Lace II (41 page)

What Judy most remembered about poverty was the humiliation.

“And how do you intend to avoid starving? Or do you intend to play poker as a profession?” Aunt Hortense waved her gold Bracelets toward Bobby, who was standing next to Maxine and shading his big blue eyes from the sun.

“My father wants me to be a stockbroker and join his firm.” Something in Bobby’s voice made it sound unlikely. “That’s why I’m a student at the business school.”

“But what do you really want to do?”

“I want to be a singer.” He gave Aunt Hortense a crooked grin.

“A singer? Like Frank Sinatra?” asked Aunt Hortense as Maxine licked her fingertips, stretched her arms to the glittering sun and then unzipped her jacket, thinking that nice boys from good families do not go into show business.

“Not like Frank Sinatra, not like anybody you know!” Bobby threw her an impertinent, urchin grin.

“Then do you play the piano, like Cole Porter?” Aunt Hortense persisted.

Bobby gave Aunt Hortense a cherubic smile. “I play the piano, but not like Cole Porter.” Still modest at eighteen, Bobby could also play the guitar, the flute and the organ; if they intended to take music scholarships to Oxford or Cambridge, the most gifted music students at Westminster school were allowed to practice on the massive, seven-keyboarded organ in Westminster Abbey. Bobby Harris’s stockbroker father had firmly told him that any kind of career in music was out of the question, but Bobby wouldn’t and couldn’t stop playing, any more than he could stop breathing.

“Where do you sing, Bobby?” Aunt Hortense demanded.

“I don’t sing in public, I just sing.” Bobby scratched his curly dark hair and felt uncomfortable; he didn’t want to make polite conversation about music to someone’s aunt.

“So what are you going to do about your future?”

“I don’t know.”

Aunt Hortense had no children, but was still, at heart, a child herself. She enjoyed doing whatever it was that young people were doing that week and (unlike them) she had all the adult goodies—the cars, the cash, the credit cards, and the credibility—to make fact of the fantasies of the young. Now, Aunt Hortense leaned forward and said, “No one will throw you into jail if you don’t become a stockbroker, Bobby. And if you don’t like it, you’ll probably be a bad stockbroker. People generally perform best at what they like doing best. So what do you like doing?”

“I write songs. I play a bit.” Bobby shrugged and lifted his high-arched eyebrows even higher.

“So why don’t we go this evening to a nightclub, and ask the band if you can sing with them for a few numbers?”

“We
can’t,” said Maxine, crossly, “because Monsieur Chardin, the headmaster, would never allow us out of school for the evening.”

“I can’t.” Bobby was obviously embarrassed. “Because my allowance has run out, and I’ve just paid for our lunch with my poker winnings.”

“Aunts are for when your allowance has run out. Would you like another méringue, Maxine?” Aunt Hortense waved
her purple-nailed hand at a waiter. “Myself, I have not much money, but I have enough for serious frivolity. I will ask Monsieur Chardin to make an exception for you tonight, Maxine, and I will beg your supervisor to free you for one evening, Judy. Then we will all dance all night together.”

“She will, too, she’s as strong as an ox,” Maxine said to Bobby.

*   *   *

Unfortunately, Bobby did not sing the kind of songs that provided good rhythm for dancing, and he was embarrasssed by Aunt Hortense’s insistence that he perform in the small, dark, pine-paneled nightclub. Reluctantly, he went into a huddle with the band—four middle-aged men, wearing lederhosen and green felt jackets. There was much head scratching and explaining, then Bobby said, “Forget it, fellows, just forget it. Give me the guitar and I’ll get this over with.” He dragged a stool up to the microphone and started to play.

Judy was surprised to hear this diffident English boy open his mouth and holler two blues numbers as, under his agile, skinny fingers, the tired old dance-band guitar produced tortured wails and hot rhythms. Then Bobby jumped off the stool and replaced the guitar on its stand as the audience, sitting at candle-lit tables, gave a cheerful round of applause. But Aunt Hortense sent him back to the microphone saying, “The band has taken a half-hour break, so it’s your job to entertain us.”

*   *   *

Judy soon found out that Bobby only liked black American music. Under the bed in his chilly, bed-sitting-room, he kept a heavy portable record player and a suitcase full of American records. All the records seemed to be by blues singers with three names: Blind Lemon Jefferson, T-Bone Walker, Sunny Boy Williamson. Bobby treated his 78s as if they were made of spun glass; he dusted the records every time he played them, and the changed the steel needles in his record player almost every day, to make sure that the discs weren’t damaged.

“I suppose you couldn’t write home to one of your friends, Judy, to get me some records?” Bobby threw her his angelic smile. “It’s terribly difficult to get blues records, even in London, and it’s downright impossible in Switzerland.”

So that’s why he’s being so cute, thought Judy, who now found it hard to believe that any boy could be nice to her, simply because he liked her. But Judy soon found out that she was wrong about Bobby Harris. He genuinely liked Judy because she was nothing like the twinset-and-pearls, protected, fluttery girls of whom his parents approved. Bobby liked Judy because she was brash, independent and—above all—because she was American. Anything American was magic to Bobby. Little blond Judy, in her pedal pushers and navy pea jacket, seemed as glamorous and alluring as his new pinup, Marilyn Monroe.

Judy liked Bobby because he made her laugh, and because she was flattered by Bobby’s comparing her to the blonde in the potato sack, who was pinned up on his wall. Bobby’s friendly attention helped to rebuild Judy’s demolished self-esteem and, with the puppylike resilience of youth, she quickly started again to look forward, hopefully, instead of backward, regretfully.

Bobby’s courtship strategy was to play his most sexy, suggestive songs late into the night. However late Judy finished work at the Chesa, Bobby would always be awake and waiting for her, ready to throw open the big, double windows of his room and help her scramble up from the street below. His fat, sulky landlady would not have allowed it but, luckily, she was a sound sleeper. One night, as Bobby played to her, Judy went to sleep, sitting on the floor with her back against the wall, and didn’t wake up until morning. Soon, Judy couldn’t see the point of crunching back to the Imperial through the starlit streets at four in the morning, when she would have to be up again at six. Somehow, she managed to survive on hardly any sleep, muttering that if Napoleon only needed two hours a night, then she had better cultivate his habit.

One evening, when Judy was sitting cross-legged on the threadbare rug in Bobby’s room, she said, “Maxine’s boyfriend, Pierre, says you’re going to get thrown out of the business school, Bobby, unless you start working. He says you’re rude to the lecturers and never write any essays.”

“At least I’m not so dumb as that ski-bum, Pierre.” Bobby fixed a capo on the neck of his guitar to alter the pitch. “The Head had me in for a wigging, but as a matter of fact, I hope
that they do chuck me out.” He readjusted the capo. “Anyway, if I get expelled, I’ll be unemployable, and then I’ll be
free!”

“But you’ll never get a good job,” Judy worried. “You can’t waste all your time playing these songs. You ought to be studying in the evenings.”

“I wish you’d stop telling me what to do.” Bobby was annoyed.

“It’s for your own good, Bobby. I’m only thinking of you.”

“I wish you wouldn’t.”

“What do you mean?” Judy thought, not another one, getting ready to walk out on me. She said anxiously, “Why shouldn’t I think of you? You love me … don’t you? You’ve told me so, often enough.”

Bobby said nothing.

*   *   *

“Telephone, Monsieur Harris, from Paris!” He could hear the disapproval in his landlady’s voice as she shrieked up the stairs after breakfast.

It was Aunt Hortense, with a surprising suggestion.

“You’re a frivolous, irresponsible old woman,” he happily shouted into the black receiver.

“And I miss you, too,” Aunt Hortense’s mellifluous voice floated out of the trumpet-shaped ear-piece.

“You have told them I like to sing the blues, not le hot jazz?” Anxiously, Bobby raised his high-arched eyebrows even higher. This was too good to be true.

“They are delighted, delighted. It’s a very
louche
little club, they love the idea. And, when they see that angel face of yours, they’ll love you on sight.”

Bobby scrawled Judy a note, then caught the next train to Paris.

*   *   *

“Two men in two months—that doesn’t make you a fallen woman,” said Maxine, comfortingly. “It’s not your fault.” She passed Judy her handkerchief, looked around Judy’s narrow servant’s bedroom and thought, growing up seemed to need a lot of handkerchiefs. Again Maxine read Bobby’s crumpled note: “‘…I didn’t tell you I was going because I knew we’d have a row … know you don’t really like my songs or my music, but I’m determined to give myself a
chance … hope you’ll understand … hope you’ll come and see me at the Hep Cat Club when you come to Paris. Don’t be mad. Lots of love. Take care of yourself. Bobby.’”

“But what did I do wrong?” Judy threw herself on her bed, lay on her stomach and buried her face in the big square pillow. Her muffled voice demanded, “Why do they all leave me, Maxine?”

“Maybe you’re a bit too … bossy?” Maxine suggested. She was not sorry to see the collapse of this unsuitable liaison, but she was sad to see Judy’s misery. “A boy does not like to be told what to do, he gets all that from his mother.”

“I’m not bossy, I’m decisive,” wailed Judy. “Why can’t I be how I am? All I want is a direct, honest relationship with a boy. I want to be loved and trusted. I want to be his friend as well as his girlfriend. I can’t be a flattering, calculating, clinging vine.”

“Then you’re in for a hard time, Judy, because most boys do not want an independent girl.” Maxine shrugged. “Why not be clever, Judy, and pretend to be a little helpless sometimes?”

“I don’t think it’s possible for me to play a part. I want to be an honest person.” Judy sat up. “But if that’s how things are between men and women, I guess I’ll just have to try being devious.”

*   *   *

In the darkness, Sandy was only a curly haired shape against the Istanbul skyline, but Judy could hear the warm sympathy in her voice, as she said, “So that’s why you never knew which one was the father of your baby.”

“Bobby left for Paris in early April. By the end of April I thought I might have missed two periods, but then I’ve never been regular, so I didn’t worry much. And somehow, I never thought that God would let it happen to me. After that, I wasn’t really interested in men for years.”

“Why didn’t you get an abortion?”

“You’re young, Sandy, you’ve no idea what it was like for a woman, only a few years ago. We were only schoolgirls, we had no idea how to get an illegal abortion, and the doctor was Catholic, in Switzerland.”

“Did any of those guys help you, when the baby was born?” Sandy would never have gotten pregnant in the first
place and, had she done so, she would have gotten rid of it, in the second place. And, on the way, she would have milked any man for any money she could derive from the situation.

Reluctantly, Judy said, “At first, I didn’t want to ask either of them, but then I remembered what Maxine had said. Why didn’t I try a little female manipulation? Kate, Pagan, and Maxine had been so supportive—they had each agreed to help pay for the baby—but I was the only one who couldn’t manage to scrape the money together—although Lili was
my
baby.”

The Turkish balcony lit up briefly as the beam of the Leander Tower Lighthouse swept over it. Judy added, “It was easy for Maxine, because she had an allowance from Aunt Hortense. It was easy for Pagan, because she had an allowance from a family trust fund. It was easy for Kate, because her father was rich, but I was a fifteen-year-old waitress.” Judy remembered that long-ago day, when Dr. Geneste, her gynecologist, had let her use his telephone to place the international call. She remembered Curtis’s reaction. Even at that distance, his voice had sounded frightened as he said, “But, Judy, why didn’t you tell me earlier?”

“How could I?” she had hollered down the receiver. “You’d just been married, Curtis. You were somewhere in the Virgin Islands, on a yacht.”

There was a pause. “Don’t worry, Judy. Let me have the details and I’ll send you money for the baby’s care. But promise me that Debra will never know about this.”

“Of course,” Judy shouted gratefully. “I promise that she’ll never find out.”

*   *   *

In the empty Hep Cat Club, just off the Champs Elysées, the silver-foil fringe around the stage looked tawdry with the lights up. The smell of cigarette smoke and old cooking fat lingered in the air as Judy said, “Look, Bobby, do you want to see your daughter?” She looked straight into his innocent blue eyes as she handed him the photographs. Bobby flipped through them once, then more slowly, then he stopped at the close-up of the pudgy little face with black-currant eyes. Slowly, Angelface grinned. “Yeah, she looks like me! Cute smile, isn’t it?” He pulled out his notecase and carefully tucked the photographs away. “Just one thing, Judy, we must
keep quiet about this, and there’s no question of marriage, understand? There never was, and I told you that all along. So let’s keep this just between you and me, and I’ll let you have as much cash as I can.”

Judy felt weak with relief. She didn’t care who was the father or how she got the money, so long as her baby was properly looked after. It looked as if things were fine for the moment, but you never knew what would happen next. She’d save any extra money for a rainy day, in case the baby was ill or something. She felt guilty because she hadn’t told Curtis about Bobby, or Bobby about Curtis, but then, had she done so, probably they would both have refused to help her.