Moral instruction by moral illustration has long since disappeared from the training of the young. Metaphor itself is considered untrustworthy—likely to weaken the facts of what already is a pretty slippery reality—and every good parent knows that the parable is too “punitive” by far. My childhood was full of them, from boogieman to Bunyan, my parents belonging to a generation still very sure of its facts. And my mother’s specialty was what might be called the “social” allegory. Obvious in design, single in target, it was part of the process by which she hoped to transform the unpromising grub at that very moment scratching its knee-scabs in front of her into something pretty and marriageable, destined to preside, with some of her own graces and others she aspired to, at a table even more elaborate than her own.
Under a codex possibly marked “Accidents, Dinner”—for, as will be seen, a good proportion of my mother’s tales revolved on accident—reposed Mrs. Potter Palmer. Famous arbiter of bygone Chicago society, she may be the model for performances slightly more rarefied than the one I know her for—as for me, I see her only in the attitude of one. Eternally she presides at her exalted dinner table, from whose foot, in the worm’s-eye view of my mother’s imagination, she is all but obscured by the gravy boat suited to her station—to my mind about twice the size of our largest tureen. In her historic moment she knows nothing of us, but all is open to posterity—hovering above her now like helicopters, like damsel flies, we see all. Then it happens. Far down the length of the gilt-encrusted table—exactly center I make it for drama—a guest jars a servingman’s wrist. A great gout of gravy erupts on the cloth.
My mother pauses; I return her look of high seriousness. Extrasensory perception or what you will, with not a word said between us, our images of that cloth are the same. As a superb embroiderer, my mother’s chef d’oeuvre is her banquet cloth. Loaded with eyelet, scallop, punchwork, Valenciennes, fringe and insertion, lying even now on its cardboard cylinder between sheets of preservative blue paper, five years in the making, never used and none like it in the world—yet there on that august table, with a terrible brown blot on its middle, lies its twin.
The guest hangs his head, and no wonder. In unavoidable frisson the other guests, well-bred as they are, avert theirs. We gloat over the dreadful moment, knowing rescue is nigh. Mrs. Palmer, whose eagle eye—exactly like my mother’s at her half-yearly dinner parties—sees everything while appearing to register nothing, pauses for a fraction in her elegant conversation. Then she makes her gesture—irreparable and immortal. I see her elbow, plump, white and shapely, a noble fin-de-siècle elbow suited to its duty, not covered with chicken-skin like mine. Carefully careless as Réjane, no doubt chatting gaily the while, she has swept it outward. Hail Mrs. Palmer, heroic hostess, who, in the imitation that is the ultimate of good manners, is seen now to have overturned, on that cloth, the tureen!
With years of reflection, this tale of my mother’s, like another even more pertinent, came to have as many holes in it as the cloth had eyelets. Was it quite the thing to be so exemplary so publicly? Wouldn’t the real acme of taste have been not to notice—had the guest felt better, or worse? It came to me that Mrs. Palmer’s manner might someday merit the same comment as her money: too much of it. As a matter of fact, if they were being served by footmen, what was the tureen doing in front of her at all?
But at eleven or so, yes, moral illustration, when taken literally, can be dangerous. We were a family of many guests and many, though infrequently regal, dinners at which, since our household was small, I was often allowed up. Time went by while I waited for someone to have his accident, so that I might pridefully watch my mother’s aristocratic amends. For months we seemed to feed no one but aunts and uncles; I knew my mother too well to think she would waste that sort of high style on them. But at last one of our guests obliged. He was a Dr. Nettel, fresh from a twenty-year stint in Egypt, who had once been one of my mother’s suitors—perhaps it was my father’s still sardonic eye on him that caused him to drop a fork into a vegetable dish that splattered wide.
To me, seated at my mother’s left, all augured well; the cloth was damask only, but the vegetable was beet. I looked at my mother expectantly; when she did nothing I nudged her, pointing to the service dish of beets which, since it was maid’s night out and we were short of footmen, reposed, family-style, in front of her. “Don’t be ridiculous,” she whispered, her lips sealed, her gaze on the horizon.
I had just been through my eighth-grade graduation—“Into thy hands we give the torch”—the noblesse of our house, it would seem, rested with me. I crooked my sharp elbow, bending my hand backward from the wrist as if it held a little pinch of something, meanwhile elegantly averting my head, as if to chitchat, toward Dr. Nettel, but since I could think of nothing to say I remained thus, bas-relief—perhaps he thought I was assuming an Egyptian pose just for him. “Stiff neck?” said my father. My mother, knowing better, grabbed for the elbow; absorbed in the mental picture, profile, of myself, I jumped at the touch; between us we upset the ice pitcher. Diversion was thus created, though not as symmetrically as it would have been via beet. Later, before I went to bed, I was whacked. “Because you are so smart,” said my mother between whacks, “and because you are absolutely unteachable.” She was wrong. I had just learned for sure what I had always suspected—that we were irretrievably middle-class.
Meanwhile, allegory still pursued me, though from another corner. Other girls my age were becoming women, flirts, sirens—at least girls—without trouble, and some avidly; it was my mother’s cross that I had to be nagged there inch by recalcitrant inch. Daintiness, my mother said, was its essence; once a woman’s daintiness got through to a man, all consummations devoutly to be wished for—such as a trousseau of one’s own triple-monogrammed tea napkins—soon followed. To me the word was “daindee,” as our German cook crooned it—“Oooh, so daindee!” over anything fancy—and as she looked on her day off, a clumsy veil of white obscuring everything human, excess of starch in the blouse, powder on the neck, fish-net gloves on her honest, corned-beef hands. To me even a bath was an assault on one’s boundaries. Cleanliness was hypocrisy, dirt “sincere.” Still the other ethic followed me, ruthlessly inserted in my ear along with the morning and evening soapings, and always with some elaboration peculiar to my mother—witness her divertissement on the Safety Pin.
I belong to the tail end of the button-traumaed generation. The embarrassments of the zipper-reared are quite otherwise—gaps in the memory or the metal, a fear of being locked in. We lived in the opposite fear of—the very words still have a blush and a hush to them—things “dropping down.” Camisoles, panties and petticoats, even when snapped or hook-and-eyed, still required ceaseless vigilance with the needle—and thread was fallible, not nylon. Hence the reign of the safety pin, now used only by cleaners and babies. But the protocol of its use was strict. Emergency supply was always in the purse—in my mother’s a chain of small gold ones. In case of “accident” one retired somewhere—to the washroom at Wanamaker’s for instance—pinned “things up” and rushed home in a pink state of guilt, praying all the while that one would not be knocked down by a car on the way. For the core of the ethic—known, as I found later, to almost every girl of the era—was: “What if you are rushed suddenly to the hospital, and there they discover...?” Dream sequences often finished the line, sung above our shrinking forms by hosts of angelic interns forever lost to us: “She has a safety pin in her corset cover!” The worst offense, of course, against sense as well as neatness, was to start the day or the journey already pinned. Hence my mother’s variation, known to me always as The Gentleman from Philadelphia.
There was once a girl who was being courted by such a gentleman. Whether there was any significance in his origin, I don’t know; perhaps—this being the unsolicited detail with which my mother often fleshed a fable—he just was. She was one of those girls (not unknown to me) who were hastily groomed on the surface, at the cost of squalor below. For a whi
le, said my mother, the girl was able to string him along. But, said she, you can’t string them along forever—tangentially I tag this as the single allusion she had hitherto made to sex. There came a day when he arrived with intent to propose. It was a warm occasion; the girl was wearing a peekaboo blouse. Perhaps it was warm enough, say, for him to take off his driving goggles and lean closer. Anyway, just as he was about to declare…he saw that her shoulder strap was attached with—you’ve got it. The gentleman went back where he came from. And the girl is single yet.
It has since struck me that she was well shet of him. But at the time—“Now do you see?” said my mother, and I mumbled back, “Yerse.”
In time of course, through vanity and the sly connivance of the lingerie-makers, I became as “insincere” as any other “nice” woman, although I never quite convinced my mother of it—or myself. “Fine feathers, on top,” she would greet a new costume of mine, and sure enough, within minutes, some detail of my toilette would mysteriously unravel. I scrubbed my wedding ring until some of the stones fell out, because she had a habit of murmuring, “Dirty diamonds,” whenever she saw an overdressed woman, and I primped for hospital visits as courtesans once may have for their levées. Wanamaker’s was torn down, but I sometimes still dreamed myself in its washroom, standing there with the top button gone from my skirt waistband, holding one gaunt safety pin the size of a salmon’s skeleton. And I never was able to look a real safety pin straight in its fishy, faintly libidinous eye.
But now—let us return to that table in London. There sit the ladies, swan-necked and squinting—what does the slightly piscine shape of their squint remind me of?—at me. And there, somewhat blue-lawed about the jowl at the very plurality of the situation, sit the men. And me—what I am thinking? As any woman would be, of course, of what I have on underneath. Being me, I am also thinking that I am after all the child, at last the Good Child of my mother, and that the scene before me—although of course she could not possibly countenance it—is the accident we have both been waiting for all my life.
For what I happen to have on underneath—nothing more of course, or less, than what thousands of Rockefeller Center secretaries, window mannequins and ladies out for the evening in Rochester, Elmira and Binghamton are wearing—is a La Belle Hélène Walzette, Model 11A56, Merrie Widowe Waiste Pincher, nyl. lce. blk., size 36 B. Edwardian it may be, but not in execution; no amount of wine will unravel me—Seventh Avenue expertise has machine-tooled me into it and only the hotel chambermaid will get me out. And its modesty is unimpeachable—is, in fact, Mail Order. This, indeed, is the accident. For what I had ordered, in the rush before sailing, was the nyl. lce. wht.—in the catalogue very daindee, with the usual sprig of mashed ribbon rosebuds in the decolletage. But what I have got on—sent me by one of the Eumenides brooding darkly in Best’s warehouse—is the blk. And the blk. is not with rosebuds. Blissfully I feel, beneath my sweater, what it is with—something to end traumas forever. There, centered where once button or pin might have resided, now lies, locking me in by patents pending, a round red cabochon glass jewel about the size of a nickel, La Belle Hélène’s star ruby clasp, my order of merit, winking rosy and waiting for the light.
Or is it? Dare I? I look heavenward, seeing at first only a dim, brackish ceiling in St. John’s Wood. But in dreams one does not always rehearse only one’s anxieties. Sometimes one dreams that one is walking downtown in one’s Walzette, and wakes to find—that one is. And better yet—that Mother is watching. Here I am then, I say upwards. See me now, met with my accident just as you warned me, but in what aristocratic company! There sits Lady Catherine, who began it, surrounded by several others who may well count sixteen quarterings, whatever that is, among them—if not all in one. There indeed sits Mrs. Potter Palmer modern version, with her sweater-tureen in her hand. Mother, you were right. And now, if I do what it appears I must, aren’t I?
And immediately I am answered. Nothing supernatural about it—if there is any moral to this fable it is that, unbecoming as we at first may seem to our parents, in the end we become them. At the moment, however, I prefer to think that the suggestion comes via the grate, where a piece of nutty slack slides down, sotto voce. “Ask the lady across from you.”
I do so. I tip Frau Ewig a wink toward the others, signaling, “Shall we join them?” She seems larger and redder in the face than when I last noticed her. Not to my entire surprise, she shakes her head imperceptibly. Under my stare her face empurples further. “Kann nicht!” she murmurs at last, her lips unmoving; and as her seams stretch with her breathing, I see why—underneath each of her vast arms, a baleful, metallic winking-back. I look the other way. More’s the pity! Anthropologist or no, Frau Ewig was reared in Vienna, and I think I know how. Like me. But I don’t see how I can help her. Still, a pity that in every apotheosis of the Good Child, there must be, clinging to the bottom of the ladder and gazing upward, a Bad.
My mother’s face, up there like a decal through which I can still see the ceiling, is of course seen by no one but me. She has her eyes closed, knowing, as usual, just what I am about to do, and she cannot quite approve this modern ending to her fable. But she also cannot help smiling. Listen to them, the heavenly host, not of angels but of interns, as leaning down with her in the center of the circle they sing it to me a cappella, con amore...“and now we discover…she has got…” (soft Gilbertian surprise) “No! She has not!…Yes she has, yes she has, she has got…” (pianissimo, ma non troppo) “a roo-oo-ooo-ooooby…yes, a ruby, ruby, ruby, ruby, ruby…a Star Ruby in her corset cover!”
And as, with my hand bent a little at the wrist, I make my gesture, all the company, leaning forward with interest—and perhaps even my mother—may see that I have.
If You Don’t Want to Live I Can’t Help You
MARY PONTHUS STEPPED OUTSIDE, into the straw-colored June morning, from the Fifth Avenue entrance of the bank to which, as administratrix of her nephew’s trust fund, she had just paid her usual call when in New York. In her size forty-two Liberty lawn and wide ballibuntl hat set firmly on unshorn white hair, she might have just stepped off a veranda in Tuxedo or Newport, from one of those corners where the dowagers affixed themselves. It would be a corner, perhaps, smelling pleasantly of Morny bath soap and littered with playing cards, over which the pairs of blue-veined hands with the buffed, pale nails would pass expertly, pausing to dip now and then into the large Beauvais handbags—hallmarks of Parisian honeymoons of forty years ago—that had outlasted the husbands and were likely to outlast the owners as well.
In fact, Mrs. Ponthus had not been on such a veranda since a morning thirty years ago, when news had been brought to her there of the drowning of her husband and son, while out sailing, in a sudden squall. Her summers, ever since, had been spent in a house on the grounds of the New England college from which she had been married and to which, desperate for occupation, she had returned to teach within a year after the news. Occasionally the summers had varied, with trips abroad to university friends made through correspondence over the slowly published critiques which had earned her a more than scholarly repute during those years when, while teaching, she herself had learned—and had finally brought her the honorary doctorate of letters that she was to be awarded here later in the day.
She walked south on the Avenue, reluctant to complete her errand, to keep her appointment with her nephew and her old acquaintance, the doctor who had once more been summoned to treat him. If she thought, momentarily, of her husband now, it was not of the tall young man standing in the boat in that aura of lost grace and virility with which the youthfully dead surrounded themselves. His influence had survived in other ways—in the money he had left her, which had not only exempted her from that professorial scratching for preferment out of which so many theses were born, but had allowed also her dearest extravagance, the subsidizing, now and then, of some young person of promise. It had survived too in the income siphoned through her to the son of his dead brother—the nephew Paul she
was on her way to see. And for him, Paul, it had been, blameless in itself, perhaps the touch of ruin.
She turned down Lexington Avenue toward the old brownstone where Paul and Helen, or rather just Paul now, had the second floor front. Here the street had a nineteenth-century breadth which only pointed up the dullness of the facades on each side, houses without resurrectible charm, that still had escaped the ash-can vibrancy of a slum. Really, Paul had a homing instinct for the vitiated, the in-between. In a city where almost no place was any longer this way depersonalized, he had managed to find a street still as inconclusive as himself, this byway that neither stank nor sparkled but merely had a look of having been turned, like the collar on an old shirt. Here and there the lights of some marginal enterprise glistened indeterminately on a parlor or a basement floor, but in general, if the street had any character at all, it was that of the “small private income.” Opposite Paul’s corner there was a vestigial hotel with an open-cage, curlicued elevator, potted plants at a few of its bays and a permanent roster of vintage guests. On her last visit she and Paul had breakfasted in its coffee shop in the company of two of these—an elderly theatrical relic in wing collar and Homburg, and a hennaed old woman, fussily ringed and dressed as if for some long-superannuated soirée, leading a dachshund that had settled down to sleep at once in an accustomed spot. The talkative waitress had fed scraps to the dog, provided saccharin for the old man and inquired about Paul’s last X rays, performing a function that, in a brisker neighborhood, might have been that of the neighborhood bartender.
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