Daughters of the Revolution (7 page)

Mei-Mei proved to be a distracted amanuensis—and a liar about her typing skills. A professor in college had advised her not to learn, she confessed, as a sort of prophylaxis against
becoming a secretary. Mrs. Graves, less tragic and snobbish and more tractable, who opposed girls and sat directly behind God in the hallway of the castle where he commanded his post, absorbed his notes into her general duties.

But God kept Mei-Mei on. In memory of Heck Hellman, he helped her as he could.

EV
, nearly nine, knows she can win God over if she tries. He sits at the kitchen table, smoking, a Pall Mall in one hand and a red pencil in the other. He smokes and then blows out his cheeks; he rocks back and forth in his chair as he reads, talking to himself in a low voice. Sometimes he ejaculates “Ha!” or “Hup!” His red pencil idles above a page, which trembles slightly, as if in terror. Mei-Mei stands at the kitchen counter holding a cup of coffee.

“What’s so funny?” she asks him.

“Essay on
Lear
. Well done. Wish I could write half as well. Hup!”

Mei-Mei reaches behind herself and unties her apron. “What mark are you going to give it?” She hangs the apron on a nail in the cellar door, then takes her cup to the sink, where she washes her lipstick from the lip. EV makes a note: Women put things on—aprons and lipstick—then take them off.

“Eighty-nine,” God says, and writes the number on the top of the page in red. It’s the first girl’s first paper. He’d do the same for anyone.

God stirs martinis in a porcelain bucket called “the urinal.” EV has studied what he gets from gin. His face relaxes; his icy eyes soften. He forgets and remembers things. Sometimes he puts a Mabel Mercer or a Fats Waller record on the turntable and sits with his hands on the arms of his yellow chair while
his eyes fill up. Or he plays the piano wildly by ear, translating lyrics into animal grunts. His hands move like claws across the keys, the fingers bent to attack the chords. His glass on the edge of the piano bursts into beads of sweat from the heat of it. He never takes his hands from the keys or a sip from his glass when he plays. His drink consumes itself and he wants more.

EV sits on the rug on the floor, watching his foot on the brass pedals, the shifting legs of his khaki pants. She wishes she could just live in his body, wear his pants, shirts and tweedy jackets on her own skin. But her clothes—jumpers and white blouses with Peter Pan collars—come from the daughter of a friend of Mei-Mei’s who is always older and larger than EV.

God’s head appears under the piano: “You might bring me a glass of the ice water.” After two drinks, what’s left at the bottom of the urinal is called “ice water.”

It’s important that Mei-Mei not see EV, who waits under the piano for a sign, Mei-Mei closing the door to the toilet, or her unhappy hum flowing into a remote region of the house. Then she climbs the cellar stairs, collects the watery dregs from the urinal and returns to him with the treasure. He pretends not to see it; he pretends not to care.

Too much to drink and he simply goes to bed. EV wants him just soft enough to notice small things—herself, for example. She wishes he would teach her. In a way he does teach her, and in this way she learns everything.

After dinner—baked fish, snipped green beans—EV says to Mei-Mei, “Tickle me.” She’s already itchy with anxiety, interested in the extreme margins of feeling—pleasure, agony, distress, bliss. God says he finds it perverse for an almost-nine-year-old to be unnaturally interested in these things, although Mei-Mei assures him that many almost-nine-year-olds
are
interested.

He reads
Heart of Darkness
at the kitchen table. He’s an old man already, fat in the middle, pink-headed and jowly; EV prefers him.

She brushes her teeth while Mei-Mei makes the bed perfect, wipes the sheet with her hand and erases the lines, punches the pillow and sets it upright. She pulls back the wool blanket in a triangle like the flap of an envelope, and EV slides inside like a letter.

Not everyone likes children; EV herself does not like them. Mei-Mei reads a few pages from a story about a woman who turns into a dog. She reads fluently, not really listening to the words. EV’s attention is divided, too, part of it held by the story, the woman turning into a dog, and part watching the dark parts of Mei-Mei’s eyes flit back and forth.

When Mei-Mei finishes the story, she kisses EV on the cheek and turns out the light. “I know what you’re up to,” she says from the doorway. “I suppose you can’t help it, but I don’t like it.”

The bed is warm and the sheets are clean. EV shudders with animal pleasure.

For the rest of our lives, Mei-Mei remembered things differently.

“God wasn’t your father!” she said, horrified. “We didn’t marry him, darling. We stayed with him in a difficult period. My husband had died, for Christ’s sake! Russian missiles in Cuba were pointed at Boston! The president was assassinated! And we were poor, poor! And God’s wife had left him.”

“But we lived there,” I reminded her. “I slept in the bonny nook.”

“We lived there for a month, two months.”

“You and God were lovers.”

Mei-Mei wrinkled her nose. “I wouldn’t call it
that.
”

“What would you call it?”

“Sometimes I was lonely. But it turned out that with God I was lonelier.”

Mei-Mei and I lived in so many different places. I remembered parts of all of them—the horrible apartment on Eden Court above the O’Greefes’, where we waited for the Strangler to tie his bows around our necks. Then one summer the Fiskes went to France and we stayed at their farmhouse in Squantum; then we rented a detached basement on Penzance Road. We house-sat for Mrs. Graves from the Goode School while she went to Reno for her divorce; then Mei-Mei inherited Madame Bonnard’s French class and we bought the house in Maidenhead.

But I remember God’s house as if my life happened there, as if it were my house. I sifted through the pennies and the rolls of Tums on his bureau, examined his artifacts: the shaving brush and bowl, the Zippo lighter, the red pencils and hand sharpeners in the drawers of his black India-rubber desk, the row of khaki pants and hanging shirts and crumbly wool jackets in his closet and, toward the back, an old blue coat made of cheap wool, serge, with brass buttons, obviously not a coat that he would ever wear—too small, too effeminate, too cheap. I put this coat on and wore it everywhere, waiting for him to acknowledge my audacity. One day he looked up and saw me finally. “Ha! Hup!” he said, and that was all. In the coat I felt most like myself—ironic, disguised, dangerous. What girl of some ambition does not in her formative years wear a coat two sizes too large for her? When Mei-Mei and I left God’s house, he gave me the coat to keep; at least I took it with me.

A
few brown and black faces swam in the sea of white boys at Goode, and several female faculty had penetrated, but Carole was the only
girl
, a misunderstanding that arose from a clerical error when Mrs. Graves, distracted by her embarrassing and ultimately liberating divorce, mistakenly included Carole’s name in the “Negro” acceptance pool under the traditional male name Carroll. (The school had interviewed a few girls and international students for admission, but God had prevailed upon the trustees to stay coeducation for one more year.) By the time Mrs. Graves discovered her error, Carole had already received and accepted her guarantee-of-scholarship letter; she had, indeed, already arrived.

On the first day of the first girl, Carole, fifteen, entered the classroom in advance of God, whose tweedy arm held the door, his patrician fingers spread expressively across the oak. The second-year boys looked up from their Arden Shakespeares, their
Lear
. As a group, the twenty boys gave off an impression of slightly fetid humidity, limp bangs, cotton shirts. Carole, too, might have seemed to the boys at that moment unspecific as she stumbled (or was pushed) over the doorjamb and appeared as a synecdoche, embodying blackness exponentially intensified by gender.

“Gentlemen!”
said God, whose final, often-quoted statement on the subject of girls—“over my dead body”—still hung in the air. The boys rose; the wood floor groaned. Carole stood in the door, blocking God, who pinched the sleeve of her boy’s
blue blazer and moved her out of his way so that he could command this historic moment and properly introduce her.

She was tall and slim as a boy, with caramel-colored skin and reddish hair that framed her face in a fuzzy halo. She wore pants, a printed blouse and the blazer, flat shoes. (Who knew then about mandatory skirts for girls, as there were no rules, as there were no girls?)

Everyone examined her as God spoke ecumenically, if a little muddily, about Crispus Attucks, the first man to die in the Boston Massacre of 1770, about the famous Negro regiment, the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts. He spoke of the liberalism of Greeks, the tolerance of the Founding Fathers, the end of slavery and the eventual enfranchisement of all men—and women. He remembered Jackie Robinson joining the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947 and ending the segregation of players in the Negro leagues. He veered back to the Enlightenment and Rousseau. He spoke of Frederick Douglass, Joe Louis, Paul Robeson, W. E. B. DuBois and Malcolm X, who, in his formative years, had worked as a busboy at the Parker House Hotel! He wound up with the late Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. (here God’s eyes filled with tears), who’d had a dream of equality that was even now being realized at Goode. When he finished, it seemed the air itself might detonate from the pressure.

God turned his back on the class and wrote slowly in chalk on the blackboard, “Are we not drawn onward we few drawn onward to new era?”

He laid the chalk in the tray, turned and held out a hand for Carole Faust to shake. “Welcome to the Goode School at the dawn of a new era,” he said. “I trust you will acquit yourself modestly and be a credit to—and be a credit to the institution.”

Her hand literally crackled when he shook it, as if a bone had broken. “I might be a little tense,” Carole said.

The boys erupted in sympathetic laughter and burst into applause. Wasn’t everyone a little tense?

Mrs. Graves addressed the problem of Carole—which God perceived as a women’s problem—by grouping her with the international boys, who came from Paris, Cairo, Hyderabad and Frankfurt. All the “different” students, she reasoned, would feel more comfortable together. She resolved the question of propriety by putting one of the unmarried female faculty (Julia Singer, Art Department) in charge of International House.

After the first dinner, which Carole ate with the international boys, she went into the courtyard, where some upper-formers were handing around a package of Winstons. Carole pulled out her own pack—of Kools. “The ghetto cigarette,” she told them.

Out of respect, the boys called her by her surname, as if she were one of them. She was never Carole, only Faust. But she was not one of anything; she was singular. Because of her, girls had to be brought in at the second semester. Because of Carole, the whole world changed.

In her first year, Carole watched, adapted and generally did what one might expect of a teenager. She took some pains to differentiate, to assert and accentuate her otherness, which God and Mrs. Graves found perverse. (Goode was already integrated, God insisted—23 of the 370 students were Negro—but still Carole chose to wear her difference, her blackness and femaleness, like a banner.) The Rebozos family—Aileen Rebozos was a trustee—had taken a special interest in Carole, who had spent part of the previous summer with the Rebozos family on Capawak Island. The Rebozoses had somehow found Carole in Brooklyn, New York—the bright daughter of an ambitious immigrant from the West Indies, some old family connection.