A Woman’s Eye

by Sara Paretsky

  I was nothing to him. Not a happening to him. It was simply the way he danced. To him that was the happening. To dance. As if dancing were created by him, for him.

  Except Elektra. When he danced with Elektra they were one person. Not two dancing. One. Transformed. Two become one. Tightly together. Never again one and one. Two melded. Like by flame. The flame of movement and music.

  My cousin Katty was sixteen going on seventeen. She and her very best Mends-four or five of them-would have none of Voss. He wasn’t privileged. Their cant word of the summer. He worked in a butcher shopl Henschel’s Butcher Shop. His uncle Gus. Underprivileged. As if Voss had blood spattered all over his clothes. Like Uncle Gus had on his white apron when he waited on my aunt Georgie. In those days in a small town, meat didn’t come prepackaged and iced by Armour or Swift. It came from a nearby farm. The farmer butchered and brought the haunch to the butcher shop. It was hung in an icebox room out back. The butcher cut from the haunch what the customer wanted. Sometimes blood would spatter on his white apron.

  Voss worked mostly at the front counter. By the cash register. By the big front window.

  But the girls shrieked “underprivileged” when I asked about him. The girls accepted only the privileged. Like Katty’s choice for the summer, Roddy Rockefeller. No, not the rich Rockefellers with the wizened old golfer who gave a dime-a-day tip to his caddy. Rockefeller is a common name in upstate New York.

  “What’s Claude?” I asked them. Deliberately to provoke them. Claude had to be privileged. He was a Clark. Founders of Clarksvale back in Revolutionary days. His father was owner and president of the bank. The one where Aunt Georgie used to work and now owned a big piece of.

  Of course they shouted with laughter at my question. “Whey-face?” I did not ever understand “Whey-face.” He had a round doughy face. Something about curds and whey.

  They added their other names for him. “Toady.” “Cipher.” And one daring friend of Katty’s who considered herself sophisticated, “Faggotty.”

  Voss let Claude hang around. That was about all. Voss was a loner. He didn’t have friends. Didn’t want them.

  We went back to the village every other summer. We-my mother, the children-my eight-year-old brother and six-year-old sister, and me. My father wanted us to know his people. He didn’t come with us. He had his business as excuse. He had had enough of villages before he walked away from them to make his mark in the city. And did, all the way to California.

  Every other summer we took the train-there were trains in those days-from California to New York, upstate New York, Change at Chicago to the N.Y. Central. Disembark at Albany. But not for the local train. Met there by Aunt Georgie and her chauffeur Fred. He was one of the garage men in a chauffeur cap. We stayed with Aunt Priscilla. George was the younger sister by two years. She was the businesswoman. She owned half the town by now. Aunt Priscilla was the stay-at-home who took care of her kinfolk’s children.

  Katherine-Katty-had always lived with Aunt Pris. Her mother died in childbirth and her father was in the air corps, a captain or something. He wasn’t on land very often.

  This summer Aunt Pris also had the Tompkin boys. Their father, a nephew, was an archaeology professor at one of the universities, and so was his wife. They were off to some big dig deep in South America. No place to take little boys. The boys were around my brother’s age.

  I shared Katty’s room in summer and we didn’t see much of the children. Not if we could help it.

  The village itself was a happening. For a girl born and raised in a big city, it was like a storybook holiday. Walking around town. No traffic. No streetcars. No buses. A post office with its walls of neat little golden boxes. An ice-cream parlor with tables and chairs.

  And every Saturday night there was dancing on the pavilion in the town park. Which was how a fourteen-year-old came to dance with an older young man. That summer at Quichiquois. That summer of Elektra.

  An open pavilion up a flight of steps to raise it above the park benches and the paths below. The pavilion was also the bandstand. The band played there in summer every night. Except Saturday. On Saturday night there was an orchestra, a real orchestra. Live music, it is called today. Miss Estelle had for some twenty-five years taught classical piano to all the children of the village whose parents were music minded, but on Saturday night in summer she played mean jazz. Deacon Raven of some local church played violin for the service. For dancing at the pavilion, he played a jazz fiddle. The drummer was the owner of the local hay-and-feed store. He was in the National Guard band. On special occasions, the city fathers would enlist a clarinet player, a young farmer up the road a piece who played in his college band. Musicians who aren’t professionals have a certain spirit. They play for the love of it, certainly not for the pittance they are paid.

  Everyone danced. Little children capered with one another. Or now and again politely waltzed with their mums or dads. Even the grampaws and gramaws sashayed around the floor.

  And I danced with Voss. A happening only that once. Although after that night the older girls taught me how to lag, Without appearing to lag. No one would know you were looking for one specific partner, When you saw him you would lag a step here or there until he was almost beside you, Katty and I would practice it at night in her bedroom, But I never had a chance to try it out for real.

  Because Aunt George decided. She made all the decisions in the family. Aunt Priscilla acquiesced or did not. If she did not, it was the end of that happening. Aunt Pris was a woman of few words. Quietly spoken. Aunt Georgie was the talker. Emphatic. Accurate. Almost always. A businesswoman, accustomed to dealing with men. With yea and nay. No palavering.

  She decided that the children should have three weeks at Lake Quichiquois. There are myriad small lakes all through the Berkshires. This was nearest to Clarksvale, about twenty miles. No resort. Just summer cottages. Friends of Aunt George offered theirs as they were going north to visit family for several weeks. The cottages were in the woods above the lake. Each was surrounded by woods, land was not costly, everyone had privacy. Just comfortably set far enough apart.

  Aunt Priscilla acquiesced. My mother, being company, had no yea or nay. My mother preferred the busiest city street to the beauties of the woods. Not to the beauty but to the creatures that came with it, flies and spiders and bees and creepy crawlers. But my mother was company. Polite. Company was expected to acquiesce.

  Of course, Aunt Georgie wasn’t going. Shut up for three weeks surrounded by children? Like my father, she had business excuses.

  After her decision, Aunt Georgie said, “I have a hired girl to go along. No sense of you and Elizabeth [my mother] turning your holiday into a wash and iron and cook for six children.”

  Aunt Priscilla was wary. “Who is the hired girl?”

  “I hired Elektra.” Aunt Georgie slid the name off her tongue as if she just recalled it.

  A look. From one to another of the aunts. And returned the other to the one. Aunt Pris decided, half-reluctantly, “Well, she’s as good as we could hope for this late in the summer.”

  Imperceptible. Aunt George had been apprehensive. Priscilla could have said no. She hadn’t. Now Aunt Georgie could resume her position as head of the family. In name. She paid the bills.

  “She’s strong,” Aunt George said. “Remember how she took up all your rugs last spring-beat them like a man would, the air was grimy.”

  “And laid them all again,” Aunt Priscilla mentioned. “And she would carry the whole laundry in one load up the stairs.”

  There were twenty-three steps up from the living room to the second floor. I had counted them. I always count steps. Another eighteen up to the attic bedrooms where the boys slept, and live-in help when Aunt Priscilla tolerated it.

  I don’t know how many steps to the basement. I didn’t go to the basement. The furnace was there and the storage. Years of the Saturday Evening Post and the Geographic, and old trunks filled with old clothes.

  Elektr
a was strong. Elektra didn’t natter. She was scrub clean. The aunts ticked off her good points. Nothing said of the bad. Of the cause for apprehension one to the other. Somehow I didn’t want to ask Katty. Katty had a way of embroidering words to make a bland story an exciting one. If not exactly a true one.

  I’d seen Elektra, of course. Someone must have said, “There’s Elektra.” Wriking on Main Street. Or going into the post office. Or sitting at a soda table at the soda fountain. “There’s Elektra.” I could describe her as if I’d seen a snapshot of her. Tall. Man tall. Lean. Man lean. Straight black hair, held back by a barrette. Hanging to her waist. Not when she was working. Then piled in braids or in loops. High ruddy cheekbones. Straight nose. Like on an Iroquois.

  I’d seen her. She delivered the ironing that Aunt Priscilla sent to Gammer Goodwife. Gammer lived in that big square yellow rooming house on the terrace you passed walking to town. The townsfolk called it the “Poor House.” Elektra lived there too. She was kin to Gammer.

  I’d seen Elektra. Dancing with Voss.

  I couldn’t but wonder if Katty had put the idea of Lake Quichiquois into Aunt Georgie’s head. Linda, her best friend, was going up there for the rest of the summer. Her family owned a summer cottage there. There was a boys’ camp across the lake. For little boys, but the counselors were privileged!

  And so we went to Lake Quichiquois. Aunt George’s chauffeur, Fred in the chauffeur’s cap, drove us up there in the seven-seater. The ladies in the backseat. My younger sister squeezed in by my mother. Katty and I on the jump seats. The three little boys in front with Fred.

  Elektra would be up the next day. Fred was borrowing a pickup truck from the garage to carry our trunks. The aunts always took trunks, even for a short stay. Elektra would ride with Fred in the cab of the pickup.

  Time goes quickly by the water. Too quickly. We are water people. Quichiquois was a dream happening. Elektra would have the breakfast cooked and served before eight o’clock every morning. She’d red up the kitchen while we waited out the dictum: “Do not go in the water until one hour after eating.” We wouldn’t. But we would go down to our dock before the hour was up and the children would splash through the shore water. Elektra would get our rowboat turned over, ready to row out for anyone in trouble. Elektra was a strong swimmer. She cleaved the water as beautifully as a dolphin.

  Dover Camp, a long established one, was just across the lake. The little boys and our boys could and did exchange taunts across the water.

  And of the three counselors, two were already in college, lordly sophomores the coming year. The other was a senior in prep school. Katty and Linda were in rhapsodies. New boys-or as they called them, men-and these girls were practiced at making boyfriends. The boys were at Brown, and the girls’ college was just across the Massachusetts line. The talk became all about football games and weekend soirees. And house parties in the spring.

  Across the lake was also Mr. Gruen’s general store and soda fountain. The meeting place for all lakers. He had a year ago built on a room for the soda fountain. He had old-fashioned tables and chairs in there during the week, but they were moved out on Saturday and there was dancing to a juke box. No Paul Jones.

  The Dover Camp boys only had to walk downhill a short way to the soda fountain. On our side it was a quarter-mile walk, after we reached the lane from the cottage, down to the bend that led to the store. It was much shorter to get into the rowboat and row right across to the store dock. If you knew how to row. We didn’t. Elektra did. She tried to teach us. It isn’t easy to learn to row. The boat goes around and around in circles. Unless you have a very strong arm. Muscles. Like Elektra. The children, Katty, and I were allowed to go with Elektra in the boat on Saturdays. My mother and Aunt Pris would walk over later to fetch the little children home early. Katty and I were allowed to stay until the eleven-fifteen closing. With Elektra.

  Until our first Saturday evening, I had not known Voss was also working at the camp. Three afternoons a week. Instructing the young campers on the fine points of sailing.

  And I couldn’t help but wonder which one of them had decided to find a job up at the lake, when the other had been already hired.

  The cottagers danced. Katty and Linda and the counselors danced. The little boys and girls tried to dance. Voss and Elektra danced together. I watched from the sidelines. So did Whey-face.

  I never did find out why he was called Whey-face. The girls would simply explode into “curds and whey” when I asked. He was sort of doughlike, not fat but a bit puffy; he would always be a little off side. No matter how fine an education he would have. No matter that when he grew up he would take over the president’s chair at the bank and his father would retire to chairman of the board.

  Both Claude and I just sat on the bench in the corner and watched the dancers. Sometimes I’d get him up on his feet and would try to show him how to move to the music. But he never understood rhythm or timing or movement. Two left feet. He always came out to the lake on dance nights to drive Voss back to town, On weeknights Voss hopped a ride to Clarksvale with workers at the camp.

  Once-just once at Quichiquois-I danced again with Voss. He walked over to where Claude and I were sitting to ask Claude something or other. I think he recognized how my feet were in rhythm even while sitting down there on the bench. He would understand because he was a dancer. Not a professional, but bred in the bone, roiling in the blood. Without warning, he took my hand and pulled me up from the bench, said, “Come on,” and we danced out onto the floor. Entirely different from the Paul Jones. A jazz jazzy. Exhilarating.

  When Elektra came back from powdering her nose or whatever, Voss sat me down. He winked at me as they went off. But ours had been the best jazzy of the evening. It even led to my having some dances with Katty’s older boys. Yes, I too have dance in my blood and bones.

  It was that same night that I asked Claude how Voss could know so much about sailing to be able to teach the boys. Claude looked at me aghast. How could I know Voss and not know that? I tried to explain that I didn’t know Voss. It was our hired girl who knew Voss. I’d just happened to dance with him once in the Paul Jones at the pavilion.

  So Claude told me, “He’s going to join the coast guard. He’s been studying all this year to pass their tests or whatever you have to do to get in. He used to sail when he was a boy and lived up the coast. His father was a sailor. On a cargo boat. His father sailed all the way to China.” It could be so. Or a sailor’s yarn to a small hero-worshiping boy. It didn’t matter. Voss would be a sailor if that was what he wanted.

  I remember so well everything about that last dance night. It was getting on to eleven thirty, and I didn’t see Elektra anywhere. I excused myself to Claude and walked across to where Katty was whooping it up with her current favorite boyfriend. Katty didn’t shoo me away. Maybe I looked that worried. “Where’s Elektra?” I asked her.

  She surveyed the dancers on the floor. “She’s probably down at the boathouse,” she said.

  “What’s she doing down there?” I asked. Innocence. Too young. For a beat Katty and her friends just looked at me. And Linda started laughing. Katty joined in. The boys were politely inexpressive. They were sophisticates.

  After she’d stopped laughing, Linda said, as if everyone knew that, “It’s where couples go.”

  Katty added, “When they want to be alone.”

  “Smooching,” Linda said.

  I caught on. I wasn’t that innocent. Necking, they called it at my school.

  “She’ll be here after the music stops,” Katty said. “She wouldn’t dare not,” she explained to her friends. “She knows Aunt Priscilla is waiting up.”

  Truly true. Aunt Priscilla wasn’t as sharp-tongued as Aunt George. But you could bully Aunt George by a temper tantrum. Katty explained it to me early in the summer. Aunt Priscilla was immovable.

  When Mr. Gruen dimmed the colored lights and set the juke box for the last dance, always “Three O’Clock in the Morning,” I saw the
m. Elektra and Voss. Dancing. Two become one. I watched through the whole record. Daydreaming. Why call it “day” when it’s at night? Someday I’d grow up and have a boyfriend who danced like Voss.

  Voss and Claude said good night and walked off. Elektra rowed us home. Aunt Pris glanced at her watch. “It will be midnight before you get to sleep.” This was a nudge to go to bed, not stay up talking. “And we have to start packing up tomorrow. Aunt George and Fred will be here Monday morning.”

  Katty and I didn’t talk much. Too tired. Too much, each of us, to remember. From the beginning of summer through this our final night of the boys’ farewell across the water. “Good Night, Ladies …”

  We had to miss Sunday morning church when at the lake. The nearest was in Clarksvale, too far to walk. Aunt Priscilla read her Bible. The children were kept quiet, and Katty and I usually slept until noon. In the afternoon we were allowed to swim and splash by our dock.

  This Sunday was different. I woke-it wasn’t eight o’clock-to the children gabbling in loud voices. Loud voices. Like on a weekday. My mother and Aunt Pris were ahead of me to the kitchen. Mother with her hair still in kid curlers, Aunt Pris with her gray hair in a plait down her back. Both in their nightgowns and robes. Aunt Pris was asking, “Whatever is the matter?” and my mother saying to her two, “Quiet. Quiet now. What’s wrong?”

  The children all talked at once. Emerged, one question. “Where’s Elektra?”

  Aunt Pris was dubious. “She isn’t here?”

  “No, She isn’t here,” all talking again at once. Almost shouting. “She’s not here. There’s no breakfast.”

  “Perhaps she overslept,” Aunt Pris said. She hesitated. Then made her way to the back of the house, past my room, sleepy-eyed Katty just emerging, saying, “What’s wrong?”

  On to Elektra’s bedroom beyond. Aunt Priscilla proper. Knocking on the door. Calling gently, careful not to startle a sleeper. “Elektra … Elektra … it’s Miss Priscilla.”