Queenie (7 page)

And I’m going off. Like a hat.

“Didn’t kill mine,” says Oscar.

Then we three are silent. Wars are what they are, but a family joke has just died.

“Why do you wear that old coral?” she says, with the first motherly petulance ever shown me. “It dates you!”

Oscar gave me it at my birth—a Georgian coral. Which is a baby’s silver teething rattle, knobbed and belled and big as a fist, with an inch-long red prong. I wear it on a chain and tell the kids it’s a phallus. Certainly it’s valuable.

“No harm done, Aurine,” says Oscar. “Since it’s George the Third…Queenie—what’s it you’ve got there, behind your back? A yes? Or a no?”

I don’t have to say.

“All that reading!” says my aunt. “You’ll ruin your chin line!”

Oscar winks at me. “Long as it’s not her eyes.”

Oh, I know the ruin she wants for me—and in what style! Just as I know the worry they have for me. Like the Vatican must have for its new-style nuns: Whatever’s in their pure hearts, their legs are showing.

And I can’t help to conceal from these two loving experts what my free tongue has hid from my classmates. That though technically of course I’m not untouched by human hands, whole regions of me remain unexplored.

There’s a dull word for that sort of female. It will never pass our lips. Not in this house.

“College couples seem to marry each other so indiscriminately,” Oscar says. “Out of nostalgia, do you think, because they can’t stay on? Don’t just marry somebody, Queenie, so’s you can revisit your sophomore year in the evenings.”

“
Everybody
going to college looks rich and healthy,” says Aurine. “So how will you tell which?”

All a parent really wants is reassurance. On what your temperament is. They just wanna be sure it’s theirs. They can’t wait to know. And they can’t believe
you
don’t know.

So I do what I can for them.

“Uncle——” I say. “I promise
not
to couple indiscriminately. Marry, I mean.” I see that his new image of him self—as a pater—isn’t quite happy with this. “Or—I won’t let anybody set me up, unless he has your permission.”

“Child, child, child,” says Aurine. Almost a groan. A wrinkle has actually appeared between her brows. “Do you know your own worth!” That’s the French side of her—she hates waste. But most of all, she wants me to
get on with it
.

What can I promise her? I think of what Gran said, how in her day the sheets still were examined for the maidenhead. Not in the Middle Ages either, Ducky—in Liverpool. “Don’t worry, Aunt,” I say, soothing. I reach out and smooth away that wrinkle. “Soon’s I’m fucked, I’ll phone home.”

So—ten minutes of apologies. If we don’t say “virgin” much in this house, we don’t say fuck either. Sorry. It slipped out. But how did it come to be there, to slip? Do girls of today always go around thinking like that? No pretense—she doesn’t. I recall Oscar explaining once why the confessions of courtesans are so mincing. “Ladies to the end. Even that end.” But he doesn’t wink now.

“Not always,” I mutter. So the peculiar freedoms of our house, which I know as well as they, are restated. Finesse is all.

Except for money. Now I’m to go, they simply will not accept my plan to pay for it.

“NO!” Oscar says, with a great rise of the watchchain. “That diamond in the vault belongs to you!”

“We-ell——” How do I say it to them? “So do
I
.”

“NO!” says Aurine. “I’ll hock
me
.” Meaning, her diamonds….One way or the other, our personalities are a good deal involved with jewelry.

Later, Oscar tells me mine’s worth too much to be any easy hock; the market would rather buy.

And Aurine remembers hers are already in pawn.

But right now, she says plaintively, “
Mesdames. Et Monsieurs.
” And stops, looking at us oddly. Why does her own generous action embarrass a person? Answer, from Oscar later—because if it concerns money, money’s not a good mixer, money’s as cold and neutral as the universe. Which must be why he can’t make it any more; money doesn’t like to be ignored.

He’s looking back at her. “
Oui, Madame?
” I realize I’ve never heard him talk French to her before. And what a lot there is between them that I, darling of their house corners, may never know.

She’s quite unable to speak yet. I see a pulse at her temple. A beautiful woman, doing a gracious act that’s difficult for her; shouldn’t this encourage the stars that once in a while humans are worth holding the universe together for? Don’t count on it. But closer relatives are much moved.

“No,” says Aurine, in the smallest voice I’ve ever heard from her. “I’ll get it. I can get quite a lot of money there….The restaurant.”

So! She does have a piece of it then. Bought back somehow from whoever the old man, whose bastard she was, sold it to? Certainly Gran didn’t inherit the place; she could never have kept it from us.

Oh, if there were a man at the head of it now, Oscar and I could understand well enough how this violet-draped woman, with her bronze hair and non-smile, could get anything from him. But there’s nobody there except the old headwaiter Marcel, and the owner is thought to be a syndicate. She must have a share.

“
Cherie, cherie
——” Oscar says quick. It means no, don’t do it; no, don’t tell me—probably a lot of things, including, “My dear girl, Queenie and I were always on to you, as you very well know.”

Oscar’s very complicated, but he seldom bothers to be quick. Last year, a young man said to him, “These new Edwardian clothes become you.” And Oscar replied, “Got them in Paris, at a price; you’ll find the mannerisms come with them, for free.” But he was too kind to say that this was all back in 1935.

“Ahhhh…
Cheri
!” Aurine says in a long, graduated voice, as if she’s stabbing herself just below her pearls. Which are not in hock. She too is much moved. It’s like Camille, like Réjane, like the divine Sarah—before her leg went; it’s like Aurine’s whole bookshelf. But since it’s like her too, it’s real.

“Oh she’s worth it, our girl, isn’t she,
mon vieux
?” she says. The pearls swell to an arc for him. The smile, from the heart of another girl, whatever’s in it, is for me. But the voice that issues from it, sideways, is pure bourse. “Don’t worry,
copain
. I won’t have to
sell
.”

She
is the syndicate.

We both know exactly what it costs her to tell. Not just the natural fear of all the girls in her set of beautiful women from twenty to sixty, beautifully kept by men of all ages. A fear which at times takes forms much stranger than stocks or emeralds, or even ace-in-the-hole secondary affairs. Like with Martyne, who’s now spending her take as a part-time bookie, on jockey lessons. And Alba, who every Friday leaves her townhouse and Maserati to go by subway to a law office—“Law stenos get very high pay.” Or Dulcie, who does “something awfully tiring, Duck,” for the government.

Aurine’s courting a deeper danger. That Oscar will catch on that her private thrift, private fear, is for
him
.

In the world of finance, he must appear to be king.

Hasn’t she often and often told me why? “Our world is cleaner, Queenie. We never make a man pay. Except in money.”

Though she knows living cheap wouldn’t bother Oscar for himself, only for her. And that’s it, you see. At the bottom of this holding company of interlocking ownership. She can’t let on to herself that she might be doing it for love. She has to keep
herself
up to the mark.

“I bought the place years ago, when it got rundown,” she says to him in her softest voice. “For a song.” That may be true, considering all sides of her. “Out of the housekeeping money.” Then she rallies, in order not to think less of herself. “After all, in all New York——” which means the people we know in it, “what woman’s had a higher housekeeping than me?”

Oscar answers smiling. “It can never be enough.”

Next day, he sends her a bibelot, not from Alexander’s, tucked inside the weekly orchid. Where does he get
his
secret income from, I wonder—at stud? Which since I’ve shocked them once too often, I don’t say. For a whole week after, he has that queer smile on his face, for how well he knows her. And another not too different one, for me.

“In that bordello you’re going to, Queenie,” he says, “see that you do as well.”

So it’s settled, Father. And that’s how I get out of the château.

It’s one hell of an exhaustion, being an old-fashioned girl.

But it’s not until the parties that I learn what’s in my own heart.

Looking back now at the loving crazy quilt of coming-out parties they patch up for me: A Stag at Oscar’s, with me the only doe; a Family Fuss at the restaurant, with no family but us; and an all-time Bye-Bye Blowout with the “girls” I can see from an aerial perspective of two months, which is plenty at my age, that they still think, “Wouldn’t sending her off with a man be the safest?” And are still hoping God will intervene.

It’s hard not believing in God, in my family. Harder even, Oscar says, than for lapsed Catholics. Aurine says, “It’s because God believes in
us
.” That’s her theology.

And I believe in her.

The Stag at Oscar’s

Oscar’s soiree is my first send-off, Father. Too bad you were in retreat. It’s only his cronies, dropping in more formally than usual, to what one of them once called the New York Athletic Club’s Theater Wing. Some still do come in straight from the steambaths over there. All are of an age to benefit from them. And they’ve known Oscar’s little ward Queenie all her life. They’re my other uncles. Still, sixty men and a girl, and not one of them too young to be a father-image—how could God help getting a little interested?

Like in my childhood, the party is stag. And since it’s for me, they all find this charming. The only change is from afternoon to evening. Plus that back then it wasn’t me, in my scrawny leotards, whose points the conversation was appreciating. And now has just toasted in champagne.

“I feel nostalgic already,” I say to Sam Newber. “I don’t know yet for what or who.”

“That’s what nostalgia is, you nit. And you don’t have to go to college to learn why.” Sam’s a sandy, marionette sort of person, polished very high, like one of his comedy successes of the forties I saw revived once. Very tuxedo stuff, with a few spiritual zonks for the male and female leads to sink into the sofa with, at the end.

“Maybe that’s what
champagne
is,” I giggle. I’ve always been able to talk to Sam almost like to a girl. Aurine can too—she says don’t let’s wonder why. Does Sam? “Imagine me not being able to drop in here every day, even for a coke.”

Imagine an arched double living room, fifty by thirty, and fifteen feet high, darkish except for the yellow Tiffany light at the tops of the oblong windows, and everything furnished from old stage sets—only the solid kind of three-acters, that used to have drawing rooms in Mayfair or Murray Hill. No flashy stuff, nothing surreal. One bent-wood rocker, from Weegie Jones’ farmhouse-ballad readings of the thirties, that even then was a flop. “Oscar’s letting him revive it,” I say. “But it still flops.”

“A lot of flops are here,” Sam says. “Some of mine.”

A lot of very elegant ones certainly are, from yards-long English breakfronts to those French bureaus that swell out like women. And seventeen pair of portieres, Father. Oscar says half of Paris comes into a room with that word. The other half comes from the thrift shops on Third Avenue. Plus twenty club chairs in black leather, said to come from the Hotel Marguery, which make it comfortable. I sink into one of them. It’s a room for men all right. Nothing cozy-chintzy. Or penthousey. That’s left to us, upstairs. This is the downstairs of life.

Two kinds of men are here. Mainly, Oscar’s clients from the big days, from the really famous opera singers, politicians, explorers, playwrights and legit stars, down to diplomats, royalties, tennis stars, any lecture name who could have filled a hall, once. The rest are the stooges; nice little guys who once worked those worlds in some way, columnists and ticket brokers and press agents, and one very old guy said to be the Barrymores’ butler—I’ve never known whether for stage or for real. As a child, I had no preference; in one respect, all their knees felt the same. I knew I was being dandled by men who liked women.

“It’s been a great background,” I say to Sam. I’m saying it silently to all of them, who though they’re deep in clubmen’s smoke at the moment, won’t have forgotten me and mine. These fine world-worn men, pledging their troth to me in cigar rings, and an occasional pinch, believed in us. And in spite of the scarcity of Cuban cigars, and the decline of the pinch—I believe in them.

Sam’s at the bookshelves. “Oscar must have over fifteen thousand books here. And over a thousand of them must be real.”

The rest are very fine vellum the stage designers used to buy by the yard. And set in a row of lighted niches under the brow of the books are the women Sam is looking at, in photos any size from one foot to life.

“Very selective,” says Sam. “Oscar’s not one to take everything he’s given, is he?” All the girls in Aurine’s set are there, each in the clothes of her big era—all the live ones. Sam is going down the line. “Why, I didn’t know Lalla was dead,” says Sam.

“Yes, Oscar never puts up a nude one until she’s gone.” When it’s respectful. For these are the girls these men in their time have belonged to. Pardon—have kept. Now and then in rotation. Though it’s true, Oscar doesn’t take just anything he’s given. Except for me.

I giggle again. “Once I asked Oscar who decided the size of the photos. He said, ‘Modesty, dear.’”

“True,” Sam says. “Here’s Dulcy, whom we all love in spite of her CIA connections. Only one foot and a half. Always so self-deprecating.”

“And there’s Taffy Rhys-Williams,” I point. “Who went off with Tekla’s rajah.” No loss. But no excuse either. “She sent herself back in a crate.” Five and a half feet of skin and pearls, and skin; when Oscar brought it upstairs to show Aurine, she said, “Well—practically dead.”

Aurine never comes down here. Her picture’s set a little apart from the rest, and is an oil painting, as a sign she belongs to the house. It’s from ten years ago. In a dress you could die for.