Borrowed Finery: A Memoir (18 page)

On winter weekends, we went to a ski cabin in the Laurentian Mountains. During one of them, a day student, Penelope, and I got hold of a gallon of red wine made by the local people in Sainte-Adèle. All of them wore wigs and didn’t have an eyebrow or an eyelash among them. Their hairlessness, it was rumored, was a result of hereditary syphilis.

We drank all the wine and were violently sick a few minutes later. We couldn’t play bridge because we were far drunker than we’d ever known Madame Duvorney to be. Madame Chennoux treated us as tenderly as babies but repeated in her dry austere way that she hoped we’d learned a serious lesson for the future.

*   *   *

Another boarder had mentioned a novel,
Sons and Lovers
by D. H. Lawrence. The title promised wantonness and scandal. I found a copy among the books in the Sainte-Geneviève library.

As I read the novel, I sank into the world of Paul Morel. The text ignited a latent sense in me of the desirability of self-knowledge. There were other realities in life beside my own. I had not really thought about my life. I began to glimpse at the most elementary level fragments of my own reality. The novel calmed my turbulence, eased my restlessness and shame.

*   *   *

One evening in early December, Madame Chennoux answered a ring at the front door. I was playing bridge, facing the hall. Three people stood on the threshold, a middle-aged woman, a young athletic-looking man, and a girl around my own age. Madame’s face grew stern when she was introduced to the young man, but she was welcoming to the girl and gripped her hand firmly. I knew she was to be a boarder in the school.

Gilberte had long dark lank hair that curled at the ends like notes on a music staff. I imagined her in a flash, winding her hair on rollers as she stood in the room of a run-down hotel. The mother and daughter looked shabby, somewhat run-down themselves. The daughter was dressed like a tart, in a mangy fur shrug that gave her a hunched look. She wore a tight black skirt that wrinkled over her rear end. Her face was small and sharp-jawed. She had huge dazed dark eyes.

Madame called me and asked me to show Gilberte up to the third floor; she was to occupy a third bed in the room I shared with Dorothy. As she walked up the stairs sideways, she lit a cigarette. She was carrying a small worn suitcase with someone else’s initials on it. An antenna in me reached out and sensed her beggarliness, her forlorn life. I began to detest her.

But she clung to me. Her face was always damp, as though she leaked tears through her skin. She confided in me, in a flat nasal voice, that her parents were divorced, that she had been sent to many schools in France, that the young athletic man lived with her mother.

She was given to momentary fits of anger over trivial things, involuntary anger like that of a small animal misreading signs and feeling under attack. She recognized in me another nomad.

Moments before we boarders went into a theater to see a performance of
Tobit and the Angel,
she handed me, awkwardly, a Christmas present, a box of heavily scented bath powder.

“Flour!” I exclaimed, upon opening it during an intermission. Several of my schoolmates laughed. I glimpsed Gilberte’s face, turned toward me a few seats away like tallow glowing in the shadows, and felt a corrosive guilt.

*   *   *

My friend Penelope, whose father was a McGill university professor, lived in a tall house on the campus. It was furnished in a spartan but comfortable fashion. The family—mother, father, and daughter—conveyed an atmosphere of amiability and unaffected learning. I spent hours in their house, most of them in Penelope’s bedroom, which was barely furnished except for an elaborate dressing table with carved drawers and a triple mirror. I was at ease with Penny. I had made silence a test. We could read our books in the same room without having to speak. And we had sinned together: we were hors de combat, as Madame Chennoux said of our weekend spree and its consequence.

*   *   *

A McGill freshman, Robert, asked me to the St. Andrew’s Ball. I was half mad with anxiety. I had no evening gown.

There was a third American at Sainte-Geneviève, a debutante from Long Island who wore her blond hair like a half veil over her face. When I asked if I might borrow one of her three evening gowns, she stared at me silently from her bed, holding a book in the air. She dropped it and pressed a finger into her cheek, depressing the skin. Then she rose and went to her closet and flung open the door.

I saw a hat on a shelf; its brim was covered with small silky-looking brown and beige feathers. Below the shelf hung blouses, skirts, and dresses and one full-length white fox-fur coat. She had returned to her bed and was watching me. I chose one of the gowns, determined to wear it however it looked. I took it from its hanger and, carrying it like a body, smiled in her direction, not meeting her eyes.

*   *   *

That night, in a corridor of the Ritz Hotel where the ball was held, bagpipers played their bagpipes, marching back and forth, their plaid skirts swinging, revealing their strong legs and hairy knees. The governor general of Canada, John Buchan, given the honorary title of Lord Tweedsmuir, made a speech, but no one I glanced at was listening. There was such excitement, such anticipation, in the air. Robert and I danced for hours until the corsage of wild orchids he had given me drooped and I dropped it in a basket. Then we left the Ritz and walked along the street that led to Mont Royal. From the heights we looked down at the city. We kissed, grew aware of other people standing near, left. We halted on the long flight of stairs down, kissed again and again.

I got back to Sainte-Geneviève as the sky was growing pale with dawn. Madame Chennoux let me in, wearing a robe, a plait of her gray hair hanging down her back. We stood in the dark hall while she decided not to punish me. She asked me how the evening had been. I gave her a not-quite-full report. She kept her eyes from the dress, which she must have known was borrowed.

When I returned it, it seemed possessed by a devil. The narrow shoulder straps slid off the hanger. When I straightened them, the skirt ballooned, and as I pushed the skirt back into the closet, the straps slid again, just as its owner entered the room. She took the dress from me and, with a grim face, hung it with dismissive efficiency next to the other gowns.

I thanked her for the loan of the dress, again without looking at her directly, this time to hide the triumph I was feeling and that I feared would show on my face. She hadn’t been asked to the ball.

*   *   *

Madame Chennoux belonged to the Oxford Movement for Moral Rearmament. Every school morning, she came to the living room before our French class began with Madame Duvernoy, to give us a brief talk on honesty, unselfishness, and social usefulness. Her fine head, covered with silver hair, and her noble profile made me think of eagles. She squinted every so often and gazed down at her thin hands.

Once, glimpsing my reflection in the night-black window of the ski train we rode to the mountains, she murmured, “My lion.…”

She had a cross-eyed Irish setter she took on long snow walks there.

When she returned to our weekend cabin and spoke to us, I detected a slight tremor of her head. I attributed it to the intensity of her convictions.

*   *   *

A redheaded girl from Toronto, a boarder at the school, knitted angora sweaters throughout our classes. She often waved her hands wildly to rid her fingers of the clinging wool, squeezing her eyes shut and making a
poof
sound with her pursed lips. Then her usual tranquil expression returned to her face—until the next battle with wool. The room is always sunny in memory, though it must have rained and snowed some days. Beneath the knitter’s long fingers, white angora wool became a sweater. She wore a pink one she had made.

One of the maids whose features instantly come to mind was named Marie. She was narrow-faced, and her voice was friendly but wary. She would announce telephone calls, and one of us would get up to take the call in the hallway.

A figure appears to me; it seems to cling to the phone. It’s hard to make out the features, but I can sense a smile, hear low laughter. The call is from a boyfriend. It is always brief. She usually ends it … goodbye, goodbye … she is thinking of her dinner growing cold.

*   *   *

I meet Robert in the bar of a hotel on Sherbrooke Avenue. We order Canadian Club highballs. I feel elegant, luxurious, although everything I have on is borrowed except for my shoes, even the little hat with the dotted black veil.

*   *   *

At the last moment, the boarders gone, I received a note from my father inviting me to spend the school’s Christmas holiday, half over by then, on Prince Edward Island, where Mary, now his wife, had bought or rented a house.

I took a train to Moncton, then a ferry that crossed Northumberland Strait to Borden, where Daddy met the boat. We greeted each other. I was cautious from habit, my pleasure at seeing him tainted with defensiveness.

But this time he was defensive, too, and edgy. I noted a long white box, the kind used for floral deliveries, lying on the back seat of the car.

He spoke about a cleaning woman Mary employed who came twice a week to the house we were driving toward. He changed the subject: How was the trip from Montréal? he asked, then abruptly interrupted himself to tell me to take the cover from the box.

Inside there was a silver fox fur. “Trapped on the island,” he said, as though that made it more valuable. Should he give it to the cleaning woman? Or me?

I wanted the fur. I felt a blush flaring. I suggested there might not be any place on the island where a woman could wear the fur, but in Montréal it wouldn’t be out of place.

A memory slid into my mind. It was about Daddy and Vin Lawrence from Hollywood days. Early in the morning, after a night of drinking, both of them sick from alcoholic excess, they had stumbled into a Los Angeles cafeteria. They looked like bums. I didn’t recall whose idea it was to measure the waitress’s charity by asking for free cups of coffee, but it was an irresistible impulse. If the waitress took pity on them, they’d give her $100. If she didn’t, they would pay for the coffee and leave, but not before letting her know what she had lost.

Wasn’t this a similar test? The hell with it, I told myself. I’d take the fur.

I knew I had failed when I saw his slow, sardonic smile.

“Merry Christmas,” he said.

*   *   *

A few days before or after Christmas, I went to a party with the housekeeper’s younger brother. We traveled to a remote hamlet on the island by sleigh. It was drawn by a black horse, the bells on his harness ringing out as we went through woods and fields covered with snow that gave off a white radiance. We paused briefly at a little house where an elderly couple, acquaintances of the boy, had given themselves one Christmas present, a small organ. Neither could play. I offered to play a few chords and, while I did, I could hear sighs of pleasure.

A few minutes later, we arrived at a dimly lit grange hall, a few cabins crouching around it. Inside, a big black stove sent out waves of intense heat, which didn’t reach to the end of two long benches. Boys and men sat on one side, girls and women on the other. An old fiddler and a young accordion player on a low platform made hectic music. Every so often, a couple got up to dance boisterously.

The island was dry; you could only buy liquor at government stores. The boys kept going outside to drink from little bottles of vanilla extract and to write their names on the snow with their urine. There was much raucous laughter and snow-muffled scuffling outside the door.

Later, when the housekeeper’s brother and I reached home, he showed me a photograph of one of his sisters. She was wearing black underwear. I started to smile, then saw by the proud expression on his face that it would be a mistake. She had run away to Montréal but had made a big success there. Did I know her? he asked. I hadn’t run into her, I answered.

*   *   *

Daddy and Mary read aloud to each other from Boswell’s
Life of Johnson
during the long winter evenings. From time to time, they would laugh in a way I thought to be worldly and desirable.

*   *   *

After the presents were opened Christmas morning, Daddy began to drink steadily, muttering about the anticlimax of Christmas afternoons, when the light was always dreary and dull and time moved sluggishly. How he hated it all! Scrooge was a betrayer of his class, and everything about the holiday was designed to bring out the worst in people.

*   *   *

One morning I looked into the room he used for a study. He was asleep on the couch. When I told him later, he said, “I was thinking, pal.” He mocked himself as well as me. I wondered about that but soon forgot whatever conclusion I came to. He began to tell me a theater story.

John Barrymore had the lead in one of Shakespeare’s plays, I forget which. He was the king. When he died, he was placed on a bier onstage. One of his courtiers, wearing a long false beard, bent over his king’s dead armored body and spoke a few words in formal farewell. Barrymore moved ever so slightly. His helmet caught the tip of the beard. The actor had either to stand up straight, ripping off his beard, or run alongside the bier as it was carried offstage. He did the latter, improvising on Shakespeare as he ran.

*   *   *

I had confessed to my father that I had a secret passion for the actor Franchot Tone. On the day I was to return to Montréal, Daddy took me to a diner in Summerside where a Chinese waiter brought our order. I liked looking at him. My father noticed and called him “Franchot Wong.”

The ferryboat wasn’t running that day. I had to fly. Daddy drove me to the small island airport where I climbed into the two-seated plane that would take me to Moncton. The water was frozen. When I looked down at it, the ice glittered like a vast field of fool’s gold. I looked at the head of the pilot, all I could see of him, and wished the flight could go on forever.

*   *   *

During the one-week spring break, I took the train to New York City and saw my father again. He had come from Canada on publishing business, he told me. I stayed with my grandmother in Kew Gardens and went by subway into the city every day.