Scruples (6 page)

“Out of the question” was her father’s answer. “Honey lives a good, healthy country life here and there are dozens of perfectly nice children around for her to play with. Hannah’s a good woman, decent and kind, and you aren’t going to persuade me that a three-year-old who gets plenty of fresh air and has normal intelligence needs to be ‘introduced’ to finger painting and, God save us all, organized block building. No, I simply won’t do it and that’s that.” None of the aunts could change his mind. He had always been the most stubborn of a stubborn family.

And so Honey, at the age of three, began to become an outcast from the tribe. The visits from even the best meaning of the aunts slowed to a trickle, since their children were busy with nursery-school obligations on weekdays and they wanted to play with new friends on weekends. To say nothing of birthday parties! It was more sensible to wait until the holidays when dear Josiah could bring Honey to them for the day. It was a pity that he would never stay overnight, but he insisted on getting back to his work every evening.

Honey didn’t really seem to miss the diminishing connection to her horde of stolid cousins and managerial aunts. She played quite contentedly with the children who lived in the modest houses on her street and attended a local kindergarten when the time came. Nor did she feel lonely with Hannah, who baked her cookies and pies and cakes every day. Josiah almost always came home to eat dinner with her before he disappeared downstairs to his work. This was the pattern of her life, and with nothing to compare it to, she accepted it.

After two years at a local kindergarten Honey entered the Ralph Waldo Emerson Elementary School in Framingham. There, from the early days of first grade, she became very gradually aware that she was somehow different from her schoolmates. They all had mothers and brothers and sisters instead of just Hannah, who was not a relative, and a father whom she saw only during a hasty dinner. They had a kind of daily family life, made of jokes, and fights and the intertwining of emotions, which fascinated and puzzled her. On the other hand, they did not have cousins who lived on enormous estates in Wellesley or Chestnut Hill or in glorious town houses in Louisburg Square or in Bulfinch mansions on Mt. Vernon Street. They did not have aunts who belonged to the Sewing Circles and went to Mrs. Welch’s Waltz Evenings—even if now they rarely came to Framingham. Nor did her schoolmates have uncles who had all gone to Harvard, who all either played squash or sailed large boats, who belonged to the Somerset Club or the Union Club, the Myopia Hunt and the Athenaeum. They were not taken by one aunt or another to the Boston Symphony on occasional Friday afternoons.

Honey fell into the habit of boasting about her relatives and cousins and their houses in order to make her lack of a mother and siblings and an ordinary homelife seem unimportant. Gradually her classmates stopped liking Honey, but this didn’t affect her boasting because she never understood precisely
what
it was that they resented. Soon they stopped playing with her after school or inviting her to their houses or including her in their parties. She began to compare them more and more unfavorably with her Brahmin cousins. Although her cousins didn’t seem to particularly dislike her, neither did they like her. Slowly, inevitably, helplessly, and without understanding why, she became a very lonely child. Hannah baked more and more, but even apple pie with vanilla ice cream was little help.

There was no one to talk to about it. Honey never considered telling her father how she felt. They didn’t talk about
feelings;
they never had and they never would. She knew, without knowing that she knew, that he would disapprove if he found out that she was unhappy. Her father often told her that she was a “good” child, too heavy of course, but she’d soon grow out of it. A good child cannot, dare not, allow it to be known that she is not liked or approved of outside of the home circle. Not being popular, to a child, seems to be a final judgment that has been made against her for reasons she does not understand but everyone else does. A child accepts this severely damaging judgment and is ashamed for herself. The humiliation of unpopularity is so great that it must be hidden from anyone who still loves that child and approves of her. That love is too precious to risk with the truth.

When the time came that the aunts insisted that Honey be sent to dancing school, even stubborn Josiah Winthrop had to agree. He was too much of a bred-in-the-bone Bostonian not to accept unquestioningly the sacred ritual of Mr. Lancing de Phister’s Dancing Class. Naturally, without need of explanation, it was simply part of Honey’s heritage, just as was her future membership in the Colonial Dames. Without even thinking it over, he knew that if Matilda had lived, she would have been one of that elect band of well-groomed mothers who escorted their small daughters to the ballroom of the Vincent Club every other Saturday afternoon from October until late May.

Children started at Mr. de Phister’s when they were a minimum of nine years old, not a day before. From the ages of nine till eleven they were considered beginners; from twelve to fourteen they were intermediates; and when the students of fifteen to seventeen had mostly gone off to boarding school, the classes were held on holiday evenings and became, in effect, predebutante dances.

Much later in her life Honey was to discover that almost every woman who had ever been to dancing school had retained horrified memories of gloves lost at the last minute, of petticoats that fell down in the middle of a waltz, and of sweaty boys who stepped on their toes on purpose. But she was secretly convinced that they enjoyed trotting out these nostalgic minor traumas as evidence that they had come from the kind of families who sent their children to dancing school. She never told anyone about Mr. de Phister’s. The lessons she learned there had little to do with dancing.

Instead of an appropriate nine, she had been almost ten years old that first year of classes because of her inconvenient November birthday. A ten-year-old who stood five feet six inches tall and weighed one hundred and forty-five pounds. A ten-year-old in a dress bought in the teen department of the Wellesley branch of Filene’s because nothing in the children’s department fit her. A terrible dress, that Hannah had helped her pick out, a genuinely hideous bright blue taffeta dress.

Various aunts kissed her as she came into the lobby of the Vincent Club, an embarrassed Hannah at her side, and then gave each other appalled glances. “Blast that thickheaded Joe anyway,” one muttered to another with fury, quite forgetting to wave good-bye to her own dainty daughter, neatly turned out in a dusty-rose velvet with an Irish lace collar. Honey’s scattered cousins gave her small waves of greeting as she shyly sidled into the crowded room.

Much of Mr. de Phister’s success depended on the fact that he charged the parents of boys half of what he charged the parents of girls so that every class had a guaranteed surplus of males. His first rule was that every boy must try to find a partner. No boy could sit out a dance until every little girl was dancing. There was, however, no way to prevent the boys from scrambling in a shoving group to ask certain precocious girls to dance, those who had, at nine, already discovered the power of certain looks, certain smiles, the note of a private voice telling a private joke. Nor was there any way to prevent one girl from being the last girl to be asked to dance by an obviously miserable, foot-dragging boy. (Every psychoanalyst in Boston eventually became familiar with the name of Mr. de Phister’s classes.)

Dancing practice alternated with six periods of instruction given by Mr. de Phister and his wife before the break for refreshment in the middle of the two-hour lesson. Six times Honey was the last girl to be asked to dance. When the nightmare came to a temporary halt, she went to the laden table at the side of the room and stood by herself, gorging frantically on small, rich cakes and cookies and many cups of sweet fruit punch. She stood alone in a corner and gobbled as quickly as possible. When Mrs. de Phister signaled the beginning of the second half of the lesson, Honey stayed in her corner, forcing the last cookies into her mouth and gulping down a tenth cup of the grape punch. Mr. de Phister spotted her quickly. This had happened before.

“Honey Winthrop,” he said loudly, “please be kind enough to join the other girls. We’re about to start.”

Honey threw up violently in a horrible purple gush. All the cookies and all the punch disgustingly splashed across the table of refreshments and the white linen cloth, even splattering the polished dance floor. Mrs. de Phister led her quickly into the ladies’ room and left her, after a few minutes of attention, to recover there on a chair. Later, when the class was over, Honey heard some girls approaching her hiding place and ran to conceal herself in a stall.

“Who in earth is that—yech—
fat
, awful, funny-looking girl in that
icky
blue dress—imagine woopsing like that! Do you really know her? Someone told me she’s your cousin,” a strange voice asked. Then Honey heard her first cousin Sarah answer with obvious reluctance.

“Oh, that’s just Honey Winthrop. She’s only—some sort of a distant cousin, a very distant one, she doesn’t even live in Boston. Promise you won’t tell anyone, but she’s a
poor relation.”

“Why, Sarah May Alcott, my mother told me no lady ever uses that expression!” The strange voice was sincerely scandalized.

“I know,” Sarah giggled, unrepentant, “but she
is
. I heard our Fräulein telling Diana’s Mam’selle just last week in the park. Just a poor relation, that’s exactly what she said.”

The rest of the memory was lost, although Honey knew that she must have been returned to Hannah eventually and that the aunts must have held a family conference because from that time on one or another of them always took her shopping for her dancing-school dresses at a discreet shop on Newbury Street that specialized in clothes for the “early bloomer.”

From time to time Honey went into Cambridge to visit her great-aunt Wilhelmina. This professorial maiden lady was her favorite relative because she never asked about school or dancing class or little friends but talked about France and books and served a sumptuous array of cakes and sandwiches at teatime in her tiny, neat apartment. Honey suspected that Aunt Wilhelmina was a poor relation too.

From 1952, when she was ten, until 1954, Honey endured and endured and grew taller and steadily fatter. Two years of Mr. de Phister’s, two years of Ralph Waldo Emerson, where she lost the few friends she had left when the other girls began to give pajama parties and talk about boys and experiment in secret with makeup and bras. Two years of celebrating Thanksgiving and Christmas and spending an odd week in Maine or Cape Cod with the aunts and the cousins, the unbearable words “poor relation” never out of her mind. She had been unhappy before but friendly. Now those two words made her awkward, sullen, and uncomfortably hangdog. She could have formed friendships with various cousins if she had felt at ease with them, for they were by no means unkind or unapproachable. After all, she was a Winthrop. But her memory of that afternoon at dancing school convinced her that behind each smiling face was scorn, that behind each remark was hidden condescension, that they would all disavow her if they could. Her remoteness provoked even the best of them to indifference, and their indifference validated her convictions.

Honey began to hate her bossy aunts and her many cousins who all acted as if they never thought about money. She knew better. She knew it was the only thing that really mattered. She began to hate her father for not making more money, for working at a dull job so that he could save long hours for the research that must be far more important to him than she was. She began to hate Hannah who loved her but couldn’t help her. She began to hate everything but the thought of having money, lots of money. And food.

Josiah Winthrop talked to Honey severely about her eating habits. He gave her a number of stern, informative lectures on her fat cells and her body chemistry and balanced nutrition. He told her it was merely a matter of proper diet, that no one in her family was born to be fat, and he instructed Hannah to stop baking. Then he went off to the hospital or his lab and both Hannah and Honey ignored him. She was almost twelve and weighed one hundred and sixty-five pounds.

During the summer before Honey’s twelfth birthday, Aunt Cornelia, Josiah Winthrop’s favorite of all his family, came out to Framingham to see him on a Sunday afternoon.

“Joe, you really must do something about Honey.”

“Cornie, I assure you that I’ve talked to her about her weight on many occasions, and she has no opportunity to eat fattening foods in this house. She must get them from her friends. Anyway, my parents were both big boned, as you probably remember, and she’ll slim down as soon as she reaches puberty. In two years—perhaps three—she’ll be right down to her proper weight. There has
never
been a fat Winthrop! Of course she has the Winthrop height—but there’s nothing wrong with that.”

“Joe! For a brilliant man you can be unbelievably stupid. I’m not talking about Honey’s weight, although, heaven knows, something has to be done, and, what’s more, she’s small boned, not big boned, as you’d notice if you ever looked with half an eye. I’m talking about the way she’s growing up. She simply isn’t part of
anything
. You’re so wrapped up in your blasted work that you don’t realize just how unhappy that child is. Don’t you see that she doesn’t have friends to get fattening food from? She doesn’t even know the people she would just naturally know—she’s hardly a part of the family. And, heaven knows, Mr. de Phister’s has been a tragedy. Joe, you know perfectly well what I mean, so don’t try that bland look on me. Or if you don’t know, the more shame on you. Her own kind of people, to be blunt, our
sort
of people, since you force me to be crude, are going to exclude Honey if you don’t do something.”