The Bobby-Soxer

by Hortense Calisher

  At dusk of that same day, just as I was leaving my grandmother’s house to go to my own, this same Citroën drove by, at a crawl. People unfamiliar with the town tended to do that, often stopping dead to have a look at our impressive turrets and bays, though this car did not. I hadn’t yet left when it returned from the other direction. This time I could see the driver’s arm, a woman’s, dangling. Maybe from long intimacy Towle and she both drove the same. Surely this time the car would stop. But again it drove on.

  Why did I go to Towle’s on my own? For a purely physical reason—to deal. And because I had never yet dealt physically with Towle himself? That too, though I wasn’t conscious of it. I was doing what we call instinctual. I had spent my short life watching the patterns of others: I wanted my own to begin.

  Our old hearse of a car had also once been elegant. I drove it there not for that but because I had seen what walking a set path in this town could do to you. The car stopped with a jolt in front of Towle’s house.

  She opened the door.

  “I’m—”

  “I know who you are.” Looking up at me she said that while I was still on the doorstep. Her accent was a shock, but I had known beforehand that everything here would be. The bobby-soxer had said the same more softly, but as clear. It could be that every woman associated with Craig Towle had waited to say that to some other woman in good time.

  “Aren’t you going to come in?”

  I bent so as to enter and came into the light. Women’s eyes don’t widen at me; they fix. One of her hands slipped into its pocket in the enviable white slacks. The arm, in its short white sleeve, was a little gaunt. Her gray-blond hair, streaked chastely only by time, but clipped and polished to a silvery shoulder-length casque, would swing only when she wanted it to. She was not beautiful, but the features were still crisp. She had that style which partakes of the expected and knows itself wanted—the style always just coming in or never quite gone out.

  She would never be what I was, or with persistence could come to be, but she made me feel as if out in a world where as a beauty I would be the dragon and she would use every steel she had. She had been surprised, but I saw that I must give her no advantage. So I said nothing.

  “I was going to come to you,” she said. “But I waited. And here you are.”

  I saw that she was used to her own simplicity, or sparse way of doing things, which she might take to be sense, or even kindness, and no doubt was used to being admired for. I did—but the stage teaches the value of pause.

  I had had a second shock. In the inglenook where the bobby-soxer had once had her puzzle, the table again had a gameboard on it. I suppose inglenooks breed the same habits. As I came farther into the house, a light-haired person, as slim as the bobby-soxer had once been, arose from the table. I saw at once that this was a young man, or a boy almost that—but still it was a shock.

  “This is my son Tarquin,” she said.

  So this was the little boy found weeping on the beach, and picked up by that swarm of girls, bright in their dotted halters—those sweet sophists, lisping of youth, whom his father had married.

  He hadn’t been that little—as he has long since told me. He was eleven, but hadn’t got his growth. And wasn’t lost, but crying with rage. At the way his father was getting out from under as usual, knowing he could always depend on her to hang on.” And those girls, all over me so cutesy; it wasn’t for me but for him. I saw the whole thing.”

  He doesn’t resemble his father; he has her features and height. Except for that he would for a while recall my brother to me, though I soon saw that his femininity wasn’t physical but that of a Picasso clown-boy, who at the time had a fey interest in miniature objects, which he collected and cosseted. What I’d mistaken for a game were some of those. In youth many mother-reared boys have a certain femininity which they are hard put to express. If Tarquin has certain ambivalences they are not of sex. By now, like most of us, he has dealt with them, in that imbroglio of adolescence out of which the real sex-to-be rises bare-toothed.

  “Come, sit down,” she said. “I love inglenooks, don’t you? Tarquin, clear that stuff off.”

  She was false and she was hard—was what I first heard.

  “Thanks. I just saw your light. And knowing the house was empty—On the Row, we kind of check.”

  “Civil defense?” She smiled; she was a veteran of all kinds. “But you don’t live on the Row.”

  “Not yet.”

  I saw Tarquin stiffen. He loves that house.

  They wouldn’t have known about mine. As for her, I had merely confirmed what she already thought: this girl too wants to marry Towle.

  “Indeed.” She had a tendency to smile as if she knew everything. Sad, powerful women often do. “Know who I am?”

  I glanced at Tarquin. “I do now.”

  “I want to talk to you. Tarquin—go chop wood.”

  He was staring at me. He would know everything she was sending him away not to hear. “You’re the girl in his play, aren’t you? I’m sorry for you.” Then he went.

  “Am I?” I sat down in the inglenook, opposite her. Oh, I thought I knew how to play Portia now. “I know he’s been working at your house, in Dorchester.”

  But drawing-room comedy was more the way it came from my mouth. When you are being schooled in many modes of playing, they tend to emerge all tumbled.

  “How old are you?” she said, with that smile.

  I put my hand on the checkerboard Tarquin had removed his collection from. I had better be cheeky at once. “We’re advised professionally—not to say. And I haven’t asked you.”

  She sat quite still. “Craig said it. But I didn’t believe it.”

  I wouldn’t ask what. She had waited. So could I.

  “That you were—‘a Venus of the mind.’”

  Who could help flushing?

  “‘—Who—hasn’t yet found her natural dress.’”

  I sat back. He was right. Though that was nothing new.

  “But then he always has a phrase of that sort about the women in his plays. He did about me.”

  “But you weren’t an actress.”

  “No.” Everybody would know who she was, her smile said. “Those he writes about.” The casque of hair swung. “I was the first.”

  And proud of it. She would have liked me to be a Portia worthy of her, if I could.

  “Yes, he did say once—that he might write about me.”

  I take advantage of you, he said that night in our yard, the night my mother, an heiress, came home—and I may just do it again.

  “He doesn’t do well on women, the critics say,” she said. “Each time he’s tried, it’s come to nothing. But he always thinks he’ll do better—once he’s slept with them.”

  She didn’t smoke. But onstage, any director would have told her to light one now. For the pause. “But you haven’t,” she said.

  I had no manner left. “He told you?”

  “He doesn’t have to. I only have to open the door to him, to see the trouble he’s in. Oh, come. Isn’t that what you’re here to ask me? Whether you should? A lot of them do.”

  “The young ones—” I said. Yes, I could see how they would. In this time where all women were becoming friends.

  “They’re all young.”

  Was that her triumph? That they were?

  Lips can go stiff; I hadn’t thought mine could. “The girl who was here. Did she come to you? To ask.”

  “Oh, poor girl. I knew her, you see. All those girls, one saw them about. None of them knowing for love or money what to do with themselves. Her new stepfather, a strict Frenchman, the kind that keeps its girls in convent till they marry, and the mother going along with it—we all knew that girl was having a time. The sort of godawful time one does, at that age. And so, in his way, was Craig.”

  Maybe wearing white helped one be honest. Or he had taught her his brand of it—of everything, even to the way she drove.

  Her head did bow, though.
“He and I were split, you know. Wasn’t as if I had a stake in it. So—matter of fact—I went to see her.”

  If I had a real rapier, I thought—not the dull foils they hand out in fencing class—I could make that bowed head roll.

  She was studying her fingers. “It’s the Frenchman who’s making the mother sue. And not for money. Not even for costs. That makes it bad.”

  “Costs?” I said.

  She misunderstood me. “It’s a legal term.”

  “I know. My father’s a lawyer. And—my great-aunt was—Leo?”

  But the name meant nothing to her.

  “Ah, then you know.” A look of calculation pinched the long, inbred face. In some ways she was oblivious to what others felt. She had attitudes instead. Nowadays one often sees her kind among the women of new principles. “But perhaps your father won’t like you to testify.”

  “Testify?”

  She put her hands across the table. “I apologize. I misjudged you. I was bowled over. And I can sometimes be a hag. Whatever you choose to do about him—Craig—about that, I mean, you’re on your own course. It can’t change things now.”

  Can’t it? For me?

  She didn’t hear. Or perhaps I didn’t say.

  “Yes—testify. It’s what I came down here for. Craig doesn’t know I’m here. To ask you to testify that you observed him and her closely. As you did, I know. That’s how you and he met, he said. Testify that he even engaged you to sit with her. That he did not neglect.”

  The room was hot, airless. She and Tarquin hadn’t opened the door to the new pastel wing. Those pretty rooms I had tripped through, and the soft voice saying that incessant movement was not wanted here—what was neglect? I’m not a lovely girl, he had said.—I merely acquired one.

  To speak the truth and admit it even to one’s own shame; what’s it do to that hooded eye of his? Is it wrong for a face to be that much on its own?

  “What did she die of? No one really told any of us here.” My voice was husky. Maybe that angered her.

  “Toxemia. But when a baby dies in the womb, the mother must surely know. That late in the day. But she let it go. She let it go on. Horrid. She was a depressed girl.”

  But one who could be cheered. When we marched out of that bar past the two salesmen who had sent us drinks, her belly well ahead of both of us, she had laughed hard enough. “He said she wouldn’t buy a layette for the baby.”

  “See! You have only to say.”

  “And that he wished he didn’t know why.”

  She slumped, rubbing her face. People who do that must feel they have two faces. Or want another? Under the rubbing hands the face so often doesn’t change. “He knows too much about us all. For his own good. And he’ll always testify against himself. Every time.”

  How had he taught her that? Venice. How that name unlocked her for me—all the way back to our front porch. Had she kept up her Italian? Was there still a sloop? I could see her opening the door to him, to their summerhouse with its ancient bulletin boards still crying their causes, and closing it, closing it and opening it.

  And was he teaching me the same?

  “Venice—”

  She wasn’t surprised that I knew her name. Everybody would. Or anybody connected with him.

  “What was the phrase he had for you?”

  No doubt a winner. Suitable for a lifetime of use.

  “Oh—that. He used to call me—a woman of ideas.”

  “He still does,” Tarquin said, reappearing at the kitchen door.

  “Tarquin. Stay the hell out.”

  He was only getting at the order of things. Like me.

  I stood up to go. It was awkward getting out from between that small bench and table, even if one had no belly. No, I didn’t like inglenooks; I wasn’t built for them. One tolerates them—as I wished I could again—for a friend.

  “Then you will?” she said. “Craig need never know. You could come forward, of your own accord. That could be better still. Say you will. I’ll have our lawyer call.”

  “It would be worse if I did testify. Far worse.”

  She scanned me—up, down. “You mean—the judge or jury might get other notions?” She drew a sly breath, already hopeful that we were conspirators.

  Tarquin could be seen in the far corner of the kitchen, head averted, but not too far away for a normally keen-eared boy. It was no concern of mine. The order of things has to go on, will go on.

  “No. It wouldn’t be of any use. He had an affair with a woman in town.” I had to swallow. “On and off.” It hurt to say that, one of my mother’s catch-all phrases. It was what she would have said. “An—older woman. There isn’t anybody in town who doesn’t know. And the bobby-soxer knew too.”

  “Who?”

  That had slipped out. But I saw she knew whom I meant anyway.

  “Nancy?” She whispered it.

  If I was going to cry I would do it for both of Towle’s women. For the lanterns swaying in a girl’s face, at a depot, the entry to a town. And for a jaunty slouch hat. “She knew from the moment he brought her here.”

  She didn’t ask anything more. In the scheme of her life, maybe an older rival wouldn’t do. Or it was enough that the phrase he had dubbed me with—“a Venus of the mind”—even echoed her own name. Though perhaps he had done it unconsciously, in that grand slump of release where such slips are made. Ruthless herself, she would be the one person his conscience need not serve.

  I would keep my mother from her as I could, safe in her own poor web. But I myself could see how the younger ones would seek out this woman, as moths do the death lamp. She had a face not to be rubbed away, emerging as she sat there, the casque of hair framing it. The face of a Joan who to avoid the stake has left Rouen for Paris, for anywhere—and is still burning.

  Later that night I lie thinking of what I will make happen. This is a dream best dreamt in one’s own house. Lying on the Salvation Army mattress of one’s choice. Eyes awake.

  I have my own gestures now, or enough. His I shall steal from his own testimony freely given, fed and coached me over a prompter’s book of afternoons. To be confirmed by the man himself, when he arrives at my door. Who will be traveling—according to the mailman’s red flag on the box and the telegram inside, by plane and train straight to me, his star witness for so long. As men go first to the girl they have not yet attained. It is very late for that. But I am dreaming well.

  The curtain will rise on me seated naked, left of center of a divided stage, with my back to the audience. So risen, it will fix me in the mind of all, in a style simple if unnatural, for the rest of my life in the theater. Or my theatrical life?

  In our profession, one migrates constantly between, he says, emerging from the wings—and at the same time entering a door, my house door. Onstage that is simple also. The problem of costume is easy too, Towle says—if you think it through.

  Or perhaps he will say that later—later still.

  At first, when he closes the door behind him—for at his knock or ring I will stop this dreaming and go to the door to let him in—all he will say is—Your hair has grown since I last saw you. And I would still be clothed. Though lying in wait for him.

  This is a dress rehearsal, when one may do the same thing over and over. Again I am on my mattress, with my back to him. My shock of curls falls to a triangle mid-shoulderblade, not too short for a handsome woman, he says, not too long for a beautiful man. Note those adjectives, transposed too. Our unaffected days are over. Language too must twist as bidden. We have painted us into this corner, Craig Towle and I.

  Except for the glowing mind of the dreamer, the house lights are dark. But she lies in wait. Somewhere along here there will be a dialogue. Once he is inside my door.

  “So you’ll play yourself,” he will explain. “Yourself—in your town.”

  His tone is as holy as if he’s asking to marry me. “For me the focus changed like lightning—once I saw I was trying to conclude—what one cannot conclude.
I saw that the real focus wasn’t Leo but is you. What you saw, and how you grew—in the town.”

  I do not quite hear my reply. Do I ask him whether I am what he thinks he can that easily conclude? But I hear his next lines.

  “It’s not a matter of ethics for me. But of obligation. To what see.

  “Nessa says you’re a sneak.”

  “So I am. One of a long, long company. Now and then honorable.”

  “How do you know? When you’re honorable?”

  “When what I do—exceeds me. Then I know.”

  His face will darken then. (Use the blue spotlight.) “When my own life creeps in—then I don’t.”

  Yes, those were his exact words, once. He would have been thinking of the bobby-soxer maybe. (Anyway, whenever that happens, use the blue.)

  “And Leo”—I’ll say—“couldn’t you have exceeded there?”

  He will assume that posture—more a stance than a gaze, though the eyes are steady, quizzical—which always made me feel the apprentice I was. This time it will not. “Maybe you could” he says. Even on your own, someday. I wouldn’t be surprised if you could. But not me. Or not without you.”

  Is it then I will tell him about the third floor? He has been hunting the mystery of Leo so long—and I am honorable. Lying awake.

  So why not take him there? Now as well as later. Montage is easy, where one plans ahead. And the lighting more professional. Would I really let them use that crude blue? Yet his words will remain his, when or wherever he has said them, on early trains, or on a whole hayloft of afternoons.

  How will he look going up my grandmother’s stair—grave? Gleeful? No, he will look as always. Say that for him—he is never two-faced. As for me close behind him, I am shivering. I should be smelling only the mystery of what we are after. But the long-gone dead are the one odor one cannot smell; that is what they are. Even Leo. And was there ever really a shirt starch that smelled of pear? What draws people to Towle is the odor of a meditation that both repels and attracts.