Growing Up (36 page)

“What’s wrong? Don’t you trust me?”

“You know I do.”

“Then quit checking up on me in the middle of the night,” she said.

I went to sleep, happy and awoke next day tormented. A football player! “Kid Muscles,” for God’s sake! Well, I’d had enough of trying to raise her to my level of taste and civilized behavior. It was time to give her up and start cultivating ladies. When the great raise to $80 a week came and it was time to marry, I wanted to have a lady—a good woman—ready to accept my proposal.

I knew such a woman. Her name was Beverly. She was a college woman with a degree from Smith. Ancient Yankee blood flowed through her arteries. I’d met her covering a story about a highly social philanthropy with which she was associated. She had explained Jungian psychology to me. An educated woman, a serious woman, a good woman. And—a small bonus here—a woman who was, in George’s observation, “built like a brick edifice.”

Beverly welcomed my request for a date as though she’d been wondering what had taken me so long to ask her. I proposed the movies. She proposed a tour of the East Baltimore Street strip joints. “I’ve never had anyone to show me the underside of life,” she said.

I took her to the Two O’Clock Club. It was a dimly lit fleshpot where the strippers worked on an elevated platform just behind the bar, so close to the customers you could hear their stomachs growl. I’d spent many a newspapering night at the Two O’Clock Club and become numbed to the erotic vulgarity of the dancers. My pleasure was in watching the owner’s skill at simultaneously monitoring three widely spaced cash registers to prevent his barmaids from cheating him. Beverly, though, had eyes only for the strippers. Though she had only one beer she looked drugged when, having stared at a succession of writhing female haunches, navels,
and breasts just beyond our reach, she said, “I’m ready to go home.”

A good woman, I thought. By bringing her here, I have disgusted her. As soon as I closed the taxi door behind us, she uttered a loud howl, seized my shoulders, flung herself back on the seat, and dragged me down upon her. “Here, here,” I said. This would never do. “Think of the cab driver,” I muttered, struggling to recover dignity.

She recovered her poise before we reached her apartment. “I’ll make us some coffee,” she said when we reached the door. I sat in a chair while Beverly went into another room and closed the door behind her. When she came out she was wearing high-heel shoes, stockings suspended with a garter belt, and skin that hadn’t a single blemish anywhere between her thighs and her collarbone. What I should have thought at that instant, I suppose, is, “A good woman nowadays is hard to find,” but I was too confused just then to think clearly.

For the next week I thought lovingly of Mimi, whose character was so superior to the character of fancy-pedigreed, college-educated women. In Mimi there was true refinement. She had dignity, native intelligence, feminine delicacy of the highest order, and character that royalty might have envied. It was ridiculous to compare her with so-called good women, women like Beverly who played the lady in public and carried the tramp in her soul. Nevertheless, I phoned Beverly again to check my first impressions. It didn’t do to jump too quickly to conclusions.

In these excesses of good feeling toward Mimi, I decided to squander another fortune on a long-distance call to wish her a Merry Christmas. I waited until eleven o’clock Christmas night to make sure of reaching her. Her room didn’t answer.

I waited until eleven-thirty and placed the call again.

“No answer,” said the hotel operator.

This was expensive, since I had to pay for the call to reach the hotel switchboard before learning she was still out. I phoned again at midnight.

“Nobody’s answering,” said the hotel operator.

Not answering on Christmas night? Still out at midnight when she certainly must have known I’d be phoning? Out with that football player, most likely. Why waste a fortune trying to phone a woman who was that insensitive?

I phoned again at twelve-thirty.

“There’s no answer,” said the operator.

At twelve-forty-five.

“No answer,” said the operator.

At one
A.M
.

“There’s still no answer, sir. Wouldn’t you like to leave a message?”

“No!”

She wasn’t worth a message. A football player! “Kid Muscles,” yet!

There was no answer at one-thirty
A.M
. I hated her, I hated football players. I hated muscles, and I hated myself for a fool who had thrown away every chance to marry her and had now lost her.

But perhaps she was merely out at some great public celebration. …

On Christmas night? In Charleston, South Carolina? Who in South Carolina would be entertaining three touring store detectives on Christmas night? In any case, the gala would surely be over by two
A.M
.

I telephoned at two
A.M
.

“There’s no answer,” said the operator.

So love ends.

I went to bed filled with the calm new strength that comes to doomed men once they accept their fate. “She has destroyed everything that existed between us,” I told myself. “I never want to see her again.”

She was scheduled to return to Washington a few days after New Year’s. I’d planned to surprise her by meeting her at the train. It would be an early-morning arrival. I would treat her to breakfast. I scrapped that plan now. I never wanted to see her
again. I enjoyed trying to imagine her lonely dawn arrival at Union Station, no one there to surprise her, no one to take her to breakfast. It would be her first opportunity to feel the cold steel wall that separated us and sense the price she would have to pay the rest of her life for discarding my love.

The morning her train arrived at Union Station I was there waiting for her. She didn’t look surprised. She looked annoyed, then she looked bored. “Let’s have some breakfast,” I said.

“I ate on the train.”

“A cup of coffee then?”

She shrugged. We sat in the station restaurant. “I tried to phone you in Charleston Christmas night and say Merry Christmas, but you didn’t answer.”

“I was probably out.”

“At two o’clock in the morning?”

“Did you come all the way to Washington at this hour of the morning to give me the third degree?”

“There was something else I meant to tell you that night. I was going to say I’ve been thinking while you were away.”

“I did some thinking too.”

“Well, what I was thinking was, maybe it’s time I started thinking about getting married.”

“Do you have somebody in mind?”

“Are you still interested in getting married?” I asked.

“We’ve covered all this a hundred times. I’m tired of it.”

“Would you like to get married?”

“To who?”

“You know what I mean.”

“Well, say it,” she said.

“Let’s get married.”

“After the
Sun
raises you to eighty dollars a week?”

“As soon as you want to. I’ve been figuring, and I think we can get by on seventy dollars a week, if you promise to quit charging things in department stores.”

“Would I have to live with your mother?”

“That’s a hell of a question.”

“I just want to know whether I’m going to have a husband or a mother’s boy.”

“Do you want to fight or do you want to get married?”

“Is March too soon?” she replied.

I suppose I gasped. March was only eight weeks away. It seemed terrifyingly immediate. “March is fine with me,” I said.

Mimi reached across the table and took my hand. “Kiss me,” she said.

“Here? With all these people around?”

“It’s all right when you’re engaged,” she said, and we leaned across the table and kissed lightly over the sugar bowl.

Then she leaned back and looked at me as though she suddenly thought me the most improbable creature she’d ever seen. She started to laugh. “What’s the matter?” I asked. “Is there lipstick on my chin?”

“Have you forgotten already?”

“What?”

“It’s not in the cards,” she said.

I
N
the autumn of 1981 Mimi and I drove down to Virginia to visit our younger son, his wife, and our three-month-old granddaughter. Afterwards we drove into Baltimore to spend a night with Doris, who was now widowed after a long marriage, and childless. Her house was in Catonsville, not far from Marydell Road, and when Mimi and I were packed next morning for the drive back to New York I said, “Let’s go look at the scene of the crime,” and we drove down there.

The house wasn’t changed much since I’d first seen it forty years ago when Herb had bowed to my mother’s insistence that Lombard Street was no place to raise Mary Leslie and spent a breathtaking $4,700 for what I considered a palace. Herb had died there in the bedroom at the corner of the second floor in 1962. Doris was downstairs that afternoon and heard him cry out and ran upstairs to find him dead in his bed of cardiac arrest. Now Mary Leslie was married, with children of college age.

“Remember the first time you came out here for Sunday dinner?” I asked Mimi.

“What I remember about your mother’s house is how clean
and happy it felt, and what a warm feeling there was with all those people there who were related to each other.”

“What I remember,” I said, “is too much makeup.”

Mary and Doris sold the house in 1977 when my mother could no longer keep it up and Doris had brought her to live in Catonsville so she could look after her. It was the only solution to a difficult problem, and it didn’t work. To my mother, Marydell Road was the “home of our own” she’d spent her youth struggling to reach. After thirty-five years in it, leaving it was more than she could stand. She’d reared her children there, sent her son off to war from there, cooked a thousand Sunday dinners in its kitchen, painted and repainted its parlor, celebrated the weddings of her three children around its dining-room table, and mourned a husband’s death there. She had poured out her strength for thirty-five years in waxing its floors, shining its windows, laundering its curtains, making its beds, tending its stoves, and dusting its shelves. When time came to close it and move to Catonsville, she couldn’t understand.

“When are we going back home?” she would ask Doris long after they had made the move to Catonsville.

“This is home, Mother.”

“Well, it’s all right here, I guess, but I want to go back home now.”

Neither Mimi nor I had been back to Marydell Road since its sale, and this day when we drove down to look we stayed outside. The new owners certainly didn’t want strangers at the door asking for a house tour.

“You never understood my mother, did you?” I said as we pulled away.

“I understood she was a mean old lady.”

“That’s not right. She was like a warrior mother fighting to protect her children in a world run by sons-of-bitches.”

“And I was one of the sons-of-bitches,” Mimi said.

“That’s not so,” I said. “Don’t you remember how good she was about our marriage?”

She had been good about it too. When I braced myself and told
her, “I’m going to marry Mimi,” she blinked and said, “I always thought you would. When’s it going to be?”

I knew she took it as a terrible defeat, but she had suffered defeats before, many defeats, and with so much practice at it, she knew how to accept one with grace. Her first question was in character. “How are you fixed for money?”

Very poorly, was the answer, “Well, don’t worry. I think I can help you out.”

There was my life insurance policy on which she’d been paying since I was knee high. By cashing it in, she could get me almost $300. That would help with the furniture. She also had “a little money saved up.” All her life she had always had “a little money saved up.” She could let me have $200. That would help finance a honeymoon. “I don’t think we ought to waste money on a honeymoon,” I told her.

“You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Russell. How do you think Mimi’s going to feel if you don’t even give her a honeymoon trip?”

There would have to be a reception, of course. Doris had been married the previous year, and there had been an elegant reception at the Candlelight Lodge. This had depleted the treasury, but never mind, she could manage the reception herself right here at Marydell Road. And oh, come to think of it, she could give us her bed. She was thinking of buying a new bed anyhow. If we took hers it would save us some money on the furniture bill.

“What church are you going to be married in?”

Neither Mimi nor I wanted a church wedding. “That’s heathenish, Russell. Don’t you want to be married in the eyes of God?”

“Not especially,” I said.

“I’ll speak to my minister about it,” she said.

We were married by her minister in her church. George was the best man. Afterwards he drove us back to Marydell Road for the reception she’d spent days preparing. Turkey, ham, beef, cakes, pies, ice cream. There was a huge crowd. She mingled happily urging everyone to celebrate the great day. So great was it
indeed that she dropped the iron bar and, to please my friends, permitted wine and whiskey to be served. When the party was at its peak and Mimi and I were leaving for the railroad station for a three-day New York honeymoon, she led everyone onto the porch and waved me gaily out of her life. It wasn’t until we were gone, a friend who stayed behind told me afterwards, that she cried.

Now, thirty-one years later, Mimi was willing to concede that, yes, my mother had had her moments, but not all of them had been so fine. I was driving toward the nursing home to see her before heading back to New York. When I pulled into the parking lot, Mimi opened a book. “Aren’t you coming in?” I asked.

“I’ll wait in the car.”

“Oh, come on. She can’t even recognize you now.”

“Suppose she does,” Mimi said. “She might sit up in bed and start screaming at me.”

“She won’t know who you are. Don’t you want to see her?”

“I’ll wait out here,” Mimi said.

I went in alone. It had been four years since the fall that broke her last links to the outer world, and her mind no longer whirled in dizzying leaps through time. She was sleeping now. Her thinning hair was as white as the sheets. She weighed only seventy-five pounds. Her wasted body was so tiny it made scarcely a dent in the mattress. I took her hand and felt for a pulse. It was strong and regular, as steady as my own. Assured that she was still alive, I held her hand for several minutes until the warmth of human contact awakened her. She opened her eyes and stared at me in puzzlement.