Borrowed Finery: A Memoir (15 page)

I told her my father was getting a divorce. I said I hoped she would marry him. She said she was my mother’s friend.

*   *   *

Mary and Thweeny left, and my grandmother arrived to spend a few days in the yellow house. I often interrupted a huddle in the kitchen between the two women. Once I heard the housekeeper exclaim, “Shocking!” I didn’t know what they were gossiping about. I found my grandmother’s presence oppressive. Her long looks at me and her sighs had a damp physical weight. She paid no attention to the house or the woods or the river. Her landscape was interior, the countryside of her emotions.

*   *   *

My father unexpectedly appeared again, to drive me back to New York. Before we left we made a visit to the bench on the bluff. From a house on our right, partly hidden by tropical foliage, a familiar-looking woman emerged. I had forgotten her name, but she greeted me as she walked past us on the narrow path.

She had glanced disapprovingly at my father. Later that same day, she came to the back door of the house and asked the housekeeper for me. When I came to the door, she whispered that my mother was telephoning from New York City and wanted to speak with me.

In those days a long-distance call was uncommon and usually meant an emergency. I followed the neighbor to her house. The telephone receiver was lying beside the base. I picked it up and listened. I heard breathing. Elsie said, “Is that you, Paula?” I said yes. She then asked, as if she already knew the answer, “Do you love me?”

Who was I to love such a person, and who was she to be loved? I was frightened by her question; there was something in her voice that made loving her a punishment. But I said yes. I was painfully aware of the neighbor listening nearby.

She asked me to get hold of Mary’s diary and read it to her. She gave me the telephone number of where she would be waiting for my call. “But Mary’s not here,” I protested weakly. Elsie answered that she would arrive any day now. She explained what a diary was, as though I were brain damaged. I agreed to do what she asked, though I didn’t mean to, any more than I intended to return her call.

Mary arrived the very next day. I was so tormented by the turmoil I felt, by the neighbor’s evident dislike of my father, by the news about Leopold he had given me, by Elsie’s telephone call, that when Daddy asked me sternly what was troubling me, I burst into sobs.

The two of us were sitting on the bench. It suddenly occurred to me I could run away. But to what? My parents filled the world.

Daddy put his arm around my waist. “There, there,” he murmured.

“Elsie telephoned me and asked me to read her Mary’s diary,” I said, immensely relieved to tell him.

He only said, “Things will be better soon.” We sat there for a long while.

*   *   *

Mattie and Matt came to say goodbye. Lee brought me a twenty-page letter to read on the way north. Marjorie cried, as she often did, about things both large and small. I saw a tear run down Matt’s soft, freckled cheek. Mattie smiled and held my hand for a minute.

As the three of us drove away, Mary, Daddy, and I, with the housekeeper waving her apron goodbye, goodbye, I was struck by the thought that the last weeks had resembled a Marx Brothers movie: people rushing in and out of the yellow house, drawing themselves up, making peculiar faces, attacking, retreating.

Somehow, I had managed to get through classes. I had one more year until high school.

*   *   *

I returned to my grandmother’s apartment in Kew Gardens, leaving my father and Mary in her Greenwich Village apartment. I went back to P.S. 99 and, following Mary’s example, began to keep a diary. I had written in it every day for only a few weeks—the entries were self-conscious and stiff—when I discovered my grandmother reading it behind the bedroom door.

She was flustered and her face turned red. She said she had picked it up from a table because it was so evidently new. I stared at her, hard-eyed. Then I took the diary from her unresisting hands. I wouldn’t admit to myself that my intention to keep a journal had been weak from the beginning, and I had been about to stop writing in it anyway.

*   *   *

My grandmother told me about her father, Señor Vicente de Carvajal, and her husband, Fermin de Sola. Carvajal had come to Cuba to visit his two daughters, my grandmother and her older sister, Laura. He was said to be the best chess player in Spain, and while he was in Havana he taught a Cuban boy, known as Capablanca when he grew up, to play chess.

His daughter Laura had been sent to medical school on the island by her father. I recall a photograph of her with other members of her graduating class. Hers is a small face among bearded men. It was toward the end of the nineteenth century, and she was permitted only to enter into pediatric practice.

During my many months in Cuba, my grandmother had taken me to visit Tía Laura, my real great-aunt. She was retired, by then, and living in the country. We had supper with her and afterward went into the wild moonlit garden. A fire burned beneath a large black cauldron. I recall that she wore a black dress, silvered by the moonlight, and stirred
dulce de leche,
a Cuban sweet, with a huge ladle.

*   *   *

My grandmother described the row of wooden stocks she had seen on a walk with my grandfather in Cienegita. She asked him what they were for, and he replied that they were formerly used to punish slaves. Unlike the neighboring plantation owners, he abhorred slavery and had no slaves. He died in the last days of the Spanish-American War, she implied of a broken heart. When she first arrived in the United States, she had settled in Freehold, New Jersey, partly because a banker who had had business ties to her husband lived there.

She had been left with little money, some valuable jewelry, and what was left of the land, which was useless after the war, more or less permanently occupied by carpetbaggers.

One day, before going on an errand in Freehold, she took all her jewelry from the box where it was kept and spread it out on her dining table, intending to sort it. One of the children called her, and she left it lying there.

She went from child to errand, and when she returned, the dining room window was broken and the jewelry gone.

She treated her children with the same carelessness. She went away on unexplained trips, leaving them in the charge of her eldest son, Fermin, already cruel at fifteen. He once ground out a cigarette on the back of Elsie’s hand. He bullied Leopold for years. Finally, when Leopold was twelve, he turned on Fermin, chasing him up and down the streets of Freehold, brandishing a long kitchen knife whenever Fermin looked back. How I would have liked to have seen that!

When she was nearing adolescence, Elsie awoke one morning to find blood on her bedclothes. Her mother had told her nothing about menstruation. She thought she was dying. Terrified, she went to her mother. Candelaria put on her coat at once, saying she would speak with her later; the bleeding was nothing; she was due at the bank or the doctor’s office, or an emergency required her to buy cough medicine for one of the boys. She went out the door of whatever place they were living in at the time.

So I envisioned the scene after Elsie told me about it, with her habitual tone of unsparing irony that diminished the meaning of everything.

When her mother left the house that morning, Elsie returned to her room, yanking at her long black hair in despair, “like someone in a mad scene from an opera,” she told me. Then she stood in front of a mirror, still pulling at her hair. She wanted to watch herself, to see how tragic she appeared—so she reported, with strained gaiety.

I too found blood on the sheet when I awoke one morning, but I kept it to myself. I had learned a few things from girls in school. I asked my grandmother for money to buy what I required at the drugstore, referring to movie magazines. She must have known, somehow, what I was going to buy. She handed me the money without questioning me as she customarily did.

*   *   *

Across the street from school was a Dutch Reformed Church, which I joined during a brief reawakening of formal religious feeling. The church once held a lottery, toward which I gave a dollar. Elsie, visiting her mother one day and hearing from her about my contribution, asked me if I thought my dollar would make a difference in the world. I did, and I said yes. She gave me a derisive look.

I left the church a few months later, when I discovered chewing gum stuck between the pages of the hymnbook I used, and I saw a fellow choir member, a boy, grinning with a trickster’s glee.

*   *   *

I knew both my parents were seeing other people. Perhaps in an effort to justify his interest in Mary, Daddy told me Elsie was “gone” on an editor in a New York publishing company. Still, he and she went together to New Mexico to write a movie script they hoped to sell because they were “broke.” The trip was a bust. Going to New Mexico had been a dramatic gesture. They quarreled continually. After a few days, they returned to New York City, where they went their separate ways.

Soon after he came back, I met my father in a bar in the city. An editor, Maxwell Perkins, was with him to talk about a novel Daddy had written.

As he drank, my father became ever more ingratiating and expansive, gesturing and speaking oratorically. The bar was empty except for the three of us. Mr. Perkins and I were talking softly beneath my father’s roaring. He asked me questions in an avuncular voice, and I answered. I had brought a small suitcase. Daddy was driving me to Pennsylvania, I informed Mr. Perkins. He said, as my father fell abruptly silent, that he hoped I would find it pleasant there.

*   *   *

I stayed with some of Mary’s relatives in West Pittston. They lived in a large house on the banks of the Susquehanna River next to a cemetery.

Baby, Mary’s cousin, was a large middle-aged woman with an abstracted, kindly face. Her hair was streaked with gray, most of it gathered in a bun at the nape of her neck, but with a few strands always drifting loosely over her features. Her husband, Henry, was tall and gaunt, heavily wrinkled, with a patch of brown hair that rested on the top of his head like a bird’s nest.

Their son, David, was home from college. He had a sly, wary look. Once he tried to kiss me. His saliva was rather sour and left a part of my cheek and lower lip wet. It must have been summer; I went to bed on a sleeping porch. One morning David drove me to a Princeton track meet. His father was an alumnus. I saw Jesse Owens, a black man, win the main race.

After we returned to West Pittston, I wandered into the yard and sat down on a swing. David followed me and pushed the swing. I felt a sudden, searing pain in my belly, then another. Henry drove me to a local hospital, where a doctor examined me and diagnosed acute appendicitis.

Two or three days after the operation, Daddy came to visit me. The moment he walked into the hospital room, I began to laugh. A nurse crawled under my cot and pushed up the mattress to help me stop. I only laughed harder, clutching my incision. Daddy left.

He came back in a few minutes, and I was again seized by laughter. By his third entrance, I wept and laughed at the same time. He muttered, “For God’s sake,” and I was undone.

When he returned the following day, I greeted him soberly with only an occasional ripple of laughter. Each time he heard it, he raised his eyes to the ceiling in mock solemnity.

Mary brought me an edition of
The Brothers Karamazov.
I can still see an onion-domed church through the hospital window, replicated on the book’s cover.

After I’d recovered from the operation, Mary paid for a few piano lessons in Pittston given to me by a tiny old man, heavily mustachioed, a former student of Leopold Godowski, a noted musician of an earlier time.

In his small studio in the boardinghouse where he lived, I played scales and studies for beginners at his upright piano and listened to his exasperated criticism, made in a voice that crackled with irritability. He showed me a photograph of one of his other students, a young girl with long black hair, whom he praised extravagantly. “She is the one,” he said, smiling at the picture.

But after my last lesson, he gave me a powerful hug. I heard and felt his tiny bones clicking beneath his musty-smelling blue suit as his mustache brushed my cheek.

*   *   *

The summer passed. In the first few days of September, I don’t remember what day, Mary drove her friend Thweeny and me from West Pittston to New Hampshire.

Mary liked night driving. The dashboard lights lit their faces from below, and they were speaking animatedly to each other in soft voices. I was in the backseat and couldn’t catch most of what they were talking about.

Mary had rented a house in Peterborough—my father was to join her later. Meanwhile, Thweeny was to stay with us. I could feel my childhood slipping away as we crossed the Berkshire Mountains. I listened to the Smith girls laugh and talk together. I was fourteen.

New Hampshire

Peterborough, New Hampshire, was a pretty New England village, comfortably ordinary, but given a certain glamour by a summer estate that had been owned by Edward Alexander MacDowell, the American composer. His widow, Marian, fulfilled his wish after his death and turned it into an artists’ colony. A noted visitor had been Thornton Wilder, whose novel,
The Bridge of San Luis Rey,
I had read a year earlier. I wanted to see where he had lived and worked.

The estate was in the woods half a mile or so north of the high school I attended and, in winter, could be reached on snowshoes. My father had given me a pair for Christmas. I trudged through the hushed woods, silent save for the whisper of the snowshoes.

When I came upon fieldstone buildings, I forgot my purpose and felt only apprehension. I breathed in the gelid air. It was still except for the soft slide of snow now and then from tree branches to the ground. I peered through a mullioned window into a room already dark in the early fading of daylight.

As I strained to see deeper into the room, a vision slid into my mind of a narrow rope bridge across a deep ravine in a far-off country. All those people, the villagers of San Luis Rey, falling through the air to their deaths, conscious as they flailed their limbs when the bridge, and time itself, gave way.