away with it. But it’s not the limberness that goes; it’s the unselfconsciousness …
“You know.” He makes the two words equal. Brushing away non-intimacy is natural to him. Can he help it if each recipient takes it personally? As he leaned toward me, his shirt still had that fine-pored scent of a good laundry, the collar not like any I knew. Neither elegant like Mr. Peralho’s, nor button-down broker like my father’s, yet better than what Bill would buy even if he had money. Nor like Tim’s, whose lapels hung like field lettuce. “I can’t tell how much you know,” he said. “But you couldn’t live where you do and not know some of it. Nor be as you are.
A noncommittal collar. And too close. I sit back in my chair.
Then he says the unforgettable.
“And besides—I saw you.”
Anybody in the theater knows what that means. I held my breath. How was I?—we students all said, crowding to each other after the performance—in which we had all been the same.
His arm reaches for the desk; his hand smooths its edge. One never knows which of his gestures come from intent. Behind them is that longest harbored intent of all, a medium he lives in, moving him to its dictates as water sways a fish. Yet he can move like any other man as well.
“You’re not Portia yet. How could you be? You’re a beginning animal.”
—I see myself back there, my face lifted, becalmed, in the way of those who want to cry but hold still. No one had ever said it so well.
“But you have what I want,” he says—and I approve the harshness. We are matched, I think. He too sees everything.
“There was a family picture Nessa showed me once. And wouldn’t show me again, once she saw it wasn’t her I was looking at. What you know—is there. And it’s in the dress you had on, that went into the wrong box. Or was put so. And in the letters she has burnt or got rid of this past year. No letters came to the dump.”
He could admit that. Then I could speak.
“When you stood up, there. At the top of the pile.” Like a statue a town has erected to itself without knowing so—and the man himself oblivious. “And my mother was at the bottom.” In her big hat. “And the ash and cinders began draining from beneath your feet.” And she, climbing, climbing toward you in the same seeping rhythm, remained always in the same spot. The dual question hung in front of me, fixed as that gray landscape and flaring sun. “You did start it, didn’t you. That anthill moving.” A slow seepage that could go on for days, which was why we children had always been chased from there. “And were you—moving toward her?”
Or back into his own life?
He smiled. When it comes to the world’s dump piles, that smile said—in that ashen landscape you are still a child. But I won’t chase you from it. “I moved toward what I saw. Toward Nessa and you. Once I saw you together. With the whole town behind you. I’ve been doing that ever since. That was the afternoon I came back here, and began.”
I got up and went to the hayloft’s window, away from the thrall he might put me in, safely back in my own. There are certain lonely paintings I love. Never any people in them, but haunted by the absence of people—in the angle of a footpath maybe, or under eaves brooding as low as guardian wings. Here the bottom of the town composed itself in a straggle of cobbles and warehouses chinked with light, at the base of one of those streets which incline up to the dots of personal houses, and a marketplace. I almost forgot him, there behind me, hunting his play. Or testing it. And hunting me?
I might be young, but I had an idea that the two should never be hunted together.
“Shall I tell you? What the play’s about?”
“I already know.”
“Who, then?”
“Somebody young.”
He laughed. “Don’t look so sullen about it.” But his voice was dashed. “Yes, young. In 1927. Come. Turn around. I’ll tell it—as I found it. In props. Prop by prop.”
I knew what he meant. In improvisation class, we were dealt situations to dialogue over—and sometimes a hasty assemblage of objects, perhaps a still life on a table, of ordinary objects, a handbag and a notebook, plus some oddity—a flute, a doll’s shoe, a knife. But he hadn’t found his properties merely, or been dealt them. He had burrowed. This was why our class improvisations were so weak, though no one at school could quite tell us why, not even our haughty mentor muttering of Aristotle’s unities, and of her own one succès fou—in Strindberg, at an age little more than we were now.
What was missing in our arranged prop fancies was the real dramatist’s lack of shame. And the real actor’s. Down in the mud, for the glory of the theater. Not to roll in it simply, but because it is there. And is not always mud. And what is mud, my dears? Stare at it long.
“First prop—” the voice behind me says.
He holds that yard-long farmhouse photograph from my grandmother’s upstairs hall. These stiff old shots are often that shape because of the length of the porches, and the size of the families disposed along them. Brownstone, on backgrounds aged to yellow, they harbor a stillness one doesn’t see in the modern technique. “I just now snitched it, from your grandmother’s. While you went upstairs to change.”
I had run up the backstairs, Etsuko vanishing out to her and Watanabe’s ell. He would have gone up the front stairs. To take the photograph, which had hung in the hall to the left, he would have had to pass my mother’s door.
“Was my mother already asleep?”
He will not answer me. Not because his former lover happened to be my mother. As I will learn, he will not ever talk about his lovers. His silence then would be his only acknowledgment that she had been one of them. To him, his lovers are inviolate, not for their own sake, but because they are his.
“Just face the camera.” He’s smiling broadly now. One of his forefingers reaches around the photograph’s frame, pointing to a head.
She is facing the camera too, my great-aunt Mary Leona, in her family called Leo for short, the last born. As often with those, she appears the handsomest, and to me, the most modernly near. When I was born she was still alive.
My grandmother, in the photograph still a young woman, has her left arm raised so that it may rest around her much taller youngest sister’s neck. Nessa—as I will grow used to hearing my grandmother named—is still alive. But in the photo Leo next to her seems as vigorous. A photograph can be made to do this, the person in it toning forward to whoever will agree to revive her or him. We are maintaining Leo. First Nessa, in the long, long run that travels away from a grave. Then Craig Towle, arrived like a bolt out of the blue. And now me?
Does he know that in grandmother’s eyes I have long been what silly old women, leaning over my cradle or bemusedly gripping my soft, untutored hand at graduation have sometimes exclaimed: “The living image!”? When did she start not being able to look at me square?
Or does he think he has discovered me all himself? He sets the photograph flat on the desk, and reaching into a drawer, places a magnifying glass on its surface. “If the photo itself weren’t under glass this would do better. But see there.”
“No.”
“You don’t agree?”
“I mean—I don’t have to look.”
Actors dislike authors with reason. When the material is good enough we begin to forget it is theirs. T
hey begin to stand between us and what we must make our own. They themselves shadow it—sometimes even against what they want of it. And we, outside both it and them, are the ones who have to make it be.
And in this case—I was the material. At the same time enraged—as a target might be—and proud. “I’ve been in that dress.”
In how many greenrooms, in how many theaters, he must have heard the cast chattering of their positions in the play, confirming or inveighing against those as people in real life discuss their destinies. And had been grateful to overhear, or desperate?
“You’re an actress all right,” he says. “But how much do you know? I mean—of this?” He tapped the picture. “Of—Leo.”
I thought of the pottery in the garage. Of the apartment my grandmother now inhabited, scattering her flowered dresses—why did female ancients so often wear jungle prints?—on all that severe wood and manly green leather, one sight of which had stayed in my mind like part of an archive not yet gathered. One dating all the way back to Phoebe Wetmore and me fiddling in bathrooms like small girls do, she the leader, giggling to me what her grandmother, once a layer-out of dead bodies, had reported. Or to my mother’s account of my grandfather’s dance with her: “little pots of those flowers like pansies with the mumps, set out all around the dance floor.” Flowers—the aunt who had lived there then had had a way with them. Flowers also then always kept in the empty niche where I had hidden this afternoon. Once, my father, coming down the stairs white-faced after a bout with my grandmother, had stopped dead in front of it to say: “Leo always kept that niche full of flowers.” Who was Leo? “My Aunt Leona,” he had replied, but had never again spoken of her. Why had I not forgotten any of it?
“I remember everything about her,” I said.
He smiled. It’s his business to know where all the lies come from. And though it may seem strange in an actress, I have never properly learned to lie. That’s from having been with the blind, he’ll tell me later. But I am not sure.
The Bobby-Soxer Page 16