Borrowed Finery: A Memoir (16 page)

*   *   *

The house Mary had rented in Peterborough was a replica of an Italian villa. It stood on the bank of a wide stream. Most of the windows overlooked the tumbling water. A formal garden, parklike, was on another level below the house. The stream became a waterfall there and could be glimpsed behind a line of poplars. There were iron-work benches to sit on and gravel-covered paths.

The interior of the house was a continuing surprise. The front door led directly into the living room from the street. The floors were laid with terra-cotta tiles, and the walls were surfaced with rough white plaster, both of which imparted a spare, calm loveliness to all the rooms. At the end of the living room was a large cathedral window. A corridor led to bedrooms with their own balconies overlooking the stream. One bedroom was mine.

For the first time in my life, I spent more than a few days with my father. It was what I thought normalcy to be. Mary had told the owner of the house that she was Daddy’s cousin. They could have belonged to the same family, the resemblance between them was so strong; both had blue eyes and fair curly hair.

I was happy for a while. Sometimes I paused on a road that climbed a steep hill where I could look down upon the village. Standing there on winter afternoons, gripping an iron rail with a mittened hand, I watched the last violet light of the setting sun, the streetlights came on all at once like a word spoken in unison, and I felt touched by an ecstatic stillness.

*   *   *

An English teacher, Ilya Tracy, who wore a red silk necktie with a white shirt, cultivated my primitive love of poetry and prose. In freshman class, we memorized sections of Milton’s “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso,” Gray’s “Elegy in a Country Churchyard,” Shakespeare’s
Julius Caesar,
and Coleridge’s
Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

One afternoon, Miss Tracy took the girls in the class on a hike. Was it in the Green or White Mountains? I forget, but I remember how, in that happy troop, I strode on pine-strewn slopes and laughed without reason along with the others.

I was on the basketball team. I had two suitors and a best friend, Beryl, who wrote poetry. One of her poems had been published in the
New Hampshire State Anthology.
My father said it was a fair imitation of Edna St. Vincent Millay. I admired that poem and her love poems about a certain senior whom I looked at curiously when we passed each other in the halls. Was he the one she embraced in a cabin by the lake where he took her in winter? Was he the one she had seen naked? Did they kiss and caress each other? Had he, as she had written, penetrated her soul and body?

I admired her so much that she managed to persuade me to give her a role I had been assigned in a play. She told me her heart would break if she wasn’t on the school stage in the spring when the play was to be presented.

Carl, one of the boys interested in me, was the pharmacist’s son. He left sodas in my locker that tended to tip and spill over my gym shoes. He was very short and bullet-headed, and he had a careening walk, going forward, then lurching to the side like the knight’s move in chess.

The suitor I took more seriously was Jerry, a senior, a handsome Irish boy with a narrow face and crisp black curling hair. He lived north of the village in a working-class neighborhood of attached row houses. Sometimes he smelled very faintly of ketchup, perhaps because there was a ketchup factory not far from his house.

One evening he came by with two friends, Stanley and Richard. My father made a brief appearance in the living room, spoke with stately good humor, looked the boys over, and left.

They forgot me and began to talk as if I were not present, ardently, gravely. They spoke about life, about what they wanted to do in their adult lives. To be a fly on the wall was an old wish of mine. Richard had written the play with the part I had given to Beryl. Stanley wanted to be an actor. Their conversation was itself like the opening of a play.

I had a conversation with Jerry in which something besides sex held us in its grip. We were in his father’s car, driving back from Keene after seeing a movie that had frightened us both. We were talking about fear.

The moon seemed to be watching us from the top of a black ridge that threw silver shadows on the road. For a moment, I wondered if my face was as guileless as his, as engrossed with what we were talking about. Love had its pretenses, its periodic withdrawals, its lies. As something to talk about, fear was safer.

*   *   *

I was a reed in the Christmas presentation of
The Nutcracker Suite
at the Peterborough Town Hall. Frank, a senior, known to be another senior’s lover, domesticity already dawning in her eyes, ran his hands up and down my thin brown costume as I and the other reeds darted off the stage and into the wings. “Nice,” he remarked, grinning.

I wondered how he could have allowed himself to have done that. I had thought him attached like a limpet to his girlfriend. I felt a tweak of triumph.

A plump dark-haired sophomore with enormous breasts was everyone’s girl. She would rest up against a locker after school and all the boys could have her.

*   *   *

Mary came to my room some evenings. We spoke about love and sex. She wore the pink linen housecoat I was so fond of. We smoked and speculated about sexual intercourse. She was nine or ten years older than I was.

When my father and Mary were together, their topic was usually books. An Englishman, H. W. Fowler, had written a dictionary whose definitions amused them. A series of books about the Dinsmore family might be the subject; they laughed when they spoke about the heroine’s father accompanying her on her honeymoon with Mr. Trevelyan. I decided it was their form of courtship. But I didn’t know whether to begin the series or not.

Daddy was working on a novel. When he was unable to write, he drank heavily, leaving the house directly after supper and returning late. Sometimes Mary drove the car down the steep hill to a bar he frequented and brought him home, protesting loudly or nearly passed out.

One night he came into my room and woke me. “I’ve got plans for you,” he muttered. It was after midnight. His words sounded menacing. I turned on the light. His crippled stance, his bleary eyes, suggested to me that whatever held him upright was leaking away. I pitied him. He misread my expression. “Calm down, calm down.… I’m going to send you to a Swiss school … white feather beds, pure air … the sun striking sparks from the Alps all around you.… You don’t believe it, do you? I’ll show you!”

And he lurched away, out of the room. It took me a long time to fall asleep. I swung between belief and doubt. I’d heard these “plans” before, but I wanted to believe them.

*   *   *

Daddy would suddenly ask if I was having a good time, demanding that I confirm some notion of happiness he had for me. “These
are
the good old days,” he would say. I had no wish to reassure him. Perhaps I wanted to get even with him for his claiming to hear what I was saying beneath what I was saying, a cause of growing division I felt in my own nature. I was becoming aware of being aware.

“One word is worth a thousand pictures,” he said once, portentously. Then his tone changed into a ragging, derisive roar that made me burst into laughter.

One day I brought home a stick toy someone had given me at school. A tightrope walker balanced on a string between two pieces of wood you worked with your hands. He took it from me and imitated a witless person, looking at me with dazed booby eyes and then slowly, shakily, lowering his gaze to the toy and back to me, an imbecilic smile on his face.

He read somewhere that the actor Will Rogers had said he never met a man he didn’t like. “What a horse cock!” Daddy exclaimed.

We had moved into the house in early autumn. Sometime after that, a hurricane struck. The stream that ran beside the house flooded the cellar and the garden below and blew down a giant tree at the end of the narrow street the house faced. The roots seemed to glare at me as I passed them on the way to the center of the village.

The wind raged for days. School was shut down. One night my father didn’t come home at all. In the small hours, Mary drove all over Peterborough, finding him at last sleeping on a bench, his cheek on his joined hands. The bench had been carried by the floodwaters and deposited next to a bar.

*   *   *

The school principal had asked me to baby-sit for him during the fall. When I arrived at his house, he opened the door and welcomed me with a smile. His son was six.

In March, when he summoned me to his office, he wore a different expression. His voice grew harsher and louder as he spoke. “You people’s ways are too advanced for us. It would be best if you left the school.”

Years later, when I was about to matriculate at Columbia University and my transcript was needed for my brief time at Peterborough High School, I was astonished at how good my grades had been. Ilya Tracy had given me an A+.

I guessed at the reasons for the principal’s asking me to leave the school. My father’s drinking had escalated that spring. The local people had seen through the pretense that he and Mary were cousins.

Many years later, during a sad, desperate period of my own life that unfolded in a small town, Daddy said, “Everyone knows everything in a village the very next day.”

Perhaps he had exaggerated. It took at least a week for scandal to travel. But travel it did.

New York City

My father rented a small apartment in the West Seventies from a Syrian who owned real estate all over the city. Sometimes Daddy was there, sometimes not.

I turned fifteen in the spring of 1938. Mary arranged a birthday party for me. Except for her, it was attended by men and held in an apartment owned by the same Syrian, Leopold’s landlord and friend.

Mary gave me $25 to buy a dress for the occasion. I found one made of organdy that I thought as white and beautiful as a swan. But it was $33. I stood irresolutely in front of the window where the dress was displayed, uncertain of what to do. A minute later, I found myself inside the shop, speaking with an English accent to a clerk. I had no idea how preposterous I sounded.

Something besides the accent and story I told her, a story I deemed both brave and poignant, persuaded the owner to let me have the dress for $25. Her smile made me uneasy as I took the package from her hands.

On an April evening, I watched the Syrian dress in an orange ruffled rumba skirt, open to his thick waist, and a turban, decorated with fruit and flowers as fake as my English accent had been. There may have been seven or eight men, including my father and Leopold, standing around the room, talking, laughing, drinking in their various fashions, my father bolting the liquor down, holding out his glass for the Syrian to refill.

Someone sat down at the grand piano and began to play a café song, sentimental but rakish, wistful, full of chords. As he raised his face to receive the kiss of another man who leaned over him, I recognized him as my mother’s lover, a German doctor who had taken care of the Down syndrome children in the brownstone house where I had gone to visit my parents.

*   *   *

Daddy began to ask me what I intended to do with my life. He was insistent. Wasn’t I drawn to something? Wasn’t there anything I wanted to make my life’s work? What in hell did I want? “You have to
want
something,” he said, in a hard voice.

I was frantic to answer his questions so that his reproaches would end. I began to dread his presence.

When Bernice and I had gone to Radio City years earlier, we had both averted our eyes from a sculpture in the lobby,
Spirit of the Dance.
But I had peeked and seen a larger-than-life figure of a naked kneeling woman. William Zorach was the sculptor.

“Art school,” I said, when his voice was particularly merciless.

*   *   *

Daddy registered me for classes at the Art Students’ League, where Zorach himself taught. It was early May. My father, speaking in his familiar voice—intimate, humorous—said he was leaving the city but would be back in a couple of weeks. Would I be all right? He gave me a handful of cash—“For buttons and lunch,” he said.

After he had left, I found a case of beer in a closet. Each night I drank one bottle and listened to the radio. A man named Long John came on at midnight. Between recordings of hit songs, he told hard-luck stories about rural people who came to the city for what he called “the big life.”

A Tennessee family had come by train along with a coffin in the baggage car containing their dead grandmother. They were drifting around Pennsylvania Station. Having heard about him down on the farm, they telephoned Long John. He asked listeners to come to the broadcasting station and bring money.

I listened to him every night, and then I listened to “The Star-Spangled Banner” until the last note had sounded.

*   *   *

Zorach’s classroom smelled powerfully of the damp clay stored there in large vats. Our model, a heavy redheaded woman, stood on a dais, naked. After a few days, Zorach walked over to me and looked at what I’d done. “You have a wild talent,” he said, as though he were making a pronouncement on Sinai.

On days when there was no class, I went to two or three movies in succession. I ate at a Horn and Hardart cafeteria nearby. Something attracted me about the glass boxes that held sandwiches and pieces of cake.

Then I ran out of money. I began to model—for Zorach, for a muralist, and for a Japanese painter.

When Miriam, a fellow student, suggested I do commercial modeling, I confessed I had nothing to wear. She gave me a cotton plaid dress smocked at the waist and loaned me a polo coat. I had my own saddle shoes. We found the name of a modeling agency in the telephone book.

I had a long wait in the office of the Grey Agency, where sleek, pretty young women also waited, large black portfolios at their feet. Unlike me, they were all appropriately dressed, a lesson in clothes I absorbed at once.

At last I was ushered into the inner office of a woman who was not pretty but all business. She asked me to pull up my skirt so she could look at my legs. After I’d complied, I was required to lean over and sweep my hair forward so she could see my neck.