by John Updike
“No, Jesus. Get your diploma. You’ll probably be needing it, to get an honest job. You’re not even legal yet, are you?”
“Not until Valentine’s Day.” This was January, the Middle Atlantic region having been hit two days before by a great snowstorm. What had been a picture postcard in Basingstoke, where the hemlock boughs were bent low over the sidewalks and the chickadees hopped in the tracery of grapevines and Locust Street chimed from end to end with the scraping of snow shovels, was in New York an icy ashy slush the traffic churned with broken chains and angry claxons. Yet there was for Essie also something secretive and radiant about the storm’s aftermath here, like light and cool morning air sneaking in across the windowsill. Spots of pure snow were still tucked in basement doorways and windowboxes and in fine straight lines on fire escapes. Dirty plowed snow was mountainously heaped along the curbs, burying the trash cans, and people had worn a narrow wobbling path like a forest trail, carrying their expensive parcels and wearing their expensive clothes. She loved it when it snowed in the movies—so richly, barrels of Lux flakes—and it was like that here. West Nineteenth Street seemed a brownstone village street, everybody’s breath visible and lemon-yellow dog pee scribbled in the snow among the cigarette butts. She even liked the scratchy coldy feeling she had in her throat from rising so early this morning and getting snow in her galoshes and thinking, Dear God, don’t let me have such a bad cold I fall apart, let me be a grown-up who just rides a cold through, as she rode the train north through the transformed New Jersey landscape, restored by the blizzard to a gently rolling land of villages with smoking chimneys.
“Almost there,” Wexler said. “You have a nice birthday, young lady. Take care of that face. Don’t go playing hardball with any wild pitchers.”
But in fact he didn’t wait; a couple of possibilities came in—demonstrating a floor-waxing machine at a housewares show at the Sixty-eighth Street Armory, and a Bloomingdale’s ad showing a group of girls modelling the daring new Bikinistyle bathing suit—for which Wexler thought Essie would be right, and by May she had become a veteran of riding the train, of getting off at Penn Station, of moving through the subway with its girder-rattling expresses and gum machines and newspaper stands and subterranean vaults, grimy expanses warmed by thousands of daily bodies. Her senior year—its basketball games where she and other cheerleaders ran out onto the floor to do the choo-choo, its weekly exams and quarterly report cards, its rasping of buzzers and slamming of metal locker doors, its herd aroma of girls’ drugstore perfume and boys’ Vitalis and sweat, its furtive cigarettes and furious hissed gossip of she-said and he-said and who-said, its juggling of boys and promises, its parked cars heated by a running engine and lit by a feeble dashboard glow, its class play in April (A Change of Heart, in which she played the mother, long-suffering Mrs. Dunlap), its May Court (she was not elected queen or even maid of honor but one of the five so-called ladies-in-waiting), its prom (she went with Jamie Ingraham, though they had broken up in April, and he kept saying how much he wanted to marry her if his parents would agree until in the back of the car she leaned back and lifted up all those scratchy petticoats and let him fuck her, which shut him up), its feeling of a sheltering world shredding and wearing thin, of her girlhood ending—all this seemed a lesser reality, like Rodney Street when she came out of the Roxie.
She moved to New York in June. Patrick had done some asking around and decided that the best place for her would be at the Barbizon Hotel for Women, at Sixty-third Street and Lexington. The rooms were pink and green and the bathrooms were at the far end of the halls. Big butch elevator operators kept the men and boys that thronged the lobby from getting into the upper floors, but there was no system for keeping the girls from spending the night out of their rooms. Essie in the next year and a half had a number of boyfriends—some her age, some older and married, and one rich besotted Iranian playboy attached to the United Nations—but it was the female friendships at the Barbizon that she thought of when she looked back on this transitional period. In Basingstoke she had missed having female friends, once Loretta Whaley and she had drifted apart in their junior year, Essie tugged one way by her lessons and ambitions and Loretta tugged another, down into virtual marriage to Eddie Bacheller, her steady since tenth grade. From the way the couple acted they had already joined their parents’ generation, with its bowling alleys and Saturday-night blowouts and its way at parties of the men clustering on one side of the kitchen and the women on the other. Loretta talked of just the kind of house and car they would have, and how many children, and where they would go on vacations. She even turned dowdy, her hair all in split ends and her nails ragged, and tough, making a chewing motion with her jaw even when she didn’t have gum in her mouth: a lazy coarseness of manner spread to her skin. Essie knew that, however tough she must make herself inside, the Wilmot fineness was her ticket out of Basingstoke—that, and a greenhouse freshness. Another reason that she hadn’t had a lot of close high-school friends was the number of hours after school and on the weekends that she had spent in the greenhouse, moving through its sultry white light, inhaling its moist, oxygen-rich air, greeting and assisting customers, carrying trays of seedlings and sprouting cuttings from one table to another in the constant rotation the miniature climate demanded, from warmer to cooler areas, from northern to southern exposures. At the Barbizon she found another hothouse, of young women in bloom; humid confidences and gushed news about men and clothes, waitressing jobs, and must movies were shared from mouth to ear to mouth until it seemed the building had a single, female nervous system, vibrating each morning through the stacked floors to the same smell of coffee and the clanking of depleted shower pipes, flooding the halls with evening perfume as the girls swirled out on stiletto heels to their dates, jeunes filles en fleur menstruating on a single merged cycle and turning over in unison in the dead of the night as they rose through the gauze of their dreams and sank back again. It seemed to Essie that for this interval the terrible responsibility she carried, of being herself, was shared—diluted in giggles and laughter and childish pranks performed in pajamas and flimsy underwear.
She saw Patrick at least once a week and took his advice except when it was about men. If he had had his way, she would never have gone out, except with guys he hankered for himself. At his suggestion she enrolled for acting and elocution lessons at a school—a dusty maze of bare-floored studios on Fifty-seventh Street—which had been rendered old-fashioned by the rise of the Method. Rather than focusing on inner emotional states, they still taught technique, which Patrick thought she needed. The voice instructor, an old Englishman who sipped martinis from a glass tube concealed in a silver-headed cane, winced when he heard her dragged-out, twangy Delaware vowels and had her wear a clothespin on her nose to force her voice deeper into her throat. To improve her posture, she was made to lie flat on the floor until the instructress, once a Thirties chorine, could see no air beneath her spine. There were lessons in fencing and stage duelling, in mime and in falling downstairs. When certain grandes dames of the stage came as guest lecturers, the girls were expected to wear hats and white gloves. The theory seemed to be that, if sufficient attention were paid to the outside, the inside would take care of itself. The shell of illusion needed behind it only a certain poise, a stillness, for the audience to feel engaged; it was better, in fact, not to reach out too boldly, but to allow the audience, like any object of seduction, the space in which to come forward and exercise its own volition. If God were too eager to please, who would worship Him?
Between lectures and lessons Essie rushed to photographers’ studios. She was not gaunt enough for high-fashion assignments, but the manufacturers of floor waxers and insecticides, toothpastes and skin creams liked her solid hometown looks, her even teeth and guileless smile and dark strong Moorish eyebrows and elusive glow. Her long straight legs, those of a tomboy a few years ago, were used to illustrate the new seamless stockings, with their “nude” look. Posed with an electric fan, she appe
ared aristocratically cool; with an electric heater, invitingly warmed. She paid for her lessons and shelter and yet had enough left for increasingly generous presents, on birthdays and anniversaries, for her parents and Ama and Grandfather Sifford. Steuben-glass bowls, imported English gardening tools, new-fashioned electric kitchen appliances, a pair of antique hornshell curved combs for Ama’s wonderful crown of hair. And she received presents—an emerald bracelet from the Iranian playboy, a silver cigarette case with a rueful inscription from one of her married friends. But she never, unlike some of her fellow aspirant actresses and part-time models, let herself be listed by any escort service, or accepted a cash present for her nights away from the Barbizon. Her lovers in this period, who in later and less reticent decades yielded up to interviewers a considerable number of candid details, agreed that Essie was striking in her energetic directness, her earthy innocence, her at times childlike gaiety, as well as in the unforgettable beauty of her naked body: the fullish breasts and slender thighs, the wrists and throat to whose pulse her fragile young life was bound, the thickly dark-fleeced mons veneris and the Artemislike virgin strength.
The big Hollywood movies at the end of the Forties were Easter Parade and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Rope and Johnny Belinda, Red River and On the Town, Adam’s Rib and Samson and Delilah. Attendance was down from the peak of 1946, but only industry insiders noticed, or grasped the significance of the anti-monopolistic legal rulings which would separate the great studios from their theatre chains. In New York Essie discovered foreign films—from England, The Red Shoes and Olivier’s Hamlet and Kind Hearts and Coronets, with Alec Guinness hilariously playing eight murdered characters. From France, La Chartreuse de Parme with subtitles and Gérard Philipe, and Les Enfants Terribles and Le Silence de la Mer; Essie had never seen on the screen such disillusion, such despair, such blunt black Godlessness, not even in The Ox-Bow Incident. The films back at the Roxie had wounded only to heal, to dismiss their consumers back into reality as even better Americans and firmer Christians. Essie was shaken and stretched above all by the Italians and neorealismo—the movie about the drunken soldier who picks up a whore and keeps talking to her about the pure and simple girl he once knew without realizing it was she, this very whore; and the one about the man whose bicycle is stolen and who looks for it all over Rome with a little boy: the poverty, the squalor, the vitality, the honesty so fierce that The Miracle and Bitter Rice had to be seen in a little showing room below Fourteenth Street beyond the notice or the reach of the Legion of Decency. Patrick took her to those, and to the chaste little pair of theatres in the Museum of Modern Art, where she entered for the first time the twitchy, stark, absurd, majestic world of the silents—it was like entering the silence before she had been born, when Ama had no gray hair and her grandfather Wilmot walked the earth. He had read too many books and escaped into the movies: these were two facts about him that reverberated in the family, calling out to her. Also, the museum showed the Russians—the glowering robed giants of Eisenstein, stalking one another through castle corridors like chambers of a vast crazed mind. For the first time, in a scene of charging Teutonic Knights, faceless in their tin-can helmets, she saw the Christian cross, flapping on their banners, used as a symbol of evil. These many films new to her unsealed an abyss that Essie had not looked into since she was seven and, sitting between her parents, had watched Lost Horizon; in that pretty young face suddenly crumbling with age had loomed an abysmal cruelty of horizonless time and space from which Hollywood and her house on Locust Street and her customarily answered prayers had sheltered her. But to remain loyal to her prayers it was necessary to face this harsh illumination and grow, though it hurt, and often the date on whose arm she walked out through the lobby did not, from his crass comments, seem to have absorbed anything, to have any idea of what a troubling revelation he had witnessed.
Patrick always knew what to say about the movie, where it went hollow and where it rang true, what bit of business suddenly fell into the rhythm of real life and made you laugh. That was a thing about homosexuals: they were sensitive. And yet they were frustrating, not just sexually; some inner deflection kept him on the sidelines of life, studying paintings but not wanting to paint himself and even sneering at those that did try, falling in love with boys at NYU who were straight, and disdaining as “queers” and “fags” those who were like himself. He had discovered at boarding school that he could neither change nor enjoy his nature; when Essie, for whom sex had never been a problem—an entertaining smooth chute into the dark-red bliss of things—offered to prove to him that he could love girls, he said, “There you go, dropping that damn towel again.”
“Didn’t you feel anything when I did that? A little tiny throb? Even of c-c-curiosity, what it would be like?” She knew how to coax a man, from seeing so many movies, but none that she could remember had ever touched on this peculiar problem, of what she pictured as short-circuited wiring.
“I felt protective,” he said, “and still do. You’re my dear little cousin, for Chrissake.” She made him feel masculine, perhaps, as he guided her education and at an uncontaminated distance oversaw her career; he made her feel effective, and reckless, and whole. He had several times mentioned a desire to get her out of the “rag trade”—increasingly the modelling agency had sent her out on assignments of modelling shortie nighties and provocative negligees and push-up bras. The ads appeared in the back pages of men’s magazines like Esquire where it was not likely Ama or Momma or Daddy would ever see them, but in fact bratty Danny had discovered one and showed it to everybody in Basingstoke. Patrick scolded her: “Wexler is using your very charming innate exhibitionism and turning you into his house tart. Next thing you’ll be posing naked for calendars.”
Essie shrugged; shame was not part of her religion. “What’s to hide? I mean, it’s me.”
“You do sell yourself short, darling, sometimes. It’s one of the disadvantages of coming from the sticks; you don’t know your price in real dollars. Now, try to think, what do you really want?”
“A house and a husband and ch-children?”
“Piffle. Oh, my, such piffle. You want a house and children and a collie dog about as much as I do. What you want is to be in the movies. Right? You want to act. You need a theatrical agent. I’ve been asking around, and I think I’ve found a fellow for you. He works for an outfit called the Music Corporation of America, but don’t you worry, they’ve gone beyond music. I did a dance on the telephone and we’ve got an appointment for you at Radio City.”
“Oh Patrick,” she said, squeezing his arm through the thick black sleeve of his chesterfield. “I wish I c-could do something for you.”
The agency was on the sixteenth floor, beyond and above the skating rink, the golden sideways-floating deity, the enormous Christmas tree and its great red balls, the revolving doors, the green-marbled lobby floor marked out with squares of concentric strips of brass, the brown murals of nudes with knotty bottoms laboring and men in Mexican hats being set free and giant obscure machines and cogwheels rolling forward in some kind of revolution, the banks of whispering elevators with pleated brassy doors and Negro operators in white gloves and braided uniforms. Essie was nervous, because as they whiningly ascended she could feel tall suave Patrick’s tension beside her, but as soon as they were ushered into the agent’s office she relaxed; the agent was like Uncle Peter, except shorter and Jewish. He gave her that same sense of jumpiness, of being up on the balls of his feet, and of wanting to touch her. His name was Arnold Fineman. What he had of hair was frizzy and reddish. Essie felt certain she would eventually sleep with him and went very quiet and proper, sitting in a chair with her knees pressed together and her gloved hands clasped on her black alligator pocketbook. She was so reticent that Patrick took over at first, describing her modelling and her acting and elocution lessons, and how she had been in summer stock last summer, in Bucks County.
“Yeah? Whadjou play?”
Essie spoke up: “I was t
he maid in that play by Thornton Wilder, The Skin of Our Teeth. Sabina.”
“Howja do?”
“She was wonderful,” Patrick loyally said. “And then she was Florence McCricket, in The Torchbearers.”
“The audience seemed to like me,” Essie admitted. “You work so hard and feel every night you’re getting better, but then in a week it’s over. The director said I needed to strengthen my voice.”
“In those hay barns, sure,” said Arnold Fineman. “They’d muffle Ethel Merman. When else you been on the stage?”
“H-high-school plays,” Essie faltered. “I was always the mother. And I was s-s-second runner-up in the Miss Delaware Peach contest in 1947, when I was seventeen.”
Her stammering perked him up, roused his protective instinct a little. “How old’re you now?”
“Nineteen. Twenty this coming February.”
“Not getting any younger, huh?” He reached across his cluttered desk to a pack of filtered Viceroys and with a tricky snap of his wrist made a couple of the cigarettes jump out an inch, offering them across the desk before lighting his own. As he squinted through the smoke he looked like Aunt Esther, and too serious about his work to be sexy like Uncle Peter. She doubted now that she would be sleeping with him. He asked, “So you think you want to be in pictures?”
“I guess so.” She amended that to, “More than anything.”
He sighed. “Would you do anything to get there?”
She supposed she should say yes, but hesitated, trying to imagine what anything might be, and he rescued her with, “Move around for me. Walk around the room like you’ve come into a bar in Shanghai. Whoops, the Commies have Shanghai now. Make that Singapore.”
Essie had put on a soft gray wool coat dress, ankle-length, rather chinoise, with a high collar and black buttons and a strip of black braid down the front, and a gray felt pillbox on the back of her head. She sauntered around in the tight imaginary skin of a shady woman, Dietrich or Ida Lupino, parting the curtain of beads with a hand and knee and cruising the bar, heavy-lidded, through the pall of Oriental smoke. Peter Lorre was there, and Sydney Greenstreet, and maybe, at the bar, in a white dinner jacket, smoking a cigarette and nursing an old grief …