Borrowed Finery: A Memoir (19 page)

On one of those days, shortly after noon, I found myself in a long queue of tearful, noisy girls outside the Paramount Theater box office, where the new Franchot Tone movie was playing.

The Paramount still had stage shows. I hadn’t heard of Frank Sinatra, but when a thin, bony, hollow-cheeked young man appeared on stage, the audience, mostly female, exploded in screams and sobs. He began to sing, accompanied by the sustained wailing of the undone girls. I had come to worship. What they were there for, I didn’t know.

*   *   *

I spent my return train fare on a dress I found in Altman’s. Those were the days when you could return a garment even after a week or more as long as it wasn’t torn or dirty. I planned to wear it to a Group Theater production of an Irwin Shaw play,
The Gentle People,
and return the dress the following day. Franchot Tone was playing the lead. I noticed I attracted a good deal of attention as I walked down the theater aisle that night. Later, I found a large rectangular price tag safety-pinned to the back of the dress.

My father had gotten the ticket for me from Walter Fried, the Group Theater business manager. He knew him from the time he had been involved with the Provincetown Theater on Cape Cod. At that same time, Eugene O’Neill was writing one-act plays to be presented by the theater, and Bert Lahr could be spotted walking on Commercial Street, on his way to a morning rehearsal, wearing his green beret.

During intermission, I found Fried—or Uncle Wally, as my father called him—sitting in the box office, wearing his black fedora aslant and smoking a thin cigar. He said he had made an arrangement for me to meet the cast in a bar across the street.

When the play ended, I went to the bar, the price tag still hanging from the dress. Members of the cast began to drift in, but Tone didn’t show up.

I thought it was a trick of Uncle Wally’s. In any event, actually meeting the actor would have been painful if thrilling. When I got back to Kew Gardens, I found the exposed price tag. That would have made the meeting doubly mortifying.

*   *   *

On the last afternoon of spring vacation, my father took me to see the movie
Grand Illusion.
The splendor of the movie made up for nearly everything, even the price tag on the dress. He had already seen it. In the pale light cast onto the audience from the screen, he was watching me. I sensed he wanted to see how I reacted. I had begun by then to notice an impulse in him—noble, he would have called it in someone else—to teach. And as a teacher, he always was running out of time, with one more thing to impart about literature and films before he left.

*   *   *

At the end of May and early June, the boarding students left Sainte-Geneviève. Madame Chennoux couldn’t reach my father by telephone or telegram. He didn’t get in touch with the school until the beginning of July to make arrangements for me to go to Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Perhaps to console me for being the last student left, Madame Duvernoy took me to a concert. It was given a few days before she was to leave for a holiday in France, where she had relatives living in Lyon.

In the middle of the Brahms Piano Concerto in B Flat, a short man in a shabby brown suit raced down the central aisle of the concert hall, his hands waving frantically in the air. He clambered up to the podium, grabbed the conductor’s arm with great force, and whispered in his ear. The music ceased.

“La France a capitulée!” the short man shouted, as he stared down at us all. Madame Duvernoy turned to me. Her hands flew to cover her ears, and there was an expression of horror on her face. It was June 22, 1940.

*   *   *

We spent three weeks in Nova Scotia in a woebegone little house whose front door opened to within a few yards of a twenty-foot bluff. A dusty train banged and rattled through the backyard twice a day on its way to and from Lunenberg, a nearby fishing town. A local woman came to clean the house twice a week, and there was a nearby village where we could buy groceries.

Except for the few days in Florida, it was the longest time I spent alone with my father. By the end of the first few days, he had gotten to know nearly everyone in the village, and we weren’t often by ourselves.

He and the local minister introduced me to fishing for salmon in a wide stream. He gave me a few shooting lessons, which drew the attention of a Canadian Mountie, first to the rifle we had used and then to me. His resplendent uniform gave him an air of gravity and the law, but he shed both in the kitchen, where he offered to show Daddy the location of various illegal whiskey stills.

That evening, accompanied by the Mountie out of uniform, we stopped by a few of them, and my father had some samples. Then, with the Mountie at the wheel of our car, we went to a billiard parlor in Halifax.

In a back room, plump middle-aged local women cavorted like aproned elephants. The laughter was strident, and my father, close to passing out, crawled around on the floor, barking like a dog. The Mountie and I stood behind one of the two billiard tables in the front room, I watching my father with anguished helplessness, the Mountie watching me with what Daddy had characterized as “hot” eyes.

The next morning, Daddy awoke, ashen-faced and weak. He had, he said, “the humblies,” and would I shave him? He struggled to get into the bathtub and lie down in his sour-smelling clothes while I did my best with the razor.

Afterward, when he looked in the small bathroom mirror, stretching out his chin to see what I had wrought, he seemed to catch sight of himself, lurching through his days and nights. He was silent most of that day, grim and depleted.

But the next day his mood changed. He recited bits of poetry: “‘Ah, yesternight, betwixt the roses and the wine, there fell thy shadow, Cynara, and I was desolate and sick of an old passion.’” I responded by quoting Tennyson: “‘Come into the garden, Maud,/For the black bat, night—’” and he said, with comical emphasis, “I’ll Maud you, you little spic.” And so it went on, he irreverent, I laughing helplessly.

He told me bits of gossip, fragments of what he considered wisdom: Men fight wars to get new women; actresses always fall for the clowns. Gabriele D’Annunzio took a lobster for a walk, a green ribbon attached to its claw; Charles Laughton and Elsa Lanchester had married each other to disguise their homosexuality. When Laughton grew tired on the set of whatever movie he was making, my father said he began to camp. I asked him what that meant, and he replied that it was a way of exaggerating and at the same time mocking the female side of one’s nature.

I wondered if Leopold camped. But Daddy said Leopold was a Spanish puritan and punished himself for his homosexuality by devising an agonizing condition for himself, tic douloureux.

He continued the long lesson that had begun in Peterborough: economy of effort. Instead of making a number of trips about the kitchen, he taught me to bring together everything I needed before I began a task: soap, scouring brush, drying towel. It was the only kind of order I saw in him.

Toward the end of the last week, we had a serious quarrel. I have forgotten the cause, but I recall the occasion. We were sitting in a rigid wooden swing connected at the top with two slanted benches across from each other.

Suddenly I called him a third-rate writer. I regretted it instantly when I looked up at his face. We were each other’s prisoners in the swing. He held it still and stepped out and went into the house. I had wounded him in the only way I could think of.

*   *   *

We packed up the car, Daddy adding to the top of the luggage a tricycle for the housekeeper’s son, whom she had spoken of often, referring to him as “little Johnny.” She was coming the next day to clean up the house.

On our way to the Boston-bound ferryboat, we stopped by the hamlet where the housekeeper lived to drop off the tricycle. As we parked, she appeared on the porch, behind her a dwarf who looked at least thirty. She clasped her hands then waved at us, while little Johnny ran down the walk to claim his gift.

We drove away, both of us appalled and bursting with laughter at the misunderstanding. In the midst of merriment, we forgave each other for what had happened between us in the wooden swing.

Later, I had to use a bathroom. He said we could stop at anyone’s house. I protested that I couldn’t ask strangers for such an intimate favor, I’d just hold it. He finally persuaded me, saying he’d be “charming.” I said, “Don’t be too damned charming!” That amused him more than the dwarf and the tricycle.

New York City

Daddy took me to the Barbizon Hotel, in those days a female-only accommodation in New York City.

He stood at the registration desk, smiling at the woman clerk, ready to oblige her in any way he could, presenting himself as the spirit of geniality, still handsome, though alcohol had begun to erode his face. She gave him a form. He took out a pen as he looked it over; he found a snag. The hotel required someone to vouch for me besides him.

But as was usual then, he had a solution for any problem. He had said to me that if I ever needed him, to send him a telegram:
SEND OUT THE TROOPS.

He telephoned a cousin I’d not met, Faith Baldwin, in her Connecticut home. She refused to vouch for me. Instead, she lectured him about the perils of my staying in a hotel at my age. It was a long lecture. He hung up the telephone, and we slunk away from the hotel desk.

Years later, a good friend said to me of Faith Baldwin’s novels, “When you’ve read them all, you’ve read one.”

*   *   *

Daddy performed what seemed a miracle. He got me into the Juilliard School of Music, then on Claremont Avenue near 115th Street. The same day he registered me at International House, a large hostel for various students, many of them foreigners.

He was skilled at lying to officials and in elaborating hugely on a theme as small as a grain of rice. I never heard remorse in his voice. But I didn’t hear self-admiration either. My father lacked the vanity side of pride; he made fun of it, saying the human animal had nothing to be proud of.

I once lied when I accompanied my cousin Natalie to her convent school to pick up her homework, which she’d forgotten to take home. A nun asked if I was a Catholic. I said yes. When she left the small anteroom where I waited for Natalie, I picked up a booklet that featured lurid drawings of hell. One crudely drawn scene depicted bodies toasting like marshmallows over flames—the punishment for liars.

*   *   *

Juilliard was threaded by white corridors along which were practice rooms. The muffled sounds of the various instruments made a blurred, discordant rumble and squeak unless you were in one of the soundproof rooms. There were also classrooms where one could study music theory and harmonics, and a small theater in which the students gave concerts.

I went several days a week and took lessons on the piano in a windowless, claustrophobic room, its space dominated by the black wing and keyboard of a much-used baby grand.

I had moved my scant wardrobe into one of the rooms in the female section of International House and on my first day found a kind of louche society there, or so it might have seemed to an outsider.

The toothless younger son of the owner of a chain of clothing stores played chess with me; an adolescent piano student, Paul, from El Paso, became a friend; a small plump Spaniard studying hotel management, a subject also pursued by all the Swiss students at the House, spoke Spanish with me and made me laugh with jokes characterized by Spanish irony and its almost exalted irritability.

Then there was Burl Ives, who had a weekly radio program on which he sang folk songs and played his guitar. He was a big redheaded man, kindly, except when he got into a barroom brawl, which he did regularly. One evening he cried out in the cafeteria, “I hear them snakes hollering out on Riverside Drive tonight,” and beckoned to me.

We took a taxi to the radio station and drove there through Central Park. He played his guitar and sang for the driver and for me in his light, mellow tenor. We arrived at the station with two minutes to spare before his broadcast.

*   *   *

Mary paid for singing lessons. My teacher, Harriet, lived on the top floor of a Riverside Drive apartment house. One night I stayed for supper, and although the singing teacher’s face has faded from memory, I can still see her plump adolescent son, dressed in a kilt, piping in each supper course she brought us. It mortified me, though I can’t think why. Perhaps I imagined Elsie was watching us with her magic telescope.

*   *   *

Elsie told me about a wealthy South American relative from Colombia staying for a few weeks in his Sutton Place apartment, a kind of pied-à-terre. Although I was unaware of the desperation that drove me to telephone him, of its force in my life, its contamination of nearly every feeling I had, I convinced myself it would be a joke to meet him. I would make a story of the visit to tell people—and myself. After all, I would hear it too.

He sent a black limousine to International House for me. It was not the enormously lengthened sort of limo that howls throughout its swollen length of the wealth and celebrity of the passenger. It was a more mannered cry.

My cousin lived on a high floor. While I was visiting, he made a series of telephone calls, to Paris, Berlin, and London. While he was speaking to London, I heard the clanging of Big Ben’s clock as it rang out the hour. He showed me a few gold artifacts, most of them elaborate nipple covers that resembled thimbles, discovered in the darkest recesses of his mine by his workers. They were thousands of years old. Shortly after, he brought me a dish of dried fruit. When I said no-thank-you, he speculated aloud about whether or not I enjoyed sex.

I left shortly, and though he offered me the black limousine to go back to International House, I said no to that, too.

*   *   *

I saw my mother twice during the autumn I was a Juilliard student. I can’t imagine that she requested my company; I must have gone to see her on my own the first time.

“Come in, Paula,” I hear her say, a half century later. It sounded to me then as if she’d said, “Go away, Paula.”