BUtterfield 8 (13 page)

And so Major Boam—who retained his military title partly because the hotel and restaurant people in Washington knew him as Major Boam, and partly because he thought it gave him standing with members of Congress—had been staying in Washington ever since the Harding Administration moved in. He spoke fraternally of Congress: “We’re getting a lot of work done down there. You wouldn’t believe it the amount of work we’re getting done—why, who is this?”

“This is Gloria. Say how do you do to Major Boam,” said Mrs. Wandrous.

“How do you do,” said Gloria.

“Come here till I have a look at you,” said the major. He held out his hands, his big brown fat hands. “Say, this is quite a young lady. How old is she? How old are you, Gloria?”

“I’m almost twelve,” she said.

“Come up here,” he said. “Sit on my lap.”

“Oh, now, Major, she’ll be a nuisance,” said Mrs. Wandrous.

“Well, if the Major wants her,” said Vandamm. “Go on, Gloria, be sociable.”

“Shooooor she will,” said Major Boam. “Ups!” He picked her up and sat her down on his left leg. He held his left hand on her back and went on talking. As he talked his hands moved, now he would pat and squeeze her bare thighs, now he would pat her little behind. She looked up at him as he did these things, and he went on talking so interestedly and in such a strong easy voice that she relaxed and laid her head on his shoulder. She liked the pressure of his hands, which did not hurt her the way some people’s did. She liked the rumble of his voice and the smell of his clean white shirt and the feel of his soft flannel suit.

“Look,” said Vandamm, interrupting and indicating with a nod how relaxed Gloria was.

Boam nodded and smiled and continued what he was saying. In a little while Gloria fell asleep—it was past her bedtime. Her mother picked her up off Boam’s lap, and Boam immediately jumped up.

He tried to stay away from the Wandrous-Vandamm home after that, but the harder he tried, the more excuses he invented. He would plan to go there after he was sure Gloria would be asleep; but then he would be saying: “How’s little Gloria?” and Vandamm would immediately say: “Come up and see her when she’s asleep.” Boam had business in Pittsburgh that was supposed to keep him there three or four days. He stayed a fortnight. All that time he knew what was happening to him. He did not know what he wanted to do with the child. He did know that he wanted to take her away, be alone with her.

Up to that time Gloria had been only another beautiful child, with a head of dark brown curly hair, and eyes that were startlingly beautiful at first glance, and then the longer you looked at them the more uninteresting they became. But each time you saw them anew you would be seeing for the first time how beautiful they were. Their beauty was in the set and the color, and being dark brown and the eyes of a child, they did not change much and that was what made them uninteresting. Gloria was like most female children. She was cruel to animals, especially to dogs. She was not at all afraid of them until after they had made friends with her and then she would hit them with a stick, and after that she would be afraid of them, although for the benefit of her elders she would call nice doggy. A Negro hired girl named Martha would come out from Wiley Avenue every afternoon to take Gloria for her walk. The other child’s nurses were white and they did not encourage the colored girl to sit with them. They did like to have pretty little Gloria with them, and pretty little Gloria knew this, knew that her company was preferable to Martha’s, so Martha had no control over her. Her mother did not try to exercise any control over her, except to see that she always looked nice before she went out. Barring only an occasional enema and trips to the dentist, Gloria’s childhood was lived according to Gloria’s rules. School was easy for her; she was bright, and any little brightness she displayed was rewarded out of proportion to its worth. She liked all little boys until they played rough, and she would fight any little boy who was being mean to a little girl, any little girl. There was one continual paradox all through her childhood: for a child who frequently heard herself called a little Princess she was very neglected. She had no one to create or to generate childhood love.

On the way out to Gloria’s home Boam did not allow himself to think of what might happen, of what he hoped would happen. He had been out to the house every second day while he was in Pittsburgh, but this one sunny day he knew was to be the day. He knew he was going to do something. It was after lunch, and he had a hunch Mrs. Wandrous would be out. She was. The maid who answered the door knew him, and when he did not seem disposed to leave when she said Mrs. Wandrous was out, she asked him to come in. “You don’t know what time she’ll be back?” he said.

“No, sir, but I don’t imagine for quite a while. She went all the way downtown shopping. You only missed her by about a half an hour. Can I get you a cup of tea or something?”

“No, thanks, you go ahead with whatever you were doing. I’ll just sit down a little while and if Mrs. Wandrous doesn’t come along. Little Gloria out playing?”

“No, sir, she’s in. The nurse-girl didn’t come today. I’ll send her in.”

“I’d like to say good-by to her. I’m leaving tonight.”

The maid was only too glad to get rid of Gloria. She had her own work to do and Mrs. Wandrous did not accept excuses when it wasn’t done.

Gloria came running in and then stopped short and looked at him. Then she smiled faintly.

“How’s my little girl today?” he said.

“Very well, thank you,” she said.

“Come here and I’ll read you the funny section,” he said, and picked up the paper. He nodded to the maid, who left.

Gloria went to him and stood between his legs while he sat and read comic strips. She had an attitude of attention, but no attention in her eyes. The pressure of her elbow on his leg was becoming unbearable, and he looked into her eyes as he would have looked into a woman’s. She showed no fear. Was it possible that this child had—was Vandamm the kind of man—did that explain Vandamm’s adoration of this child?

He stopped reading the paper. “Let me feel your muscle,” he said. She made a muscle for him. “Mm,” he said. “That’s quite a muscle for a girl.” Then a silence.

“All ready for the summer, aren’t you?” he said.

“Yes,” she said.

“Not much on,” he said. Then panic and fright and the need of haste came on him, and his hands went wild. He kissed her so hard on the mouth that he hurt her and she could not be sure what else was going on, but she knew enough to struggle.

He tried to pass it off with acrobatics. He held her high in the air and spoke to her and tried to laugh. He wanted to get out of this house, but he was afraid. He had not done anything but touch her, but he was afraid of the story she might tell. He could not leave until he was sure she would not run frightened to the kitchen and babble something to the maid. Then he said: “Well, I’ve kissed you good-by now, so I guess I’ll go. All right?”

She did not know what was the polite thing to say.

“You going to miss me?” he said. “I’ll bring you a nice present next time I come back. What would you like?”

“I don’t know,” she said.

“Well, I’ll bring you something pretty nice all the way from New York, next time I come here. That’s our secret, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Are you going to say by-by to me?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Well.”

“ ’By,” she said.

“Tha-a-at’s right. Good-by, Gloria. You tell your mother and uncle I said good-by to them, too.” He was tempted to give her money but some kind of hog’s caution prevailed. He went away and he never came back, but he was remembered.

Gloria wanted to tell someone what he had done. The minute he left she forgot how he had hurt her with his teeth. She remembered his hand. She went to the kitchen and stood watching the maid, who was polishing silverware. She watched the maid and did not answer when the maid said: “Well, what are you looking at?” She could not tell
her
.

It took a year for her to tell the story, which was doubted word by word by her mother and denied by her uncle. But Vandamm knew something was wrong, because Gloria suddenly did not like him or anything he bought her or did for her. He thought it had something to do with her age. She was twelve years old, and she might be having her menstruation earlier than most girls. Lots of reasons. She was moody. A little depressed always. You couldn’t expect her to be a child all the time, though. But the story did come out, little by little, until mother and uncle were able to reconstruct the scene. They took Gloria to their doctor, but Gloria would not let him touch her. They had to take her to a woman physician. Vandamm hired a private detective to look up Boam, and instituted his own campaign to have Boam ousted from his job in Washington. This was not necessary. Boam had gone back to Washington after his maltreatment of the child, quit his job, and left no forwarding address. The private detective ascertained that Boam had got into another similar mess a year or two before the war. His daughter’s fiancé found out about it and daughter and fiancé eloped and never saw her father. That was the reason he never went to see his daughter in Trenton.

There was no physical aftermath to the Boam incident, except that her mental state affected Gloria’s general health. Vandamm thought it would be a good thing to move away from Pittsburgh. A change of scene. New York.

For three years New York turned out to be a good idea. They put Gloria in a High Church day school where the girls wore uniforms. Thus from the first day she was like all the other girls. Her mother took her to school every day and met her after school. Here Gloria was not the prettiest nor the brightest, and was singled out for no special attention. She made a few friends, and in the summer she went with these friends to a camp in Maine, which was run by two members of the school faculty. There were enough girls at the camp from other schools to keep her from getting tired of the same faces. Then back at school there were always new girls. She improved to such an extent that it was she who asked to be sent away to school. She wanted to go to school in California, but when it came down to giving reasons her only reason was that she loved a tune, “Orange Grove in California,” which was popular at the time. At that her uncle almost indulged this fancy, and would have had it not been for the—he trusted—momentarily depleted state of their finances. He tried to get a job in California, and found out for the first time that he was a lucky man; good men were working out there for monthly salaries smaller than the rent of his apartment in New York. And whatever chance there was of Gloria’s being sent to California or anywhere west of the Hudson disappeared when two crimes of violence occurred within a week of each other, solidifying for all time Vandamm’s inherent prejudice against the West. One crime was the Leopold-Loeb affair, which was too close a reminder of what had happened to Gloria; and the other was the suicide-pact of the woman and the doctor Vandamm had known long ago. A good, not spectacularly fashionable New England school was decided upon for Gloria. She was there almost the whole year before another man, who eventually made Boam seem like a guardian angel, was attracted to her.

 • • • 

When you are a year away from a day that (because of some Thing) was not like other days you are as far away from the day and as far away from the thing, good or bad, as you will ever get. If it is bad, it is far enough away. Its effect may last, but there is no use kidding yourself that you live the thing over again. Something is missing. One thing that is missing in living it in retrospect is the reality; you know when you start that what you are about to recall is only, so far as this moment is concerned, a kind of dreaming. If a year ago you saw yourself cut open, your blood coming out of you, and everything outside was pain coming in you—you still cannot live that over again. Not the day, and not the moment. You can and do live back to the moment when the awful thing, whatever it was, began. Or the good thing (but of course life is not made up of many good things; at least we don’t make milestones out of the good things as much as we do the bad). The still beautiful word poignant does not apply to ice cream, medals you won in school, a ride on a roller coaster, something handsome to wear, or “The Star-Spangled Banner”; although “The Star-Spangled Banner” comes closest. It is music, and poor old music, whether it’s Bach or Carmichael, it knows when it starts that it is making a forlorn effort to create or recapture something that it of itself does not possess. Music is synthetic, so how can poor, lovely old music, which is the highest art, have by itself a fraction of the poignancy of an important day, an important event that day, in the life of a human being? The answer is it can’t. You may shut your eyes for a second while the Maestro is conducting, but you will open them again, and to show how completely wrong you are in thinking that you have been listening to the music he brings out, you will catch yourself noticing that he has shifted the baton from his tired rheumatic right arm to his left. It is nothing to apologize for, however. Only a phony would say that he does not really notice the man Toscanini, but a phony would say it. A phony would think he gained by saying he could overlook the genius because he is a man, a human being. Who the hell wrote the music? A disembodied wraith?

We have had long and uncomfortable periods when we built chairs, forgetting that a chair is meant to be sat in. Music, too, is to be enjoyed, and we might as well face it: it must have human associations if it is to be enjoyed. The same way with love. It can happen to be pure when for one reason or more, two people do not go to bed together. Love
can
be as far away from the idea of going to bed together as hate is from the idea of killing. But a chair is meant to be sat in, music is good for what it does to you, love is sleeping together, hate is wanting to kill. . . .

Three years can pass, and for two of them Gloria can be safely away from the ability to live again the time with Major Boam. This is not to say that Boam did her a favor. He was bad for her because he made her different, inside herself, and made her have a secret that was too big for her but was not the kind she could share. But she got bigger and stronger, not in the metaphorical sense, and what she knew—that a man as big as Major Boam, a man that you didn’t even know what he looked like undressed, wanted to do the same things to you that little boys did—became final knowledge. It became knowledge that made up for your lack of curiosity, or your willingness to learn. Out of fear you did not want to find out too much when you were thirteen and fourteen, but you could always tell yourself that you knew quite a lot, something the other girls did not know.