Mrs. Leake—a tiny, coronet-braided woman with a dry, bodiless neatness—did call, but only, as she carefully explained to my mother, for the purpose of securing a Southern, presumably genteel playmate for her daughter. My mother was not Southern, but she shared her caller’s opinion of the girls Ginny Doll and I brought home from school. The call was repaid once, by my mother with me in tow, after which it was understood that any entente was to be only between us girls; my parents and Mrs. Leake never saw each other again.
On that first call I had been relieved to find how much the Leake household, scantily composed of only three females—Mrs. Leake, Ginny Doll and Ida, the cook—still reminded me of our own crowded one, in its slow rhythm and antediluvian clutter. Three years spent trying to imitate the jumpy ways of my New York girl friends had made me ashamed of our peculiarities; it was comforting to be reminded that these were regional, and that at least there were two of us on Madison Avenue.
With the alchemic snobbery of her kind, Mrs. Leake had decreed that the intimacy must be all one way; Ginny Doll could not come to us. So it was always I who went there, at first I didn’t quite know why. For, like many of the children introduced to me by my parents, and as quickly shed, Ginny Doll was a lame duck. It would be unfair to suggest that she and her mother were types indigenous only to the South; nevertheless, anybody down there would have recognized them at once—the small woman whose specious femininity is really one of size and affectation, whose imperious ego always has a socially proper outlet (Mrs. Leake wore her heart trouble on her sleeve), and whose single daughter is always a great lumpy girl with a clayey complexion. At fifteen, Ginny Doll was already extremely tall, stooped, and heavy in a waistless way; only her thin nose was pink, and her curves were neither joyous nor warm; her long hand lay in one’s own like a length of suet just out of the icebox and her upper teeth preceded her smile. One glance at mother and daughter predicted their history; by producing a girl of such clearly unmarriageable aspect, the neatly turned Mrs. Leake had assured herself of a well-serviced life until her own death—at a probable eighty. After that, Ginny Doll’s fate would have been clearer in Lenchburg, for the South has never lost its gentle, feudal way of absorbing its maiden ladies in one family sinecure or another. But up here in the amorphous North, there was no foretelling what might happen, much less what did.
Ginny Doll also had manners whose archaic elegance I remembered from down home—it was these that my mother had hoped I would reacquire—but unfortunately hers were accompanied by a slippery voice, with a half-gushy catch to it, that gave her a final touch of the ridiculous. Still, I found myself unable to desert her. It appeared that I was her only friend (although her importunities were always so restrained that it took a keen ear to hear the tremor in them), and after I had gone there a few times I felt guilty at not liking her better, because I felt so sorry for her.
For it appeared also that my father had been accorded a signal honor in being allowed past their threshold. Mrs. Leake was not a widow as we had assumed, but a deserted woman, and it was because of this that nothing more masculine than the old pug, which she sometimes boarded for a rich sister-in-law, was ever allowed past her door. According to Ginny Doll, her mother had done nothing to merit desertion, unless it was having committed the faux pas of marrying a Texan. Indeed, her position was so honorable that conscience money from the sister-in-law, the husband’s sister, was the means by which she was quite adequately supported. Still, there was a stain upon them—it was the fact that Mr. Leake still lived. Somehow this fact committed them to an infinite circumspection, and was responsible for the exhausted, yet virulent femininity of their ménage. It was also to blame for Mrs. Leake’s one perverted economy, for which Ginny Doll was never to forgive her—her refusal to get Ginny Doll’s teeth straightened. When approached by the sister-in-law, Aunt Tot, on this matter, she would reply that she wouldn’t use conscience money to tamper with the work of the Lord. When approached by Ginny Doll, her reply came nearer the truth: “You didn’t get them from me.” As I came to know the Leakes better, I concluded that the stain was increased by the fact that Mr. Leake not only was, but was happy somewhere. Although Ginny Doll never spoke of him, I saw him clearly—a man still robust, with the slight coarseness of the too-far-south South, a man barreling along somewhere careless and carefree, a man who knew how to get peach fuzz off his hands.
By this time the household had won me, as it was to win so many—in later years I could well understand Ginny Doll’s unique position in the Party. How it must have salved Party spirits, after a hot day in the trenches of the Daily Worker, to enter an authentic version of that Southern parlor inside whose closed circle one sits so cozened and élite, pleating time’s fan! Our famed hospitality consists really of a welcome whose stylized warmth is even more affecting than genuine interest, plus the kind of stately consideration for the trivial that makes everybody feel importantly human—Ginny Doll did both to perfection. In my case, it was summertime when I met the Leakes, and our people do have a genius for hot weather. Inside their living room the shades were drawn cool and gray, white dust covers were slippery under bare legs, and a music box was set purling. No one was ever there long before Ida, a frustrated artist with only two to feed, came in bearing an enormous, tinkling tea which she replenished at intervals, urging us to keep up our strength. When, during the first of my visits, Ginny Doll happened to remark, “Your father is truly handsome; with that ahngree hair of his and that pahful nose, I declare he looks just like a sheik!” I took it for more of her Lenchburg manners. It was only later that I saw how the idée fixe “Men!” was the pivot from which, in opposite ways, the two Leakes swung.
When I was sixteen, my parents gave me a coming-out dance. After a carefully primed phone call to Mrs. Leake by my father, Ginny Doll was allowed to attend, on the stipulation that he bring her home at the stroke of twelve. At the dance I was too busy to pay her much mind, but later I heard my parents talking in their bedroom.
“She ought to take that girl back to Lenchburg,” said my father. “Up here, they don’t understand such takin’ ways, ’less a pretty face goes with ’em. That girl’ll get herself misunderstood—if she gets the chance.”
“Taking ways!” said my mother. “Why she followed the boys around as if they were unicorns! As if she’d never seen one before!”
My father’s shoes hit the floor. “Reckon not,” he said.
The next day, Ginny Doll telephoned, eager for postmortems on the dance, but I’d already been through that with several of my own crowd, and I didn’t get to see her until the end of the week. I found that she had spent the interval noting down the names of all the boys she had met at my house—out of a list of forty she had remembered twenty-nine names and some characteristic of each of the others, such as “real short, and serious, kind of like the Little Minister.” Opening her leather diary, she revealed that ever since their arrival in New York, she had kept a list of every male she had met; my dance had been a strike of the first magnitude, bringing her total, with the inclusion of two doctors, the landlord and a grocery boy, almost to fifty. And in a special column opposite each name she had recorded the owner’s type, much as an anthropologist might note “brachycephalic,” except that Ginny Doll’s categories were all culled from their “library,” that collection of safely post-Augustan classics, bound Harper’s, Thomas Nelson Page and E. P. Roe which used to be on half the musty bookshelves in the Valley of Virginia. There was a Charles Brandon, a Henry Esmond (one of the doctors), a Marlborough and a Bonnie Prince Charlie, as well as several other princes and chevaliers I’d never heard of before. A boy named Bobbie Locke, who’d brought a flask and made a general show of himself, was down as D’Artagnan, and my own beau, a nice quiet boy from St. Mark’s, was down as Gawain. My father was down as Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia.
I remember being impressed at first; in Richmond we had been taught to admire “great readers,” even when female, and almost every family we knew had,
or had had, at least one. But I also felt a faint, squirmy disquiet. Many of the girls I knew kept movie-star books, or had pashes on Gene Tunney or Admiral Byrd, but we never mixed up these legendary figures with the boys who took us to Huyler’s. I was uncomfortably reminded of my father’s cousin, old Miss Lavalette Buchanan, who still used more rouge than you could buy on Main Street, and wore gilt bows in her hair even to the Busy Bee.
From then on, my intimacy with Ginny Doll dwindled. Now and then I dropped by on a hot summer day when no one else was around and I simply had to talk about a new beau. For on this score she was the perfect confidante, of course, hanging breathless on every detail. After each time, I swore never to go back. It was embarrassing where there was no exchange. Besides, she drove me nuts with that list, bringing it out like an old set of dominoes, teasing me about my fickleness to “Gawain.” I couldn’t seem to get it through her head that this was New York, not Lenchburg, and that I hadn’t seen any of those boys for years.
By the time I’d been away at college for a year, I was finished with her. Ginny Doll hadn’t gone—Mrs. Leake thought it made you hard. My mother occasionally met Ginny Doll on the avenue, and reported her as pursuing a round that was awesomely unchanged—errands for Mamma, dinners with the aunts, meetings of the Sons and Daughters—even the pug was the same. The Leakes, my father said once, had brought the art of the status quo to a hyaline perfection that was a rarity in New York, but one not much prized there. Who could have dreamed of the direction from which honor would one day be paid?
The last time I saw her was shortly after my engagement had been announced, when I received a formal note from the Leakes, requesting the pleasure of my and my fiancé’s company on an afternoon. I remembered with a shock that long ago, “down South,” as we had learned to say now, within that circle of friends whom one did not shuffle but lost only to feud or death, a round of such visits was de rigueur. I went alone, unwilling to face the prospect of Ginny Doll studying my future husband for noble analogues, and found the two Leakes behind a loaded tea table.
Mrs. Leake seemed the same, except for a rigidly “at home” manner that she kept between us like a fire screen, as if my coming alliance with a man rendered me incendiary, and she was there to protect her own interests from flame. Ginny Doll’s teeth had perhaps a more ivory polish from the constant, vain effort of her lips to close over them, and her dress had already taken a spinster step toward surplice necklines and battleship colors; it was hard to believe that she was, like myself, twenty-three. We were alone together only once, when I went to the bathroom and she followed me in, muttering something about hand towels, of which there were already a dozen or so lace-encrusted ones on the rod.
Once inside, she faced me eagerly, with the tight, held-in smile that always made her look as if she were holding a mashed daisy in her mouth. “It’s so exciting,” she said. “Tell me all about it!”
“I have,” I said, referring to the stingy facts that had been extracted over the tea table—that we were both history instructors and were going to teach in Istanbul next year, that no, I had no picture with me, but he was “medium” and dark, and from “up here.”
“I mean—it’s been so long,” she said. “And Mamma made me dispose of my book.” It took me a minute to realize what she meant.
She looked down at the handkerchief she always carried, worrying the shred of cambric with the ball of her thumb, the way one worries a ticket to somewhere. “I wondered,” she said. “Is he one of the ones we knew?”
The Leakes sent us a Lenox vase for a wedding present, and my thank-you note was followed by one from Ginny Doll saying that I just must come by some afternoon and tell her about the wedding trip; Mamma napped every day at three and it would be just like old times. I never did, of course. I was afraid it would be.
Ten years passed, fifteen. We had long since returned from abroad and settled in East Hampton. My parents had died. The vase had been broken by the first of the children. I hadn’t thought of Ginny Doll in years.
Then, one blinding August afternoon, I was walking along, of all places, Fourteenth Street, cursing the mood that had sent me into the city on such a day, to shop for things I didn’t need and wouldn’t find. I hadn’t found them, but the rising masochism that whelms women at the height of an unsuccessful shopping tour had impelled me down here to check sewing-machine prices at a discount house someone had mentioned a year ago, on whose door I’d just found a sign saying “Closed Month of August.” In another moment I would rouse and hail a cab, eager enough for the green routines I had fled that morning. Meanwhile I walked slowly west, the wrong way, still hunting for something, anything, peering into one after the other of the huge glass bays of the cheap shoe stores. Not long since, there had still been a chocolate shop down here, that had survived to serve teas in a cleanliness which was elegance for these parts, but I wouldn’t find it either. New York lay flat, pooped, in air the color of sweat, but a slatternly nostalgia rose from it, as happens in the dead end of summer, for those who spent their youth there. This trip was a seasonal purge; it would be unwise to find anything.
“Why, Charlotte Mary! I do declare!”
I think I knew who it was before I turned. It was my youth speaking. Since my parents died, no one had addressed me in that double-barreled way in years.
“Why—why Ginny Doll!” Had she not spoken, I would have passed her; she was dressed in that black, short-sleeved convention which city women were just beginning to use and looked, at first glance, almost like anyone. But at the gaspy catch of that voice I remembered everything about her. Here was the one mortal who must have stayed as much the same as anyone could, preserved in the amber of her status quo.
“Why, believe it or not, I was just thinking of you!” I said. It wasn’t strictly true; I had been thinking of Huyler’s, of old, expunged summers to which she faintly belonged. But early breeding stays with one, returning at odd times like an accent. I can still tell a half-lie, for the sake of someone else’s pleasure, as gracefully as anybody in Virginia.
While she extracted the number and names of my children, I revised my first impression of her. Age had improved her, as it does some unattractive girls—we were both thirty-seven. She still stooped heavily, as if the weight of her bust dragged at the high, thin shoulders, but she was better corseted, and had an arty look of heavy earrings and variegated bracelets, not Greenwich Village modern, but the chains of moonstones set in silver, links of carnelians and cameos that ladies used to bring back from Florence—I remembered Aunt Tot.
Something about her face had changed, however, and at first I thought it was merely the effect of her enormous hat (how had I missed it?)—the wide-brimmed “picture” hat, with an overcomplicated crown, often affected by women who fancied a touch of Mata Hari, or by aging demi-mondaines. Later, I was to find that this hat was Ginny Doll’s trademark, made for her in costume colors by the obscure family milliner to whom she still was loyal, whose fumbling, side-street touch saved the model from its own aspirations and kept it the hat of a lady. At the moment I thought only of how much it was just what Ginny Doll grown up would wear—one of those swooping discs under which romantic spinsters could visualize themselves leaning across a restaurant table at the not-impossible man, hats whose subfusc shadows came too heavy on the faces beneath them, and, well, too late. Here was her old aura of the ridiculous, brought to maturity.
“And how is your mother?” I asked, seeing Mrs. Leake as she still must be—tiny, deathless companion fly.
“Mamma?” She smiled, an odd smile, wide and lifted, but closed, and then I saw the real difference in her face. Her teeth had been pulled in. She had had them straightened. “Mamma’s dead,” said Ginny Doll.
“Oh, I’m sorry; I hadn’t heard—”
“Six years ago. It was her heart after all, think of it. And then I came into Aunt Tot’s money.” She smiled on, like a pleased child; until the day of her death, as I was to find, she never tired of the wonder of
smiling.
“But don’t let’s stand here in this awful heat,” she said. “Come on up to the house, and Ida’ll give us some iced tea. Oh, honey, there’s so much to tell you!”
“Ida,” I said, enchanted. “Still Ida? Oh I wish I could, but I’m afraid I haven’t time to go all the way up there. I’ll miss my train.”
“But I don’t live uptown any more, darlin’, I live right down here. Come on.” I gave in, and instinctively turned east. Toward Gramercy Park, it would surely be, or Irving Place.
“No, this way.” She turned me west. “Right here on Fourteenth.”
I followed her, wondering, used as I was to the odd crannies that New Yorkers often seized upon with a gleefully inverted assumption of style. From Union Square just east of us, westward for several long blocks, this was an arid neighborhood even for tenements, an area of cranky shops being superseded by huge bargain chains, of lofts, piano factories, and the blind, shielded windows of textile agents. Nobody, really nobody lived here.
We turned in at the battered doorway of a loft building. Above us, I heard the chattering of machines. To the left, the grimy buff wall held a signboard with a row of company names in smudged gilt. Ginny Doll took out a key and opened a mailbox beneath. I was close enough to read the white calling card on it—Ginevra Leake.
At that moment she turned, holding a huge wad of mail. “Honey, I guess I ought to tell you something about me, before you go upstairs,” she said. “In case it might make a difference to you.”
In a flash I’d tied it all together—the hat, the neighborhood, the flossy new name, my mother’s long-gone remark about unicorns. It wouldn’t be need of money. She had simply gone one Freudian step past Miss Lavalette Buchanan. She’d become a tart. A tart with Ida in the background to serve iced tea, as a Darley Leake would.
The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher Page 11