The Bobby-Soxer

by Hortense Calisher

  “Are we in shadow?” Mr. Evams asked.

  I nodded.

  He smiled. “Thank you. I would marry you myself, if your ears were not so jug. But I have a present for you.” He led me to the table. “For not having made me complete that service.”

  He was giving me the Ronsard, and I knew why.

  I was the beginning animal.

  That was the beginning of how I have come to live in my house. I had never lived in one that did not have strong reasons for me and mine being there. People like me will always find reasons for why they must domicile themselves in a place, or even doom themselves to it.

  In a town like ours, the merely expedient—to work in the hayloft, with Towle a few easy doors down the Row from me, was also the most troublesome. I wanted that too. I wanted the town as audience to what it would immediately conceive to be corrupt, and I knew to be pure—or professional. Perhaps I needed their help to keep it that way. But of this I was still ignorant. Can you remember that bracing joy—of being ignorant?

  So for three months Towle and I would spend every afternoon that I wasn’t at school in the loft there, in slavishly sexual concentration—and with never a touch. For me it was all for Leo, for him the play—on which he talked business with a vigor that shocked me. To me “business” was the theater’s compelling slang word for the business of life as transacted on stage. I was surprised to find that even a man like him would have to hunt backers. “Oh, they’ll listen.” No worry about that—and their agents would ploy. But getting up the ante for a play like this one wouldn’t be easy; some money would be repelled. And he wasn’t having a star. It might have been hard to find one. “Though I didn’t choose you because of that.” Nor for the brief news value in an untried actress, nor worse—for my family connection with the play. Or worst, even in my possible bodily connection with the part. Though many would slyly think so. Until they saw—he said—and again that beam of light went through me. To be seen being—the thrill that cauterized any wounds I had.

  Often we went into the city together on the morning train. I think now of the poker players behind us, in those first weeks their ears growing through their hats, and not a card heard to drop—as he and I discussed the Boston clinic’s report on Leo. An anciently evasive essay, as much mumbled as written, its language reminded him of the gothic romances of its day. “More monkish horror than medicine.” The doctors had vacillated over what to record, and while satisfying themselves of the situation had decided that in the case of a living person, “non-concealment” would cast “contumely” on the patient—and even disbelief on them.

  Our own argument was always the same. “She urinated as a woman,” I said, “I feel sure of it.” Behind us, a chip was at last tossed into the pot; perhaps they were getting used to us. But when he answered: “Remember when they were in the church—he must have erected as a man,” the players got up and moved from their own consecrated spot. After that, we sat at the car’s end in the seat where the conductor kept his supplies. In that seat, we settled it that part of Leo’s organs must have been vestigial; we would never know which.

  Later still, and not on the train, I told him what I would and would not ask my grandmother. “She would never have seen Leo in the nude since Leo’s puberty.” But at the hotel where they stayed in Boston?

  I searched among the small authorities that with practice seemed to be coming to me the way the fingers acquire thimblework. I don’t believe in spirits. But spirit transmits. “They wouldn’t have shared a room together. But I’ll ask.” And I would also ask her—because I thought I already knew the answer—to describe that lovely babe at birth. I would ask anything that gave my grandmother pleasure, or relief—no more. I thought of her now as an old tree transplanted, its dreams and comportment still on the farm into which I had projected myself by inheritance—where he could only research. He and I were changing seats even with respect to the two of us. But he knew that sooner than I.

  “I won’t press you to ask—”

  “My father? No. Don’t.” But in my researches, at night before I went to sleep, I did ask him, and slowly he was telling me.

  When we actually met it would be at Mr. Peralho’s apartment in town, where he spent much of his time. Peralho had gone back to Rio, Tim being at Harvard at last—on probation. My father was staying on to help, in what we all knew was a matter of Tim’s conduct. My mother was not now a consideration, or rather to us a permanent one, not subject to change.

  Meanwhile, in the loft, where the town surely imagined me in all the carnal positions a girl and her mother’s lover would try, I was walking back and forth as Leo would, limbs hung so, arms held thus, and trying never to posture. I no longer thought of it as a role in a play, his play. Our practice was Leo, coming alive between Towle and me.

  The school was partially taken into our confidence. The voice coach, accepting the challenge in his own high decibel, was acquainting me with recitative, in a range from falsetto through countertenor to second alto, to light baritone; and one day, among a pile of old discs—Peter Pears, Bidú Sayāo, Kathleen Ferrier, I found the voice in which I could sing—for four words only—but perhaps could learn to sing-speak in: the dark alto vehicle of Rose Bampton, long before she made herself suffer upscale into soprano—singing O, rest in the Lord. The next phrase—rest patiently in Him—I could muster, though not as well.

  Miss Pevsner, the drama coach, not confided in, was highly allusive in the Strindberg style. After her class, which Towle sometimes came to watch as he did the voice class, he and I could laugh, our sole time to, and even that helped, for I began to wonder at Leo’s own reliefs—what had been broad enough, or grotesque enough to make a Leo laugh?

  “Found that out yet?” he said one day in the loft, at the end of a long afternoon. Each day I reported to him on my outside labors, if not on all my thoughts. My grandmother was away at her one indulgence, a summer stint at Chautauqua, taking the Austrian couple along “because the lectures will help them with their English.” After forty years in this country!—but both she and they had to have an excuse for her charity. I was glad of the delay. Over the weekend I had been to see Knobby and Etsuko. She had shown me a picture-book, lent by the ballet niece, on the Japanese male actors who played women. She had charmingly refused to let herself understand why Leo’s case might not be covered by such a switch, I told Towle, and miming, I began to play Etsuko in Kabuki gesture, until warned by his glance. I had better play no one but Leo. For the time being, I must be no one else.

  At the moment I was having tea with gloves on, in an effort to find out why Leo might have worn them so often. I took them off. Absurd. But Leo would not have been a fool. Then why? In the pictures the hands were well formed, free of rash and not really large enough to be hidden either for vanity’s sake, or for maidenliness. Neither of which, I decided, Leo had suffered from. But those hands would have had their own gestures—perhaps unique? Gloves of thin kid, like these found in a thrift shop, would restrain them. I flexed my fingers. “At times maybe one would simply want relief—from being reminded. Of what one was.” Whatever that had been.

  He was always as attentive to these revelations as if he were at a seance. Or as a lover might watch one disrobe. Or might listen—the day beforehand—to one’s dreams? Though I knew he stared at me, I had never caught him at it.

  “What Leo laughed at.” I made it a statement, not a question—as if like all these matters, it was there to be found, a jewel mislaid but somewhere safe. “Maybe. I didn’t find it though. Knobby did.”

  “Oh, you talked to Watanabe—good girl. No telling what Nessa might have let fall—or he’s picked up.”

  He spoke so idly. I understand artists’ casualness with their own work. The way a sculptor, showing the studio, will cuff a statue the way a father cuffs a child. Roughing up what no one else must. But Towle, when offhand, unnerved me, unable as I was to tell where “the work” left off and he began.

  “I speak to no one
about Leo but you,” I said fiercely. “No one else.” Then I caught his stare. I had become easy with his smell, heady but now not dizzying. The eyes, brown-pupiled but no longer liquid with youth, were like a fence, scarcely divided by the nose. Out of his presence one thought of the nose as a hook; returning, one saw that it sloped. Of course one doesn’t see a body’s whole import in its eyes. But one may see the flicker behind the fence, or the undisturbed brown. I thought to myself: in him the idea of only one other besides oneself, of that exclusivity between two people—one for one—which my small world and many books had taught me to long for—is not there, is simply not there.

  “We’d been making cookies,” I said shakily, and certainly in my own voice. I had wanted to do even that in the persona of Leo. Knobby and I were alone, he watching quietly; I had told him nothing. Just as I needed the sieve, he reached not into the drawer but in a cabinet above, on the side where the set of brown-black pottery dishes was kept, and brought down an odd-shaped one from a corner that held strainers, tongs, and other kitchenware, all, as I now saw, with the pewtery shine of old implements. “The best,” he said. “Make the flour like silk.” He knows, I thought; Knobby understands what I am doing. This stretching back to be another person, in order to honor them. That natural tribute to one’s ancestors, which one performs time after time in daily life.

  “Then, all of a sudden, we had this big plate of cookies. And nobody to come for them. And Knobby said: ‘Children should be coming for them. Our family house Kamikura, they come like clockwork.’” He said “crockwork,” but I had long since stopped grinning at his accent or his specially trotted out phrases. “Knobby wanted children, you know. But Etsuko’s turned out to be too old. And then he said, ‘Children are monsters. Dal-uh-ring monsters. With them one can laugh.’”

  We two were quiet. As at each of these discoveries when they rang true. It’s a solemn thing to reconstruct a life. This was why in spite of all, I could approve of him and maybe even why—as the town became aware of what we were up to—it let us alone. I would not know Mr. Evams’s role there for a long time.

  “I’ll visit the day nurseries,” I said. “As Leo did. Everybody thinks they know what it is to be a child. Especially someone my age. But I’ll go.”

  I finished the tea, bare-armed. Arms in long gloves move differently at the elbow, protected as they are from excessive gesture—was that it? But which such gestures, of which sex, would a Leo have been seeking protection from? Even to the oddity of wearing gloves inside the house. And when one wore them, in or out, did one or did one not touch the face? “Makeup,” I said. “Are we back to that?”

  Would the Leo I was feeling my way toward have worn it? I felt not, but Towle maintained this might be because I didn’t wear it myself, except when acting. “For you it means the stage,” he had said. “Not what women feel they have to do.” The play, as so far shown me, had had a scene in which Leo, as Aunt Leona, returns to the church after years of avoidance, wearing too much rouge. Painful—but too beautifully written, he said, and had discarded it.

  It still amazed me, that in his mind the scenes changed from day to day, and might do so up to dress rehearsal and even after. I had thought that somebody as eminent as he wouldn’t do that, or have to.

  “May I never be—that eminent.”

  I wasn’t too stupid to see that my use of the word amused him. But I was still to learn that he was leading me through a part, more than I would ever lead him toward his play.

  Only yesterday I had challenged him—did he really know what he wanted his play to be? “Of course,” he said, quick, “I want it to have—a haunting provincialism.” I saw that he both grudged and loved saying that. Then he lowered his head, to slap me down for it. At these times the nose has a definite hook. “Exactly like you.”

  “Look, Towle, don’t stare,” I said now. “It puts me off.”

  “Good voice, that—” he said at once. “Make note of it.”

  I did, and of how it had come without thinking.

  “Does it scare you?” he said. “To be becoming someone else?”

  I nodded. “But not enough.”

  I rubbed my face with my hands—it hadn’t changed. Leo would have had no beard, we had agreed, but I was becoming ashamed of our practice, so mincingly literal. I stared at my palms. The children. Eyes like magnifying glasses spying at the pores of adult flesh. Luray Walsh’s mouth corners, for instance—how repellent their thick pink, wet with beads of saliva, had been to me when I was eight, the year the Walshes came to town. Younger children see even closer, with the same gaze—open to first principles—that they give to the Silly Putty in its staple primary colors and to the building blocks.

  “The children—” I cried, “could Leo have worn the gloves for them? Maybe not to touch them.” Not to repel. The conscious monster, protecting what it loved. “Oh that would be—” I couldn’t find a word. “Oh, how can I know, at my age, how Leo felt about them?” The loft echoed. “How anyone does,” I said, in my own voice. That was the key. In what I said—and in how I said it, both. But I wasn’t ready to know that yet.

  He knelt to pick up a piece of paper, one of his everlasting notes to himself. “What we’re doing—it’s for real but also not for real—can’t you learn that?” In his cool distaste, I heard that I had become too partisan. Was he mulling whether he would have me in his play after all? Deciding that what we had done here was about all the use I would ever be to him?

  He stood up and went to his desk, fingering the big pile of script, of which he had fed me only a scene here and there. “Yes, the children. That will be it.” He didn’t mean how it had been for Leo, but how it would be for him. He handed me one of the scripts. The pile, always changing, had never been so high. “So you too have come to that conclusion. Good girl.”

  He dropped to his haunches, in front of me—later I would note how he always did that when explaining a part. “Here. Time you read it, began learning your lines. As well as learning how I may change them.” He stood up over me. “Going out to get us some dinner. Might have a few drinks on the way. Are you too hungry? No? Good.” Climbing down the ladder which led up here, he still faced me. “Read between the lines, remember? Not just bung on.”

  “That’s unworthy of you,” I called after him. “But teaching corrupts.”

  The play in that version began in Boston, with Nessa and Leo walking on the Common. The hospital and the hated doctors one never saw, except as a background chorale, in half-dark. Though the two walkers never left the stage, there were flashbacks. One to Nessa’s wedding eve, not confined to that bathroom but including it. One to the time when she first held the babe in her arms. The order of these scenes was not yet certain. There was also a flash of the farmhands in the barn—though Nessa was there too. The two main characters, Nessa and Leo, were sometimes there in the flesh, sometimes only in the spirit, and all variations of this were played on. This he called spirit-shading, and I supposed it to be his method—he replying when I said this, that yes, he supposed so, since the method had been around since the millennium.

  He didn’t like the analytics our school so fostered. Even with only those two walking, his stage was often densely packed, but the shadings were never intentionally cloudy. “I write to make things clear,” he said, “and don’t you forget it.”

  The second act was all Leo’s affair with a man, one not so silly as Ruskin Swazey. “I think he was not silly,” Towle said. But the scene in the church was there. It was to hang in the mind, the directions to the stage designer said, “like a postcard painted by Raphael.”

  There were no suggestions as yet to the actors.

  I hadn’t got to the last act, when he was back.

  He fended off what I was full of and about to say. “Pizza? Or quiche?” He always brought both, as well as other delicatessen, laying out the food and beer like a picnic.

  “I never thought Nessa would actually be in it,” I said. “Does she know?”

&nbs
p; “Eat.”

  I was hungry, with an anger against him that added zest. All through our association he would play on that anger.

  “She does and she doesn’t know,” he said then. “It won’t matter.” He put out a restraining hand. “Come come. It would matter to your grandmother as you know her, maybe. But not to Nessa. Or not that much. And they both want the same thing.” He reached for his beer. Not a stage pause. In his own life he never acted; he was one of the few people I could trust not to be theatrical. My father was another.

  “She wants Leo to live,” he said. “For as long as she does.”

  I was near tears. Such violations were new to me.

  “Eat.”

  I did; my appetite these days was huge. I thought again of prisoners. As I was to always to do, when I must act at someone else’s behest counter to my own. “The lines. They’re—kind of primitive. Some—are they to be read double? As if the character wouldn’t know all it’s saying?” It was a relief to call Leo the character. I began doing so that night.

  “Read those plain,” he said harshly. “Leo would know everything.”

  And there we utterly agreed.

  When we’d finished, he said: “See you haven’t read the last part. Go ahead. I’ll nap.” He stretched out on the couch. He often did that. I no longer stole secret looks at him, as one does at a male sleeping. He was no longer that to me, I thought.

  I bent to the playscript. Up to now it had been all continuity—a flow. But in this final section, not an act in the usual sense, more a charade, the actors spoke in stylized cries, as if in echoes of an old theater craft that everybody might have forgotten. The stage was filled with them—with the town. And children were everywhere—urged away from hot pokers and sneaking cold biscuit, kneeled to and scooped up, and fed warm cake. And all, all were imaginary. Not only to Leo. Spoken to, their answers could not be heard, except at the end, when Leo did hear one of them, who emerged into the real. A boy of fourteen, speaking in low peroration.