The White Russian

by Vanora Bennett

  No … I’d need to gather my thoughts first, I thought, getting up; I’d wait till I was home.

  4

  I’d been nervous for months about the approaching end of college. Put simply, I didn’t want to go home for good.

  Mother, who seemed more frail among her orchids and gardenias these days than I’d remembered her being before, only drooped extra wearily if, while on vacation, I ever actually answered her question about what it was I’d been doing while away. I’d keep my answers brief, and Hughie would nod tolerantly until I fell silent, then pass me the drink he’d been concentrating on mixing as I spoke – always a Manhattan, the first night back – after which he’d make the same jovial toast, ‘To homecoming!’ And then, with very visible tact, he’d start asking about the brothers and families of my new friends, raising his eyebrow only just enough to make me uncomfortable when it turned out they weren’t at all what he would call marriageable. They weren’t, I could see that. My friends all wanted to be writers and painters and photographers and editors. They weren’t ladylike in the least – nothing like the delicate flowers Hughie would have liked me to be friends with, the husband-hunters my friends and I laughed at so much for just marking time till their weddings. Thank God he didn’t realize, at least, quite how shockingly different to his our political ideas were! Or even to think, in those early months of 1937, that girls might have any valid opinions at all! As soon as the ceremony of welcoming me back for a vacation was done, he and Mother would resume their complaining about the New Deal and pro-convention campaigning dinners and Republican comeback soirées and Hoover one-liners. ‘Blessed are the young,’ as Hughie liked to say, nodding sententiously at me after his second drink, ‘for they shall inherit the national debt.’

  So I did what I could to not offend, when at home. I tried to keep in check the critical faculty that college was developing in me, and to quell the suspicion I’d begun to find coming into my head whenever Mother was having one of her querulous fits that she might not feel ill at all, but just be play-acting, for attention, so that we’d all jump, as we always did, and whisper and tiptoe and look after her. But as my college time went on, a kind of sourness seemed to creep into our relationship all the same.

  There’d been a lot of talk, for instance, during my last college Christmas, about the shape my twenty-first birthday celebrations should take at Easter. It started on the evening of the day I’d seen the lawyer and been pleasantly surprised at how big my settlement from Father was going to be once I turned twenty-one; my first idea had been to throw a party and invite my college friends. But no one in the family had responded to my suggestion.

  A family dinner at a restaurant with some of the cousins was what was decided on; but what to wear? When, before Easter, my mother took me shopping for a dress, the saleswoman took one look at me and put me straight into heels and a shocking-pink halter-neck evening gown in some new industrial silky stuff, and gasped when I stepped out in it, feeling six feet tall and swaying like a movie star.

  My mother gasped too, but less approvingly. ‘Haven’t you got something … prettier?’ she asked.

  We left ten minutes later with a flowery, flouncy, chiffon thing in light blues and greens, in what felt an oppressive silence. My mother looked pained for hours; I felt obscurely guilty.

  We spent the rest of our day together in various stores while she tried on gown after gown and listened fretfully to the praise of sales clerk after sales clerk. When we were alone, I dreamed up little stories about the cousins or the movies to tell her, and asked nervous questions about her friends and committees, all to earn her forgiveness. It was evening, and we were home and dressed for dinner, waiting for Hughie, before she relented, and the look of suffering finally left her face. She ruffled my hair, and smiled her beautiful smile, and, to my tremendous relief, said tenderly, ‘My baby, and such a pretty girl … we need to sort out your hair.’

  I didn’t want anything done to my hair. Why bother? I was happy with my hair falling over my shoulders and held to one side by a clip; and there was no need for extra curling, as it was naturally wavy. But Mother, who had always favoured complicated chignons and Grecian tendrils of hair falling past her ears, cheered up at this new thought.

  Leaning conspiratorially towards me, she murmured, with a soft voice and a loving look, ‘I’ve talked to my hairdresser about you, and she says she would love to style the hair of the most important person of the birthday party. Would you let me take you? She is a wonderful artist. I would love to introduce you …’

  And so I said yes, of course, though with a slightly sinking heart at what kind of freakish coxcomb the mystery hairdresser might give me to match that flouncy dress, and the appointment was made. Off we went together, in the back of another cab, on the morning of the dinner a week or so later. Mother was smiling and chirping away, brighter and more energetic than I’d seen her for weeks, so that I was happy, mostly, to have given in.

  ‘You’ll love Colette,’ Mother said more than once, playfully smoothing down the fur on her lap with her gloved hand. ‘And she’s so excited to be doing the hair of the most important person of the evening …’

  It was only once we were actually on Fifth Avenue, and had passed through the red doors Mother pointed to and into a padded interior place where sleek young women were converging on Mother, who knew them all, that I began to realize this wasn’t going to be the kind of two-girls-together grooming morning I’d envisaged. A much older, stouter female, clearly the terror of the establishment, emerged from behind a door, and the young bird-females scattered to a respectful, watchful distance.

  ‘Madame,’ the new arrival said in Gallic tones. She deftly swept up Mother’s mink. ‘What a pleasure! ‘Ow excited I am to be creating ze coiffure of ze most important person at your party … you will be ze belle of ze ball.’

  They gazed into each other’s eyes for a long moment, in a silent duet of mutual appreciation. Then Mother’s faint social laugh tinkled out and she gestured at me. ‘My daughter, Evie …’ Colette nodded and her mouth turned up without her eyes leaving Mother’s face. And then, with another little laugh, one that sounded more definitely false this time, Mother added: ‘I wondered, dear Colette, whether you might also have time to do my daughter’s hair?’ Now Colette swivelled her eyes towards me, as if seeing me for the first time, to give me the full benefit of her disapproving glare. ‘She hoped you might fit her in too,’ Mother added.

  Colette turned her face towards me, though her smiling eyes didn’t quite meet mine. ‘But … no time! No stylist! We are a very famous salon! So busy …!’ she growled, and the bird-girls twittered.

  I was hot and cold with mortification; sinking into the floor with it. Was there no appointment for me? Had I completely misunderstood the purpose of the trip? In my panic, I couldn’t even remember whether Mother had ever specified that it was my hair that was to be cut, or even whether I was the most important person of the evening at all: had I simply been so arrogant as to make that assumption for myself? ‘It’s really not a problem,’ I said, eyeing the door. ‘I think there must have been a misunder—’

  But the terror of the establishment was already rising to the occasion. ‘‘Owever, for you, madame,’ she said, and as she turned back to Mother her face sugared up again, ‘we can always find a way. Nadine,’ she barked at the youngest of the girls, ‘you will take zis young lady. And I will be wiz ze most important person of ze evening for ze next two hours.’

  My head went on spinning throughout the long silent period of washing and heat and snippings that followed. I still hadn’t got my thoughts together or my voice back even by the time we came out on to Fifth Avenue together, my hair only a bit shorter and puffier than before I’d gone in, but Mother’s in full stiff-curled golden splendour, and got into the cab home. The only thing I had in my mind, the closest I could get to a strategy, was not to react, especially when I felt so light and hot and stifled. You didn’t quarrel with Mother. She was deli
cate.

  I was aware of her looking at me, sideways, beady-eyed.

  ‘Your hair looks beautiful,’ I said, to avoid giving offence.

  ‘Colette is an artist,’ she answered, pleased, and her hand wandered hairwards. And then, as she patted, she added, ‘Didn’t you think her charming?’

  Avoid conflict. I kept the half-smile on my face and looked out of the window.

  After a while, she said, rather accusingly, ‘You seem angry.’

  ‘Angry?’ I said, wonderingly, in my most innocent voice. Outright denial seemed the best strategy. ‘Oh no, Mother. Why would I be?’

  ‘Well, you’re not saying anything.’

  ‘Ahh … well, maybe I’m a little nervous,’ I said, making my smile wider and my voice warmer. ‘It’s a big thing, after all, turning twenty-one. My big day.’

  I wondered whether I’d put too much stress on the word my. But it was too late to unsay. I smiled more. Mother pursed her lips. She didn’t answer. She began fiddling with the clasp of her big crocodile-skin purse. We were nearly home.

  Aunt Mildred was my mother’s aunt, and my great-aunt, and the matriarch of our family. In mountainous black taffeta, she was stirring her coffee and looking approvingly down the restaurant table at her army of descendants. Everyone but me and Mother (who with Hughie was safely at the other end) had the same very dark hair, the girls’ curled and crimped above their flowery, floaty, A-line pastel dresses, the boys’ all neatly smoothed down from side partings. It was a neat, correct group, with barely a concession to modernity. In the car on the way here, Mother, in flirty high spirits, had been singing the praises of my various male cousins: Cousin Ned, rising star at Bethlehem Steel and her favourite relative of my generation, and Cousin Theo, already doing so very well at J. P. Morgan …

  ‘How we’ve all changed. I can’t believe Sophie and Chloe used to be so naughty,’ I said as she stirred. My cousins were meek as milk now, halfway down the table, in identical pink and blue. They were Aunt Mildred’s favourite grandchildren. She glanced at them and grunted happily.

  ‘Do you remember?’ I continued, suddenly knowing what I wanted to know and how to get round to the subject. It might not have occurred to me to ask, if it hadn’t been for the hairdresser’s visit earlier. Neither of us had referred to it again, just as Mother didn’t seem to have noticed that, on returning home, I’d gone to my room, brushed out my salon hairdo and changed the style. ‘What teases they were when they were small? Dancing round me at the beach and shouting, “Evie’s got a crazy grandma”?’

  Aunt Mildred snuffled at that, and raised the coffee cup to her lips with her strangely small, delicate hand.

  ‘I’ve often wondered, since,’ I added casually as she sipped. ‘Is she crazy? Is that why we never see her?’

  Aunt Mildred’s little dark eyes darted down the table, fixed on Mother safely in animated conversation with Cousin Theo, and then returned to meet mine. She put the cup down and leaned closer. ‘Crazy’, she said carefully, ‘would be putting it too strongly. But what my sister Constance has always been …’ and here she paused and narrowed her eyes in the search for the mot juste, ‘… is unconventional.’

  I was none the wiser. I’d always understood Aunt Mildred to hold that unconventional and crazy were pretty closely related anyway.

  ‘Not raving in the street, exactly …?’ I pursued tentatively. ‘But …?’

  ‘Art.’ Aunt Mildred disapproved of art, and all that went with it. Her lips shut tight as a trap on that ‘t’.

  I raised an eyebrow. I knew there’d be more if I waited. Aunt Mildred had had two glasses of wine. Her cheeks were pink.

  ‘She was always a great one for ideas. She read too much, you see; too clever for her own good. When poor Eddie – your grandfather – was killed in Russia, of course we brought Constance back to have the baby – your mother – in our home. We did everything we could for her: we knew it wouldn’t be an easy time for her, and she was family. We even sent her to a sanatorium for her nerves, because she was so thin and sad that she couldn’t feed Jeannie. More fool us. We thought a summer of Switzerland and mountain air would do her good. And of course I said we’d look after Jeannie until she came back. I had three of my own by then, and there was room in the nursery. But no one could have expected Constance to head for Paris, and take up with … artists … and intellectuals … and want to stay there indefinitely.’

  I shook my head. ‘It was stifling at home,’ Aunt Mildred added forbiddingly. ‘Or so she said.’

  ‘What about Mother?’ Had Grandmother just abandoned her child? Or had she been pushed out? ‘Didn’t she want her?’

  ‘Well.’ Aunt Mildred glared down at her cup. ‘She did write. She wanted me to let Jeannie go to Paris and live with her there, can you believe?’

  I made my smile more encouraging and waited for more.

  ‘Of course I said no. Highly unsuitable. Opium, lunatics, bordellos and men cutting their own ears off: not at all the environment one would want one’s niece growing up in.’

  Despite myself, I smiled inside. I could just hear Aunt Mildred saying those words. ‘Didn’t that change her mind?’

  Aunt Mildred’s jowls quivered as she shook her head. ‘Though she did leave Paris for a while,’ she conceded. ‘She came home and tried to argue with us. But Herbert and I stood firm, and we had the family behind us. We told Constance she could still spend the summers with Jeannie, if we could be confident that it would be done in seemly fashion – here, or near – but she’d proved she couldn’t raise her on her own. So she went off to live with a colony of lady artists’ – Aunt Mildred’s voice quivered with disgust at these last words – ‘in New Mexico, over the winter, though she did turn up the next summer, as promised. But by then it was up to Jeannie to choose. And she didn’t want to go. She wanted to spend her summers with us.’

  Sadness stole through me. I could imagine how outraged Aunt Mildred would have felt, how sincere she’d have been, and what she’d have said … I could imagine, too, how a small child hearing what her family was saying would have feared the idea of a summer alone with her shockingly improper and invisible parent … At the same time, I thought I also had an inkling of why a bookish, well-travelled young woman like my grandmother, so recently a widow, and then, while still in grief, a mother, might have felt stifled by her return home. I could imagine her falling in with what she thought they wanted, at first, and going to Europe – and then being bewildered when she found they’d locked her out forever, and she’d lost her daughter.

  ‘And that was that,’ Aunt Mildred finished, not without satisfaction. She eyed me.

  ‘She went back overseas …?’ I prompted.

  ‘Yes, off she went, and from then on she seemed to be positively going out of her way to be outrageous. There was another painters’ colony in a fishing village in Italy; Rapallo, I think she called it, because she did write, sometimes. She said it was peaceful. And then ambulance driving in France in the Great War, which she said was her duty – which was quite absurd: it was clearly no job for a woman … or at least a lady. We couldn’t even find her to ask her to poor Jeannie’s wedding …’ At this, Aunt Mildred picked up her coffee cup and stared fiercely at the grounds, in a way that suggested she hadn’t tried very hard. ‘But we always kept the door open, in case she’d changed. And, sure enough, she did pitch up again, after the war – and even though she brought some shady new Russian husband of her own to meet me, she made a very affecting speech, about how sad she was not to have known your father, and how much she wanted to meet Hughie, and could she spend a few weeks on the island with the family?’

  Aunt Mildred put down the coffee cup. ‘So I put aside my doubts and did the decent thing. I said she could go to you all in July, before my children and I got there, when the top floor was free. I suppose I was impressed that she’d come to ask my permission. And that she was still trying at all. Maybe I even felt sorry for her … But it was a terrible mistake. I real
ized that afterwards. I blame myself. She hadn’t changed at all.’

  ‘You mean’, I said, making myself small, making my voice very innocent, wondering if I’d be giving away too much knowledge, or too much interest, by finishing my question, ‘because of the women’s parade?’

  A great snort travelled through Aunt Mildred’s tightly encased frame. ‘That!’ she rumbled dismissively. ‘No, long before that. Your mother said it was clear from their first day there. She said that Constance was teaching you the Charleston whenever her back was turned, and reading Dostoyevsky. She had to go.’

  I bit my lip. Excommunicated, then … I supposed it was only to be expected that Mother would get her revenge, in the end, for having been abandoned as a child. And suddenly, despite the sadness of this tale of inevitable estrangement, Aunt Mildred’s emphatic horror at those two particular crimes made me want to laugh. As did the guilty question that came fleetingly into my head: what would Aunt Mildred, or Mother, think if they knew I also had The Brothers Karamazov in my trunk, packed ready for my departure in the morning?

  ‘And now?’ I asked quickly.

  ‘Oh … Paris. Artists, no doubt. Maybe more Russians. It does no good to know too much. The point is, she was always too clever for her own good, my big sister. But, in the end, all her ideas did her no good at all. They just left her on her own.’ Aunt Mildred stretched out her black sheeny arm towards me, setting her taffeta-encased flesh swinging. The improbably small finger that touched me felt improbably hard. ‘That’s something for you to think about, too, my girl,’ she added with the glint in her eye that I’d always found amusing, ‘now you’re nearly through with your college education: the danger of ideas. Don’t get your head too full of them to know what really matters. It’s family that counts.’

  I felt much more warmly towards Mother by the time we set out for home, now that I could picture her as a lost, worried, golden-curled child, looking along the beach for a lost mother and crying too much over every grazed knee or lost toy.