by Mary Cable
Although I was fourteen when my father died, I have few vivid memories of him. He always worked early and late at the Consulate or Embassy, and came home either to go out with my mother to parties, to host one, or to go to bed. On weekends, he liked to sit and read piles of newspapers. He was definitely not the sort of father who would teach you how to throw and catch, or take you fishing. As the years went by, the good food at parties got the better of him and he was subject to dyspepsia. My mother often used to tell me, “Don’t bother Daddy - he’s not feeling up to snuff.” And in Bangkok, where nineteen kinds of salmonella were a continual menace, he once had to be taken to the hospital directly from a Queen’s Birthday reception at the British Embassy.
I have a photograph of the three of us (my sister was at college in the States). We are on the wide veranda of the Bangkok house where we lived, surrounded by many empty rattan chairs. That indicated that we had had a party the night before and the extra chairs hadn’t been put away yet. Daddy sat in one of them, reading. One could hardly see his face, because the Bangkok Post was in front of most of it. Mother was in another chair, some distance away, smiling for the camera. She was always good at that: social smiles, smiles saying cheese, were a genuine talent with her. She was a pretty woman, with curly light hair and gray-blue eyes that looked guileless. (I look like her, but not guileless; more evasive, I’d say.) In this photograph, I am thirteen. I am seated on the veranda steps, holding up a chinchook (one of Bangkok’s ubiquitous house lizards) and squinting at the sun. I am smiling, too, but I have not developed the art of camera smiles and the look on my face is more of a grimace. I think the gardener, Sampong, was holding the camera. I don’t remember much about him, except that he was thin, with a shiny light brown face, and always wore, as his complete costume, a baggy white loincloth. Probably he was smiling, too. Thais smile a lot. But his personality blurs in my memory with other men servants we had here and there. Outstanding is the blue-black one, in Africa, in his pristine white garments and perky white hat, and his dignified manner that my mother complained was somehow condescending.
This photograph of three disconnected souls on a Bangkok veranda haunts me. Only the rattan chairs, side by side with their wide arms nudging, or tipped up against one another, seem convivial.
I remember very clearly the first party my parents gave after we arrived in Bangkok, a seated dinner for thirty, with the tables set on the lawn. Each table was lit by candles and adorned by flowers arranged in the Thai manner - many blossoms closely packed (one might say jammed) into small vases. A circle of rosebuds might surround a circle of jasmine, and in the middle would be large, full-blown roses, as many as possible. Unlike the reticent Japanese arrangements, where every flower counts, Thai bouquets give the effect of unfailing abundance, of tropical gardens where nothing ever seems to stop growing. To those of us from cold countries, where philodendrons live humbly in small pots, it seems strange to see these same plants sprawling and climbing higher than our heads.
My parents soon learned not to give seated dinners in Thailand, because sometimes the Thai guests would simply never show up (they had preferred another invitation), or they would arrive bringing friends and relatives. Western-style party planning apparently seemed rigid to them. And, beautiful though that lawn party was, old Bangkok hands warned that snakes come out after nightfall and that some of these snakes are cobras, kraits, and pythons. Now, when I recall that evening, with the candlelight flickering on the flowers and the pleasant ebb and flow of voices, I imagine that the dark lawn beneath the guests’ feet is invaded by swiftly slithering shapes. I wrote in my diary (at thirteen I had a taste for the melodramatic), “The party was paradise on top and sudden death under the tables.”
The servants would have been no help in case of a cobra alarm, being Buddhists and reluctant to kill anything. When my mother encountered some large, villainous-looking insect inside the house, she would scream for Sampong, who would then come and tenderly carry it outside where it might enjoy a flower bed.
Since Bangkok is suffocatingly hot and humid nearly all the year round, the American Embassy allotted an air conditioner to each of its families. Ours was in the parental bedroom, so that (my mother told me) Dad could have a good sleep and do a good job at the office. My room had screened windows across three sides. Although it was next door to my parents, their closed door and windows and the hum of the air conditioner made me feel lonely and left out. Sleeping in my many-windowed room was almost like being in the trees, where leaves stirred in the night breezes, and from dark to dawn a miniature dinosaur - a gecko - crawled about the branches and spoke from time to time in a harsh and critical voice. He reminded me of an angry old man, carping about the food and the service.
I felt frightened, but of something beyond the night creatures; something beyond burglars or snakes or even the spirits that lived in the doll-size spirit house at the end of the garden and whom the servants propitiated with gifts of food and flowers. Perhaps I was frightened - and overwhelmed - by the continual changes in my life, and by the need to please so many people in so many different languages and by getting accustomed to one set of circumstances and then suddenly having them change to something quite different. In the several schools I had been to, I never got to be an old girl. My parents pointed out that all Foreign Service children had the same problems and that I had just better face up to them.
My father died in Bangkok. I say “died” because that was the word my mother preferred. In fact, he was murdered.
That was long before the time of worldwide terrorism, so the motive was not suspected of being political. The murderer was only an ordinary Thai burglar, clumsy enough to wake my parents in spite of the loud-humming air conditioner in their bedroom; and handy enough with a long knife to put it through my father’s heart when he started to shout for help. The burglar then left, taking a watch and my parents’ wallets with not more than twenty dollars in baht, plus my mother’s silver party shoes, while she lay frozen with fear on the other twin bed.
The burglar, who was later apprehended, said that his religion prevented him from killing insects, reptiles, birds, animals, children, and women, and that he didn’t approve of killing men, but my father had been noisy and so there was no choice. I was sound asleep in the next room and I knew nothing until next morning, by which time my mother had got help from the Embassy and from the police. She told me something equivocal, like “Daddy’s had an accident, don’t ask questions,” and sent me to stay with the family of the Deputy Chief of Mission. I heard what really happened, with lots of blood included, from the servants there. By the time I rejoined my mother, the packers were in our house and very soon we flew to America, my home where I had never lived.
Not then or ever did my mother and I talk about the murder. Her alternating tears and stony despair dismayed me utterly. I felt guilty for my inability to console her, and more guilt about having failed my father as well. Why had I not heard the burglar and warned him? Why had I been such a boring child that he had always preferred his newspapers to me? The possibility that I, too, needed consoling, seems not to have occurred to either my mother or me.
Most of the people she knew lived in Washington, but she would not consider settling there. Without her husband, she knew she would feel like an outsider, and that if she were invited to a dinner party at all, she would be squeezed in where the nobodies always sat; never again would she be at a host’s right. Washington is a company town, she used to tell me sadly. So we moved to New York, where she had a few friends who had nothing to do with the State Department. She sent me to boarding school in New England, and after that I went to Katharine Gibbs Secretarial School. There was not enough money for college, where I might possibly have developed my naturally studious mind and found a career beyond the typewriter.
Two of my Katharine Gibbs classmates asked me to join them in an apartment they had found, but when I broached the subject to my mother, she wept.
“You are too young.�
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“I’m nineteen. That’s too old to be living with my mother.”
“In my day, girls lived at home until they married.”
“But this isn’t your day.”
She tried another tack. “You are young for your age. Foreign Service children often are. You know the capital of Swaziland, but you don’t know how to cook, or mend your clothes. Who’s going to tell you if your slip is showing? Who will do your laundry? Your hair will be a mess.”
“I’ll learn,” I said angrily. “Other girls learn. Do you think there’s something wrong with me?”
“Not wrong, just different. You weren’t brought up like ordinary American girls. You are different.”
“I don’t want to be different,” I said, and then I began to cry, too.
Finally, we agreed to compromise. I would stay with her for another year. And she would stop babying me.
That same week, I was hired for a secretarial job at a new magazine called Bystander, where one of the four young men who owned it was named David Smithson.
Over the years, I have made it a rule not to think about David. But on that May afternoon following lunch with Lydia and Deck, I came home in a rage against him. After Oz returned to his office, I sat down on the swing on our portal and tried to settle my nerves by looking at my garden. I have found that thoughts of gardening can lift my spirits. The garden has its own world and nothing there talks back or asks me any questions, even the fat pale cricket called niño de la tierra, whose head is like a smiling child’s face and looks as if it might have something to say. The flowers and shrubs inform me silently of their needs and I try to provide. This interchange seems to me more satisfactory than any of my human relationships, and more tranquilizing than Valium.
Fortunately, our portal faces away from the main house, so that Lydia can’t see me “wasting time,” which, it would appear, is a capital crime in Rhode Island. One time, when she caught me unoccupied, she called me over and put me to work stamping and sealing two hundred and fifty fund- raising letters for the Animal Shelter.
In Santa Fe, anything will grow if you water it, and the flowers that were in bloom that day included the lavish opulent ones I love best: Emperor tulips, peonies, and huge purple lilacs, so big and billowy that the bushes hardly seemed able to hold them up. As I sat there, birds were singing snatches of inspired songs I never knew they knew. I thought, these birds are overachievers. Maybe they have even surprised themselves; especially the mockingbirds, with their bravura improvisations. The very small birds were making themselves look bigger by fluffing out the feathers on their heads. And the male house finches, whose heads and necks are a dull reddish gray most of the year, seemed to have put on scarlet hoods.
Cotton from the big cottonwoods by the arroyo was blowing like snow and floating into dark, rich places. Butterflies were darting, seeking, pollinating. A woodpecker, somewhere among the treetops, was knocking urgently on a hollow trunk. It was a sound like little hollow balls, bouncing fast, and it put me in mind of fast heartbeats.
I thought about David.
Listening to the woodpecker, I began to wonder when it was that my heart had first beat faster because of him, and it seemed to me that it may well have been the first time I ever saw him. He was striding around the halls of Bystander: late (he was always late), but when he got there he rushed around, stirring up action. To me, new there, and young - nineteen - he had movie-star good looks and charm, but, like a movie star, he was not (I thought) available to me and therefore not to be considered seriously. As we in the office all knew, he was unofficially engaged. Aside from that, I thought him inaccessible in other ways. His family name, unremarkable as it is, was one that my mother, when I told her, recognized at once. One of my mother’s hobbies was knowing who was who.
“Smithson?” she said. “The Smithson Mills, in Rhode Island. A very old family. Was his grandfather called Osgood Decatur Smithson?”
“I don’t know.”
“Ask him.”
“Oh, no, Mother.”
I knew that she both longed for me to marry someone as exalted as David and was perfectly sure that I could never bring it off.
“It’s a catastrophe that you have no father,” she used to say. “I mean, an established father, like your poor Daddy would have been by now. It places a girl. If Daddy were alive today, everyone would place you: a State Department daughter. We’d be living overseas or in Washington and Daddy would be an ambassador. But as it is, no one knows anything about you. You are a nobody.”
I was sure she was right, and that all that could ever happen between me and David would be that he’d chat with me by the watercooler. So I entertained no hopes whatsoever regarding him. It is a queer thing about love that the time when you first meet someone, and like him, and think he’s extraordinarily nice but expect nothing, can be one of the happiest times.
David first asked me out to dinner late one hot summer afternoon, when, as he pointed out, sensible people were at the beach.
“Come on! Alex! Princess Alexandra! Let’s go out tonight!” He made it sound so exciting. But I said no, because one did not go out with engaged people. I didn’t want the others in the office talking about me or watching me for signs of a broken heart.
David’s fiancée, Edwina Bishop, called Bishy, had been in the office a couple of weeks before, just before leaving to spend the summer in Europe with her family. David had introduced her all around, while they strolled from office to office, holding hands. On her third left finger was as large a diamond as I had ever seen. Now it is dull with dishwater and New Mexico dirt, but, of course, it is still big - three carats - and topples to one side of her slender finger.
On that bright summer day, Bishy wore a dress of crisp black linen, and a wide straw hat with a black ribbon. I made a mental note, then and there, that what basically sets the rich apart is that their clothes either are new or look like new because they are pressed. And I particularly envied Bishy her hat, even though I knew that had it been mine it would soon have been rained on or crushed in the subway crowds. (Conservative girls still wore hats then, although the days of general hatlessness were fast approaching.) My summer hat that year was a naive-looking straw bonnet from Bloomingdale’s basement, which suited the look I was then unconsciously trying to project - that of a fragile young thing, deserving of protection and help. Now that I think back on it, I see that in that hat I suggested a somewhat demented shepherdess, wandering the streets of Manhattan in search of her sheep.
Bishy was wearing black patent leather pumps, and her long pretty legs were bare and very tan. Her face was more sweet than pretty. She had an habitual expression that seemed to say, if you tell me anything unpleasant I simply won’t believe it. So keep telling me everything that is good news. Give me compliments. Take me to the theater. Buy me a white camellia and I’ll pin it to the barrette in my sleek brown hair and then maybe I’ll give you a wee sweet kiss.
I was certainly nothing at all like Bishy, so I was sure that if David liked her he wouldn’t have the time of day for me. What I didn’t realize was that David liked many different types of women. Practically all of them. There was plenty of room for me.
The second time David asked me out was after five on another hot and humid day. Most of the staff had gone home. He came charging into the alcove where I was typing.
“Let’s go!”
“Where to?” I thought perhaps he had some letters to dictate, and I got out my notebook and pencil.
“Where to? To get a drink and have some dinner.”
“Oh - I-” I was tongue-tied, but I managed to shake my head.
“Why not?” he demanded.
It seemed to me very silly to reply, “Because you’re engaged.” After all, he hadn’t asked for my hand in marriage nor had he made an indecent proposal. He just wanted to have dinner.
So I said, “I’ve got on the wrong clothes.” And I would have liked to add, “To go out to dinner with you I need a better ha
ircut and a shower and a new dress, and actually I ought to have a different face and personality.”
He understood some portion of that, and said, “Come on, you look fine. I like the way you look.”
Walking along the street with him I saw myself in a mirror, and something made me like my looks, too. It was mostly because I looked happy. I took his arm when he offered it, crossing a busy street. Women don’t do that much anymore, but it always seemed pleasant to me: a minor but subtle act of courtship. To touch without deliberate familiarity was one of the ways of raising the sexual temperatures of a man and a woman without anything needing to be said or commitments made.
We went to the Oak Room at the Plaza (where I had never been) and had drinks. I had a gin and tonic, and he had three. The 1912-ish mural over the bar, showing the Fifty-ninth Street Plaza as it once was, with carriages waiting in front of the hotel in a bluish twilight, spoke of mystery and sophistication. So did the other customers in the bar. Beautiful women, spectacularly well-dressed; and their escorts, who, like David, were superbly self-assured. And those who weren’t handsome clearly felt that the way they looked was better than handsome.
Later we walked (in the bluish twilight of the mural) to the Italian Pavilion, that beautiful, long-gone restaurant on West Fifty-fifth Street. Having lived in Italy between the ages of eight and ten, I had the pleasure of translating the gigantic menu for David, glad to let him know I was not quite the simple little typist he may have taken me for. (As my mother would have said, I placed myself.) I also talked Italian with the waiter, finding out that he was a native of Tuscany, whereupon we exchanged expressions of rapture about the city of Florence. David was amused, and touched my hand. Then he asked me where else I had lived, and when I told him Uruguay, Turkey, Germany, Rhodesia, and Thailand, he said Good God, those places were a blank to him. Which one had I liked best?