by Mary Cable
“Rhodesia,” I said, without hesitation.
“Yeah? Weren’t you worried about the Mau Mau?”
“The Mau Mau were in Kenya, and anyway I was a kid and I didn’t worry much.” For an instant I saw my Shona nanny, playing tag with me in the garden of our Rhodesian house, in and out among mimosas and two-story-high poinsettias. “And that part of Africa is so beautiful,” I added. “And surprising.”
“Beautiful? Surprising? How about being more specific?”
“Well, there was a tree called a kaffirboom that all winter had no leaves but only very big red flowers, like something you might make out of crepe paper in kindergarten. And then, there was a kind of worm, called a chungalolo. About a foot long, with a head at each end. He could go either way without turning around.”
“Beautiful and surprising. Like you.”
“Do I look like a two-headed worm?”
“No,” he said, “No, you really don’t, although I’m sure they’re very nice.” He took my hand. “I just think you’re beautiful and surprising.”
We took a taxi downtown to Eddie Condon’s for a couple of hours lost in Dixieland jazz. At some point I called my mother and told her I would be late and not to wait up. Although I was grown up and earning my living, she nevertheless said, “I want you home by midnight. And be sure the young man brings you to the door and waits until you’re up all three flights.”
We lived in a walk-up on East Eighty-ninth Street, and my mother was ceaselessly on guard against burglars. I couldn’t complain, in view of what had happened in Bangkok, but at that time, there were surely not nearly as many burglars in New York as she imagined, and I was tired of hearing about them.
Her voice on the telephone sounded very displeased, as if I had no business to be out on the streets unless she had planned it.
“Who, might I ask, invited you on such short notice?”
“David Smithson.”
“That young man in your office? I thought you told me he was engaged.”
“Mother, somebody is waiting for this phone booth. 1 have to go now,” I said, and did so.
That brief telephone conversation stirred up the anxiety my mother and I shared: how was I ever going to perform the one most important task of a woman’s life - to find and hang on to the right man? The dread alternative was to become a “career girl”; and, according to my training, career girls, such as Consulate or Embassy secretaries and the occasional female Foreign Service Officer, were objects of pity and scorn. My role models were State Department wives - serene, gracious, husband-enhancing. Some were beautiful and had acquired handsome husbands; some were plain and had plain husbands. The corollary between female beauty and handsome husbands seemed close - so that a girl like me, who was at best pretty but nowhere near beautiful, could not expect anyone much to look at. Nevertheless, many people much plainer than I had found some sort of husband; and even ugly couples, if they were friendly and hardworking, had been known to attain ambassadorial rank, or its equivalent in the outside world. So, my mother and I kept telling ourselves, I would most likely find Mr. Right or Mr. Quasi-Right; or rather, he would find me.
In my eagerness, I tried to please everyone, to be whatever the young man at hand wanted me to be. I was glad to see any man who paid me attention; sorry when he left, worried when he didn’t call. I was ready to like anything he liked, whether it was beer, the study of calculus, Richard Nixon, or the Rockette shows at Radio City. I had no native interest in sports, but I went along to football games in the foulest weather, standing up to cheer when my escort did, wondering why.
My mother didn’t think much of any of the “boys” I went out with, most of whom I met through my classmates at Katharine Gibbs. She couldn’t place them. So I began to have two sides to my life: one in which I was my mother’s faithful little girl, and the other in which I associated with people who barely knew where Uruguay or Thailand were or that America had representatives in those places. The one I liked best, Walter N. Hofer, was big and overweight and never had clothes that fitted him. His red wrists and hands seemed to be escaping from his coat sleeves and his Adam’s apple bobbed above a tight shirt collar. But I found him sweet, attentive, and interested in sexual dalliance of an unalarming kind. What I enjoyed most about him was what we then called necking, and since he had no car, this took place sitting on the stairs that led up to our third-floor walk-up. He was a student at NYU, the first college man in his family, and he intended to become a certified public accountant. I don’t remember that we ever talked of marriage or even of going steady. I realized that Wally had a long way to go before he could afford to “get serious” and that was fine with me.
My mother was appalled by Wally, and said we’d better move to Washington so that I could look for a Foreign Service Officer. My sister had been successful in that maneuver, five years previously, and was now the wife of one of our Assistant Economic Officers in Munich.
“But I don’t want a Foreign Service Officer, Mother,” I said.
“Not want a Foreign Service Officer? Not want a man like Daddy?” And tears came into her eyes and her nose got red. I hated to have that happen. One couldn’t urge her to stop mourning for her husband, and I always felt in despair of cheering her up. Nor could I explain that I didn’t want to take to the road again, and the high seas, and the airplane journeys. I wanted to settle down for good and belong somewhere.
“Mother, half of New York is male,” I pointed out. “Sooner or later, surely, one or two males will show up who are possibilities.”
“But you won’t be nice to them. You’re only nice to undesirable NYU boys.”
I did not suggest the possibility that I might never marry, because such a notion made me very anxious. Equally with my mother, I cherished the tale of the Sleeping Beauty, and had done so ever since my fourth birthday, when I was given The Sleeping Beauty, illustrated in silhouettes by Arthur Rackham. I had been instantly fascinated by Rackham’s ominous fairyland: the stark, black, twisted trees, the bramble thickets, the bats, the spiney castle turrets, and the hunchbacked Bad Fairy. And I liked hearing the story over and over, of how a lovely princess, through no fault or action on her part, became enchanted and fell sound asleep for a hundred years, along with everyone else in her castle. The king fell asleep on his throne, the housemaids keeled over, brooms in hand, and the cooks stopped turning the spit and collapsed on the kitchen floor. There were no cobwebs because the spiders were asleep, but the castle became very dusty. At last, a prince fought his way to the castle gate through a hundred years of thorny undergrowth. He stepped over the sleeping guardsmen and bounded up the dusty stairs. In a tower bedroom, on a bed whose canopy had fallen into tatters, he found the princess - dusty, too, but as lovely as ever. He planted a kiss on her lips. And at once she jumped up, well-rested and ready to snap up the prince’s proposal of marriage.
Now that I have become somewhat enlightened - through age and a few analytical insights - I realize that, for me, this was no ordinary fairy tale. The Sleeping Beauty exemplified the precepts that my mother had conscientiously passed on to me from her own early twentieth-century upbringing. Like the princess, a woman must be passive, a little dumb, and ready to be led; sweet at all times, uncomplaining when ill luck strikes. If she observes these simple rules, she will surely attract a prince - or, at least, some viable sort of husband. Otherwise, she will become one of life’s discards, an old maid career girl.
By the time I had taken all these ideas in, they were already out of date. My sister Ginevra’s daughter, born in the 1960s, never liked The Sleeping Beauty. Among fairy tales, she preferred The Bremen Town Musicians, with its nonstop action and its unisex, self-asserting characters.
Once, soon after I started at Katharine Gibbs, I thought I had hold of the Prince, in a young man I met at a party, Franklin Brock. He was from the Middle West, his father owned an enormous company that made pots and pans, and he drove a Cadillac convertible. It was summer when we met and he invi
ted me to drive to Easthampton for the day, where we joined friends of his at the Maidstone Club. I felt at once that I registered as totally from away, because my bathing suit was neither new nor pressed and my skin was not tan. The other girls had skins like that of beautiful mulattoes, and their slender brown feet were adorned with exquisitely painted toenails. Mine were plain.
In the surf I got knocked down by waves. One of my breasts escaped from my bathing suit top, for the whole beach to see. This was not my fault, emphatically not my plan, but Franklin Brock was horrified as he pulled me to my feet and stood between me and the beach, not knowing what to say - doing nothing - certainly not touching it, I glanced down and covered it up. But I had lost Franklin.
“Why doesn’t that nice Franklin call?” my mother asked, a day or two later.
“He’s not going to.”
“You’ve lost him?” she cried. “What did you do, Alexandra?”
Of course, I didn’t tell her. She would have commanded that I stay away from beaches.
That first evening with David, I was convinced that there would be no sexual advances or even hints, because he was engaged to adorable Bishy. If, by remote chance, the subject should arise, I planned to act as if I had no idea of what he might be talking about. However, when he took me home, there was not even a kiss goodnight. The absent Bishy was probably on both our minds.
The following week, David was back at my desk.
“Let’s go dancing tonight!”
Of course, I wanted to go and of course I wanted to please him, but, again, I didn’t like the way I looked.
“I’ve got on this old dress,” I said dejectedly.
“Don’t be silly. We’ll go to the Village Vanguard and you’ll be the prettiest girl they ever saw.”
As it turned out, the dancing went so well that I forgot everything but what fun it was. I remembered hearing from my father about a musical comedy star of 1918 or so, Eva Tanguay, who threw herself about on the stage, singing a song called “I Don’t Care”-with abandon, my father had said disapprovingly. Abandon was what I felt, dancing that evening.
In the taxi there was a lot of kissing. Next day David asked if I would have dinner with him on the following Monday.
“Get dressed up,” he said. “We’ll go to a really good restaurant. How about Twenty-One?”
I had read that name in gossip columns, but had never expected to set foot there. I spent all day Saturday shopping and put out three weeks’ salary on an impractical, beautiful dress of the very palest pink silk, a color sometimes called ashes-of-roses, which suited my pale blond hair. I told my mother I was going to a party given by a female friend at Bystander, that she lived on the Upper West Side and that I would very likely spend the night with her if the party was a late one.
“What is her telephone number?”
“She doesn’t have a phone.”
“But, Alex, I need to know where you are. Suppose something happens to you?”
“Call the police.”
David lived with a friend in the East Sixties, but after dinner that night, he explained that we weren’t going there. Bishy, he said, sometimes telephoned him from Europe.
“She says she can’t sleep,” he said, “but she’s just checking up on me.”
“But you are engaged, aren’t you?” I dared to say.
“Not seriously.”
“But you gave her a ring.”
“That was my mother’s ring and my mother’s idea. She and Bish try to tie me down, but they can’t. I’m free, sweetheart.” And he kissed me.
Like many another silly girl, I imagined that if a man wanted me, it was only me he wanted.
David took me to an incredibly dreary cold-water flat in the East Village, borrowed from one of the more raffish members of the Bystander staff, who kept it as a love nest. I hated it. The stale air smelled of mice, and of long-ago meals of cabbage, and of more recent sweat. The kitchen counter, covered in stained oilcloth, was a staging area for cockroaches, even though there was nothing to eat there, only bottles of gin and bourbon. When we lay down on a dingy sofa bed, I saw a mouse zipping across the floor, and at that point I threw my arms around David’s neck and confided that this was all fairly new to me.
“You mean - you’re a virgin?” he asked.
I was so afraid of displeasing him that I said in a very low voice, “Sort of.”
That made him laugh. Then he embraced me and said that was all right, that we’d sort of make love, but that I could have the day off tomorrow if I’d go and see a doctor and “get fixed up.”
“I’ll probably have to wait for an appointment,” I said. “Maybe weeks.”
“Go to the emergency room.”
Next day I managed to find a gynecologist and a prescription for the Pill. After that, the double life I led became even more complicated. It was hard to conceal anything from my mother in our small apartment, and I decided to keep my reserve pills in the hatbox that held her 1940s hats, feathered and veiled, which she had worn to receptions when we were in the Foreign Service. I knew she wouldn’t look inside that box, because the sight of the hats made her cry. But neither would she throw the box away. Being a pleaser, it seemed vital to please my mother, and to her I tried to present an image of a chastity as guarded and hard to breach as the dikes of Holland. A white dress could scarcely be white enough for me on that mythical wedding day when she would watch me coming down the aisle.
Yet that summer, from June to September, David and I were intensely involved in sex, and I, at least, was in love. We were only four years apart in age, but David seemed about twenty years more experienced. He knew how to make me feel not only lusted for, but cherished. And that was of immense importance to me. In some deep sense, it was like finding a home at last. I felt surrounded, buoyed up by love, as surf surrounds you when you leave the beach: surrounds you, envelops you, makes a place for you.
All through the very hot summer, several nights a week, I found that home in David. Then, the rest of the evenings, I was “home” in the Eighty-ninth Street apartment with my mother. David always left on Thursdays to spend weekends with one of his partners on Long Island, taking work with him - which may have been one of the many reasons why Bystander did not succeed.
David and his partners had plunged into the New York publishing world with the arrogance of privileged children. I believed that their very arrogance carried them a long way - as a fast, shallow dive will carry a swimmer halfway across the pool. Probably because of his southwestern upbringing, David was not as conventional as his Harvard cronies - even though he belonged to the best Harvard clubs and admired Harvard traditions. He had drawn cartoons for the Lampoon and since graduating he’d received nice rejection letters from The New Yorker. Cartooning was probably the thing he did best, but he didn’t regard it as a serious career, because he wasn’t that unconventional. The small component of rebellion in David’s nature (and which I had some of, too - one reason why we found each other so attractive) led him to try things he had not really thought over in depth. At twenty-one he had come into a million dollars. Invest it in a new magazine? Why not?
I think of him now, coming to work at eleven in the morning, full of the excitement of new plans and complicated schemes. Sometimes when his face was in repose - waiting for an elevator, perhaps - his youth, his twenty-three years, suddenly became very obvious. He looked puzzled, even anxious. But not for long. Someone would speak to him and immediately he would become animated and full of wit. There was always a lot of laughing wherever he was. I can’t document what was actually said, and nothing dates as fast as a style of humor. Even if I could remember the funny things he said in the Sixties, they probably wouldn’t seem so funny now.
His good looks, though, were timeless. He was six feet tall, black-haired and blue-eyed. I came to know how the pupils of those blue eyes became larger and darker in dim light, reminding me of the dark sapphire of midocean.
He was not an intellectual, but his mind
retained all kinds of information with the ease of a computer, and he could talk superficially about almost anything. Sometimes he went on at length about sports (where he completely lost me) or about Dixieland jazz and its musicians (where I learned to follow him). Eddie Condon, Muggsy Spanier, Wild Bill Russell, and the rest soon became familiar to me. I knew what instruments they played and where they were born and whose bands they had formerly played in, just as David did. At his side, at Condon’s or the Village Vanguard, I heard old songs and the words are still in my head: “Georgia On My Mind,” “Jada,” “The Sheik of Araby.” We decided to pick “our song” and it became “How High the Moon.” The bittersweet-ness of the words and the minor notes in it thrilled and saddened me. David was too high a moon.
“You and I can’t go out for a while,” David told me in September. “My mother and father are in town. I’m trying to get a loan from my dad, so I’ve got to be nice.”
It seemed that his parents had come East for a week’s holiday, and that Bishy and her parents had returned from Europe. The four older people were good friends. Every evening all six had dinner together and went to the theater or to a nightclub. Then Bishy went back to Mount Holyoke for her senior year, and David came back to me as if he had never been away. I wondered if he had missed me, even though he said he did. Had I missed him? Without David, all days were rainy and all lights were out.
In late November, I was stunned to read in the Sunday New York Times the announcement of the engagement of Miss Edwina Bishop of Brookline, Mass., to Mr. David Smithson, of Santa Fe, New Mexico. The following evening, Monday, David took me to dinner. Monday was our usual night. I began to cry in the restaurant and embarrassed him.