A confirmation Bible, from its freshness rarely used since, is next to one of the Little Blue Books—by the Robert Underwood who billed himself as an “Iconoclast.” Next came a green-and-gold edition, lovely to thumb, of the Cathedrals of Europe, next to that a coverless cookbook, yellow-spotted and very early, printed in our own county. I would one day ask to have it and be given it. The recipe for sheepshead is there—and in the margins, the only examples of Leo’s penmanship. Almost every recipe had been tried—marked with a large check, or a cross, or even a “Nix,” and some of the old ingredients had had their current substitutes noted. For isinglass, a penciled “Cornstarch?” and below this—“No—agar-agar.”
I keep that cookbook to remind me of the everchanging pharmacopaeia of women; maybe Leo did so also. Nothing on that shelf brought me nearer that creature’s spirit. Certainly not the miniature copy, printed by one Thomas Mosher, of John Donne’s Biathanatos, an apology for suicide. Alongside it, as if in answer, a healthily large Newman’s Apologia Pro Sua Vita had been stacked. The last book on the shelf was much worn. Duns Scotus? I had never heard of him, as most have not.
A short preface stated that Scotus, a British or Irish scholastic commonly called “the Subtle Doctor,” had died in 1308. Asserting that any knowledge of finite truth rested on that ultimate truth which is God, he had denied the individuality of matter.
This I could not understand—God helping or not. And am not sure even now of what a Leo would make of it. Would a Leo have wanted a denial—or an affirmation? But the huge engraving that hung frameless above the shelf—that I could appreciate. Its fine-print title said: Château d’If, State Prison off the coast of Marseilles. Illus. Comte de Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas.
I had never cared for Dumas. But the prison looked like what it was.
Lying on the table beside the shelf, there was a portfolio of red leather, stamped LETTERS. Empty. Towle had reported such an article, brought from the farm, and gradually filled. Letters to people we never heard of, Nessa had said. Letters to books, long-ago books. And the authors dead, most of them. Letters never sent. She had destroyed them all, unread.
Resting my hand on the red leather, looking up at the Chateau, I made a vow. “I’ll write your letters, Leo,” I said.
I found my grandmother asleep, or nodding. Was she half awake? With those who can destroy, one is never sure.
“Nessa?”
In extreme age, the pupils of the blue-eyed either go greenish, like cheap glass looked at from the side, or clearer in their own color, with the clean innerness of flint. But her pupils were that brown which rims with mauve, as if from an ever-perfected past.
“Go back,” she said. “Go on back in, my ewe lamb. No, I’m not done with you. But that girl is here now. The one he’s writing his play about.”
I climbed the twist of steps to the captain’s walk—as I had every day since. I needed an ugly place to be. The house below was empty. My grandmother, for months the target of the old Austrian’s plea to let him and his wife show her their country, had given in, half out of amazement, when she discovered she was not expected to pay for them.
“Every Austrian has a nest egg,” the old man said, and that had sealed their kinship, for though my father had been conned into paying her expenses, all along so had she. Also, such a country seemed the right sort for a ninety-three-year-old’s first trip abroad. “Travel’s like housework, isn’t it?” she wrote my father, who had never done housework in his life. “Why didn’t you say? It clears the head. At my age that counts. By the way, I said something to upset your girl. Don’t remember what.”
He sent the letter on to me, saying he well understood what she meant about travel, though her version of it was a demi-pension outside Vienna, where their party would stay put for three months. As for him, Rio was now home—perhaps the reason why it hadn’t yet helped my mother, although she had been slightly roused by her new Indian nurse. Etsuko, lingering on in the name of duty, had finally persuaded Watanabe to detach her by promising to meet her in Japan, to which until then he had refused to return. “As for your grandmother, take her with the usual grain of salt. Her age is certainly wandering; far as I know she is not yet ninety-one. Maybe those debentures are the draw.” He concluded by saying that I was the only one of us who had not traveled, which he would someday help me toward, though of course I was busy—and how was the play getting on? “We will all return for your debut, of course.”
It was his first real letter, and I treasured it.
By then, I had also had a note from Towle. He was at the family beach house with his children, saying that their presence was useful since he was keeping the children’s scene in, though rewriting it.
But Leo is no longer the main character. I was pretending that to myself. As well as to you. What I’m doing now works. Hope you’ll understand, once I’ve got it all, and will agree to play your new role. No more—until I see you.
Watch for the flag.
For rendezvous we had used the red flag on the mailbox of my empty house, which no longer received mail or sent it. Whatever the mailman thought—when he stopped for the pickup flag and found nothing—went into the granular underdust of the town. For it all goes somewhere, I believe now. If the flag was up when I came by of an afternoon, it meant that Towle was still in the loft and at work, in which case I continued past it to the backyard of my house and sat on a torn, tan-striped garden chair whose seat sagged as the weeks went by until I was almost on the grass. I remember that humped waiting, excited but mindless except for the pattern between my knees—and their jump—when he called me to come up.
I rarely went inside my house. When I did, at first only Phoebe was there, if feebly. A mere arrangement of light and the sound of a name, in the way of persons not seen for a long time and once known too well. But then Bill joined us, and with that I couldn’t yet deal.
But now I slept there every night, on the mattress the Salvation Army had refused, Towle’s letter beside me on the hall floor where I had tossed it, where if I left it long enough it might tell me all. There was that virtue in owning an empty house. Or three houses to be alone in, in a kind of spirit-travel, in which I was going from one to the other, out in other company only at the school, which would shortly recess. Not before teaching me that very few egos, there or perhaps anywhere, would ever have as much time for me as my own. My getting the part had been a nine-days wonder. That a role—or a play—might evaporate, was not.
“That’s the theater for you,” the voice coach said, basso profundo on this anodyne which would perhaps serve us both best of all. “In the mornin’ and the evenin’.” He had just rehearsed “Mighty Lak a Rose” with two boys slated for a television commercial—canceling my final lesson for theirs. They had a job. “Read in Variety that Canada weren’t the only ones backed out. Hear Towle’s gone away. To revise, it said.”
“I know. I had a note.”
“From Towle? Signed?” Mr. Margolies hummed a certain three bars—his own signature. “Save it, if I were you. Never know when one’ll need a testimonial.”
“Him? Or me?” I said, and left him shaking his head—in six eight time.
So here I was, in recess, when one is supposed to learn nothing. Or else, as they advised at school—to go back to life. But I seemed to carry my life with me wherever I went. Which practice, as Miss Pevsner had warned, could keep one unprofessional. A group of students was going to Spain, to wallow in the scenic and forget that they would soon graduate, but I told them that I had an obligation. “To Towle?” said a boy who fancied me in a light way and had declared I had better learn that style sooner than later. “Come on—shape up.” No, not to him, I said. Other students had dropped me bids to parties in the city, but Mr. Peralho’s was to be painted; I couldn’t stay overnight there—and didn’t want to, though I already knew that the city in dead of summer is operetta, is nice. Ambition is in its own dead swoon—or at the shore.
Towle’s note had been se
nt from Dorchester.
As for me, I felt at the height of physical and mental power, ready again for the scenery of sex, or to board Shakespeare on strophe after strophe, or to strip to its core any blood-and-thunder script a casting agent would toss me—my own history waiting second by second to burst from my veins and deal with anything, if only there were something with which to deal. Meanwhile that half-obliterated postmark from Dorchester, whose oval I had turned this way and that to read for sure, lay in my mind’s eye like a seashell for which I would not stoop.
In those days the train to our town took at least an hour and a half. I boarded a slow afternoon number known as the “Philadelphia freight,” whose wheels seemed to be deploring their own slackness: Tsk—ull, tsk tsk. Only the morning trains had many men on them. I thought of the two in whose company I had traveled this route with such intent on my part, such significance, each man only half joined to me, each riding with one shoulder pressing forward beyond the two of us—and the division between men and women seemed to me the heaviest I would ever bear. Perhaps that was why Leo had never ridden the trains.
In the town as I hurried home on foot the evening sun made dark dunes of the narrow streets near the depot. Children, poor ones, were still out playing in all the networks children maintain. I knew none of these little webs anymore. But what if one had known these, stepping along in one’s Sorosis shoes, steady, steady, between all the signposts of generosity and will along the path one had made for oneself? Had had to make.
In the kitchen I concocted my nightly meal of sandwiches with lurid fillings, meanwhile missing Knobby, presently walking the misty streets of Japan, maybe toting that same cotton bag he had brought to my wedding, which had held not rice but paper blessings never scattered. He had given me a private handful instead. Of all the people I would miss later—and I would become faithful to the point of neurosis there—he cast the least burden. Perhaps I could have asked him about Leo. His language was more cognate with our country’s past than with its present. As is often the case with foreigners here—though only they seem to notice.
Sandwiches make me optimistic. I went up the stairs singing for real, passing the locked third floor, for which I now had no need. Up the pie-cut steps to the triangular landing, through the tower space with its purple and amber bordered panes and slanting floor, and I was out on the walk itself, a lacy three-sided railed balcony that surrounded the mean-sized tower and excused it. Here I could survey the town, and more and more it was Leo’s town, for I felt sure that after the hidden errands of charity and other shy forays of Leo’s day, those shoes, pair after pair, wearing like iron and yet wearing out, had mounted these steps.
What I was seeing, and daily more familiar to me, were the lanes that people’s workpaths make. And that these have little to do with whether a town council has paved with macadam or tar. The path to the factory was trod early but by few, all older men lumbering along as if linked by one and the same arthritic twinge. At 6 P.M. twenty or more women of all ages flounced or sagged from the new department store, the cleaner’s and the other service shops, their sharply coiffured heads of white or blond, russet, or brown dotting erratically between the houses, until each singly entered her own door. On Friday nights the two beauty parlors, one a Nook the other a Bower, took in the disheveled and sent out again these sedate blooms. The doctors’ offices, most now in one medical building, seemed at some hours to disgorge more than they took in, and at others to do the opposite. The exception was one granddaddy house only a block away, a replica of ours even to the tower. In that house’s similar carriage house the town’s reigning doctor kept the special-built Packard that doubled for funerals as needed, in the mortuary run by his son-in-law. One went to this doctor as a last resort. Through both his door and his son-in-law’s the patients entered at stately intervals in a thin, selective line, to exit in identical lines and with much the same mien as before, only somewhat nearer the grave.
I watched this theater of the ordinary with the eye of one who had never traveled, and with the aid of a pair of opera glasses found in a case with the music society’s gold stamp on it, inside the glassed-in bookcase I had after all opened. Possibly the books there, all of them on law, contained much to do with what I was seeing: how people moved, divided, connected—and were mowed down. People were a crop.
Why did I feel it necessary to tell myself I was seeing the town as Leo saw it? Because I was seeing it with love?
I was doing “Oh, Rest in the Lord” when the front doorbell rang. Leaning over the railing I saw the police car at the curb, but couldn’t see who was below. “Door’s open,” I called, leaning out farther.
“Don’t do that,” the police captain’s voice said.
He climbed the flights at a stately pace, nothing like when he and Denby had stampeded the loft. Once on the landing, he leaned in, framing himself in the tower’s doorway. “Nice lookout you’ve got here.”
“Built for sea captains,” I said. “Emphasis on sea.”
“And only accommodates one?” he said. “That’s a change. What the hell you up to now?” But he had already scanned the plate of food, the schoolbooks dumped on the floor, my decent shirt and braids, and neat ballerinas, and I could see he was relieved.
“Rehearsing, for a play.”
“I heard. Who’s the leading man? No, don’t tell me. Heard that, too.”
“You heard wrong.”
He grinned. “With you, I always hear wrong. Don’t you do anything—downstairs?”
I had to laugh. “Who phoned you this time?”
“Nobody. Keep my ear to the ground. Have to, the kind of crime this town mostly commits. Murders in haylofts. Voyeurs in braids.” He pronounced it voy. His eyes went again to the opera glasses lying on a box of Kleenex for polishing them.
“I was studying the town. How it would’ve looked to the person who owned those.”
“You don’t say. Tell you something. This is a real town. Not some play-acting. People worry about you. Know you’re alone.” He bent over the Kleenex box to scrutinize the glasses, but didn’t touch them. “So—who belongs to these? Our local genius—and lady-killer?”
“No. He—he studies on his own.”
“Bet he does. So then—who?”
“It was a long time ago. Thirty years.”
His eyes crinkled. “Try me.”
“Mary Leona. My great-aunt.”
What he did then—he stepped inside the door frame, over to where I was. There was room for two on the walk after all. Lowering that big head of his from left to right, he checked the view, then stood still for it, his hacked profile forward. If there had been a ship’s wheel up there, his head could have manned the whole walk as if from a prow.
When he said: “So that’s what he’s onto—” he no more had to say he meant Craig Towle than one of a pair steering some old packet boat always on the same course would have had to say to the other—South, southwest.
Then, still looking out and over the town, he said—“Leo …”
Not a question, not just a statement but in the way two inhabitants would refer to what a whole town knew, but didn’t talk about.
So—I nodded back.
That rough-cut mouth didn’t change, nor that big ear, which had to keep itself to the ground. I had to answer to them.
“Was.” It came out a croak. My throat hurt. “Was onto. Now—I dunno.”
“Uh-huh,” he said. “Saw the evening paper. Too bad.”
The local paper came at four o’clock. Its delivery box was down there at the edge of the lawn. But the paper had been stopped.
“The play—” My voice broke clear. “They’ve announced the cast of the play!”
He turned, shaking his head slowly at me, the way he must do when he came to a house to report a crash—and a death.
“Towle’s young wife—the one who died? Parents in Boston are suing him. For neglect.”
Then he patted my cheek, which was what he must have come
to do—and to check on the view from here. After which he did pick up the opera glasses, handed them to me, and went back down the stairs.
THERE WAS SOMEONE STAYING IN the Towle house—and I thought I knew who it was. Once or twice a day the Volks, not so new now, passed my grandmother’s house, going slow. Towle usually drove with his left arm out the window, but the car was on the wrong side of the street for me to see the driver. I didn’t think it would be he. At night, from in front of my own house, I couldn’t quite see whether there were lights in that other house down the Row, but as one by one the houses in between went dark, the cobbled path in front of the fifth house down was still luminous. Whoever was there stayed up late.
Each morning, waking early and ravenous, I would walk over to my grandmother’s. At that same hour those workmen who still lived on the Row were making their way to the old factory, the few young apprentices slamming by in their cars, the elder men still on foot, as befitted men who all their lives had made furniture by hand. On a pearly morning, one could see clear down the Row to the nineteenth century, to where the factory’s low buildings, all of cobble too and improvidently made to last, clustered like a village, among trees dwarfed by age or else by a decision to stop growing. No apprentice with any get-up-and-go to him ever stayed there long.
One day, halfway down the Row, a new car glittered, its hood like a long upper lip clamped in disdain. A tow truck, from the garage at this end of town whose habit was to repair at night and deliver in time for those who drove to their jobs, was just drawing away. By the license plate, this car, not a big car, almost mutinously small, worked in Massachusetts, if at all. My brother, who had once been mad for foreign cars, had classified this kind as not like a Jag, for show, but if you wanted to hide your wealth like the Chinese—as he had recently reported some Bostonians still did—this was how you might go.
The Bobby-Soxer Page 24