I saw how heartrending that could be—or could be played—the two, he and Leo across the stage from one another, separated by that dumb throng of the imaginary.
But all of the scene was spoiled for me, spoiled, spoiled—by the presence of the town girl—she the silly essence of all those small-town girls whom banking money or land money would send into the world to boarding schools, only to come back—and in physique like those bow-mouthed, frill-necked cloth dolls that the divas and housewives of Leo’s era had had in their bedrooms. A girl Leo now loved. And more imaginary—I thought scornfully—than any of the throng.
Towle was smiling. When I said nothing, he yawned. “We could have production money now. And dates. And two winners willing and eager to sign for the girl. One from Hollywood—who can act up a storm, by the way. The other, from Broadway via Park Avenue, doesn’t have to. She could lisp that part in her sleep.”
“But what’s she doing there!” A girl—such as my mother might have been—at the time.
“I knew how you would feel.”
“I hate it. It’s not true.”
“For Leo? Why not true for him?”
“Her!”
We were both standing now. Even if he had been as tall as me, we would never see eye to eye. Why must I always seek that, with men especially? Whereas with women—Etsuko, my mother, even my grandmother, I had a warm tolerance for their variation, and with my girl classmates could argue amicably half the night? Because we already had a common ground?
And the play’s end—that boy, leaning against the two bikes. How did Towle dare?
“I’m going to see my father.”
His eyelids flickered. “So I’d hoped.”
Mr. Peralho’s flat was in one of those large apartment buildings on Cannon Place, where my father said old money on the run came up against new.
“Slightly on the run,” he added, looking out with me on the East River below. “Nothing serious.”
The river, with so little now of the gear and traffic of a live waterway, must be only a print of its former self, and on the run too. To a gelatinous shoreline not far enough across, and holding almost still, mere window bric-a-brac for buildings such as the one in which we were. Massed together over the East River Drive, all on one side, these apartment houses gave off a gray money-light. Flowers dotted them, at closed casements. Terraces did not flaunt but hid. The windowsills here were lined with plants inside the panes. Across the water a sign said PEARLWICK HAMPERS, a vista from a factory fairy tale. “These places seem to me like hampers for people,” I said.
I had mostly been asking my father mild questions since I got there, to get him used to them. When talking of money, older people, men particularly, are always glad to instruct.
“Well, the florists’ bills on this side are certainly large,” he said. He had already told me that the West Side, where our school was located, was the side of the city where people thought about money even if they had it; the East Side was where it was kept. As I would see if I came to live here during the play.
“Is Mr. Peralho’s money old or new?”
“Old. And not on the run.”
“He’s kind.”
“I’m glad you see that.”
“I like him a lot. Or else I couldn’t stay here.”
“Neither could I,” my father said.
The flat was sleek but shallow, scattered with photographs artistically arranged, even packed with them, in the same style as the sitting rooms of the two gentlemen at the farm, who had so keenly enjoyed naming the originals. My father had made no move to, here.
I went to a good-size study of a man, hung on one wall. “I seem to know that face.”
“T. S. Eliot? Yes, the resemblance was remarkable. Leslie himself often said, I look like that poet with the large but weak nose.’” My father’s mouth folded inward, as happens when people quote the dead.
“Was he a poet?”
“He played bridge for a living. On ocean liners, when he was young. Later—here. Those he won from helped him invest. It was nothing to them.” My father inched closer to the portrait. On our porch that had been the way he used to defend me. But the bloodlight once in my head had faded. A great leveler I hadn’t yet named was pushing it out.
“That why we’re talking so much about money?” my father said. “You still minding—how you got yours?”
The curls I had grown to play Leo swung in front of my face, startling me. “In the end, people don’t mind, do they?” I said. In my new voice. “And as for me—if a person knows what the other person is. And accepts that.” I dared not look up. “It’s like a view. One gets used to it. Is that bad?”
“Think I’ll buy myself a drink,” my father said.
He brought me a small wineglass filled with red.
“What is it?”
“Punt è Mes. It won’t hurt you.”
I thought: They talk flip here. These people without real streets to refer to. Or closets of a depth to hold their lives. But serious things could be said that way, too. It’s just another style. Take it in. “I just thought—maybe I ought never to begin?”
He stared into his own glass of drink. Was he thinking I blamed him for my mother? They give us their own burdens, I thought, but we are never to present them.
“You take all of your heritage so hard,” he said. “So hard.”
Is that bad? I can’t ask that again, I thought—and then I saw what was tipped against the swinging door that led from the dining ell to the kitchen. They had no back door here, no real dining room either. Though I supposed a view could inhibit just as much as a Taj Mahal lamp. “Why there’s the old Raleigh. Your old bike.” He used to ride it home from the station, in the early days.
“Not mine. That one’s long gone. There was another like it, at your grandmother’s. I’ve had it revamped. They’re too heavy for the city. If I were going to stay here I’d get an Italian one. But I hope not.”
He was always one to say what he felt—only never saying much.
“Why would you stay?” Of course I was busy now, too busy for him.
“It’s Tim who shouldn’t drink.”
With so much else Tim shouldn’t be doing now, that too? “I’m sorry.”
“Not really. No one is. That’s the trouble.”
“Not even you?” The horrified question shot from me.
My father gazed at the plants. “I give what I can.”
They were a mixed lot, those African violets and worn begonias, assembled without concern for their separate sun needs. But not too clumsy if tended for honor’s sake. If I stayed here, I would water them.
After a while I said: “Those pocket plants we used to have at home—it’s not the season for them?”
“No.”
Down below, a barge urged itself grudgingly north. It was carrying piles of real coal that glinted in the water mist. But with every foot farther along this sector of river, didn’t it risk becoming a mere paper cutout for these residents above? My father was watching it also.
“Ask me the questions you came for,” he said. And I was not surprised.
“Pocket plants were Leo’s favorite, weren’t they.”
He nodded, still tracking the barge. Not asking how I knew. “But Leo had pockets everywhere. One never spent a day in that—presence, without receiving some gift.”
“Cookies.”
“Not always tangible, those gifts. But you could always sense them.”
We seemed to be breathing in unison.
“You’re like that sometimes,” he said. “When you come from the Evamses’ especially. And maybe you’ll be like that on stage.”
How could a barge grudge being looked at, or having to go north? Onstage though, we imputed to a property what we wanted it to be. And backgrounds were tailored to us. Yet wasn’t there a chance that the inanimate was as suspended in emotion as we? And that this too, was heritage?
“Other times—you’re like me.”
; What are you like, Father; what are you really like? I knew better than to ask it straight.
“What—are we like?”
His answer came quick. “We give what we can.”
How kind he was, to take the blame for whatever we were. Who had shown him how?
Could you give me—Leo? I was about to ask. But it happened that I moved—to see the last of the barge.
Or scow? I know nothing about the sea, although the idea of a sea somehow moves me toward the generous, as it does most people. As that vessel turned, I saw a woman sitting against the south wall of its small cabin, a child at her feet. The camp chair on which she sat was distinct in the sun. Did her shoulder also have the storyteller’s outline—how could I have seen that from so far? Far enough to see my mother telling me her story bit by bit, on trains in flight, on striped porch chairs in the evening, or in the silence drawn under big hats—often with her shoulder so curved. The legends told by women drop into the same sea as the legends told by men, but even a woman born of a woman has to learn to fish for them.
“Did Leo ever study for the law?”
“Yes. By correspondence only—and reading. And passed the bar exams. But never practiced. That was why I went in for it, later. My idea was—we would practice together.”
“But when you graduated—Mother once said something about your—planning to go in with somebody from Hartford—a friend you graduated with.”
“Did she?” He turned from the window and took my hands in his. “Your mother’s a sibyl. Who doesn’t know she is.”
“She refuses to,” I said. “That’s the trouble.”
We held onto each other eye to eye, exchanging our blindness and our sight.
“So will you be, one day,” he said. “And you won’t refuse.” He let go my hands. “During law school, yes, I had a friend. He and I were, as the saying went then—inseparable. Nothing more. Men could still do that then. Be close, without other thought. His father, who was a judge, agreed to help us open an office up there. Not Hartford, New London. And maybe in Boston, later on. And I spoke to them about Leo, my aunt, that privately educated lawyer. It was a time when women were coming into view in the labor field especially. There had been a woman Secretary of Labor in the Cabinet. And Mrs. Roosevelt. And my friend and I planned to go into labor law. So he and his father were open to it … What are you looking at?”
“A barge. A scow. And now it’s gone.”
“So—my friend came to the graduation party. Intending to meet Leo. Who was not a recluse, you understand—do you understand? Only retiring, in the way many spinsters then were. Helped with the family work, both the heavy and the pretty touches, and then went to their rooms. Appeared for meals, or didn’t. Some were made into slaveys. If they were loved—they were made into characters. The town did a lot of both.” My father peered after the barge. “It’s all gone now—the spinster cousins and aunts and sisters who stayed at home. Sometimes they helped the family make them into characters. It gave them a status. And freed them of criticism maybe. For their one central lack … And in that respect, Leo was no different … What’s wrong?”
I was awed, that’s all. “Nothing. It’s just that I never knew you thought that much. About the town.”
“Oh?” He smiled at me. “Everybody in a town thinks that about the others. That’s what a town is.”
And the difference between men and women may lie elsewhere than where we think. A woman slopes over her hoard of the past. My father, leaning again into his, squared his shoulders as if taken aback.
“In those days Leo’s quarters were slightly off limits, but nothing sacrosanct. Few outside of the family were received there, but partly only because there was so much room downstairs. The houses afforded that. So families might either receive together, or scarcely at all. Except for the town children, who ran in and out from house to house. Upstairs all of us could be pretty much private to ourselves. So bringing my friend upstairs was—a kind of occasion. Not much noticed—the house that day being in preparation for the party. It was the day before. My friend was at the moment the only guest. The girls hadn’t yet arrived. That evening, they would.”
The river was ready again for the next batch of whatever. I am more used to the city now; I can love it for what it is. Apartment buildings are all the same, rich or not. They are barracks, with starers everywhere along the façades. A city is audience.
“So I took my friend upstairs to meet our possible partner,” my father said. “My Aunt Mary Leona, called Leo. And Leo was waiting for us. Dressed like a man.”
On a river, the revelations rise and sink. Any stranger may fish for them. But a house can be set for company, with all its significances plain. Until now I had thought of our once sturdy farmhouse as desecrated, like a plowhorse made to wear pompoms and strut. But now I saw that the two gentlemen had massed their photographs of European tours, their bric-a-brac and even their boys in the garden according to an instinct honest for them. Maybe even the suave barrenness of the fields had been intended. It was what they had had to do.
I strained toward Leo with whatever empathy I had been born with, or learned. The aunt who had ridden from the farm with my father, bike to bike, the hamper of male clothing bought in Boston trundling ahead of them in the van. Who maybe saw my father and his roommate come into the house still flushed and innocent of what their linked future could be. Leo the debater, watching all belowstairs from the captain’s walks that both our family houses had had—haylofts of a kind. Who later would surely have seen the girls fluttering around their tall host, the son of the house, as handsome as he was remote.
I strained toward him, the nephew. Taker of pictures at an early age. Of Leo and a music society, when he himself was just able to pen his name. My father the lawyer, who had never had a business partner. But in whose New York office there had always hung what when questioned he had said was “an art photo”—which he said was what one called pictures with no people in them. Yet that one was strangely inhabited. A picture of two bikes leaning against a wall.
“Leo let you see on purpose.”
How loudly I said that. But then—I was not at Evamses’. Look at those huge speakers in the bookshelves—what mammoth music must issue from those. Quiet as the cardplaying here would have been, this had been a high-decibel house.
“That’s what Leslie said.”
How it must have mattered to them. For my father to tell me this.
“We discussed it endlessly. As to what the purpose had been.”
The false Mr. Eliot looked down on us. Not a face that would have come to no conclusion.
“Perhaps you have an opinion?” my father said. “From what you and your—collaborator—know of Leo?”
I saw—or heard—that my father thought Towle was already my lover.
“If you yourself could say—” he said stiffly “—I would particularly value it.”
And I hear how faithful my father is. How much it must matter to him still, that those he has loved since should know Leo, that Leo should live again in such a dialogue. First with Leslie. Now with me.
Only my mother would have been debarred.
While my father and Leslie Warden discussed “endlessly” whether or not my father had been in love with Leo, and Leo with him? And whether or not for Leo this had been as men love women, or as women love men? That face up there would have thought of it. And of how the two must never have loved as my father and mother once had, or as he and my father. I could only feel that they had not. But that face could have been told.
This apartment was a place where everything had been said. I was not going to. Nor would I ever ask for sure when and how my father had found out what Leo was. Leo would not want me to. What Leo would want me to know I must find out for myself, or it would be worth nothing. And if it was worth what I was beginning to think—then I must tell the world.
“I think—Leo did not do it from jealousy.”
“Indeed not.” From my father�
�s tone, he has never bathed in that yellow light. Or else had been taught otherwise. “It was done from grace. The way Leo did everything. I feel you should know that. Before you begin.”
“I feel—almost as if I do.” True. But I won’t be asking my father anything more. How odd to find one’s father more innocent than oneself. It heals the jealousy, but leaves another kind of hole.
What I want from Leo is the bitterness as well. Even from that half person, or double person, the hidden part that hides in all of us, and anneals our lives. And perhaps because I want that annealing for my own life—I will find Leo’s.
“When you and your friend confronted Leo? What then?”
We were talking as equals. To do that with a parent is heaven. But it is not done with both parents together. Perhaps that is the bitterness.
“My friend—as you call him—turned tail and fled. And I had to go after him.” My father bent his head in anguish. “No, I didn’t have to follow him. Leaving Leo. But I did. All the way to the station, to which he demanded to be taken at once; he kept waving his arms. In flagrante delicto—he kept saying. But that means ‘taken in the act.’ Maybe he wouldn’t have done that well in the law. Anyway, I never again heard from him.” My father raised his head. “That was the worst. That I turned tail, from Leo. And fled. And the next day—your grandfather died.”
“And Leo?”
“Leo came down to help, as usual. Dressed as usual. My Aunt Mary Leona. Not quite as slim as when we rode our bikes.”
“Did Leo and my mother ever truly meet?” Truly was my mother’s adjective.
“No doubt, in a bevy of girls. Girls traveled more in bevies then.”
“School is a bevy—” I said.
“But I remember Leo at the kitchen window after the funeral, ironing the dress your mother had worn to the party. And saying to me: ‘The touching way that girl says down home. She should not be put to traveling all the way there alone. After such an experience as hers. We owe it to her to escort her there.’”
The Bobby-Soxer Page 22