The Swashbuckler

by Lee Lynch

  I wanted her at Edie’s house. At my house now. I almost started crying when I thought the words my house. But I didn’t want her here before she belonged here. I wanted a whole Frenchy, not just the pieces she gave because she was afraid, or didn’t understand, about giving more.

  I went into the living room and put the Supremes on the record player. Edie and me danced around the room, like silly little kids. I felt great.

  Chapter 4

  She Wore Skirts, Didn’t She?

  Spring, 1966

  The bus drove noisily up and down hills lined with small homes and large trellised gardens like calendar pictures of Italy. Small old people bent to measure the growth of the tomatoes that thrived on the College Point air, heavy with the smell of rubber. Frenchy felt like gagging each time the wind off the East River shifted towards her. Yet she stayed by the window, watching the many worlds the Q44 bus went through. She’d been tempted to walk the few blocks to the Bronx Zoo where she transferred to the Q44, but Jessie and Mary were expecting her. Riding over the grey river reminded her of Provincetown and she wondered if this was the way she’d gone that one time. She craned her neck to see the airplanes taking off from LaGuardia Airport. She changed to a bus that took her into crowded but unusually green College Point.

  This had been Jessie’s dream, Frenchy thought, sickened again by the rubber smell. To marry a girl and settle down someplace outside the City. Mary was from College Point. She worked in a factory there like her mother and father and her three sisters. Her brother had done better. He was a cop. They all knew Mary was queer and loved her anyway. Even the cop. That’s how she and Jessie could swing an apartment together, because they’d moved in over Mary’s sister and brother-in-law. Frenchy couldn’t believe this would work out. Who ever heard of a family not minding if you were queer? And it was really pushing it to move in over them.

  She reached her stop, across from College Point Park. Her friends lived just down the hill from the park. They went walking in it all the time, they said, even held hands sometimes when they could get off the sidewalks and be more alone. They loved to watch the water of the East River. To Frenchy it sounded like paradise. Not that she would ever give up her weekly walk into the Village.

  She had a black sweatshirt on over her white button-down shirt. She hitched up her jeans, the blue ones she saved for special days like this when she was going to be with gay friends, not cruise or pick up girls. She stopped to comb back her hair. There wasn’t even a store whose window she could use for a mirror out here in College Point. Her red pinky ring glinted in the sun and she smiled. It didn’t matter how she looked today — Jessie and Mary were just pals now, she didn’t have to impress them, they knew what she was really like. She strode on, remembering to tone down her bulldagger walk for the neighborhood. It was good she did; when she turned the corner onto Jessie’s street there were people everywhere: little kids rushing in front of her on tricycles, teenage boys glaring at the short mannish stranger on their turf, young girls giggling to see her diddy-bop by in her d.a., her comb sticking out of a back pocket. Grandmas on narrow porches and mothers pulling shopping carts or pushing baby carriages glared at her suspiciously. She began to feel even shorter than she was and hurried to find Jessie’s street address.

  She ran up the steps and leaned heavily against the doorbell. Somewhere way above her a voice yelled down, “It’s open, Frenchy, come on up!”

  She bolted in the door and stood in the darkness of the hallway to compose herself and catch her breath. How did these two stand it here? Jessie looked as much like a dyke as she did.

  “Hey, Frenchy, come on in! Help yourself to a paintbrush!” Jessie said at the doorway to her third floor apartment. “How do you like it, huh? Ain’t it a palace?” Jessie grinned, paint all over her chinos and sweatshirt, her squarish face red from exertion under very short, home-cut hair. “Mary, c’mere, Frenchy’s here!”

  Mary came out of the kitchen, wiping her hands on a ruffled apron, and kissed Frenchy on the lips. She was wide-hipped and full-breasted, with dark, warm eyes. Her hair was permed in a short, neat style. “I’m so glad you came! I’m baking a cake for after lunch. Did it take long to get here?”

  “Pretty long,” Frenchy answered, disoriented by seeing her bar friends in their home. “Looks nice,” she approved with a cool steady gaze around the living room. The aqua couch and matching armchair were neatly covered with a fitted plastic see-through protector. There was a white coffee table with curlique legs to match the legs of the chair and couch. Above the couch hung a gold-framed mirror. Two lamps with thick swirling bases on either side of the couch looked like modern art, and another lamp was suspended from the ceiling over the chair on a gold chain. The white floor-to-ceiling drapes over the window had not yet been opened. A cabinet, also standing on curliqued legs and adorned with scrollwork, was filled with tiny dishes and dolls and souvenirs. Frenchy walked to it on aqua and gold shag wall-to-wall carpet. “You really done this place up nice,” she said.

  Mary lifted her chin proudly and darted to Frenchy. “These are all our treasures,” Mary explained, going on to tell the history of each item.

  “Great folks, Mary’s family,” Jessie said. “Make me feel like family, too. Wish I could take Mary home to my folks, but they just wouldn’t understand. Hey — how’d you get a Saturday off?”

  “I’ve been up at the A&P so long, I work two on, two off now.”

  “Let me show you around,” Jessie said. “Then you can help me paint.”

  Mary put her hands on her hips. “You can show her around some more, but our very first guest outside the family is not going to paint.”

  Frenchy was relieved; she didn’t want to mess up her clothes with paint. She sat on the edge of the couch; its plastic folded, with a crumpling sound, beneath her.

  In very little time, Mary brought a plate of steaming soup to the table and began to dish it out.

  “Hey,” Frenchy said in surprise, looking at Jessie, “since when do you wear glasses?”

  Jessie blushed. “A couple of years. I always wear them at home, never downtown.”

  Mary sighed. “We’re getting old, Frenchy. Jessie’s twenty-nine and I’m not telling how old I am,” she finished coyly.

  “Come on,” Frenchy teased, “Jessie couldn’t have married an older woman ...”

  Mary scolded Frenchy, cutting her off. “You need some fattening up. You ought to settle down with a nice girl who’ll take care of you.” She got up, then called from the kitchen, “Whatever happened to you and Edie?”

  Frenchy toyed with a fork. “You guys even got nice silverware.”

  Mary arrived with a steaming tuna casserole. “Nothing fancy, just a little lunch to keep us going till dinner.”

  Frenchy said, “Jess could put away three or four hot-dogs at Nedicks in one sitting. With the works. And coffee and pie for dessert.” She laughed. “Those were the good old days, right, Jess?”

  Jessie looked covertly toward Mary who was dishing out plentiful helpings of casserole. “Sure were,” Jessie replied. “Not that I’d trade them for the good new days.”

  “What about Edie, Frenchy?” Mary asked again.

  Frenchy was having trouble eating a second course. “She’s okay. Haven’t seen her for a few months. She don’t come downtown now she’s got this new girlfriend.”

  Mary looked shocked, disapproving, and sympathetic in quick succession.

  “I don’t care,” Frenchy said. “We were through long before that. I mean, I liked Edie a lot. She was maybe my favorite girl. But she was looking for somebody I wasn’t like, you know what I mean? Besides, she needed a smart girl. Not like me.”

  “You’re plenty smart, Frenchy. All she had on you was an education and you could get one of those if you wanted to.”

  Mary was silent for a moment. “She wasn’t our kind, is all. Here, finish this and I’ll bring the cake,” she said, splitting the rest of the casserole between the two butches.

>   “I can’t Mary. Honest I can’t,” Frenchy groaned. She was still trying to decide if she should defend Edie to Mary. “How do you like being married, Jess?” she asked instead, pulling out a box of Marlboros and lighting one.

  “It’s great, Frenchy. She does all the cooking and cleaning, won’t let me do a thing except painting and fixing stuff. Sometimes I feel bad, but in her family, that’s how you’re a good wife.”

  “They really don’t care you’re a girl?”

  “No,” Jessie said, pushing back from the table and unbuttoning the top of her chinos. “I mean, I guess they’d rather she had kids, but they’re happy she’s married to someone who loves her and who she loves. She said it was hard at first when she came out, with her mother telling her how she’d burn in hell. She met this girl at the factory back then. One date and she knew she was queer. She never did like men to touch her and this girl showed her why. One night her mother caught them making out in the hallway. They had a big scene. Her father wasn’t home. They made a deal to keep it from him. But over the years I guess Mama couldn’t keep the secret and brought the old man around. Now he talks to me about cars. Wants me to learn to play bocce with the boys. Wants me to help him put in his garden this year so’s I’ll know how. They figure to leave their house to Mary since she can’t earn good money like the boys.”

  Mary bustled in, bearing the cake. “Now that Jess told my come out story, let’s hear yours, Frenchy.”

  She was blushing. “You don’t want to hear that.”

  “Yes I do. So does Jess, don’t you?” She hugged her.

  “We were saying just the other night how we don’t know yours.”

  Frenchy shrugged and crossed her legs under herself, secretly pleased by their interest. She lit a cigarette.

  “I used to tell girls who asked me that I never came out — I was born gay.” Frenchy wriggled a little on her chair, nervously looking to see how Jessie and Mary were reacting to her words. “Whatever, I was fourteen the first time I knew for sure. Me and Terry, a friend of mine, used to hang out together. Go to the candy store for egg creams, up to the RKO for Debbie Reynolds musicals. Our favorite thing was to dress up like guys and ride the subways.”

  “You? In your neighborhood?”

  “We were like spies in a foreign country until we got out of our own neighborhood. Sometimes we’d go downtown to the wrestling matches at Madison Square Garden. There were always weird people there. They never noticed us. Sometimes we walked Broadway, pretending we wanted prostitutes.”

  Jessie and Mary laughed. “Ever get picked up?” asked Jessie.

  “You kidding? We just had a great time being whoever we wanted, going wherever we wanted. Then we discovered Greenwich Village. The girls down there all looked like us!

  “We’d heard of queers and we’d heard there were a lot of them in the Village, but neither of us ever thought of them being girl queers. Just fairies. We went running back to the Bronx so fast...”

  Frenchy put out her cigarette and stretched her legs as far as they’d go. “After a while we started hanging out in Washington Square instead of Madison Square. And at PamPam’s.”

  “Good old Pam Pam’s. Our favorite hangout,” Jessie said. “I think it’s a Dunkin Donuts now.”

  Mary asked, “How did you get boys’ clothes?”

  “My mother always dressed me in my brother’s hand-me-downs. Terry ripped hers off.” Frenchy shook her head, smiling. “I’d go over to her house to change. Then there was this basement passageway through a couple of buildings. We’d slip down an alleyway and into the subway.”

  “How old were you?” Mary asked.

  “We met in sixth grade. I remember Terry best in gym class, when they’d give us dance lessons. How those droopy felt skirts we wore would cling together, all full of electricity. It made me scared the other kids could tell how I was feeling about her, all that electricity between us.”

  “So what happened?” Jess interjected. “When did you finally do it?”

  “Jess!”

  “Aw, Mary, we’re all girls.”

  Frenchy had a soft smile on her usually cautious face. “Even seeing all those gay girls downtown didn’t tip us off to ourselves. When we finally figured out what was going on, what kind of scene we’d gotten into down there, we didn’t call each other up for about two weeks. Then we did, and I went over there to change. Terry’d ripped off some new clothes and looked more like the gay girls downtown than ever. She was sitting on her bed watching my every move. We didn’t say a word. When I’m mostly dressed, she pulls a tie out of her pocket and comes toward me. ‘I bought this for you,’ she says.

  “Terry never gave me nothing before. It was embarrassing. ‘Bought it?’ I asked her, because she never paid for anything. She put it around my neck and started straightening my collar, her fingers touching my neck. I remember feeling all my little neck hairs stand on end, she was so close.”

  Jessie and Mary were holding hands, staring at Frenchy who was lost in her story. Frenchy took a deep breath. “She kissed me. We fell on her bed and never got off it until we heard her mother come home late in the afternoon.”

  “And Frenchy the lover came out.”

  “Come on, Jess,” Frenchy said, still self-conscious. She changed the subject. “What’re the candles for?”

  “For you! Didn’t Jessie tell you? We missed your birthday so we thought we could celebrate today.”

  Frenchy was even more self-conscious. “You didn’t have to do nothing.”

  “I knew she wouldn’t come if I told her, Mary,” Jessie declared.

  “I hope you’re not upset, Frenchy.”

  Mary lit the candles. She and Jessie sang “Happy Birthday,” mortifying Frenchy even further. “Come on, make a wish and blow out the candles!” Mary insisted.

  “I can’t think of nothing to wish for.” But when it came to blowing out the candles, she wanted to do that right. It was a matter of pride to quench all twenty-seven candles in one breath. Mary and Jessie cheered when she did it.

  For a long time they ate cake and drank coffee around the table. Mary got up to do the dishes and Jessie offered to go for a walk in the park with Frenchy.

  “No, thanks,” Frenchy said, thinking about the gauntlet they’d have to run through the crowded neighborhood.

  “Let’s wait for Mary then and we’ll all walk together. We’ll take you to the busstop afterwards.”

  Maybe it would be better with Mary along. “Okay,” she said, thinking how the stares and taunts never used to get to her like this. “I guess everybody’s getting old,” she said aloud.

  “But you know,” Jessie said, lighting a cigarette, “it’s not as bad as I thought it would be. Sure, I wish I knew Mary when we were kids, but I don’t know as I could have appreciated her then. I always wanted to go with a girl forever, but I didn’t know how. It took Mary to teach me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I can’t really say. She just knows how to do it. I can even help in the kitchen, as much as she’ll let me, without feeling dumb.” She lowered her voice. “Even in the bedroom she knows how to make me stick around.”

  Frenchy winked at her friend.

  “Not like you think,” Jessie whispered. “I never thought I’d want to go with a girl who liked to do it to me, but she makes even that okay. And I can’t have her unless I let her, she says.”

  “You mean you’re not butch no more?” Jessie sat up tall.

  “Of course I’m butch,” she said firmly. “You can see that. And I’m butch in bed too. But I’m more than that now.”

  Frenchy shook her head, feeling abandoned. “I went to a new bar once up on Sixteenth Street. I swear they didn’t know what butch was.”

  “Yeah? I don’t go for that. I still want to be man of the house. But it sure is different being married than being a wanderer. Remember our old theme song? The Wanderer? That Dion sang?”

  “Yeah. You sure have changed, Jess.”

&n
bsp; “I sure feel good, Frenchy,” she said as Mary came out of the kitchen. Jessie pulled Mary onto her lap and hugged her.

  Frenchy left them making out while she went to use their bathroom. She wondered if it was easier to walk through a neighborhood when you were married and lived there, so they all knew about you and were used to you. Especially when your family lived there. Maybe you’d get some respect if they knew you were okay and didn’t bother nobody.

  She sang The Wanderer as she combed her hair, looking into the mirror of her friends’ home. Twenty-seven years old or not, the old songs still fit her life best.

  * * * * *

  The long trek to Queens and back wore Frenchy out. She didn’t feel like going downtown this Saturday night. Besides, the past year or so the old crowd had thinned out considerably; only this one or that one showed up. With all these young kids moving in Frenchy had begun to feel like one of those leathery older dykes who sat at the bar all night getting soused and watching the young femmes, hoping one would be looking for an old lady to take care of her. And if she found one, a month or so later the old lady would be back, hoping again, and still drinking.

  She went to bed early and got up Sunday before her mother. She dressed in her blue jeans and left a note that she was visiting friends again. With the styles changing now she found she could dress almost the way she wanted to as long as she was going out and her mother didn’t look at her too long.

  Once she hit the street all she had to do was snap on her ID bracelet, buy a box of Marlboros, and when she was on the subway and out of her neighborhood, slick back her hair.

  It was a beautiful warm day, the skies over New York cloudless, like an Easter Sunday when she was a kid, an exciting day when everybody would get dressed up. After church her mother would allow her to stay outside and play like on a Saturday. Today she had that same feeling; she could do with her Sunday anything she wanted. Since she had missed her usual Saturday night walk down 6th Avenue from 14th Street into the Village, the walk that helped her get into being Frenchy, she decided to go for a walk today. When she got to Columbus Circle she went over to 5th and headed downtown.