Family Secrets (50 page)

“You can sleep on the living room couch with Daisy,” Everett said.

“She’s not going,” Lavinia said.

Paris could hardly wait for fall, when she could go back to college. She still had Rima to visit her, but she missed the rest of college, the kids, the lively activity, the intellectual stimulation, and the boys. She had been going steady this past year, but now that her senior year was coming she had broken up. It would be her last chance to date a lot of boys, and she meant to take advantage of it. She knew she was going against the universal plan. You were supposed to go steady, then get engaged, then get married after graduation. She would rather kill herself than marry Fred. He was a handsome, prep school type, with a rich family and bland good looks, and she had to admit he was stupid. He had little to say to her. She liked him because he liked her and because everyone else was going steady, but that was all fun and makebelieve. She knew the difference between that and life. Not that Fred would marry her, as he wasn’t Jewish. But still, he was the sort of passive boy who might even be persuaded to marry her if she really wanted him. She had tried to break up with him twice at the end of the term and he had cried, and she had been so touched that she had stayed with him, but finally the last week she had made it final. It was easier just before summer vacation. Maybe he had met another girl during the summer, and was in love again. She hoped so. Her friends didn’t really understand why she had broken up with him. It was more than leaving him, it was going to something more. She didn’t expect or want to meet a boy she would fall in love with and marry this last year. She just wanted to have a busy social life. She would be only nineteen. When she graduated she might never have a date she liked again, judging from what her parents had planned for her. She didn’t know how to fight them, didn’t have the courage to make a break, but at least she could make a compromise. It would be possible to live two lives if she had to.

TWELVE

Paris and Elizabeth were having dinner in a restaurant in Harvard Square. Paris was having her meals out of the dorm more and more in this, her senior year. The dorm seemed too regimented now.

“Don’t go home when you graduate,” Elizabeth said. “You’re a very special person, very talented. Your family will destroy you.”

“Where else could I go?”

“You could stay here and go to graduate school. Your parents wouldn’t object. Or you could get an apartment in Cambridge and a job, and write.”

It sounded so tempting, and just as unreal a dream as living in Europe. Now that the war was long over and the bombed cities were being rebuilt, many of the kids she knew were going to Europe for summer vacation the year they graduated, or even to stay for a year and find a job or just explore on their parents’ money, but that dream was for boys and some lucky girls, but not for Paris. Her parents would never allow her to go anywhere alone and she didn’t have the courage to oppose them. But to stay in Cambridge … to be able to sit around and have long talks with other people who were interested in the same things she was, to take writing courses, to write and try to sell to magazines … not to have to dress up and go on blind dates and to charity dances and try to find a husband who would please the family, but simply to live her own life the way she wanted, for her work and her thoughts and her interests and needs …

To be here in Cambridge with people of her own age was happiness, but the tough struggle that would get her where she wanted to be, Paris knew, was in New York. In New York she could work for a magazine or publishing company, learn the trade, meet people who would have things to teach her. She had to go to New York.

“I’ve met your family,” Elizabeth said. “I’m so afraid they’ll destroy you.”

“I know they’ll try,” Paris said, “but I won’t let them. I have to be in New York.”

Elizabeth’s life was settled. After having been engaged to Jimmy since she was fourteen years old, one day in this last year at college she saw a boy in the museum and fell in love with him at first sight. They spoke, and he asked her out. She sneaked out with him for coffee, they talked, and then she confessed to Paris with fear and emotion that she had really fallen in love this time, that she had to tell Jimmy it was over; she was in love with Allen. Allen felt the same way about her. So Elizabeth told Jimmy, and began seeing Allen, a tall, handsome boy who played football and the cello and loved art as much as she did. He came from a small town in the Midwest and was on scholarship. It would have seemed that Elizabeth, at twenty, had finally begun to date, but instead she and Allen decided to get married in the Harvard chapel when they both graduated this spring. She had given up her future for him, and so he had offered her one with him instead. To both of them it was only right and honorable, also logical. To Paris it was too romantic and unreal, but she hoped it would work out.

Senior year was the best year at Radcliffe because if your marks were good you could stay out every night until two o’clock without writing where in the book in the front hall. Other girls had blithely lied about their whereabouts in many cases, but Paris had been so conditioned to tell the truth by her mother (you could never fool her mother; Lavinia could look into her face and she would crumble) that she told the truth to everyone. So it was good to have this freedom now. Paris had made Dean’s List every term. She was getting good marks on her stories and sending stories and poems regularly to the literary magazine, of which she was art editor, and they were always accepted. She had so much control on the magazine now that she had even put herself on the cover: a photo of a Radcliffe girl looking longingly at the new Lamont Library at Harvard, which was for men only with no girls allowed. She was active in the fight the girls were putting up to be allowed to use the same good library facilities as the men. “The boys,” Paris still called them. Why should they be men, not boys, when she and her friends were all called “girls,” not women? All right, she wasn’t twenty-one yet, and a “woman” had to be twenty-one, but some of the girls were, and some of the boys were younger than twenty-one and still called men. How could you call those silly children, who got drunk and threw up in the bushes, whose only ambition in life was to get their hands in a girl’s pants and eventually go to work in a bank, how could you call them men? Ectoplasms or schmoos or teddy bears maybe, but not men. How could anybody want to work in a bank? It was impossible for Paris to imagine any of the boys she knew as dignified bankers; she saw them more as tellers, all dressed up in their gray flannel suits and striped ties and button-down shirts, counting out someone else’s money.

For her own career, she didn’t mind that she would be living with her parents, because she was lucky they already lived in New York. She had read the help wanted ads in the newspapers and knew that a girl started out at forty dollars a week, fifty if she was lucky, and everyone wanted the few jobs in publishing. She could never have afforded to live in New York alone. If you lived with your parents and they fed and clothed you, fifty dollars a week was an enormous amount of money. She would save as much of it as she could so that someday, when she was older and braver, she could have her own apartment.

“Allen got his scholarship to grad school,” Elizabeth said.

“Oh, good. I’m not surprised.”

“Neither am I. I’m going to get a job to help support us while he’s studying. A lot of the stores need salesgirls. I’d rather work in the museum, but they don’t pay as much, and everybody wants the same job I do. It won’t be easy for a few years, but as long as we don’t have any children we can manage. And we
won’t
have any children for a long time.”

“Good,” Paris said. Everyone in the class seemed to be competing in the baby race. Some of the girls were already married, most of those were pregnant, and it was a close race between two of them who would deliver first. It looked as if both of them might give birth right in the middle of final exams, which didn’t seem like very good timing.

“I’ll tell you the truth,” Elizabeth said, “I just don’t feel maternal yet. I know this would shock everyone but you, but I don’t want a baby. I don’t know what I’d do with it. Maybe later, when we have a decent-sized apartment and some money, I’ll feel different.”

“I don’t feel one bit maternal,” Paris said. “I feel like a kid. Kids shouldn’t have kids.”

“What do you say when people ask you how you feel about it?”

“I lie, of course.”

Elizabeth sighed. “So do I. Except, of course, to Allen, and to our parents. They would kill us if we had a baby. They would have to support it, and they can’t even afford to support us.”

“We’ll have to keep in touch after we graduate,” Paris said.

“You bet. We’ll write to each other. And you have to promise to come visit us. You won’t mind sleeping on the couch, will you?”

“Of course I won’t mind. It’s got to be better than my bed in the dorm.” They both laughed, and then they were sad for a minute. Who knew if they would see each other again after graduation? Their lives would be different, in different places. They would try to keep in touch, of course, but their lives would be full, each with her own problems and struggles.

“I can’t wait to graduate,” Elizabeth said.

“Neither can I. I’m not going to graduation, by the way.”

“
You’re not
? Why not?”

“I don’t want to. It’s silly.”

“But it’s one of the most important moments in your life.”

“I don’t have a date for the dance,” Paris said. “And everyone who’s going has a date. I can’t stand to be there all alone, with my parents. Rima’s not going either.”

“You can be with us,” Elizabeth said.

“No. I’m just not going.”

“Not to any of it?”

“Just the luncheon the first day. Then I’m leaving.”

But as it turned out, Paris went to graduation, all of it. At the farewell luncheon the speeches and good will suddenly filled her with a rush of school spirit. As a going-away present each girl was given a cheap little keyring with the Radcliffe seal on it, and holding it in her hand Paris was filled with emotion for her school and everything it had meant to her. She telephoned her parents and told them to come see her graduate, and rented the cap and gown. She would go to everything.

The dance was held outdoors, in the quadrangle between the girls’ dormitories, because it was a warm night. Paper lanterns swung from the trees, a band played, and her classmates with their dates wandered from porch to porch saying goodbye to old friends. Paris sat on the stone railing of her dorm with her parents, feeling embarrassed and sad and left out. She knew this was how it would be if she chose to stay alone; she would always be embarrassed and sad and left out.

“Dance with her, Jonah,” her mother said.

“No,” Paris said. “Nobody here is dancing with her father.”

“Well, it’s your own fault. You could have had a date. Nobody you knew was good enough for you.”

“That’s not true. They were going home.”

“Well, if you had wanted to go steady you could have had a date for the dance too. Everybody here is going steady or engaged.” There was pride in her mother’s voice, not censure.

“Would you rather I was engaged, mother?”

“You know I always told you that was up to you.”

“She’s too young to get married,” her father said, sounding perplexed.

“Of course she is,” her mother said. She turned to Paris. “When you come home, we’ll go to Windflower, and then in the fall when we’re back in the city, please God, you’ll keep up with your writing and you’ll do some charity work.”

“I’m getting a job,” Paris said.

“All right. I had a job once. But you should do some charity work too. Grandpa always said that people should do for others.”

“I could work in the foundling hospital a couple of nights a week after work, or maybe weekends.”

“Don’t be silly. You’ll go to luncheons with me, you’ll meet people. It’s very important to become a part of the community. You don’t need to work in the foundling hospital; they have all kinds of diseases there.”

“Luncheons?” Paris said in horror.

“Yes, indeed,” her mother said. “You’ll meet my friends and they have nice sons and daughters you can become friends with. You can be on a committee for a dance or a benefit, and you’ll meet more nice people.”

“No luncheons,” Paris said.

“Don’t be silly. You’ll go with me. You can still have a job. They give you a lunch hour, don’t they?”

“Luncheons are for old people.”

Her mother was furious. She took on her clipped tone. “There are many, many lovely young girls your age who go to charity luncheons with their mothers. They are humanitarians. They don’t waste their lives with people who won’t mean anything to them in a few years.”

“Let’s discuss it another time,” Paris said. “This is my graduation dance. I’m supposed to be having a good time.”

“Isn’t that that friend of yours who was up at Windflower?” her father asked.

“Yes, Elizabeth,” Paris said.

“Who’s the guy?”

“Her fiancé. They’re getting married next week.”

“He’s not much,” her mother said. “But she’s not much either.”

Paris looked at Elizabeth and Allen and their parents, and wondered if Elizabeth would come over to say hello to her while her parents were there. She knew Elizabeth was afraid of her mother. Maybe Elizabeth hadn’t seen them, hiding there in the shadows. She wanted to go over and say hello to their group and suddenly she felt a new shyness, a diffidence, a strangeness. She could see everything through her mother’s eyes, as her mother must be seeing it, and Elizabeth and her family and fiancé and his family seemed like strangers. It was as if they were fading from sight, out of her life, like an old snapshot. Paris was suddenly afraid of them.

Her mother had a power over her, she knew it, and it was beyond anything she could understand intellectually. She could be so sure of something that she wanted, and then her mother would start to hammer at her and she would not be so sure. She would want it, but she would also want her mother to say it was all right. She was too old to be so influenced, and yet the older she became the stronger her mother’s power seemed to be. That was why they fought. If Paris had been sure of what she wanted she would simply have done it, but she always let—no, made—her mother be part of it. She told herself it was because she wasn’t yet twenty-one and had no legal rights, she told herself it was because she had no money, but the truth was she had no courage in the face of her mother’s steely disapproval. Any extreme horror fantasy was better, more believable, than the withdrawal of her mother’s love and approval. Sometimes she hated her mother for making life so difficult, and hated her father for not taking her side against her mother. Were all parents and children so tied together in love and hate and need? Paris doubted it. She felt she was a freak, and that they were freaks too. People either accepted everything their parents wanted or they broke away. But she was locked in mortal combat. If she chopped off one of her mother’s tentacles she knew her mother would grow another, instantly, magically.