Lives of Girls and Women (22 page)

Mr. Chamberlain had to read commercials too, and he did it with ripe concern, recommending Vick's Nose Drops from Cross's Drugstore, and Sunday dinner at the Brunswick Hotel, and Lee Wickert and sons for dead livestock removal. “How's the dead livestock, soldier?” Fern would greet him, and he might slap her lightly on the rump. “I'll tell them you need their services!” “Looks to me more like you do,” said Fern without much malice, and he would drop into a chair and smile at my mother for pouring him tea. His light blue-green eyes had no expression, just that colour, so pretty you would want to make a dress out of it. He was always tired.

Mr. Chamberlain's white hands, his nails cut straight across, his greying, thinning, nicely combed hair, his body that did not in any way disturb his clothes but seemed to be made of the same material as they were, so that he might have been shirt and tie and suit all the way through, were strange to me in a man. Even Uncle Benny, so skinny and narrow-chested, with his damaged bronchial tubes, had some look or way of moving that predicted chance or intended violence, something that would make disorder; my father had this too, though he was so moderate in his ways. Yet it was Mr. Chamberlain, tapping his ready-made cigarette in the ashtray, Mr. Chamberlain who had been in the war, he had been in the Tank Corps. If my father was there when he came to see us—to see Fern, really, but he did not quickly make that apparent—my father would ask him questions
about the war. But it was clear that they saw the war in different ways. My father saw it as an overall design, marked off in campaigns, which had a purpose, which failed or succeeded. Mr. Chamberlain saw it as a conglomeration of stories, leading nowhere in particular. He made his stories to be laughed at.

For instance he told us about the first time he went into action, what confusion there was. Some tanks had gone into a wood, got turned around, were coming out the wrong way, where they expected the Germans to come from. So the first shots they fired were at one of their own tanks.

“Blew it up!” said Mr. Chamberlain blithely, unapologetically.

“Were there soldiers in that tank?”

He looked at me in mocking surprise as he always did when I said anything; you would think I had just stood on my head for him. “Well, I wouldn't be too surprised if there were!”

“Were they—killed, then?”

“Something happened to them. I certainly never saw them around again. Poof!”

“Shot by their own side, what a terrible thing,” said my mother, scandalized but less than ordinarily sure of herself.

“Things like that happen in a war,” said my father quietly but with some severity, as if to object to any of this showed a certain female naiveté. Mr. Chamberlain just laughed. He went on to tell about what they did on the last day of the war. They blew up the cookhouse, turned all the guns on it in the last jolly blaze they would get.

“Sounds like a bunch of kids,” said Fern. “Sounds like you weren't grown-up enough to fight a
war
. It just sounds like you had one big idiotic good time.”

“What I always try to have, isn't it? A good time.”

Once it came out that he had been in Florence, which was not surprising, since he had fought the war in Italy. But my mother sat up, she jumped a little in her chair, she quivered with attention.

“Were
you
in Florence?”

“Yes, ma'am,” said Mr. Chamberlain without enthusiasm.

“In Florence, you were in Florence,” repeated my mother, confused and joyful. I had an inkling of what she felt, but hoped she would not
reveal too much. “I never thought,” she said. “Well, of course I knew it was Italy but it seems so strange—” She meant that this Italy we had been talking about, where the war was fought, was the same place history happened in, the very place, where the old Popes were, and the Medici, and Leonardo. The Cenci. The cypresses. Dante Alighieri.

Rather oddly, in view of her enthusiasm for the future, she was excited by the past. She hurried into the front room and came back with the Art and Architecture Supplement to the encyclopedia, full of statues, paintings, buildings, mostly photographed in a cloudy, cool, museum-grey light.

“There!” she opened it up on the table in front of him. “There's your Florence. Michelangelo's statue of David. Did you see that?”

A naked man. His marble thing hanging on him for everybody to look at; like a drooping lily petal. Who but my mother in her staunch and dreadful innocence would show a man, would show us all, a picture like that? Fern's mouth was swollen, with the effort to contain her smile.

“I never got to see it, no. That place is full of statues. Famous this and famous that. You can't turn around for them.”

I could see he was not a person to talk to, about things like this. But my mother kept on.

“Well surely you saw the bronze doors? The magnificent bronze doors? It took the artist his whole life to do them. Look at them, they're here. What was his name—Ghiberti. Ghiberti. His whole life.”

Some things Mr. Chamberlain admitted he had seen, some he had not. He looked at the book with a reasonable amount of patience, then said he had not cared for Italy.

“Well, Italy, maybe that was all right. It was the Italians.”

“Did you think they were decadent?” said my mother regretfully. “Decadent, I don't know. I don't know what they were. They don't care. On the street in Italy I've had a man come up to me and offer to sell me his own daughter. It happened all the time.”

“What would they want to sell a girl for?” I said, adopting as I easily could my bold and simple facade of innocence. “For a slave?”

“In a manner of speaking,” said my mother, and she shut the book, relinquishing Michelangelo and the bronze doors.

“No older than Del here,” said Mr. Chamberlain, with a disgust that in him seemed faintly fraudulent. “Not so old, some of them.”

“They mature earlier,” Fern said. “Those hot climates.”

“Del. You take this book, put it away.” Alarm in my mother's voice was like the flap of rising wings.

Well, I had heard. I did not come back to the dining room but went upstairs and undressed. I put on my mother's black rayon dressing gown, splattered with bunches of pink and white flowers. Impractical gift she never wore. In her room I stared, goose-pimpled and challenging, into the three-way mirror. I pulled the material off my shoulders and bunched it over my breasts, which were just about big enough to fit those wide, shallow cones of paper laid in sundae dishes. I had turned on the light beside the dressing table; it came meekly, warmly through a bracket of butterscotch glass, and laid a kind of glow on my skin. I looked at my high round forehead, pink freckled skin, my face as innocent as an egg, and my eyes managed to alter what was there, to make me sly and creamy, to change my hair, which was light brown, fine as a crackling bush, into rich waves more gold than muddy. Mr. Chamberlain's voice in my mind, saying
no older than Del here,
acted on me like the touch of rayon silk on my skin, surrounded me, made me feel endangered and desired. I thought of girls in Florence, girls in Rome, girls my age that a man could buy. Black Italian hair under their arms. Black down at the corners of their mouths.
They mature earlier in those hot climates
. Roman Catholics. A man paid you to let him do it. What did he say? Did he take your clothes off or did he expect you to do that yourself? Did he take down his pants or did he simply unzip himself and point his thing at you? It was the stage of transition, bridge between what was possible, known and normal behaviour, and the magical, bestial act, that I could not imagine. Nothing about that was in Naomi's mother's book.

There was a house in Jubilee with three prostitutes in it. That is, three if you counted Mrs. McQuade who ran it; she was at least sixty years old. The house was at the north end of the main street, in a yard all run to hollyhocks and dandelions, beside the B.A. service station. On sunny days the two younger women would sometimes come out
and sit in canvas chairs. Naomi and I had made several trips past and had once seen them. They wore print dresses and slippers; their white legs were bare. One of them was reading the
Star Weekly
. Naomi said that this one's name was Peggy, and that one night in the men's toilet at the Gay-la dance hall she had been persuaded to serve a line-up, standing up. Was such a thing possible? (I heard this story another time, only now it was Mrs. McQuade herself who performed or endured this feat, and it was not at the Gay-la dance hall but against the back wall of the Blue Owl Cafe.) I wished I had seen more of this Peggy than the soft, mouse brown nest of curls above the paper; I wished I had seen her face. I did expect something—a foul shimmer of corruption, some emanation, like marsh gas. I was surprised, in a way, that she would read a paper, that the words in it would mean the same things to her, presumably, as they did to the rest of us, that she ate and drank, was human still. I thought of her as having gone right beyond human functioning into a condition of perfect depravity, at the opposite pole from sainthood but similarly isolated, unknowable. What appeared to be ordinariness here—the
Star Weekly,
dotted curtains looped back, geraniums growing hopefully out of tin cans, in the whorehouse window, seemed to me deliberate and tantalizing deception—the skin of everyday appearances stretched over such shamelessness, such consuming explosions of lust.

I rubbed my hipbones through the cool rayon. If I had been born in Italy my flesh would already be used, bruised, knowing. It would not be my fault. The thought of whoredom, not my fault, bore me outward for a moment; a restful, alluring thought, because it was so final, and did away with ambition and anxiety.

After this I constructed in several halting imperfect instalments a daydream. I imagined that Mr. Chamberlain saw me in my mother's black flowered dressing gown, pulled down off the shoulders, as I had seen myself in the mirror. Then I proposed to have the dressing gown come off, let him see me with nothing on at all. How could it happen? Other people who would ordinarily be in the house with us would have to be got rid of. My mother I sent out to sell encyclopedias; my brother I banished to the farm. It would have to be in the summer holidays, when I was home from school. Fern
would not yet be home from the Post Office. I would come downstairs in the heat of the late afternoon, a sulphurous still day, wearing only this dressing gown. I would get a drink of water at the sink, not seeing Mr. Chamberlain sitting quietly in the room, and then—what? A strange dog, introduced into our house for this occasion only, might jump on me, pulling the dressing gown off. I might turn and somehow catch the material on the nail of a chair, and the whole thing would just slither to my feet. The thing was that it had to be an accident; no effort on my part, and certainly none on Mr. Chamberlain's. Beyond the moment of revelation my dream did not go. In fact it often did not get that far, but lingered among the preliminary details, solidifying them. The moment of being seen naked could not be solidified, it was a stab of light. I never pictured Mr. Chamberlain's reaction, I never very clearly pictured him. His presence was essential but blurred; in the corner of my daydream he was featureless but powerful, humming away electrically like a blue fluorescent light.

N
AOMI'S FATHER CAUGHT US
, as we raced past his door on our way downstairs.

“You young ladies come in and visit me a minute, make yourselves comfortable.”

It was spring by this time, windy yellow evening. Nevertheless he was burning garbage in a round tin stove in his room, it was hot and smelly. He had washed his socks and underwear and hung them on strings along the wall. Naomi and her mother treated him unceremoniously. When her mother was away, as now, Naomi would open a can of spaghetti and dump it out on a plate, for his dinner. I would say, “Aren't you going to heat it?” and she would say, “Why bother? He wouldn't know the difference anyway.”

In his room, on the floor, he had stacks of newsprint pamphlets which I supposed had to do with the religion he believed in. Naomi sometimes had to bring them from the Post Office. Taking her cue from her mother, she had great contempt for his beliefs. “It's all prophecies and prophecies,” she said. “They have prophesied the end of the world three times now.”

We sat on the edge of the bed, which had no spread on it, only a rough rather dirty blanket, and he sat in his rocker opposite us. He was an old man. Naomi's mother had nursed him before she married him. Between his words there were usually large gaps, during which he would not forget about you, however, but fix his pale eyes on your forehead as if he expected to find the rest of his thought written out there.

“Reading from the Bible,” he said genially and unnecessarily, and rather in the manner of one who chooses not to see objections he knows are there. He opened a large-print Bible with the place already marked and began to read in a piercing elderly voice, with some odd stops, and difficulties of phrasing.

Then shall the kingdom of heaven be likened unto ten virgins, which took their lamps, and went forth to meet the bridegroom.

And five of them were wise, and five were foolish.

They that were foolish took their lamps, and took no oil with them.

But the wise took oil in their vessels with their lamps.

While the bridegroom tarried, they all slumbered and slept.

And at midnight there was a cry made, Behold, the bridegroom cometh; go ye out to meet him.

Then all those virgins arose, and trimmed their lamps.

And the foolish said unto the wise, Give us of your oil; for our lamps are

gone out.

Then it turned out of course—now I remembered hearing all this before—that the wise virgins would not give up any of their oil for fear they would not have enough, and the foolish virgins had to go out and buy some, and so missed the bridegroom coming and were shut out. I had always supposed this parable, which I did not like, had to do with prudence, preparedness, something like that. But I could see that Naomi's father believed it to be about sex. I looked sideways at Naomi to catch that slight sucking in of the corners of the mouth, the facial drollery with which she always recognized this subject, but she was looking obstinate and miserable, disgusted by the very thing that was my secret pleasure—poetic flow of words, archaic expressions.
Said unto, tarried, Behold the bridegroom