by Anna Shapiro
Weesie hated for her mother to be “charming.” “Oh, come on, Mums. She’d listen to you if you put your foot down.”
Mary Jane emitted a “charming” laugh and fluttered her hands in ushering motions that made it impossible not to go. The girls caught her sharing a pals-y, parental look with Milt. “Anyway,” said Weesie, “she already tried to make us sand-wiches. For a snack.”
“I think she thinks American girls are too thin, dear,” said Mary Jane, draping her smock over an umbrella tree, emerging into skirt and blouse. “And I agree! You’re both so thin, you’d go right through a crack between the floorboards.” She always said this. Weesie finished the sentence along with her, and the girls shrieked with laughter, leaning on each other and setting each other off again each time one stopped. It was so normal! They couldn’t have seen what they’d seen.
The party of four obediently settled onto the comfortable chairs and two-seater couch of the pouch. The furniture wore its summer slipcovers of white painter’s canvas or linen, and the carpeting had been replaced with sisal matting. Even a week earlier, a fire might have been lit, but instead the French windows were open to the melting late afternoon. Just as they arrived, one of the ubiquitous tawny Long Island bunnies hopped along the brick veranda and perched on hind legs at the room’s threshold, ears like a two-fingered salute. Then it registered their presence and shot into the shrubbery.
“We should feed it,” Maude moaned in a stricken, possessive tone.
Mary Jane laughed.
“But really. I mean, we’ve taken over so much of where it might have lived or found food.”
“I never thought of that,” said Mary Jane. “You know, with your sense of justice, you could be a lawyer.”
“Mother!”
“What’s wrong with that? No, really.”
Maude struggled against showing disgust. “Oh, I don’t think so.”
“Maude’s going to be an artist, Mummy. You know that.”
Mrs. O’Donnell came in, weighted down by a huge silver tea tray. The females all tensed, fighting the desire to jump up and help her with it as they had tried to do in the past.
“Great stuff!” said Milt, reaching for the bread and butter before the tray was settled on the low table.
Maude knew that bread and butter: rounds of firm, fine-grained white bread spread with sweet butter and, where crusts might have been, butter also had been spread and the edges rolled in parsley. The parsley reminded her of Passover—and then, this past April, at Grandma Resnikov’s, as she placed on her tongue the sprig of parsley dipped in salt tears at the seder, it was as if tea at the Herricks had materialized, not just in her mouth but as a presence, as if she’d lost consciousness a moment and in that moment dreamed. Looking up, she was startled to see balding and pudgy Uncle Lou instead of Mary Jane. She would never again be altogether in one place, or even just a Pugh. She might never after this year, she thought, in a strange mingling of comfort and tension, be altogether at home. She loved this bread and butter. But in its delicate flavors, its green crunch and rich mildness, it had also developed for her a taste of homesickness and nostalgia. She already missed it while she ate it.
“Are you sure I can’t lay you a fire then?” Mrs. O’Donnell pleaded. “T’would be no trouble.”
“Goodness, Mrs. O, it’s almost iced-tea weather. Don’t even think of it.”
“Shall I get some ice, then, and squeeze a few lemons? Let me make up a wee jug of iced tea then.”
“No, no, no, no, no.” Mary Jane waved her hands in front of her face. You could see how sorry she was to have started that hare. “Don’t even think of it, Mrs. O’Donnell. You’ve done far too much already.”
“Oh, it shan’t take the slightest effort. T’will be a pleasure—though I don’t know about mint leaves; you’ll be wantin’ yer mint, I’m thinking, and it’s only just coming in.”
“No, really, please, please, Mrs. O’Donnell. This is quite enough, much more than enough, far too much—please.”
Mrs. O’Donnell sighed. “Well, ma’am, if that’s all yer wantin’ . . .”
“That’s all, Mrs. O’Donnell. Thank you so much. Really.”
Squeezing her hands together, Mrs. O’Donnell reluctantly left. Mary Jane turned her exasperation on Weesie. “I can just put my foot down?”
“I think she’s insane,” said Weesie, eating her way around the bread, biting off just the nonfattening parsley and mouse morsels of what it was fastened to.
“Persecuted by kindness,” said Maude and put her hand over her mouth, turning the color of the winey dogwood blossoms outside the window, sure she’d been rude. She often felt this at the Herricks’, as if she were feeling her way through a marsh, sinking into chilly water where she’d expected a firm tussock underfoot.
“Exactly,” said Mary Jane, but Maude didn’t feel any better. Once she felt she’d misstepped, it couldn’t be undone.
Milton had polished off about ten of the little rounds. “She’s welcome to come to our place any time.”
“Oh, Daddy.”
He popped another in his mouth. “You’re right, Maude. I take that back, you’re absitively right. You can’t live this way and be an artist.”
“That’s—tosh,” said Mary Jane.
“Well, now that you say that, I feel as if you’re right. But then I look at this—” he gave a little push to the silver hot-water kettle, which was in a kind of silver sling over a filigreed burner—“and I know it’s true.”
“You think if you’re comfortable you can’t have an artist’s vision?”
Maude had never heard Mary Jane sarcastic. It was intimidating. But Milton was unperturbed.
“Comfort is great! I’m all for it. But what’s comfortable about dealing with Mrs. O’Donalds?”
“O’Donnell.”
“O’Donnell, O’Shmonnell. When you’re making art, nothing else matters. Nothing can get in your way. You can’t go around worrying, is that just so, is this just so, my clothes, my lipstick—sorry, Mary Jane, but if you’re serious about your work, you should—your life has to be serious, dammit. That’s what it is. It’s high seriousness. And to hell with the rest. There’s none of this—asking permission. Keeping it neatly in place. You go ahead and do what you need to do and that’s it.”
“Oh, very romantic.” Mary Jane spoke with gathered dignity and such scorn you expected the ends of her hair to emit sparks. “And I suppose your family just happens to feel that way.”
“Of course we do,” said Maude hotly, not adding: we have to. She felt mortified by her father’s rudeness, but furious at Weesie’s mother for attacking him. The clash inside her almost seemed proof that there were two systems at work.
“So if I go around in paint-stained dungarees with my hair unwashed, this will make me a genius.”
“Well, I don’t think it’s necessary not to wash.”
“ ’Scuse me, ’scuse me, beggin yer pardon.” Mrs. O’Donnell dashed in holding sugar tongs aloft like a torch. She clanged them onto the tray and backed out.
“I’ve seen dogs dragging their ass after a beating that look happier.” Milton chugged cooled orangey tea from the translucent cup, which was curved like a bell.
“You’re saying propriety and—conventions are incompatible with . . . Are you saying you need absolute social freedom to make art? No, not freedom—license. Just pure untethered fancy. Whim,” said Mary Jane. No one could have accused her of looking whimsical.
“It would be nice. It’s probably not possible in this world.” Milton looked thoughtful.
“Oh, you’re just as conventional as you could be; it’s just a different set of conventions. The conventions of bohemia instead of whatever you think these are.”
“If I lived by those conventions—which only look like conventions from the outside, anyway, but maybe that’s the nature of such things—I’d still be in our old place on Minetta Lane.”
Maude looked at Weesie. They had discussed the mys
tery and tragedy of the Pughs’ leaving Greenwich Village, like any bourgeois couple, for the suburbs when Seth was born.
“Anyway, the convention of bohemia is to be free,” Milton said.
“Oh, yes—and dress a certain way, be ‘hep’ to certain things, go to certain places. It’s all just fashion, being ‘free’ in such prescribed ways. It’s a wonder that—”
“There are always lesser lights. There are always people who imitate prevalent forms. That’s just fashion. It has nothing to do with values, or not enough. And none of it is the work of art. Of making art. The point is, you can’t go by what comes to you. You can’t be obedient. It’s a disaster, you can’t just take what’s ready-made, what comes before you. You can take it, that is, but you have to make it your own.
“Just look at Gertrude Whitney. She lived a slightly bohemian life; she had some talent—I don’t know why she couldn’t become an artist. But she couldn’t. If you can be free in this house, in this life—” the skinny man with the magnificent white hair and bobbing Adam’s apple, who came from a cramped tract house to deliver this message, spread his arms—“more power to you.”
“Having money should make you freer,” said Mary Jane.
“Yes. It should. Money itself isn’t an impediment unless you don’t have it.”
“You have to interrupt your work to teach. That seems worse than stopping for tea.”
“It is. But I have to.”
Maude wanted to say that the Herricks ate so late—eight, nine, even ten at night—they’d never make it to dinner if they didn’t have a meal in between, but she was embarrassed to reveal their own plebeian six o’clock dining hour.
“Robert Motherwell came from money. And Frankenthaler—she’s well fixed; I run into her at charity events,” Mary Jane said.
“I’m sure having money has made their careers much easier.”
“Mm. I wonder how much fashion does come into it, now that I think of it. Into art. I mean, the whole way style is everything these days . . .”
“Fashion! Mum.”
Mary Jane arched her eyebrows, clearly feeling she was on to something. “Maybe abstraction is just today’s fashion. Maybe it’s just chic. If that’s true, I’m knocking myself out just to be ‘cool,’ like you kids, not to do something higher and more pure and fine. Pared-down art, girls who want to look like Twiggy—”
“Mu-um.”
“All right, all right,” said Milt, raising a hand like a cop halting traffic. “It was just a thought.”
2.
MAUDE HAD THE impression that people went wild around graduation, that all the hierarchies and divi- sions that ruled the rest of the year dissolved and anything could happen.
For the last ten days of school, classes were suspended and students undertook self- assigned tasks that ranged from studying all available sources on Aztec culture to living in and off a local marsh with no resources but a poncho, matches, and an ax. (It was rumored that the boy who did this, though he may have boiled marsh grass and roasted frogs, was in fact hitchhiking into town and getting candy bars and beer—which was going to do little for the weight problem that, many suspected, had led him to design the project in the first place.)
The school still had Meeting every day, but the days of Selected Work Week were loose and unpredictable. The sculpture studio was full morning to night, theater students appeared at meals with lavender circles under their eyes from rehearsals that ended at dawn and spoke lines while they ate together, their real world the one of the play; the lawns were dotted with readers whose shoulders were growing pink in the sun, someone finishing off the ends of a piece of weaving, a trio of long- haired girls twin- ing through the intricacies of creating and learning a piece of choreography; the library rustled as if with cockroaches, and classrooms were empty.
Maude was consolidating her study of Bay Farm culture, which she was illustrating with line drawings of cultural artifacts as if it were a real ethnological monograph. She was copying it, in her maniacally neat Edgar Allan Poe typefacelike printing, into a black- bound artist’s notebook that looked like a book. She used an old- fashioned pen that had to be dipped, but the professional effect was undercut by the fact that she dipped into India ink of psychedelic purple. Luckily the pictures to be pasted in were more conventional black and white, except a drawing of shirts colored in purple, one a carefully rendered fine European crinkle cotton, the other a tie- dyed T- shirt, together labeled “cool.” Next to a wigglily outlined pair of harlequin glasses, the maniacal printing read: “Also known as‘cat’s- eye’ glasses, uncool in any color.” A freshman who’d been so uncool as to enter the school wearing a pair—plaid, admittedly—had been unable to recover any social standing even, after returning in acceptable oval tortoiseshell frames.
She was copying out the summation, with which she was pleased. She loved it when her thoughts seemed to bite into some- thing and actually raise her, as if she were striking into rock and inching up an otherwise inaccessible peak. First she demolished the possibility the school’s charter held out, of utopia, saying there were more cultural variables (as Malinowski called it, in the text she had taken in only in its broadest outlines) than anyone could isolate or account for and that no planned society could possibly coordinate them all, much less in a smoothly ideal way. Among the variables beyond Bay Farm’s realm, to start with, were students’ families, the culture at large, and the school’s nonexistence as an economic unit except for faculty and staff. But while it failed as a realization of a promised or implied utopia, it had evolved its own culture. Subculture.
A shadow fell over her half- empurpled page. She was sitting in the orchard, where when she looked up she could half con- vince herself that the trees were covered in snow, while the scented air felt like bathwater, and bees buzzed like fuzzy little machines. For whole seconds she had achieved this deliciously paradoxical winter- spring effect, fooling herself. But this time when she looked up, Danny Stern’s head was silhouetted against the blushing blossoms. He was smiling at her, but his face was upside- down, so this too had a paradoxical effect: if she let go of what she knew and just let herself look, then he was frowning or, going a perceptual step further, a weird flopping lesion had developed in his forehead.
“Hey. How’s it going?”
Danny Stern was the olive- skinned juvenile boy from the pop hovel. She squinted up at the flopping lesion.
“What?”
He dropped onto the grass beside her, his smile righting itself. It seemed that there should be a boy beside her in such a place. It always seemed as if there should be a boy beside her, sharing her feelings, offering meaningful looks, holding her hand or putting a protecting arm around her shoulders. But not Danny Stern, who, though he had grown over the year, just looked like a longer, more stretched- out eleven- year- old. Even his head was long and thin, oblong from crown to chin so that the genial way he had of angling it as he smiled at a person was exaggerated.
“The skewering of Bay Farm pretensions and social iniquity,” he said.
“Skewering? Is that what people think?” She held a hand in a visor as though it would stop the treacherous prick of tears she could feel inside her sinuses. She hadn’t meant to be judgmental, just realistic.
“Hey.” He almost touched her raised hand with his own but stopped just short. “People feel like you’re doing a service.”
“Which people? Not the coolies.”
At Bay Farm School, coolies were not Chinese peasants in conical straw hats but the most sought- after students. It was in her glossary with the sentence, “He thinks he’s such a ~,” the way the dictionary did it.
“Of course coolies, are you kidding? Nobody wants to think they’re the, you know, hypocrites or snobs.”
Maude remembered why she wanted to be accepted by them. They were admirable. They were better at being people. She remembered seeing the circle of them the first day of school, laughing together, regal.
Danny asked if he could
see. Instead of handing him the neatly copied artist’s book, Maude rifled through her sheaf of unlined notebook paper mixed with torn- off corners on which she’d scribbled phrases. She held up one of these. “This is what they’re going to find when I die. Thousands of scraps of paper with these—cryptic messages.” She had just learned cryptic. It was a test. But he evidently passed, since there was that smile and the exaggerated, easy, oblong tilt.
Instead of making a comment on the page she handed him, he made a mark on it. He was the kind of boy who used a car- tridge pen and carried it in his breast pocket. Neat, as she was, but in a squarer style. She looked at what he’d written. Even though it was on a messy page, she felt encroached upon, slightly violated, but her face lit when she took in the meaning. He’d written just “m.”
“Girls can be coolies,” she nevertheless objected.
“Name a girl who’s a coolie.”
She pictured the coolie table in the refectory, where the queen of the coolies reigned with her crinkle- cotton shirt, leather vest, and big guffaws like a boy. She pictured the other faces at the table under their scrolls of hair. They were almost all boys.
“Dale Handler.”
He shook his head. “Not really.”
“Linda Haverstyk.”
“Maybe. Maybe Linda Haverstyk.” Then he wrote, in graceful, easy script that was as far from her maniacal print as you could get and still be in the neat spectrum, “No female variety known. The closest an f. can come is to be a ~ girlfriend. For f.’s, such transferred status may in some cases outlast the relationship.”
“Linda Haverstyk,” said Maude. Linda Haverstyk was known even to freshmen as having been the girlfriend of a legendary graduate of the year before, and it was as if his coolness, never glimpsed, lingered like a purple aura around her Mexican embroidered muslin smock- dresses and center- parted hair. She’d had boyfriends this past year, but they were like the emascu- lated second and third husbands of a professional widow. They derived status from her, mere consorts.
Danny’s head tilted to read the rest of the glossary. Newie. That was any new student, freshman or sophomore or the rare new junior, though new juniors were so rare and unpacklike that no one bothered putting them in their place but accorded them the dignity of upperclassmen. Daisy chain . . .