Borrowed Finery: A Memoir (20 page)

Was it she who always imposed a painful formality between us? Or by then was it a collaboration of the two of us? As some people are inclined to do in such tense circumstances, she simulated frankness and told me personal stories about herself, more detailed perhaps than she intended, or else a certain brutal self-revelation was her specialty. Perhaps she didn’t know any better.

She smoked constantly, lighting one cigarette from the end of another.

The second time I saw her was when I was taken by taxi to her apartment accompanied by my El Paso friend, Paul, and another acquaintance from International House. My face was red with fever. She was expecting me. Friends had telephoned her to tell her that I was ill. They half carried me up the stairs.

When she opened the door, I saw she was dressed in a coat. An open sack of oranges sat on a table. She waited until my friends had gone and then said to me politely, “Take care of yourself,” and left. Harmon was gone too. I spent the night there.

Perhaps to atone for what even I could judge as utter neglect, she invited me a few weeks later to a concert conducted by Arturo Toscanini. I had a date with a Columbia University medical student. I told her I had an engagement that night. “Engagement?” she asked lightly, with sardonic disbelief.

My life was incoherent to me. I felt it quivering, spitting out broken teeth. When I thought of the purposes I had tried to find for myself the last year, to show my father that I “wanted” something—piano, voice lessons, sculpture, none of the least use to me—when I thought of the madness of my parents where I was concerned, I felt the bleakest misery.

*   *   *

A middle-aged woman named Kay, an acquaintance of Mary’s, lived on the other side of the Susquehanna River across from Mary’s cousins, Henry and Baby.

Her life had unraveled. She was giving a few piano lessons to a few children, and playing the Ouija board to encourage in her a sense that she had a fate. My father persuaded her to take me to California. I never doubted my father’s powers of persuasion.

Mary bought us a second-hand convertible Chevrolet and gave Kay some money. One winter morning the two of us, lots of Kay’s luggage, and her little dog set out for the long drive that getting to California entailed in those days. At least, in that rakish little car, we didn’t look like refugees from T
obacco
R
oad.

California

The first day, I discovered Kay was an alcoholic and that most of the driving would have to be done by me. Drunk or sober, depending on whether we’d stopped at any roadside taverns, she took what she called “monkey glands.” They were good, she said, to help delay the ravages of age. She talked in fits and starts, first voluble, then silent for hours. From gnatlike clusters of words, I gathered that she knew Delores Del Rio and some of the Barrymore family.

Now and then she had me stop the car in empty stretches of road so she could get out, fall to her knees, and pray to whatever god she had momentary faith in.

We stopped in Dallas and I telephoned my roommate, Dorothy, from Sainte-Geneviève. She was astonished to hear my voice. I arranged to meet her that evening, along with her brother, at a nightclub. I left a sodden Kay in a small hotel on the outskirts of the city.

There was a dance contest in the club, and I won the second prize. An ancient lady, the sentimental favorite with the patrons, won the first, dancing a waltz with a professional dancer hired for the occasion.

Then the spotlight fell upon me. People applauded. I stood up and walked toward the pro. He whispered fiercely to me as we tangoed—“Turn now! Left! Right! Backward dip!”—while he beamed at the audience. What may have appeared to the audience as a couple lost in the rapture of the dance was really an intimidated girl and a man tugging and muttering, his strong stringy arms guiding her.

*   *   *

In the desert, a few miles before the Rocky Mountains, we paused for fuel at a desolate gas station and its small, nearly empty lunchroom. After the car’s tank was filled, just before I turned the ignition key, a tall lean fellow emerged from the station and asked us for a ride to a mountain settlement where his wife was about to give birth to their first child.

Kay was sober that afternoon. We hadn’t passed any roadhouses in miles. She looked him over and judged him trustworthy as he stood there, a petitioner, his cowboy hat in his big reddish hands.

He squeezed himself into the back of the car and we took off for the mountains. He was a cook in a nearby work camp, he told us, provided for by Roosevelt’s National Recovery Act.

The road was rarely traveled then, a narrow blacktop clinging to the slopes and rises of the Rockies like a vein of coal. “Ma’am, can I drive?” he asked. I was glad to relinquish the wheel. It had grown dark, and he switched on the headlights. We passed no one.

He leaned over the steering wheel, his long-fingered hands gripping it. His hollowed-out cheeks and eyebrows, his whole face in the dashboard glow, looked old. I guessed he’d married a young woman. Now he was flying toward her like a devil, or an angel.

We arrived at a small settlement in the middle of a range of the mountains. It sent out a dim light among the trees like a weak flashlight. What looked like a small community center was a walk-in clinic, a single bulb hanging from its roughly carpentered porch roof. He stopped the car and, extricating his long legs and feet encased in cowboy boots, thanked us and said goodbye.

“What’s happening?” asked Kay, who had fallen asleep. As I drove away from the settlement, I could see the tall cook in the rearview mirror, waving to us from the porch, and then he opened the door and disappeared. Soon there was nothing but the living darkness around us; our headlights seemed always on the point of being extinguished.

*   *   *

On the outskirts of Los Angeles, we stopped for the night at a large stucco house owned by a friend of Kay’s and Kay’s long-dead husband. Edwin came from a rich polo-playing family often in the newspapers; he had three ex-wives.

He was short and round, and his skin was the color of a mushroom. Although he was a contemporary of Kay’s, he looked ancient, dried up. After Kay retired, he chased me around his patio for a few minutes. I suddenly stopped running and looked at him. He stopped too. I realized his mind was not on me; he was only following an inane ritual that he must have felt he owed to his reputation. I went into a bedroom off the patio. He followed, limping. We both lay down on the covers of the bed, and he fell asleep at once. For a person of his years, he had had a lot to drink that evening.

I slid away from him and walked down the corridor to another bedroom, where I undressed and got into the bed. When I awoke, hours later, a Mexican servant was staring at me from the door. I hesitated, then said to her,
Buenos días.
She heard my accent—someone had told me once that it was recognizably Antillean—and smiled warmly. For many years, I preferred the company of servants, finding comfort and acceptance among them.

We had a breakfast with Kay’s friend before we left. He behaved with a foolish effort at dignity, never looking at me. But it was too much. Kay asked, as I drove away from the stucco house, what had gone on during the night.

*   *   *

Kay rented a house on Beechwood Drive, not far from where I had lived briefly years earlier. I didn’t spend much time there either.

Every evening, she drank herself into insensibility after she had taken her little dog for his walk. One night she returned, her hair and clothes rumpled, a look of soused outrage on her face. She shouted to me that a man had bitten her on her left breast. “Well,” she cried, “what do you think of that!”

“I don’t know. How can I know anything at all?” I said, and burst into tears myself.

She sobered up as I broke down. Dank air was blowing through the window; rain was coming. For the first time, I glimpsed my whole life. What a sinkhole! I recalled good periods, good times, but they weighed little against the bad. What bleakness! What awful struggles just to stay afloat!

She poured me a drink and I gulped it down. Then another. At once I was fiery with liquor. I saw everything with such clarity. The scene I had made was the only way I could confide my bewilderment—and I’d got her attention for once.

But all that came to my mind was how I had not come to Uncle Elwood’s defense when my mother’s second husband had said, in a quarrelsome voice, “What kind of a name is that? Blooming Grove, for crissakes!” And when my father had asked after “Uncle Corn-beef.” They had both been deep in their cups at the time. I saw liquor’s benefit; it made everything come into the present. No time passed. Time stood still.

*   *   *

The next morning, I wrote a note to a Las Vegas gambling club I had heard of, asking for the job of “house shill.” Several days later, I received a reply from the club owner. It said there were no openings, but from now on I would be wiser to call the position “house dealer” rather than “shill.” That is, if I meant to write to other gambling clubs for work.

*   *   *

I had a brief disastrous marriage to an actor I had met at International House. He had come to California on a ship. He was part of the crew, what was called then an “able-bodied seaman”; it was his regular work. He was almost twice my age. He said we’d better get married, and I could think of no alternative, though I didn’t like him very much.

I was underage, so I was obliged to get parental consent. It took me several days to find out where my father was living and write to him. He sent me a telegram that included his permission and the words “if that’s what you want.”

We were married by a judge in Los Angeles City Hall. By then he had found a cheap place to live on Hollywood Boulevard, at the very end before it went into a tunnel and emerged on the other side into the city.

The room, which came with kitchenette and bathroom, was skimpily furnished and gloomy. I knew nothing of domesticity. When he sent me out with a handful of bills, I went into a food shop and bought sausages in pastry, what the clerk who waited on me called “toads in blankets.” He made a scene when I returned with them and asked me if I knew nothing. Of course I knew nothing.

I would have been one of those children found in a wilderness, written about in case histories, if it had not been for Uncle Elwood; I had learned civility and kindness from him. I knew how to behave in parlous circumstances, to temporize and compromise, a lesson taught me by my father. From my mother I had gained the knowledge of how to contend with the madness of people. And from black servants, I had learned what justice was.

A few days later, after I had brought home the toads in blankets, I found a job as a waitress in a Greek café. The actor picked me up after I had worked there a week and we went into Los Angeles. I thought he was going to take me out to dinner. Instead, he took me to a bus terminal, where he boarded a bus bound for New York City.

He had saved that news for the last ten minutes. He was to join the crew of a merchant ship hound for Murmansk in the Soviet Union. He would be gone for months.

The thought of returning alone to that room was intolerable, but I played dead, like a possum. I stood by the looming bus, watching shadowy figures find seats through dusty windows. I couldn’t see my new husband. It was as though he’d vanished.

*   *   *

I didn’t have time to think much about the actor’s abrupt departure. The restaurant where I worked was a meeting place for caddies from the golf courses around Hollywood and wanderers with movie ambitions from all the states in the union.

A redheaded man came in every day, headed for the jukebox, put in a coin, and selected the same record, a Sibelius piece,
Finlandia.
He sat on a counter stool, listening to the music and making a somewhat theatrical display of his response.

I constructed hundreds of shrimp cocktails during the time I worked for Gus, the owner of the restaurant. During the days, I wasn’t lonely. But at night in the furnished room, my solitariness spoke from the unmade bed, the rickety table, the small frying pan on a greasy burner, the few articles of clothing scattered about on the floor. In the closet hung the blue tweed suit I was still saving for a special occasion—of which there was none.

*   *   *

One evening I called Vincent Lawrence from a telephone in the corridor. I had found his number in a frayed phone book hanging by a chain. He told me to take a cab to Arizona Canyon, where he lived; he would take care of the fare. He was surprised to hear from me. He didn’t know I had returned to California.

His house was large; a narrow brook ran through the grounds. It reminded me of the waterfall I had fallen into years before. The unlocked door opened to a wide hall and a circular staircase. The Lawrence family were at the dinner table. Vin smiled up at me as I stood hesitantly in the door to the dining room. Then he covered his face with a large linen napkin. As he spoke, his breath fluttered the cloth. It was his version of a scene.

Some members of his family were there, including his sister-in-law September, as he had nicknamed her. His wife, South, also renamed by him, and two of his three children were there; they kept their eyes on their plates. It was September who had irked him. Mild sarcasm, as I learned from my occasional visits to him over the years I spent in California, was the only expression of anger he permitted himself. That, and a certain eccentricity, as with the linen napkin hiding his face.

He abruptly rose and held out his hand to me. “Come on, pal. We’re going upstairs to have a powwow.”

I followed him to the stairs, up them, down a hall, into his bedroom, where he handed me two acts of a play he had written. I noticed holes in his blue sweater. “What do you think about it?” he asked, after I had read the neatly typed script. I had not been asked my opinion on anything since Balmville days.

*   *   *

I met an old actor from the silent screen when he came into the Greek restaurant. It was midafternoon. We got to talking. He worked in the wardrobe department of Warner Brothers studio now, and referred to himself as a
wardrobe mistress.
He had always wanted to be called mistress. When he was younger, he had longed for beautiful young men, but two had blackmailed him, he told me.