The Bobby-Soxer

by Hortense Calisher

  At that point—at that exact point, old Nessa said: Leo became my elder. Both of us accepting that. When you’re the elder, it’s easier to be brave, Leo said. But I would put it another way. Leo thought it was my turn to be young.

  The portfolio? Letters, old Nessa said. In a house in town they can be burnt, even fifty years later. And were. The hamper? Here old Nessa’s voice failed her, then found itself. Those, sir—articles of underwear and other garments—were in the bundles that went to the dump. The shoes, pairs and pairs of a high-buttoned style with the brand name Sorosis, Leo would wear for life.

  And the life, loaded too into the van?

  What a tale, the man in the restaurant says in spite of himself. Like a folktale.

  We were not folksy, the old woman in the Stetson hat says. We were folk.

  Sorry.

  Accepted. One day—I may tell the girl, my son’s daughter, about that life, the old woman says. But just now, we are leaving the farm.

  My son—that girl’s father—is leaning on the porch-rail, picking at his blazer buttons, which he hates. He has been hating a lot lately. “Our bikes—” he says. “Leo’s and mine. There’s no real room for them. Why don’t we ride behind and follow you?” Two British Raleighs, the pride of his existence, formerly. “And the plants will bruise them.”

  Everybody laughs, even Leo, who quickly adds, “It’s miles and miles, yes, but he and I have done more: let us try.”

  So we’re ready, but no one moves, even the grandfather. Those cows knew, Nessa said. Potato futures are down, though, her husband says, rubbing the grizzle at the back of his neck. Potatoes—the boy says; at school, that’s what I miss the most. No one laughs, all their four necks hunched out, shoulder to shoulder. You could paint them, hankering face against hankering face, locked toward that buff-colored crop-lined horizon, sealing now with night.

  “Your window’s open, Leo,” the grandfather says. “Somebody go close it.”

  “Let Mason close it,” Nessa says. That was the banker. “Let him try.”

  The wind whips the curtain out. Nothing funny about that; there’s often a night wind.

  “Nessa—we’re all trying,” the grandfather says. A man without temper. A rock to lean on. Yet one needs more.

  “Somebody’s still there,” the boy says. “Looks like somebody’s still there.”

  “Does so,” his father says, and climbs in the second van.

  Driving down the road to the highway, they have to pass the entire front of their house, the van with the two in its cabin crawling heavily, the two bikes wheeling behind.

  Out on the highway, the house fronts them again, following as it can. It understands why they are leaving, and is flying a white flag for surrender, nobody will say whose. Somebody’s image is still in possession there. As the four faces recede: land broker husband, wife and sister, boy nephew, Leo—or grandfather, grandmother, my father-to-be, and Leo—Aunt Leona, each face sees who has been left there, each in its own way.

  Upstairs, in the lodger’s room, the androgyne rocks, debating what to be.

  “HE WAS A GREAT ACTOR —Leo.” Craig Towle got up to turn on the desk lamp. The prosaic flooded in and retreated. It would not dare the two of us, I remember thinking—a young judgment.

  “I assume you know the life—Leo’s outer life,” he said. “The eccentricities a whole town was made to accept. The kindness that flowed.”

  I pre-sume, was what was said down home. Taking for granted that a life, outer or inner, was not that easy to get to. We were the actors; couldn’t he see that? The kindness was what was real.

  “Ever see his tombstone?” Towle said. “Worth a trip.”

  I hadn’t. But when I went, I would go alone. And I would be taking the part for Leo’s sake as well as for myself. How black the window was now, how dark the town. The moon would rise over Towle’s final word on us, but not without me.

  “She—” I said, rearing my long neck at him, and scuffing the place on the floor where a moth had been. “She.”

  “I WANT THIS ROOM TO shine for you,” Mrs. Evams said. “Yet I want it to blaze.” She didn’t have to tell me why. We were in their library, with all the windows that faced our old house—now the Walshes’—opened wide. I wondered though, what vision of light was behind that high, polished forehead, what concept possible only to the blind.

  To attain it she had gone to the local rabbi and asked to borrow every branched candlestick he knew of in his community, then had ordered dozens of natural beeswax candles from an up-country apiary. The five thousand books had been cleaned by a corps of their students, who had been able to find scarcely a speck of the dust she had said she smelled. Two of them, two young men in their best jackets, now stood by, holding candle-snuffers for any emergency, and flanked by bins for resupply. She had wanted no girls, because one could never be sure what girls would wear. The two boys had been chosen in part for their jackets, which she had made them describe. One in a woolly brown that blended him with the leather bindings, one in sharp white, they did look like acolytes. One of them was sighted, for safety’s sake. Both were smiling.

  I had given up counting the candles, all honeycomb patterned and twisted to a point that burned true even at eleven in the morning. Luckily the day was as soft as taffy waiting to be pulled. Brides’ weather, Etsuko had said, coming in to wake me, who had never had to be waked before—and adding hastily that this was a good omen too. She always had a polite one handy, often drawing out a wrinkled slip of rice paper to confirm it, from somewhere in her invisibly seamed garments. But this omen I felt had been improvised.

  I was already wearing the biscuit-colored dress she had made to my design from yardage bought years back by my mother to take down to Miss DeVore but never used, and now cast into a plain shift banded low at the waist, and with an irregular drift of skirt, of a kind I still wear. The wedding was not to be until four, but I had dressed early—for the candles.

  “Does it shine?” Mrs. Evams said, facing the windows, her arm at my waist, weightless but unprecedently there. “Does it—do that?”

  Across the street at the Walshes’ a smart gray van from Trenton, there when I arrived, was now being emptied by a uniformed crew of two who were delivering unidentifiable gear inside. Now and then there were nervous shadows at the Walshes’ windows. Perhaps they were planning a rival party. No one was to come here except family.

  Mr. Evams, suddenly behind us with the quiet footfall practiced in this house, had heard her question. I could feel that he knew of the activity across the way, but glancing sidelong at his face—at the aquiline nostrils expanding, and the wise eyes, blank with infinities always changing, I saw that I was not to signal to her of whatever, high up on her own alp of vision, she hadn’t sensed.

  I would miss the cues gathered for me in this place, more than I knew how to say.

  “The room blazes,” I said. “And it shines.”

  At four, Mr. Evams, wearing a surplice, grouped us around the oak table at which students always stood in a body for the more difficult or unique instruction. On it lay the ordinary braille Bible always there. Today, another book lay beside it. I should have recognized it, but trembling, I was noting the order in which he had placed us, for no one ever left this table without turning to fingertip the face on one’s left, the face on one’s right. And I hadn’t yet told anyone what I was going to do.

  Mr. Evams had made a masterly dinner party of us. Placing himself at the head of the table between bride and groom, so as to conduct the service, which was to be as agreed, a civil one, he had put my father on my right, in effect to give me away, though the service would not press him to do so. Next after where Bill would be on my left, came my mother, after her Mr. Peralho, surely now family, and as the staff she often leaned on when awake. At his left was Tim, at once placated by this, then my grandmother, who would want him next to her, then Watanabe, whom she would want also. Etsuko, as his spouse, came next, though on his left. Her delicate scent
and graces would soothe Mrs. Evams, by etiquette on my father’s right.

  And so we come round again to the bride, the minister—and the groom, entered last, as grooms when flustered sometimes do. He was wearing his best, a jacket I could see my father thought surprisingly decent, not knowing it had been left behind by the former owner of the New York pad, to whose pleas to send it out to him Bill had responded, “Should you turn out to be somebody, I will.” The style of that had pleased me; he might still be Bill Wetmore. But was that why I was marrying?

  As we settled in, my mother reached for her purse and a slight pressure went round the table. To watch her sip from the flask now always with her—given her by Mr. Peralho, who swore it held only fruit juices—was still not comfortable to watch, for by this time we knew she slept even when seemingly awake and with us. Now and then a remark would escape her, she always staring at the ground as it did so, and on occasion lifting the sole of a shoe to look there, as if she walked on needles, always self-directed, one of which had pierced its way up.

  Mr. Peralho had formed the habit of reaching for the hand in the purse and kissing it to quiet it, but today he kept still, his mismatched eyes almost crossing, in evident prayer that wedding manners would sustain her. The hand came out with one of her lavender lozenges.

  Next to Peralho, Tim fluttered up at him, seductive, anguished and smart-alecky, all at once. I knew how much it was costing him to blurt nothing. Across from me, was even my grandmother—having noted my dress—stretching her lips in approbation? Etsuko, in bliss over the dress, Watanabe holding the printed cotton foldover bag carried by men in his home city, from which he intended to scatter a ritual something, my two dear blind guides—and even my father, who this morning had given me a check, muttering: “Something blue—put it in your stocking,” and adding that it came from the sale of his lawbooks, as if nothing less would do—how did I know what all of them were thinking? Was this the common lot of brides?

  Across from me, Mr. Peralho was checking our circle with his keen, flawed glance. I liked him more and more. Last night he had come to me to volunteer not to be present, as not being family. The two gentlemen at the farm weren’t coming either, he said; I guessed he had so persuaded them. “No,” I had answered, “you must come.” This is our daughter, he had said to those two at the farm that day, with his one off-color eye hopefully marking it, though he knew I was not that and never would be. The other eye, unflawed, must know as much about acceptance as a man could. Today he reminded me of the poll-watchers at election time. Nothing partisan, for or against a particular candidate, can be said within so many feet of an election booth—or of this oak table. But never glancing at any of us too long, was he letting me know he was counting the vote?

  Mr. Evams was about to begin. Though he was to marry us in his capacity as a justice of the peace rather than as a minister, he had indicated he would not do so without homily: “A few tags.”

  Yearning not to hear that man straddle what he could not approve, or pretend to be as blind as the sighted—and do all this for me, I turned to my brother, whose verdict I knew already, its blue glare fixed on Bill. Once he had come upon Bill and me scuffling in the back hall where my grandmother’s house divided, a prosy arena where snowboots could walk in and slickers hung. Hatracks make me horny, Bill had been growling, clasping me wetly. Now I’ve got you where I want you. “No you haven’t,” Tim had said from behind us in his bow-tie voice. “You’ve just got yourself where you want to be.” And flinging up his hat, which had lodged like a goal-shot on the hatrack’s top hook, he had passed us by.

  “Well—!” my grandmother said now, in the voice that knows itself to be a yea-sayer. I dared not trust that voice, even though I knew how it had come to be.

  I could trust Knobby, but he would not speak. Though if that bag of his could have held something even better than a finger-bowl to show up the groom with, it would have.

  Etsuko, mother of geishas—for by now we knew there were two—would always cancel out his vote.

  And why anyway had I left the counting until now?

  Bill, studying the grain of the table, had his drawing hand in his trouser pocket, where it would be abortively moving … “Have to be careful in buses, I do. Take me for a pervert. Never sit next to a girl, I don’t. Only next to you.” The groom. Who will stand there totting up his own charms and other scores the way smart people do crossword puzzles—in order to keep other conundrums at bay?

  My father is the only one looking straight at me, clearly thralled in a hot attendance he sees he should have given me sooner. But that is all he will give me. Plus something blue. He is like me—but in what way?

  And Mr. Evams has not begun. When the blind won’t look at you, you have done something bad. Or you have not done what you should.

  “The faucet!” Mrs. Evams cried in sudden agony. Releasing us.

  One of the candle boys ran over to the tap where we students washed our hands before braille, and shut it tight—and Mr. Evams began.

  Though he goes on inexorably with his pre-marriage sermon, I do not hear it, nor will I ever be able to recall more than the edge of what he said. Perhaps he counted on that. For down the arc of the table my mother, the forgettable, has raised her head, intent on the big double door to the corridor, which creaks lightly, as if someone waits there.

  It is only Terence, the Evamses’ Sheltie. Not trained to be a Seeing Eye dog, but sired by and brought up with the one Mrs. Evams had used early on, he has learned his fierce obligations anyway, waiting to be admitted at every room where she is engaged with people, always entering any classroom a half-second before she is done. He will know when instruction is over.

  My mother stands up. Etsuko has dressed her cannily, not too elegant, one dull jewel. Except for the turban she always wears, which keeps her out of all eras and frames the two fever-spots of the cheekbones, she looks like the mother of the bride. Perhaps that has cued her sufficient strength to come down the table to me on her own. Mr. Evams’s skein of words falls silent. She puts her arms around me. They were always long enough. “He’s come for you this time, hasn’t he. When I saw you go off with him I knew he would.” I whispered back that it was only Terence, that I could see his muzzle through the crack of the door. But she knew better. “No, you know too much. Do what you must. But be careful.” We might have been mother and girl on the train again, putting the flats of Jersey behind us—and for a minute we were. She gave me a squeeze. “You never did like chocolate.” Then, still holding me, she raised her head to the rest of the table, spellbound there. “I see it all from my window. It’s just that I cannot always wake.”

  Still in her arms, I felt the shiver she said that with, pushing me to look out these windows, across the street to our old house—and I saw what the Walshes had done. They had given in. Heavy drapes, sculptured like marble, now blocked ground floor and landing; upstairs, every break in the façade had been packed with lace. They had curtained the whole house. It’s only what a town does, of course, even if the Walshes had had it done tighter than the street had ever seen. “Yes, tell them—” she said. “For me too. Tell it all to stop.”

  The candles helped persuade me, pulsing their gold. There should be candles upstairs here at the Evamses too, around that cameo bed—attesting to what ought to be. Behind us all, the tap rill-rilled. Across the way, my mother came to a college party in a dress that crackled compliantly with death, and won a strange groom, who as a boy had kept snapping a picture with nothing in it except two bikes. On the third floor of a house much like this one and the one across the way, my grandmother keeps a companion. In a gentleman’s farmhouse, kitchen boy now quarrels with garden boy over who loves who—but in the grain of a past that maybe resides there yet—maybe in the old horsehair plaster of the walls, maybe in the night creaks an old barn gives forth like coarse conversation—a rocking chair rocks, debating. I have obligations to all of them.

  “I can’t marry anyone right now. Bill—if y
ou can wait, one day I will.”

  Etsuko, never too stunned for ritual, makes a wavering Japanese sound.

  I face my father first, because of those two bikes that pedaled steadfast all the way here. “I’ve been given the role of Leo, in Craig Towle’s play.”

  And Bill? Wild for an adversary, he peeled off his filched jacket and flung it behind him. Then he fled.

  My brother’s jeering “He’ll wait” followed him.

  “That was unkind,” Mr. Peralho said. “But perhaps too cowardly slow to be heard. I better go after him. Perhaps to order a picture. Perhaps—one of you. Come along.” Tim followed him.

  “Tim has the sweetest tooth of all—” my mother’s whisper came. “But I couldn’t foster it.” Then she looked down at her shoe, and Etsuko and Watanabe, who knew the signs, led her away.

  My grandmother came toward me. “When you want to come to the third floor, you are welcome.”

  My eyes filled. So did hers. She turned to my father. “Take me to dinner. In my own house.”

  He put his arms around me. I was a little taller than him now. The time for looking at each other eye to eye had passed without our ever knowing. I put my head on his shoulder. What he said came to me in vibration. “I am glad that you were born.”

  Terence, the Sheltie, came through the door for his charge. Mrs. Evams, making a sign to the candle boys, went out with him.

  “They’re all leaving me,” I said. “Why does it feel so good?”

  “They’re wedding each other,” Mr. Evams said. “You’ve made that possible.”

  The acolytes were putting out the candles one by one. They had a system good to watch too, the blind one first, following the heat of his hand in order to quench a candle, the one who could see following him to the next. When all were quenched, they left.