by Mary Cable
But when I opened the kitchen door I was greeted by sounds of chopping, Bishy stood at a butcher block table, wielding a knife over vegetables. We said hello, and, perhaps because these greetings were so lacking in warmth, I added, “Happy New Year.”
“Happy New Year. You’re up early,” Bishy said, scooping up a pile of chopped carrots and throwing them into a pot.
“So are you,” I said. “What are you making?”
“Soup. Soup for Auntie Lydia. I thought it was the least I could do, since she’s been so wonderful to us all. And I’ve been taking cooking lessons.”
“Good for you,” I said. “I’d offer to help but I have to catch a plane.”
“So soon?”
“Yes,” I said. “So soon.” I looked around desperately for something to eat - anything - so that I could get out of there. Bishy had put down her knife and was pulling up a chair for me. I was sorry to note that she looked fresh and blooming, with no sign of having overdone New Year’s Eve. Her abundant satiny brown hair was brushed and tied back with a ribbon, her face was scrubbed, and under a businesslike chef’s apron she wore a neat gray sweater and skirt. Indeed, she might have been waiting to be photographed for an article on New Year’s cooking. I was glad that at least she hadn’t seen my frowsy hedgehog coat.
“May I pour you a cup of hot coffee?” she inquired, very polite.
Automatically imitating my mother, I said, “Oh, I’d love it, how nice of you, Bishy!”
“Would you like a bowl of cornflakes?”
“Perfect.”
Bishy set the breakfast in front of me and then sat down. I began to realize that there was more on her mind than an exhibition of good manners.
“How long have you known David?” she asked.
“David? Oh, I guess since last summer.”
“I was wondering how come he invited you here.”
I was thrown off base. My mother’s manners were not going to help now. I met her cold gaze and realized that she intended an inquisition.
“Maybe you should ask him,” I said.
“I did. He said you work in the office and you’d never been West. He made it sound as though he was sorry for you.”
I didn’t like that much, but I tried not to show it.
“Okay,” I said. “So he’s sorry for me.”
“Do you agree with that?”
“Bishy,” I burst out, “what’s the point you’re trying to make?”
“That David and I are engaged. I’m wondering whether that is entirely clear to you.”
Before I could get together an answer, she went on, “I thought you were supposed to be some poor little typist that David was being kind to. But you don’t act like it. All that dancing and cavorting around last night, and that great big revolting kiss you gave him. None of that looked much like a poor little typist to me. So I thought I’d better tell you something, now that I have the chance. Leave him alone. He’s not yours. And it wouldn’t be good for him right now to have you chasing after him.”
I rose to my feet. “Now I’ll tell you something,” I said. “I think you are boring and arrogant and you don’t know what you are talking about.” Then, leaving the coffee and cereal untouched, I left the kitchen.
Crossing the lawn, I ran into Oz, who was supposed to drive me to the plane and had been to the guesthouse to make sure I was up.
“There’s plenty of time before we have to leave,” he said. “I could make breakfast for you.”
“No thanks,” I said. “Let’s leave now. Right now.”
“Right now? I’d better wake David. He wanted to be sure to say goodbye.”
“You say goodbye for me. Just say I said thanks a lot.”
In mid-January, the staff of Bystander got termination notices. No more magazine. I found a secretarial job at the Ladies’ Home Journal, and David went home to New Mexico - to lick his wounds, he said.
“I have to recover from this mess at Bystander,” he told me, the last time we visited the cold-water flat. “I probably won’t be writing or calling - but I know you’ll understand.”
One day in March I got a telephone call from Oz. He was in New York - on vacation, he said - and David had given him my telephone number. He wanted to know if I’d like to see a musical with him. Later I learned that his purpose in coming to New York was to see me. Indeed (he said) to see me a lot. I was flattered and amazed, and, also concerned about what David might have told him about me. But it was soon clear that David had said very little.
“When I asked for your phone number,” Oz said, “he was surprised and maybe not too pleased. I think he likes you pretty much himself.”
“Do you mind?” I asked quickly.
“He’s always been a dog in the manger,” Oz said.
“David and I used to be really fond of each other,” I said. I thought I needed to warn him a little, and he seemed to understand that.
“But this time he can’t get in my way. He’s engaged and the wedding’s all planned for June.”
“Oh.”
“So what shows would you like to see?”
“I don’t care,” I said; for at that moment I cared about nothing except the appalling news I had just heard.
We went out nearly every evening for two weeks, and from morning till night on the weekends. (“He’s giving you a rush,” purred my mother.) We saw nine shows, ate ethnic meals all over town, and admired countless sights, including some I had never been to, such as the Brooklyn Museum and the Statue of Liberty. Toward the end of his stay, I took a day off from work in order to help him sightsee. Without making any amatory advances beyond a kiss or two good night, he told me that he had fallen in love with me and would I please think about marrying him.
My mother was ecstatic. Here he was at last, the prince himself, loaded with the proper credentials; and what was the Sleeping Beauty going to do about it? Just lie there?
I had a strong desire to telephone David, if only to let him know what was going on. But common sense prevented me. After all, I knew he wouldn’t say the only thing I wanted to hear, which was, “Don’t marry Oz, marry me.”
The evening before Oz left town, he wanted to know if I had decided anything. It crossed my mind to tell him about David and myself, but, after all, that was in the past now, and Oz was not easy to communicate with on a personal level. If David chose to tell him later, then I would deal with it later.
What I said was, “I like you, I like you very, very much, but love? I can’t honestly say that I love you.”
“You’ll get to,” Oz said. “I’m not worried.”
“Well, then, I won’t worry either,” I said.
We let my mother send an engagement announcement to The New York Times, in which Oz’s connections and ancestry took up most of the space. Not long after that, I think, the Times gave up including centuries-old family data in these notices, but at that time they were still willing to write, “Mr. Smithson is descended from four colonial governors of Massachusetts, and from the noted eighteenth-century shipowner Silas Smithson. . . . Miss Burrows’ late father, Fielding Burrows, was a Foreign Service Officer.”
In June, Oz insisted that I accompany him to the Bishop-Smithson wedding in Brookline, at which Oz was his brother’s best man. I need not have dreaded it: there were about five hundred people present, and I barely caught a glimpse of the happy pair. The only time I was even close to David was when the rice was being thrown and he and Bishy, dressed for travel, were running out the big front door of the Country Club, making for a car that had “Just Married” scrawled in soap on the back window. David seemed bewildered. He stared at the cheerful faces and the raised arms, throwing rice, as if he feared these people and what they were doing. As he turned to get into the driver’s seat, a particularly large handful of rice spattered over his back. He looked back, frowning, and at that moment saw me. I think it was distress I saw on his face, and I wished I could say, “I didn’t do this to you, David. You did it to yourself.”
He took the driver’s seat, while his bride ran around to the other door and jumped in beside him. In no time they were down the drive and gone. Only Bishy waved.
After the Bishop-Smithson wedding, Oz kept after me to set our date. So did my mother. But I told them both, as crossly as I knew how, that I had suddenly become very interested in my Ladies’ Home Journal job and would like to go on working for a while. There were unmarried “career girls” there of all ages, who loved their work and made good money and didn’t seem to feel at all like despised old maids.
In July my mother had a stroke. I felt guilty, even though common sense told me that I hadn’t caused it, or that even if I had, a stroke was an unfair weapon for a mother to use. But when I saw her lying in her hospital bed with one side of her mouth drawn up and her eyes full of anxiety, I leaned close to her and said, “Please stop worrying. I’m going to marry Oz.”
I knew she wanted to ask “When?”, so I added, “Soon. Just as soon as you get better.”
She stirred, and then, quite distinctly in view of the fact that she had not said a word since the stroke, she whispered, “Say. Say name.”
I understood and answered, “Mrs. Osgood Decatur Smithson Fourth.”
My mother died a few hours later, looking very peaceful.
By overseas telephone to Munich, I discussed plans with my sister Ginevra. She said she couldn’t leave her husband and small children, and we decided that I had better quit my job and take care of everything that had to be done. It was only a year since the summer of meeting David, but I felt infinitely older now, although, in fact, I was only twenty. Every day there were decisions to make, having to do with the dismantling of the apartment. I tried to follow the rule, “Keep nothing that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful,” but another category, “Sentimental value,” kept getting in the way. So I kept twenty-four black-and-gold lacquer finger bowls from Thailand, and an Italian pearwood desk, pretty but collapsing, and platters and trays suitable for serving hors d’oeuvres to a hundred people, all because they brought back memories of my peregrinating childhood. Never mind that I had not enjoyed my childhood much; these objects took the place of roots. There were at least a dozen framed photographs showing Consul and Mrs. Burrows in action: shaking hands with VIPs from Washington (John Foster Dulles, William Fulbright, Harold Stassen) and famous others (Adlai Stevenson, Louis Armstrong, Paul Tillich), plus noncelebrities, such as a girls’ choir from Ohio; and one poignant photograph in a silver frame, showing Fielding and Alice Burrows - she in one of her beloved veiled hats - in Rhodesia, proudly on their way to a reception for some visiting British royalty.
One late afternoon, as I was sitting on the floor of the apartment living room, surrounded by photograph albums and loose snapshots, the telephone rang and it was David. He was in New York, he’d heard from Oz that I was there, and how would I like to be taken out for dinner? I said yes, without beating around the bush. After I had hung up I realized that I was making a serious mistake. Dread crept into me and made me cold, and my fingers trembled as I changed my clothes. I knew that it was a mistake to see David, and that if anything to be sorry about happened, I was walking into it idiotically, with my eyes wide open, I told myself severely to be sure to say goodnight right after dinner and come home alone.
We had one of our dinner and dancing evenings, exactly like the ones of the summer before. Except this time neither of us talked much, and I couldn’t even tell whether he was enjoying himself or was sorry he’d suggested this. Once, as he took me in his arms on the dance floor, he said, “Your hand is cold.” I said, “I know.” And, I thought, it is cold with fear.
When he brought me home, he came up the three flights without asking, or being asked. And as soon as the door was closed behind us in the apartment, we began to make love. Then I knew why I was with him at all this evening. I was obsessed. There was no other way to explain it. Here was a man at the mercy of strong but capricious feelings whose very existence he could not face or deal with. Common sense should have told me that such a man was dangerous for me. But I had no common sense.
I thought of the story of Adele, the daughter of Victor Hugo, which I remembered reading somewhere. Abandoned by her lover, an English army officer, she pursued him to his post in Canada, followed him everywhere, and spied upon him as he trysted with other women. She was crazy with love. In the end, she was restored to her family in France and lived to be an old woman, permanently mad. Although I had never tried to pursue David, I knew exactly how Adèle Hugo must have felt. The poor girl’s love had little or nothing to do with the virtues of her beloved. It was simply that with him she had met love itself. She had met Eros. She had found that place where she wanted to be, and there could be no turning back.
I began to understand certain Greek myths, which I had once thought of as tedious. I had always thought it implausible that Aphrodite, the beautiful goddess who arrived from the sea on a fragile scallop shell (I pictured her as the Botticelli maiden, with her long yellow hair blowing and her eyes full of mysteries) could be the same woman who later proved so merciless and kept gods and humans in a continual state of turmoil. But now I was suddenly learning about the terrible contradictions of love.
David and I were together every night during the three weeks he was in New York. All reason disappeared. Judgment? Common sense? Discretion? I ignored them, and I never dared wonder, let alone ask, what David might be thinking or feeling. I knew he was in the city to look for a job, while Bishy was in Maine with her family, but I never questioned him. To ask might have led to finding out for sure what I believed to be true - that his feelings came and went as surprises to him, and when they went, he never attempted to detain them in order to find out more about them. Feelings, for David, were not a part of reality. He could not take them seriously. He understood the reality of a depleted bank account, and he knew that finding a job was a real necessity, but he did not understand the reality of feelings, and, except when making love, I think he was frightened of them.
One night he arrived at Eighty-ninth Street, very pleased with himself. He had found a job. With pride, as if speaking of a profession well-known for its prestige, he told me that he had been hired as a voice-over.
“That’s terrific, David,” I said, putting my arms around him. “What exactly is it?”
To illustrate, he made up a little scene for me. Standing in front of the open refrigerator, he pointed silently to the ice trays, the vegetable bin, the meat compartment. Then he went out of the room and I heard him saying in great excitement, “Why live in the past? Say goodbye to that out-of-date refrigerator. Time for Imperial, the refrigerator you’ve always wanted. Automatic defrost. Ice whenever you need it. Vegetables kept garden-fresh-” And more. Then he came back in, with a big smile. “That’s a voice-over. You hear me but you don’t see me.”
“Do you think you’ll like it?”
“It’s hard, but if you catch on you can make money. I didn’t think I could do it, at first, but they kept on training me because they like my voice.”
“So do I,” I said. And I could understand why the TV people liked it. It had exuberance and style, and was capable of suggesting sexiness even when the subject was refrigerators. The western and Harvard elements of his speech blended nicely, too, and gave him the sound of an American for all seasons.
David’s part-time career as a voice-over began back then. And more than once I have been startled, not to mention shaken, to hear him speaking from my television set. The charm and enthusiasm and impression of sincerity that first attracted me to him have apparently had the same effect on the buying public. He sounds like Mr. American Everyman, a nice fellow eager to share a special treasure with you. Sometimes his commercials have been repeated for weeks, and they have brought him enough money to help keep the ranch solvent.
A few days later, David told me he was leaving for Maine to bring Bishy back to look for an apartment.
“When are you and
Oz going to be married?” he asked.
I certainly did not want to talk about that. “I don’t know,” I said.
“I wish it were never,” he said. “I wish-”
“What?”
He paused and then said, “I guess, that things were different.”
I hoped he might say more, but he only added, “It’s funny, all that’s happened.”
“Not funny,” I said.
“Oh, I didn’t mean funny-lots-of-laughs. Of course not. I’m talking about funny-strange.”
I felt weary and impatient. There was only one thing I wanted to hear and that was that he loved me. But he only said it - and rarely - in those moments when ecstasy seemed to wrench it out of him.
“David,” I said, “Please. Let’s not have a long goodbye. Just go.”
“Whatever you like,” he said, and rose to leave. “But it won’t be for long. I’ll be back, sweetheart. Probably in a month or two and then I’ll be living here in New York. Sit tight.”
But I did not sit tight. I spent the next five weeks dismantling the vanished life of the Burrows family, and then I took a plane for Munich. My reason for going to Germany was not that I longed to see my sister, to whom I had never felt close, but that she was my only family and I needed emotional support. I was pregnant.
Whatever I decided to do about it, I didn’t wish to consult David, even if I could have reached him. I would need to borrow money from Ginevra and pay it back when our mother’s estate was settled.
Ginevra met me at the Munich airport. In an international crowd, my sister’s Americanness was unmistakable. She was a tall, athletic young woman with a lot of well-brushed blond hair, the same shade as mine, only mine was curly and hers straight. Her friends called her Ginny, which was much better suited to her than the Florentine Ginevra. Our parents had bestowed that name upon her because they had been vacationing in Florence about the time of her conception. The historical Ginevra was Ginevra dei Benci, daughter of a great Renaissance family. During a party to celebrate her betrothal, fifteen-year-old Ginevra had climbed into an empty chest while playing hide-and-seek. The lid banged down and she could not lift it again. She suffocated.