Borrowed Finery: A Memoir (6 page)

*   *   *

My parents were staying temporarily—their arrangements, as far as I could work out, were permanently temporary—in a small borrowed apartment in New York City. The minister arranged with my father to leave me there for a few hours and then return to take me home.

A large dog lay on the floor, its eyes watchful. I recognized it as the same animal that had attacked the cat in Provincetown a year or so earlier. It got up to sniff my shoes. My father filled in the silence with his voice. I wasn’t listening to him. Where was my mother?

Suddenly she appeared in the doorway that led to a second room. I saw an unmade bed behind her. She pressed one hand against the doorframe. The other was holding a drink. My father’s tone changed; his voice was barely above a whisper. “Puppy … puppy … puppy,” he called her softly, as though he feared, but hoped, to wake her. She stared at me, her eyes like embers.

All at once she flung the glass and its contents in my direction. Water and pieces of ice slid down my arms and over my dress. The dog crouched at my feet. My father was in the doorway, holding my mother tight in his arms. Then he took me away from the apartment.

At some hour he must have returned with me. Perhaps we waited for the minister outside the front door.

For years I assumed responsibility for all that happened in my life, even for events over which I had not the slightest control. It was not out of generosity of mind or spirit that I did so. It was a hopeless wish that I would discover why my birth and my existence were so calamitous for my mother.

*   *   *

A few months later Uncle Elwood took me to the city again to visit my parents. This time they were staying in a hotel owned by a family they were acquainted with, whose wealth included vast land tracts on the west side of the Hudson River, just north of the Palisades, as my father explained to me. I was to stay overnight, and for that purpose the rich family provided a room for me across the corridor from Paul and Elsie.

The idea of spending so much time with them filled me with alarm. But the visit began cheerfully, though a malaise gripped me as soon as I saw them together in the hotel room. I mistook the feeling for excitement.

Humorously, my parents played with the idea that I should marry the son of the hotel owners, a boy only a year or so older than I was, I guessed. They would arrange the marriage first thing in the morning, they promised, both smiling broadly. I strained to match their mood. It would be like the marriages of children in India. I had seen such children in an issue of the
National Geographic.
They looked so little. They wore bands of jewels across their brows and large brilliantly colored flowers behind their ears.

Evening approached. The dark, like ink, filled up the airshaft of their room on the fourteenth floor. My father asked me what I would like for supper; he would order it from room service. My experience was only with the minister’s cooking. “Lamb chop and peas,” I said, partially aware that this was a special occasion: hotel rooms, Paul and Elsie, so tall, so slender, both, a marriage planned for the future so I would be able to live in this room for years, the excitement of great things about to happen. We hardly ever had lamb chops at Uncle Elwood’s house, though we often had little canned peas. When the tray was delivered by a waiter, I looked at it and saw I had forgotten something.

“There’s no milk,” I observed.

At once, my father carried the tray to the window, opened it, and dropped the tray into the airshaft.

Moments later, as I stood there stunned by what my father had done—nothing Elsie did ever surprised me—I heard the tray crash. Through tight lips, my father said mildly, “Okay, pal. Since it wasn’t to your pleasure.…” My mother, behind the half-closed door of the bathroom, where she had gone at the very moment he walked to the window, exclaimed “Paul!” in a muffled voice, as though she spoke through a towel.

Again, as in the episode of the trunk in Provincetown, I was profoundly embarrassed, as though I were implicated in my father’s act. But nearly as painful was the gnawing hunger I suddenly felt for that lamb chop lying fourteen stories below.

As the two of them were leaving for the evening, for whatever entertainment they anticipated, there was a loud knocking at the door. My father opened it to a laughing young man, possessed by what was to me an inexplicable merriment. “Foxes!” he cried, clapping his hands, fluttering and capering, calling out praises to my mother. “Your costume, darling!” My father murmured, “Dick is to keep an eye on you,” and at that the young man spotted me and held out his hand, which I took. “Come along, Paula,” he called, even though I was standing next to him.

I followed him across the corridor to another room. He threw himself down on one of the twin beds, still smiling. “Well, dear little one. What shall we play?” he said, and promptly closed his eyes and fell asleep. Even if it had not been his purpose, he had rescued me from two incomprehensible people. I looked over at his pretty sleeping face in the other bed, and I was overcome with an emotion I had no word for—a kind of love for that stranger.

I put myself to sleep with pictures of everything I could envisage in the Balmville house, the way I felt its walls around me, and Uncle Elwood, coming and going; the animated spirit of it all.

*   *   *

It seems unlikely that I would have been allowed to go unaccompanied on a train to New York City, yet in the winter of 1928, you could place a child safely in the care of a conductor or a porter. In any event, several months after the Visit of the Dropped Tray, as I named it in my thoughts, I went to the city on the train and was met at Grand Central Station, not by my father but by a married couple, actors, who took me to their tiny apartment, which they shared with two enormous dogs—Great Danes, they told me. A large window in the living room looked out on Central Park.

They both had roles in the play
Animal Crackers,
and except on matinee days they were always at home during the day. They expected my father to “turn up” at any moment, as they smilingly told me. I spent two nights with the actors, going to sleep in their bedroom, carried into the living room and deposited on a sofa when they were ready to retire.

During the day the dogs kept watch over the two rooms, pacing restlessly the length of the living room or sleeping sluggishly in great canine heaps.

My father came to get me on a matinee day as the actors were on their way out the door. “Thanks, dear pals,” he said to them. He told me he had lifted a few too many glasses two evenings earlier and had not been able to meet me at the station. “I was—ahem, ahem—indisposed,” he said, with comical exaggeration, and I, without comprehending what he meant, smiled up at him. Now we were going to take a bus to Schroon Lake, New York, in the Adirondack Mountains, where he and my “sainted mother” had rented a cabin. I puzzled over his words about Elsie for a while, then gave it up as another mystery.

He looked tired, as though the glasses he had lifted had weighed too much for him. His water-color eyes were bloodshot; his voice, usually so deep, so melodic, as though he were always on the point of breaking into song, had a cranky, querulous note; and his words, usually so finely cut, were blurred.

He slept on the bus, falling against me as it lurched. I had not seen him since he had dropped the supper tray out the window, and I felt wary and nervous. As he slept, I investigated his face, his hands, one of which held an unlit cigarette, his trembling eyelids.

After hours of traveling, we arrived in the hamlet of Schroon Lake. My mother and a friend, a slender, spidery, dark-haired man, were waiting in front of a general store, a dusty, cheese-smelling, dark space in front of which stood a single gas pump. Nearby was a beat-up little car that apparently belonged to my parents. As I stepped from the bus, the spidery man’s eyes widened with amusement. “Oh, she’s a one!” he exclaimed to Elsie.

We drove several miles and turned off the paved road to a rutted lane. Soon a small cabin appeared. Behind it was Schroon Lake. A pale strip of shoreline was still visible, but it vanished as night spread over the water. The cabin was meagerly furnished; the smell of old fires emanated from a stove that stood at one end of the living room.

Recalling the evening in the hotel, I said nothing about meals, although I was hungry. My father fixed me supper with particular effort, noticeable effort, as if he too remembered that evening and was determined to erase it from both our memories. He laughed and talked ceaselessly. Now that I think of it, his movements and gestures might have been a dance of contrition.

The next evening we drove to the hamlet of Schroon Lake, parking the car on a country road across the street from a wooden building that served various community purposes that included movie showings. In the one that we saw Warner Baxter played the lead. When the film was over, I walked beside Elsie into the small anteroom that served as a lobby.

I startled myself by asking her how babies were made. The spidery man on her other side burst into laughter. After a moment, she replied, in an impersonal voice, “Sexual intercourse.” At that moment, we reached the car. She drove, with my father in the passenger seat and the spidery man and me in the rear. She spoke animatedly about other matters. No one mentioned the movie or my question and her answer.

*   *   *

Suddenly, as it seemed to me then, my childhood years with Uncle Elwood and his mother ended. Plans of which I had been ignorant came to fruition. My father, who was living in California, sent for me. I found myself on a train with Aunt Jessie bound for Los Angeles.

Outside of Albuquerque, New Mexico, a dozen or so cowboys galloped alongside the train, slapping the flanks of their horses with their broad-brimmed hats as they yipped. The train gathered speed and the cowboys fell away, one by one, their cries fading gradually as though blotted up by the vast sky.

One night the train slowed as it passed through a village. Through the window, I saw a tree-lined lane lit by rays of a street-lamp. I longed to be walking along it past the shadowed houses, on my way home in the silent dark.

I spent a year or so in California. When I came back, it was winter in the East. There was snow on the ground when I returned to Balmville and Uncle Elwood.

It was to be for only a few more months. I held on to the transient safety. I knew it to be a lifeline that might slip out of my hands at any moment.

One gray winter afternoon before I left for good, my friend Lucy and I went to skate on a small frozen pond not far from the Balmville tree.

Out of cold blue shadows, from beneath tall leaning ice-stiffened reeds, a boy emerged with a hockey stick held diagonally before him. Another boy appeared behind the first, then another. They looked like medieval warriors. As Lucy and I watched from the pond’s edge, a black puck flew out from under their skates like a crow, and slid along the thick pearly ice.

Hollywood

Sober or drunk, my father spoke dismissively about the places he had lived in over the years. After downing a few drinks, he would fall in love with his own voice, theatrically honeyed, filled with significant whispers and pauses. He was in thrall to his voice; his thoughts stumbled behind.

From fragments of sentences that fell from his lips, I understood him to be claiming that he’d been on his way to his true and noble destination when he was sidetracked by women. He himself, he asserted, would have been contented with an unadorned life, a roof over his head to shelter him from weather, a cot to sleep on, a stove to keep him warm when cold winds blew, and upon which he could prepare spartan meals.

All men aspire toward the mountain peaks, but women drive them down into valleys of domesticity where they are ambushed by family life and other degrading and petty tyrannies.

As we drew near to his rented house in the car he had met us with at the Los Angeles railroad station, he gestured toward it, saying disdainfully that it was furnished with “yard upon yard of Spanish junk.” The road we were on ended a half a mile farther among bare hills. At their summit rose a gigantic sign:
HOLLYWOODLAND.

When I recall the few days I spent at the house, I’m always outdoors and it is nighttime. The dark is thinned by stepping stones of amber light cast on the sidewalk by streetlamps. The house is large, its windows partially hidden by elaborate ironwork grilles. An outside staircase reaches the top floor. Big shadowed houses stand back from the street, separated by extensive gardens and trees unfamiliar to me.

Aunt Jessie, her task to deliver me to California completed, departed after a week or so for the East and her mother, whom she’d left in a housekeeper’s care. On the evening of the day she boarded a train bound for New York, Daddy and my mother went out to a party, leaving me on my own.

In the long dusk, I wandered through doorless, cavelike rooms with beamed ceilings and rough white plaster walls, turning on lights where I could reach a switch. A chill rose from the red tiles of the floor. Tables and chairs were made of some dark wood. A plump pink sofa squatted in the center of one of the larger rooms. The sudden barking of a dog startled me, each bark like a gunshot.

I came to the front door, opened it, and stepped outside. It swung shut behind me. I tried the metal handle. Even as I moved it back and forth, I knew I was locked out.

The dark tightened around me, and for a moment I couldn’t draw breath. It was as if the night were a black sack into which I’d been dropped. I listened. A faint breeze rustled the leaves of the trees; a car suddenly speeded up with a grinding of gears on an unseen street. There was the steady splash of a waterfall at the back of the house. I tiptoed toward it across the grass.

It fell into a shallow pool like a serpent sliding from a tree branch, the water shimmering in the lights from the house. In the pool swam a few torpid goldfish. I had spent hours beside that pool, and one morning I had fallen into it.

A man appeared suddenly a few feet away. His head was cocked at an angle as though he too were listening. When he saw me, he said—and his voice surprised me in a world only seconds ago empty of human life—“I’ve made the same mistake before. I think I’ve left on my lawn sprinkler. Then I find out it’s the sound of your little waterfall.” He waved toward it.