Borrowed Finery: A Memoir (17 page)

She consulted a wallboard covered with slips of paper, each with a written address. “You’ll need to hurry,” she said, after giving me directions and one of the slips.

The place was a town house off Madison Avenue, midtown. I looked past open doors at a marble floor covered with black cables. Men walked about among cameras on tripods, occasionally bending to look through a lens. One of them saw me and smiled.

I couldn’t do it; I didn’t have the nerve. I left. The man who had smiled at me ran out of the town house. I looked down at the sidewalk while he tried to persuade me to come back, make up my face, wear the dresses piled on a couch, and pose for them.

The thought of it in the days that followed was nearly intolerable. I had had a chance. I blew it.

*   *   *

My father ultimately returned. It might have been late spring. He made arrangements for Miriam—who had become my friend—and me to go to Nantucket for several months, an island where I had spent a week with my grandmother a few years earlier.

Like many of Daddy’s arrangements, it started with an impulse. He paid our fares for the ferry and what he guessed would be a few months’ rent and living expenses. The money covered one month.

We found a two-room cottage in Siasconset. The front door, somewhat lopsided on its hinges, opened to a street that glared with the whiteness of crushed oyster shells. The two rooms were crowded with shabby furniture and a seriously out-of-tune upright piano. But the rooms smelled cleanly of the sea. At the back of the cottage, a path wound among little gray-shingled houses, their fences covered with rambler roses that bloomed soon after we moved in.

One evening as Miriam and I played a Scarlatti duet, badly, she with violin and me at the piano, a thin young man stepped through an open window, weeping and almost incoherent.

We made out that the cause of his grief was that European churches would be destroyed by bombs if there was a war. And there would be one! Think of the marvelous stained-glass windows! Their destruction was inevitable.

We commiserated with him, reminded him that whole populations would die too, and after an hour or so he left as he’d arrived, through the window.

We found jobs, Miriam as a waitress in a restaurant that opened in May, me as an errand girl for the ’Sconset summer theater group. I made a friend, Jon, among the actors. We swam together in the late afternoons if he wasn’t in rehearsal. Morgan, the director of the group, asked me if I wanted to be an extra in a play by Thornton Wilder,
Our Town,
a nameless mourner at the funeral of the lead character. I was provided with a costume, an umbrella, and a place to stand.

On opening night, Katherine Cornell and her husband, Guthrie McClintock, had come from Martha’s Vineyard especially to watch a young actress in the cast, Ruth March.

I stood with my back to the audience, beneath the umbrella, which was open because the play called for rain. If I looked to the left, I could see Jon facing me, half hidden by the curtain. He began to make funny faces. Since mirth was out of place unless called for, and especially at a funeral, it was doubly irresistible. The stage was flooded with my laughter, the auditorium itself, and the ears of the two distinguished guests. My career in the theater ended at the moment it began.

But Morgan continued to take long walks by the ocean with me. He didn’t reproach me for the night of the big laugh—though the curtain was lowered briefly when it was apparent that I couldn’t stop—I went on being an errand girl for the company.

One morning, at dawn, I put on my bathing suit. So as not to wake Miriam, I crept silently out of the little house.

’Sconset sat snugly on the edge of a bluff down which wooden stairs led to the beach. As I stood on the top step, the sun was rising on the horizon. I looked down at the still-shadowed shacks on the sand where, in some of them, the servants of the summer people lived. It was called Codfish Park.

All at once, a few black women began to emerge from the shacks. They wore white robes that billowed as they seemed to float toward the sea like so many white and black blossoms blown by a dawn wind.

*   *   *

During the months I spent on Nantucket, I was courted by a Harvard freshman and a high school teacher from New Jersey who drank too much. The freshman had an older brother whose face appeared to swell every time he looked at me, though he never spoke a word.

One evening after dark, the teacher and I set out across the golf course. The rotating Tom Nevers light, our destination, poked at the sea with its broad finger, then at the small rises and dips of the course, light without end.

We stumbled on a sand trap. He nearly dropped the gin drink he’d carried from the bar where we had met earlier. I hadn’t meant to say that I loved him. I didn’t. But the three words had risen, flooded my mouth, poured out. He was in any event too drunk to respond. And I was too puzzled and mortified to repeat the words. So I threw them away for a long time.

*   *   *

My grandmother had told me that her husband, on one of his many visits to the United States, had taken a boat from New York City to Nantucket long before most of the houses in ’Sconset had been built. When I imagined him there, he was dressed like a Spanish dancer, standing on the bluff, looking out to sea. A fierce wind blew yet did not dislodge his flat black dancer’s hat.

*   *   *

At the end of our fourth month on the island, I heard from my father that I would be going to a Canadian boarding school in September. I returned to Kew Gardens, where I stayed with my grandmother. I felt bleakly grateful for not having to go back to the Syrian’s West Side apartment where I had spent such desolate days and nights.

My grandmother asked me to visit my mother before I went off to Canada. A thrill of fear went through me. Yet I was powerfully drawn to Elsie, who had formed my first sense of the world by a refusal so absolute that one of its consequences was that she seemed neither male nor female to me, a genderless presence who must be propitiated, but always in vain.

The same day, I went to see my father, who was staying in Mary’s Greenwich Village apartment on Charles Street. He gave me “a piece of change” to buy Elsie freesias and arrowroot biscuits, for both of which she had what he characterized as intense greediness.

When I came to her door, holding the bouquet of freesias and the biscuits, I stood in front of it without knocking, rehearsing what I was going to say. But she suddenly opened the door. “I thought it was you,” she said, with a smile.

Daddy had said she was living with an editor from a New York publishing house. My father called him “an old sheet from Sheet Harbour,” because he had been born in a town of that name on Nova Scotia.

I had not been alone with her since we had bought shoes in De Pinna’s, other than in the bathroom of Mary’s Florida house. I could hear the strain in her voice as she tried to fill in silences. I strained too, to respond, to react. In what I judged to be a burst of artificial intimacy, she told me a story that illustrated her jealousy. She acknowledged that trait as though it were a peculiarly Spanish virtue.

She and the editor, Harmon, had had a fight, which had ended temporarily with his leaving the apartment in a rage. The first thing she did was to find his address book and send telegrams to everyone listed in it. “I’m in desperate trouble. Can you send me two dollars?”

She laughed as she told me Harmon was very “tight with money” and the telegrams had humiliated him. Another time, suspecting that he was having an affair with someone, she had taken his underwear to a pharmacist to have the stains analyzed.

I had a revelation. She was pleading with me to be recognized, not as my mother but as an entertainer. The first story had evoked my laughter, but not the second.

I asked her how she had met my father. “He and Leopold were in the navy together,” she replied. “One day Leopold brought him home to us. We all fell for him, my brothers, my mother, and me. But I was in love with a Jewish student at Columbia University. Paul wrote scenes for me to play with Harold, who didn’t love me back. They were pretty good scenes. I recall how we walked on upper Broadway, your father and I, working out ways I could get Harold involved with me.” She smiled as though forgiving herself for an indiscretion.

She didn’t refer in any way to the telephone call she had made to Florida and our conversation. She appeared to have forgotten it. I hadn’t, or the question she asked me during it: Did I love her? Her tone had been utterly assured. She had never doubted it. In some way I did love her, if an intense preoccupation with someone is love.

At some point that afternoon, Dina, her dachshund, trotted into the room, wagging her tail. “Did you know you can embarrass a dachshund?” she asked me. I shook my head. Her voice grew deeper, reproachful, as she looked at the dog and spoke. “Why, Dina! How could you! Such a bad little dachshund!” And Dina began to lick herself, stopped, looked guilty, yawned. My mother laughed. “All right, Dina, it’s over,” she said, clapping her hands.

*   *   *

Mary took me shopping; she bought several things at Bonwit Teller’s. When she paid for them, she bent down and took off one shoe, where she kept money. My father had told me she was eccentric.

Montréal

Sainte-Geneviève was a small finishing school in Montréal. I spent nearly a year in its rambling four-story house, September to mid-July.

After dinner, those of us who boarded were obliged to play bridge. Madame Duvernoy, who taught French and comportment, changed tables each night. There were eleven boarders, and she made the twelth bridge player.

Everyone dreaded to have her for a partner. She held her cards close to her face in small fat hands that were like faded pink mittens. She was drunk every evening. Her marceled hair was unmoving, like a cap. She would purse her thickly rouged lips just before she made an impossible bid. If her partner groaned or laughed out loud, Madame Duvernoy smiled enigmatically.

Afterward, when we went to our rooms in the old house, which was a block or so from one of the main streets, Sherbrooke Avenue, we had savage conversations about sex. Did old people in their forties do it? The bedroom of the headmistress, Madame Chennoux, who owned the school, and her husband, a lawyer, was on the second floor. She was at least fifty. Still, we took turns listening at her door in the middle of the night, hoping, dreading, to overhear some intimacy. Her husband was shorter than she was, a fact that added a further dimension to the grotesque stories we invented about the carnal life of the grown-ups among whom we lived, compliant young girls with hearts of ice.

Most of the students were fifteen or sixteen, the rest, a year or two older. The blondes among us were covered with a fine down only visible in sunlight; the brunettes decried the dark springing hairs on their arms and legs that intimated hidden thickets which, one of us had read in a prohibited book, only whores shaved away.

Two of the girls, it was rumored among us, had no interest in boys. They smiled sardonically at our preoccupation with them. We whispered to close friends our thoughts about these girls—that they entertained each other all night long and urinated like men, standing up. One of them had the face of a pug dog and wore around her wrist a broad leather strap with a silver buckle. She was an outstanding student, but she learned derisively, as though conceding to a madness in adults that drove them to teach.

She was a skilled pianist. She played Chopin’s “Revolutionary Étude” with such intensity it seemed that an army was about to storm the house. What we most admired her for was her imitation of Madame Duvernoy, dead drunk, playing bridge, becoming slowly aware she had forgotten to dress and was, in fact, stark naked.

We found sex in everything. We each had to plan and cook an entire dinner once during the term. We laughed insanely at the Mont Blanc I made with its nippled peak of whipped cream, at the leg of lamb reclining on a bed of flageolets that was like, someone said, the bluish splotchy thigh of an elderly man, and at the lewd rigidity of the root vegetables I had chosen as side dishes.

One of the girls, Moira, suddenly announced she was leaving the school to get married. It happened so quickly! In a week! We were thunderstruck. But it turned out that she was not pregnant as we had been sure she was.

Toward the end of the school year, she came to visit the school. We were mute, staring at her. She had been “doing it” all these months! Surely there would be a sign! To everyone’s surprise, she appeared unchanged, perhaps slightly more sedate than we had remembered.

My father came to see me around Easter. Although—as I was mortified to learn—he didn’t pay school bills on time, he bought me a small luxurious case of Elizabeth Arden cosmetics. My roommate, Dorothy, who was from El Paso, and I used up the creams in a week. In certain moods, we wanted to be like the courtesans we read about in Balzac.

My father tried to seduce Dorothy, who was six feet tall with a small square jaw and a tremulous voice. When she told me about it, I couldn’t look at her. My own father!

When? I asked her. When I had gone to use the bathroom in his hotel room before he took us out to dinner, she said. But I hadn’t been gone more than two minutes! What could he have done in that time?

“He looked at me in a certain way … he whispered,” she said. Whispered! What did he whisper? She couldn’t make it out, she said. “But I know it was about
it.
” She giggled then and observed that all men were alike, even fathers.

Even, probably, the Franciscan brothers in their brown habits who walked on the streets of Montréal, wearing sandals on their feet in all kinds of weather.

Several of us went out with McGill boys. We returned from our trysts with lips and breasts sore, eyes glazed, breath caught between appalled laughter and tears.

My best friend, Claudia, a day student, was rich and glamorous and wore thick black mascara that took her half an hour to brush on. One day she told me she had been “doing it” for nearly six months. She lit a cigarette and began to tell me details until I made her stop. I glimpsed her boyfriend once or twice, a French Canadian as sleek as a greyhound.