In the Beauty of the Lilies (28 page)

They all lived closer to the ballfields, by a few blocks, than Essie did—Eddie Bacheller and Loretta Whaley and her twin brother Benjy and Junie Mulholland and Fats Lowe, who was a year older but had been held back, and some others from their end of town, up on the tannery side instead of east toward the old fishery wharf. They smoked cigarettes, Wings and Kools, they had stolen from their parents and complained about how all the teachers were jerks. Essie secretly didn’t think that; she thought Mr. Langford, who taught beginning algebra, was rather handsome, with black eyebrows that nearly met in the middle like Tyrone Power’s, and Miss Fenn was almost glamorous, if she wouldn’t pull her hair back so old-maidishly but let it fall to her shoulders like Veronica Lake and straightened her spine, so she didn’t seem always to be peering out at her class through some kind of keyhole. She
could have taken a posture lesson from Mr. Josephs, who had left town because of the war; there were job opportunities, and his tap-dance class had gotten down to just five girls anyway. Sometimes when Miss Fenn was one of the teacher chaperones at the junior-high lunch-hour sock hops, she would step out and dance with a ninth-grade girl, and really knew the steps. That was one of Essie’s personal goals: to become the best jitterbugger in her class. Others were (1) to stop being so skinny and (2) to stop blushing when she stood up to recite in class and (3) to never stutter, even for a tiny second on the words beginning with “d” or “l.” Her singing teacher, Mrs. Loring up in New Castle, taught her how to breathe from the diaphragm and let the sounds come out at the top of a continuous column of air—“Breathe with your belly—your belly, Essie!”—but when she got excited or felt in the wrong she forgot about her belly. What she saw when she looked in the mirror was a face too fat and round on top of a body too skinny, with a nose a little too broad at the nostrils and a bump at the bridge like Momma had and shapeless big red hands dangling at the ends of her arms. She was one of the taller girls in the seventh grade now, and had inherited the Wilmot ranginess, though she didn’t swing her arms and wisecrack like Aunt Esther. She was always studying her face, frightened but fascinated as if the mirror were a deep hollow-smelling well, tilting her head this way or that, trying to catch the best angle, the perfect angle with shadows and light like the movie stars’ autographed pictures she had been collecting since she was ten. You sent away with a polite letter saying how she was your absolute favorite and enclosed a three-cent stamp, and after months went by Daddy in his mailman’s uniform would bring it to the door; so as not to bend the big envelopes from Hollywood he would open the door and toss
them in on the hall carpet. Marlene Dietrich was the first one ever, back before the war, to send a photo, of herself, holding a cigarette holder and top hat and one leg up on a little white box, and then Ginger Rogers, with her eyes warm and starry just like when she danced. Recently Essie had collected Linda Darnell, Dorothy Lamour, Alice Faye, Carmen Miranda, Loretta Young, Laraine Day, Osa Massen, Jane Greer, Ann Sheridan, and Rita Hayworth. The stars had big loopy signatures, full of ease and pride. Some used purple ink, and Alice Faye wrote in green,
Thanks for your lovely letter Esther
. Carmen Miranda wore her big fruit hat and frilly South American dress as you might expect but Dorothy Lamour was not in a sarong with a flower behind her ear but wearing a sensible sort of well-fitting suit, the sort she went around selling war bonds in. Rita Hayworth was wearing her Gay Nineties
Strawberry Blonde
outfit but her signature looked like it was printed on, and so did Betty Grable’s. Linda Darnell appeared a little sad the way she always did, her lower lip heavy and her eye sockets full of shadow, and her inscription was the saddest:
For a dear girl
, she had written—
May your dreams come true
. All these were pinned around the walls of Essie’s room; she had over fifty now, counting a few from men stars she especially cared about—Ronald Colman, Joel McCrea, Errol Flynn, and George Sanders. George Sanders never got to be the main hero except in the Saint movies, but Essie loved him even when he had one of his nasty roles, like in
Nurse Edith Cavell
and
Rebecca;
she loved his above-it-all attitude, and the way he spoke everything so beautifully. When she practiced acting and talking smoothly to herself in her room she was most often Bette Davis or Katharine Hepburn but sometimes George Sanders, slightly drawling, and killing people in the Saint movies so calmly, with a sleepy little blink and a pursing
of his elegant English lips. When Danny got really frantic with her teasing and her lording it over him he threatened to come in and rip up her movie-star collection and spatter ink all over them but she knew he would never dare commit such a sacrilege: she would never speak to him, her own brother, again.

She didn’t like her own face but had to love it because it was hers. She thought it might be too broad but then Myrna Loy’s and Greer Garson’s faces were broad. Her skin had Momma’s glow and the only acne so far was in the creases where the nostrils met the face and where the chin came out under the lower lip—there was a little not exactly crease but depression there. Her eyes were big and clear like Momma’s yet instead of being a cornflower-blue like hers or a quiet milk-chocolate like Daddy’s were a brown lighter than his, lighter even than Ama’s, closest to Grandma Sifford’s mysterious Moorish flecked honey-brown, but often changing, depending on what kind of day it was and what she was looking at; in the studio photographs Mr. Purinton took on his second-floor studio on Rodney Street last winter there was a little pinhole gleam right next to each pupil, white and black, fascinatingly, the white bouncing back from a light and the black going in and down as far as you could go. In black-and-white photographs her thick hair could look black but in the summer sun bleached almost to blond. Like Ama’s hair it was very thick and began straight across the forehead, without a widow’s peak. Essie wished it was the color of Rita Hayworth’s in
The Strawberry Blonde
, with James Cagney and Olivia de Havilland. Olivia de Havilland was Joan Fontaine’s sister and neither of them, nor Vivien Leigh either, had responded to Essie’s request for a photograph; perhaps because they were over there in England under the bombs or because Essie
hadn’t put enough postage on to get her request across the ocean. Aunt Esther had very fine pale hair, like cornsilk to the touch. But she had almost no eyebrows whereas Essie’s were long and sharp, right on the edge of the two arches of bone that ended her forehead; she loved their shape, every hair of them, and the way at the outside of the arches they went slightly up and over the edge, like Vincent Price’s when he had evil thoughts. Momma said one time it made her look more mature than thirteen, she had the eyebrows of a grown woman, and Essie treasured all such remarks that helped her to see herself from the outside, as others saw her.

Aunt Esther since the war started had stopped getting her hair cut and permanent-waved but let it grow long and made of it a pigtail she wrapped around her head, as if just to get it out of the way now that she was the mother of three—all boys, all noisy and awful: Peter Junior, Jefferson, and Ira. Their father, Peter, was going bald and off in Washington all the time working for some wartime agency; he couldn’t explain what for fear of giving away war secrets. The war had done Uncle Jared out in Colorado good, too. Back after the Crash that had started the Depression he had been given a piece of a mountain with a played-out copper mine in it, to keep him quiet, by his wife’s father, who was a crook, Daddy and Momma told her one night when Ama wasn’t listening. Now the need for copper was so great the government had paid him lots of money to get the mine working again. “That Jared,” Daddy had said, and laughed a little—he never laughed a lot. “My brother will always land on his feet. It might take him years, but he’ll land on his feet.” Essie loved it when Daddy let slip his sense of the Wilmots’ being somehow special, with a destiny that stretched above and beyond Basingstoke. Instead of being fine and shimmery like Aunt
Esther’s, Essie’s hair was thick and unruly, so when she came in from running home from the baseball fields or working in the hot damp greenhouse it would be out from her head like a madwoman’s, Momma said, sending her straight to her room to comb and brush. Essie would experiment in front of the mirror with putting her hair up like Rita Hayworth’s in
My Gal Sal
or Bette Davis’s in
The Little Foxes
and
Now, Voyager
, or looser like Greta Garbo’s in
Two-Faced Woman
or Ingrid Bergman’s in
Casablanca
, more like real hair that hadn’t been shellacked or frozen in ripples like Irene Dunne’s. Her face as she pondered it in the mirror was like a pie somehow in the middle: the nose a bit blobby and the lips not curving in and out as the stars’ did but straight across, a slash in the dough, not cushiony and pushy-out like Betty Grable’s or even Momma’s when she was listening to the dance bands on the radio in the kitchen. Essie’s lips were thin and careful like Daddy’s and not pink and flirty like Alice Gordy’s. When she experimented with Momma’s lipstick and rouge it felt as if she was painting the middle of a pie. Though she began to have periods last July she had no breasts, either, though Loretta Whaley had quite nice pointy ones that pulled at her blouses and even Junie Mulholland, you could see where they were starting when she wore a sweater.

Essie sighed, leaning her weight backward on her elbows on the splintery bleacher board above the one she was sitting on. Something needed to rescue her but in the meantime the flat land that had been the poorhouse fields receded hypnotically under a soft April sky that looked like a piece of wet paper somebody had been brushing with gray in stripes. The smells of new grass and softening earth and peach blossoms from the sea of creamy pink beyond the playground were soaking into her brain, so she could hardly move, though it
was getting late. Loretta and Junie had gone on home, cradling their books against their lucky breasts, and Eddie and Fats and a couple younger boys from this tannery end of town were playing basketball around the playground backboard. The ball had a slow leak and whenever anybody tried to dribble the bounce got less and less, so that everybody laughed and somebody would kick the ball away. The only other person on the bleachers with her, three boards down, was Benjy Whaley, who was reading a
Captain Marvel
comic book and yet was aware of her, she could tell. She uncrossed her ankles in their white socks and recrossed them, stretching her legs out so tight she felt the muscles squeak. At least she had nice long legs. Already she was as tall as Momma, and even though Ama was still taller a lot of it was her hair, piled up that way she had, like a big gray doughnut on top of her head. Essie sighed again, so loud she almost had to say something. “How’s the comic book, Benjy? I don’t hear you laugh.”

He didn’t turn to speak to her, a sure sign he had been really aware of her. “It’s not supposed to be funny.”

“Sometimes it is, though,” she said. “Some of the villains. And the way he says ‘Shazam.’ ”

Benjy said, “Shazam!” in a big voice, meaning to be funny but showing he was too nervous to think of what to say.

“You can’t tell me those men who draw that strip don’t think it’s funny,” she said. “I bet they sit there laughing at dopes like you who take it seriously.”

“Without dopes like me spending their dimes,” he said, “they’d be out of a living.” Now he did look at her, leaning back and staring with his face upside down, a pointy chin where the top of his head should be and his eyelids blinking the wrong way, with the red on top instead of underneath. It was terrible like a creature from Mars, or a crab when you
thought where its eyes and mouth were. He actually had a nice round pointy chin, like a girl’s, more feminine than her own, which was a little bit too squared-off. She wished she had his chin. Benjy had always noticed her, pushing her and pulling at the ribbon in the back of her dress, but in the junior high he was milder, somehow, and more subdued, as though with the addition of the new students that had been in elementary schools over near St. Georges and that now came by bus, swelling the classes, he had discovered something about himself, maybe that he would never amount to much more than his father, who worked in Shorty Sturgis’s Garage and ran a one-man gun shop on the side and in the evenings. In Delaware men loved to shoot ducks; they would get up early in the mornings and go crouch in the reeds. Benjy needed to be teased a little. She retracted her long legs in their scuffed saddle shoes and red kilt skirt and moved down to sit on the board beside him. Looking down to be careful and not fall and break a leg, which could happen on these old bleachers, she saw all the papers and bottles that had collected on the grass underneath. The grass was trying to grow, but because of the shade from the bleacher boards was coming in yellow.

“L-let’s see,” she said, leaning slightly against his arm. Captain Marvel was fighting some bald scientist who was within a whisker of having the secret that would permit him to rule the universe, along with the Axis powers. One panel showed him talking to Hitler over the phone, with electric zigzags leaping around the curve of the earth. “That’s so dumb,” she said. Benjy said nothing, just turned the page. She couldn’t believe he read so slowly. “D-did you listen to Jack Benny the other night?” she asked. “I love it when he visits his money in the vault, all that creaking and slamming—even my father gets to laughing hard. We all sit listening Sunday
nights right from Jack Benny through Phil Harris and Alice Faye, and he starts to snore in the middle of Charlie McCarthy.”

“I forget,” Benjy said, lowering the comic book and looking toward the horizon. “Sometimes we listen. My father says they’re all Jewish.”

“I don’t think Edgar Bergen is Jewish, he’s Swedish,” Essie said. “Anyway, what does it matter?”

Benjy had a very interesting mouth in profile, fitted together so precisely, and a little angrily, like Vivien Leigh’s in
Gone With the Wind
. That had been
such
a tremendous movie, though she didn’t like it when the little girl fell off the horse and died, and preferred
The Wizard of Oz
, where nobody got hurt except the witches. Dorothy had breasts, you could see, even though she’s supposed to be a little girl. “We’re fighting this war,” Benjy said, “because the Jews got us into it.”