Borrowed Finery: A Memoir (13 page)

Now I was getting the worst of it in a different way: confronted by a kneeling adult, tears running across his prominent cheekbones and into his crocodile mouth.

*   *   *

Several months after my parents had returned from Europe, I found myself alone with them in the bedroom my grandmother and I shared. She was talking with Leopold in the living room. It was late afternoon.

My mother lay down on the bed on her side, holding her head with palm pressed against cheek. My father was lying on his back, his head on a pillow, and I was half reclining between them. They looked at me gravely as I spoke about music I had heard. I wanted to speak to them about what I imagined they loved.

It was a long moment, lasting a few minutes or an hour. I don’t know which. Some sort of sympathy flowed among us. I wanted to keep it forever.

Later, I regretted I had spoken so adoringly of a tenor of that period, Nino Martini, and claimed to have heard whole operas when I knew only arias from them. Yet for years I thought about this moment with my parents, an intimacy out of time, larger than language.

*   *   *

In December of that year, my grandmother and I took a train to Cape Cod and then a boat to Martha’s Vineyard, where my parents had rented a house in Edgartown.

We were to spend the long Christmas weekend with them. It would be their first holiday season in the United States in years. My father met our ferry. He stood on a pier, his hands in his jacket pockets, looking out at the stormy waters of the bay. He looked a heroic figure, and there was a statuelike quality about his stance that gave me the impression he knew it.

As he was stowing our luggage in the trunk of the car, I stole a glance at his jacket, the most dashing one I had ever seen. Of course I knew very little about jackets. He caught my look. It was a Norfolk jacket, he said, one he’d bought in London during the years he had lived in England and worked for a British movie studio, writing screenplays. He said it was named after the Duke of Norfolk, a hereditary peer.

I was overwhelmed by all that I didn’t know, my bottomless ignorance. Words slipped from his mouth laden with meaning: silent explosions lighting up worlds that had been dark before he spoke.

In an upstairs room of the small weathered shingle house, he was writing a novel.

*   *   *

My mother said, neutrally, that other children in the neighborhood were able to amuse themselves; they didn’t seem to need adults to be involved with their pastimes. With a disinclined air, she taught me how to play solitaire.

*   *   *

My father introduced me to Jimmy Cagney, who was sitting in his idling car on the main street of Edgartown. His clump of a hand, covered with reddish freckles, rested on the window rim.

A minute earlier, Daddy had said loudly, “There’s Cagney!”

“Do you know him?” I asked.

“Of course not,” he replied, walking ahead of me to cross the street. “Come on. Don’t go all maidenly and shy, for crissakes.…”

Cagney was small and compact. I could see he was thinking of something else as he exchanged greetings with my father. Daddy’s voice was nervy, boastful. I kept my eyes on Cagney’s hand, which hadn’t moved from the window. I thought I saw the skin tighten.

I heard my father say, as we walked away from the car, “He has a house on the island.” He seemed apologetic, weakened, and I thought of how the notability of a man turns everyone around him into beggars.

*   *   *

I saw a dartboard hanging on the dining room wall. Daddy said dartboards hung in all the pubs in England and explained how the game was played. A handful of darts lay nearby. I picked up one and threw it. It landed on the tip of another that was already in the bull’s-eye. Daddy, passing at that moment, said, “I’ll give you a hundred bucks if you do that again.”

He carefully removed the dart I had thrown. I threw another, feeling possessed by dark powers, and saw the thrown dart quivering in the end of the first.

“My God!” he shouted. “You did it!” My mother entered the room frowning. When she’d heard what he’d promised me, she exclaimed fiercely, “Puppy! You can’t! You can’t do that!”

But he did, holding out crumpled bills to me that I handed over to my grandmother. It was further evidence of my poor character—in my mother’s eyes and in mine. I was assailed by nameless fears. I stared at the dartboard as if it might tell me what I had done.

After our return to Kew Gardens, my grandmother bought me a winter coat with part of the winnings. What she did with the rest of it, I don’t know.

My mother retired to her bed, where she spent the rest of the day, a hot-water bottle on her abdomen. I heard my father’s voice as he took her cups of hot water to ease the pain of the “gut trouble” she was prone to. My grandmother and I crept around the house, trying not to make noise. Elsie’s misery sent out waves of repressive holiness.

*   *   *

Daddy and I took a long walk along an ocean beach a few miles from Edgartown. It was a winter sea, the air damp, the water the color of gunmetal. As the mild surf broke at our feet, Daddy talked. Unlike the last time when he had spoken of books, he was sober.

The interior of the country was abhorrent to him. He feared those vast stretches of prairie and mountain, those flat plains, the towns and cities populated by characters out of
Main Street,
those Babbitts—

“What are they?” I interrupted.

“Sinclair Lewis wrote novels about them,” he replied, with a broad gesture of his arm that took in the whole beach and the bluffs above it.

He had wanted to be a teacher, he said. But he had sold a story to
Smart Set.
A few days later, the telephone rang in the Morningside house he lived in then with his family. He was nineteen and dazed by the call from H. L. Mencken, the editor of the magazine. Mencken invited him to lunch at Delmonico’s. He had been so overwhelmed he couldn’t even glance at the menu and ordered scrambled eggs.

In the late Twenties and early Thirties, my father was writing screenplays for a Hollywood studio, along with other scriptwriters. He was drinking a good deal. So was F. Scott Fitzgerald, whom he knew. “A minor poet,” he said dismissively.

One of the people he was close to was Vincent Lawrence, the man who had met my train from Redlands and taken me to the miniature golf course. Another was an English playwright, Benn Levy, temporarily a screenwriter too. Benn Levy had put him in a car when he had passed out from liquor, driven him to the Mojave desert and a shack he had rented in advance, and left him there with a typewriter, a cot, groceries for a week, and a table. Benn had had the foresight to hire an ex-sailor, a grizzled elderly man, to bring him a barrel of fresh water once a week. After my father sobered up, cursing Benn for a couple of days, he began to write his first novel,
Sailor Town.

“Were there snakes?” I asked.

“Yes. One morning I discovered an enormous rattlesnake curled in a corner,” he answered. I gasped.

He had run to his cot, he told me. The snake wriggled out of the shack while Daddy stared at it over the edge of a thin blanket he’d covered himself with.

“Snakes can bite through thin blankets,” I said, consulting my imagination.

“I know,” Daddy replied.

I didn’t believe him, but I didn’t think he was lying. Or rather, I believed in the power of stories. Perhaps he didn’t tell them all to me that day on the beach. Perhaps the stories were told over several days and evenings of that visit, and in later meetings with my father. They struck me as a way of thinking, of finding out the weakness of given attitudes and so-called truths inherited by the generations. There was no final truth.

There were two English brothers, the Stokers, and they bet on the question of who could write the most frightening story. Bram Stoker won when he wrote
Dracula.
Until then, he had written books for children.

There was a South American ant that carried a leaf over its head; there were other ants, called army ants, that could destroy a plantation house.

The French Revolution had begun because cooks in aristocratic households made
cotelettes à la victime;
three lamb chops on a skewer held over a fire. The cooks threw away the top and bottom chops for the benefit of the remaining one.

He’d been a play fixer as well as a playwright. Play fixing was emergency help for ailing plays. One had opened in Boston, Louis Calhern in the lead role. When Calhern saw that the audience consisted of five people, he stepped forward and invited them on stage to join the cast.

Among our ancestors was Lord Fairfax of Virginia, who had given a young surveyor employment. The young surveyor was George Washington.

He had been “thrown out” of five colleges because “rules were made to be broken.”

I listened desperately, time-haunted, rapt. Now and then I asked a question. Daddy would preface his answer with the assertion, “I hear what you’re saying beneath that!” It gratified me with its implication that there was a deeper meaning to my words than even I understood. If only I could discover what I really meant! I worked like a mole, tunneling always deeper for meaning, attributing nuance where there was none.

When it was too windy for the beach, we walked through the streets of Edgartown. He knew people everywhere, I thought to myself, as we went into a real estate agent’s office, where a black stove sent out the fragrance of woodsmoke. I began to feel nostalgic for a past that wasn’t mine.

During that visit, on a late afternoon, I heard him singing “Smiles” to himself. His voice was light and filled with a kind of random tenderness. But his mood changed when he began to amuse himself by replacing “All who love are blind” in the song “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” with “You and who else besides…?” He prolonged “besides” until his voice gave out.

When my grandmother and I boarded the ferry in Vineyard Haven to leave the island, my parents stood on the pier. As the boat made its ungainly turn, my mother walked away, but my father stayed until he was a shadow on the horizon.

I was wretched at the idea of returning to Kew Gardens. But I didn’t dare contemplate a change in my life. The stars, after all, were fixed in the heavens.

*   *   *

I read a novel,
The Last Days of Pompeii.
It was thrilling to know that the city had been preserved at the moment of its destruction in
A.D.
79, even as people went about their daily lives. I found photographs of its villas, its chariot-grooved cobblestone streets. Like a fly in amber, it was a manuscript of life as it had been, to be read again and again, readings accompanied by incredulity at the literalness of preserved objects: loaves of bread, artisans’ shops, dog on a chain, bodies.

*   *   *

My parents borrowed an apartment on the top floor of an East Side brownstone in New York City. A flight of dimly lit carpeted stairs led to their rooms. I made a visit there. On the way up, I saw what I took to be dark bundles of laundry. When I came close to one, I realized it was a huddled silent child, staring at me through the balusters. There was something queer about her face. Her round head was covered with straight straw-colored hair. I said hello. She smiled at once, as if until I had actually spoken she didn’t know what kind of creature I was.

Other bundles stood ahead of me, crouching or standing up and leaning on the stair railing. I learned they were brain-damaged children in the care of the German doctor who owned the house. I heard more about him subsequently than I wanted to hear.

I came to know the title of his favorite song, “Wien,” that he drank heavily, and that his practice was limited to those children. My mother had had an affair with him, she told me a few years later. She made no effort to soften, justify, or explain the affair, the same way she told me she had once “gone to bed” with a South American relative for a mink coat he had promised her. “We’ve always, Paul and I, been so broke,” she said, in a detached tone of voice.

When the German doctor died, she went to his grave and poured a pint of whiskey on the earth above his coffin.

During that visit to my parents, my father told me he intended to take me to Europe, then to the island of Capri. A fisherman could be hired there to row one to a marvelous grotto. My heart jumped. I asked if we could sail over on the
Queen Elizabeth.

Daddy scowled. “What a dreadful little materialist you are!” he exclaimed. I didn’t know what a materialist was, but I knew it was odious to him. In Elsie’s presence, I had noticed, he tended to get angry with me.

My mother said, “It’s a natural thing to want at her age,” and smiled at me. I was astonished that she had defended me. It was the first time.

*   *   *

Elsie, too, had stories and sayings. One of the former took place in Tijuana, a Mexican border town. She and my father had gone there for a weekend. They registered in the only hotel, then went to the long bar, a well-known place to tourists.

He drank himself into a stupor. She left for the hotel. Hours later, he stumbled into their room. She telephoned the desk clerk and, in Spanish, told him there was a drunken stranger in her room. Mexican police came to arrest him and take him off to “the pokey,” she told me, with the condescension some foreigners exhibit when they use American slang.

He spent the night in jail and didn’t speak to her for hours when he was released the next morning into her custody. She was wildly amused by the episode.

She had an idea for a ballet she told me about several times. There would be dancers costumed as houseflies.

Love and death, struggle and triumph, and suddenly immense shoes appear on stage and advance. They hold the feet of a monstrous charwoman whom the audience never sees, only her broom, sweeping the flies and their dramas away.

After reading a news story about farmers shooting coyotes, she said, “Why not arm the coyotes?

“What if it’s
cancer
that catches
people
?” she asked. “Cancer says, Look out! Here comes a human!” And how tiresome it was to hear someone speak of the stars and how small they and the universe made him feel. “What huge egotism to feel so small when it’s all relative,” she said. Each story, each saying, illustrated an aspect of her nature. I didn’t know how to put them together for a long time.