The Road Taken (13 page)

“That’s a step in the right direction,” Hugh said. “Nonjudgmental.”

“I didn’t say that. I don’t want you to be the way you are.”

“There’s nothing you can do about it. I am who I am.”

“That woman in the photo . . . you dress as her . . . with your friends?”

“Sometimes. Her name is Camille.”

“And do you go out with other men?”

“Do you mean on dates?”

“I suppose I do,” Rose said.

“When I can get one,” Hugh said. “I’m not so young and pretty anymore. It’s difficult for any woman past a certain age, or so you keep telling your girls.”

“Oh, Hugh!” Despite herself, she smiled.

“Usually, though, I go out with my dates as a man. I’m better-looking as a man.”

“Oh, Hugh!”

“Stop saying, ‘Oh, Hugh!’”

“We must never tell anyone in the family about this,” Rose said.

“
Au contraire.
We must tell them all. I want to be loved and forgiven. I want to teach the girls how to put on makeup properly. I want to be restored to the bosom of my family. The only one we will never tell is Celia.”

“Of course not. Never Celia.”

She was still in shock, but instinctively, as always, she was protecting him.

As it happened, Hugh’s secret life didn’t change. He never dressed in women’s clothing in the house, unless he was behind locked doors, and who knew then if he did or he didn’t? No one ever saw a tall, voluminous-haired blonde who looked of dubious reputation leaving their building in the evening, or coming home in the early hours of the morning. Hugh prepared, and restored, as always, at his friend Lady Clifford’s house. But somehow, after that night when he had revealed himself to her, Rose was not able to tell anyone in the family, except for Ben.

Ben was not as horrified as she had worried he would be. He only seemed a little bewildered. The queer part he accepted without argument, and the women’s clothing part he chose to forget. But he didn’t mention it to anyone either, and when Hugh began to advise Peggy and Joan on their hair and makeup the girls simply thought of him as a higher authority, like a hairdresser, or makeup man on a movie. They knew about the third sex; Rose had heard them talking about their gym teacher, who they suspected was a lesbian. And she thought they probably knew about Hugh without being told, but because they had known and loved him since they were born they never made an issue of it. Perhaps, Rose thought, they were more sophisticated than she had believed. Certainly they were more so than she was. It was what you expected of the younger generation, whether you liked it or not. In this case, at least, she was glad.

Chapter Fifteen

Prosperity had returned to America. Christian Dior’s the New Look swept fashion, with tiny waists, long flowing skirts, crinolines, ball-gowns. Hair was short, or pulled back. Hats were small and perky. Heels were high, on narrow pumps. Lips and nails were bright crimson. Sophisticated femininity led to the fulfillment of nearly every woman’s wish to be mom in an apron. The favorite gifts were perfume and a large appliance. The returning veterans married, had babies, and moved to the burgeoning suburbs. The running joke about these identical suburban tract houses was that sometimes the husband would come home at night and get so confused that he went in to the wrong house, not discovering his mistake until he saw someone else’s wife and children there.

The War had decimated; the young couples were repopulating. The husbands commuted, on trains, or in cars that had become huge because there was gas to run them again. The wives stayed in the suburbs, baking cookies and tuna fish casseroles, raising neat, well-behaved children, driving them to activities in station wagons, so called because you used them to pick up the husband at the station. The license plates of these cars and station wagons often bore the initials of the kids.

Peggy had graduated from high school, and now she waited impatiently for Ed to finish college so they could get married and start their adult lives. Once they had thought they would marry as soon as she had graduated, but then they discovered there would be no money, or at least not enough to support them both if he wasn’t working, so it would be best to hold off until he had a job. Neither his parents nor hers offered to support them, which Peggy thought was cruel. After all, their parents were supporting them now, separately. What was the difference? She wondered if his parents didn’t like her enough, or if hers didn’t like him enough, and it made her frustrated and sulky.

Her parents had asked her if she wanted them to send her to college while she was waiting, but she said no. She found a job as a secretary (a typist, really) in a boring law firm, gotten through her father’s influence, and she couldn’t understand why Ed had told her working would be interesting and that she would need to experience it so she could get it out of her system and not think she would be missing something. She hadn’t thought that since her first day on the job. Even worse, she made so little money that she might as well have been working for free. It was clear that she would not be able to support Ed and herself, that he would have to do it, and that they would have to hold on and suffer until he could.

Her parents asked again, this time, if she would like to take some extension courses instead of working, but again she declined. If she had ever been a scholar, and she doubted it, all that was gone now; she lived in a haze of romance and sex, of anticipation and irritation, collecting dishes and towels piece by piece, naming and renaming her unborn children, clipping recipes from women’s magazines, meeting Ed in his apartment and going all the way.

Sex with him was everything she had imagined, and then some. She wondered why no one noticed how different she looked now, how glowing. Well, maybe her mother did. Peggy couldn’t decide if her mother was suspicious and questioning because she was paranoid, like all mothers, or if she could tell. They were engaged, after all, and Ed was an adult. If her mother was so worried about her precious virginity, the coin of the realm, she should help them get married.

Little Ginger was taking ballet, and had already read all the Oz books. Joan slept all the time. It was said that teenagers needed their sleep, because they were nervous and growing, but Joan could drink a cup of coffee and then lie down and take a nap. At one point her mother, thinking Joan might have something wrong with her metabolism even though she was slim, took her to the doctor for tests. He had Joan breathe into a bag to test her metabolism and said it was fast if anything. There would be no need for her to take thyroid, which was fortunate, since they had heard thyroid tablets could make a girl grow a mustache. Let her sleep if she wanted to. When she had something she really wanted to do, Joan could manage to wake up fast.

At Christmas Ed took Peggy home to Iowa to get to know his family better. She had met his mother and stepfather only once, when she and Ed announced their engagement and his parents had taken the mandatory trip to New York, partly as tourists, partly to size up the Carson family. Peggy felt as though his family didn’t really take her seriously. She was just the fiancée, and there were no phone calls, no friendly letters, except for the thank-you note his mother wrote to Rose. To tell the truth, Peggy didn’t care about Ed’s parents all that much either. Her own family was both satisfying and annoying, a force to fend off when you wanted to grow, and to embrace when you needed their warmth and support, and the idea of taking on a whole new set of parents at this time in her life seemed odd.

At Christmas in Iowa, that year, in a house that smelled old, surrounded by snow, Peggy was homesick. Naturally she and Ed had to sleep in separate rooms. Why was it, she wondered, that she always wanted to cry? Her closet smelled like camphor and her mattress of mildew. She had never been away from New York, where she had been born, and now she counted the days until she could go back, with Ed. Surrounded by well-meaning strangers, including the two large men who were Ed’s stepbrothers, Peggy only felt vulnerable. She knew she couldn’t tell Ed. A grown-up wouldn’t complain. These people were doing the best they could, and they thought they were being nice to her. They pretended to like their Christmas presents (or perhaps they did, who could tell?) and she pretended to like hers, a bunchy bone-colored sweater with multicolored rosettes on it, which his mother had knitted herself, and which Peggy wouldn’t be caught dead wearing.

“It’s so special, I’ll save it for a party when I go home,” Peggy said, feigning awe and delight.

Ed had given her a link bracelet, to which he would later gradually add charms—the first piece of jewelry except for her graduation watch from her parents that Peggy had ever had in real gold. That is, unless you counted her engagement ring as jewelry, but she did not; that ring was a bond, a troth, something of such emotional value that calling it jewelry would be like calling the Taj Mahal a house. Her own gift to him was a leather album for the photographs and memories they would amass together. It was personal and yet not so intimate it would threaten his mother. Already she could sense that his mother was far from thrilled that Ed had decided to marry a girl who lived in New York, a stranger he had met through letters, and that he would be living far away from his dear ones.

“It’s wise,” his mother said, “that you two children are going to have a long engagement, to get to know one another.” By now it was thoroughly clear, if it hadn’t been before, that if she and Ed got married before he was self-supporting, his parents wouldn’t want to help them.

On their way back to New York on the train, released from their mandatory charade, Peggy and Ed necked and petted for hours. Breathless, her lips sore and swollen, wishing they were in bed and he was inside her, Peggy finally felt like herself again.

Their own little studio apartment in New York, his “student apartment,” was their haven. It was tiny compared to her parents’ house, or his parents’ house, but to Peggy it was big. It was sophisticated. It was paradise. It occurred to her that if she and Ed got married and had a baby before he graduated from college, the baby could fit in there fine. The baby had become a part of her fantasy ever since she came back from Iowa. The baby, a pregnancy, was how she could get married. No one would want her to be a disgrace, a slut. A child out of wedlock? Unthinkable! A six-month-long pregnancy resulting in a chubby full-term infant would be bad enough. If she got pregnant, Peggy knew, her mother would make her get married immediately.

She had a diaphragm now. Engaged, she had been able to go to a gynecologist and be fitted for one with no embarrassment except for the doctor’s expression of surprise when he discovered she didn’t need the novice’s size. She and Ed had been careful, but one time they had been carried away, and Peggy knew it could easily happen again. She didn’t like the idea of tricking him, but she was afraid to tell him that she planned to have an accident, in case he tried to talk her out of it, or worse, got angry. She allowed herself a few moments of guilt and fear over being manipulative and then decided what she planned to do was good.

It seemed a long time ago now that she had lied to him about her age, and it had turned out all right after all. This second little deception would turn out all right too, she knew it. Everyone who would be trusted with the news she was pregnant, and there would be few, would be upset at first, and then would rally around her and Ed to cover it up and make a happy ending. Peggy knew she wouldn’t be the first girl to get pregnant in order to hasten a marriage, and she wouldn’t be the last.

She knew that a girl her age who was healthy could conceive with no trouble at all. When her period was three weeks late she went to her doctor, who confirmed the good news. That night she told Ed. He looked dismayed for only an instant, and then became adorably excited at the thought of becoming a father. “I guess we have to get married sooner than we thought,” he said.

Peggy told her mother there had been an accident, that she and Ed had only done it once. She didn’t know if her mother believed her, but Rose got to work on the wedding plans right away. Luckily Ed’s midterm vacation was coming up. He and Peggy would have a small church wedding, with a white dress for her while she could still fit into it, and her sister Joan as maid of honor, and the couple would spend a few days in Bermuda, where everyone went for their honeymoon because it was a beautiful and peaceful place to do what she and Ed had been doing all along anyway.

“Ed is an honorable young man,” Rose said. “He could have backed out. He could have deserted you. These betrayals aren’t unheard of.”

“You don’t know him at all, do you, Mother?” Peggy said. She was really annoyed at such lack of trust. It had recently occurred to her from what she saw and heard around her that many women didn’t think of men as people. A man was a prize to be won, an animal to be tamed, a rescuer, a status symbol, a villain, or a fool. The woman had to go through all the right steps and then maybe it would work out and she would catch a husband. If a woman really knew the man she loved, Peggy thought, the way I know Ed Glover, she wouldn’t have to play tricks to keep him from running away.

Ed’s mother and stepfather and two stepbrothers came to the hastily planned wedding. They all knew, and Peggy could see that whatever love could have developed between her and his immediate family had been nipped in the bud. At the reception Ed told her that his stepfather had told him he would lend them some money. Her father was contributing too, but he was making it a gift, not a loan. That was like her father, Peggy thought: generous and kind. It was sweet to see how thrilled Ben was at the thought of his first grandchild.

“I know exactly what that child will look like,” Joan said to her. “You and Ed look so alike you could be brother and sister. That’s probably why you fell in love with each other. And baby makes three.”

“Someday, Joan, you’ll be nice,” Peggy said.

“I am being nice.”

Aunt Maude was at the wedding, down from Bristol with Uncle Walter and Peggy’s four cousins, two of whom were bridesmaids; and Aunt Daisy was there from Bristol too, with her family; and even Aunt Harriette, the adventuress, was there from Washington, D.C., alone but looking chic and content. One of Ed’s two stepbrothers was best man. Uncle Hugh and Ed’s other stepbrother were ushers. Ginger was a perky flower girl, allotting her petals so seriously and precisely that she almost stole the show. None of Peggy’s or Ed’s friends had been invited, in order to keep the wedding small. Secret, almost. Later there would be a mailed announcement.

Peggy thought her wedding was magnificent and moving. She had dreamed of this day, and her dream had come true. Even though there was an unavoidable subtext of embarrassment and haste, it was felt by the others, not by herself. The wedding didn’t have to be a big production. What mattered was that she was marrying the man she loved and would always love, united forever in the sight of God and her family. Her ring was a plain gold band, and Ed had one too. That would keep the women away from him! Her mother, in the front row, cried.

After their honeymoon the couple moved into Ed’s studio apartment. Peggy quit her job so that she could devote herself to cooking for Ed and cleaning their little paradise and making everything nice for him. She actually liked being pregnant, up until the last month, when she couldn’t wait for it to be over. She was getting along with her mother better now than she had in a long time, because they were more equal. The baby, born in New York Hospital six months after the wedding, was an eight-pound twelve-ounce boy with blue eyes and blond fuzzy hair. They named him Peter.

A new baby, Peggy soon discovered, was a lot of trouble, but she didn’t care. She felt like a part of life, of the universe. Whenever she saw a mother wheeling a baby she basked in the warmth of sisterhood. She felt important. Soon she was sitting on a bench in Washington Square Park with her contemporaries, the young mothers who were only a few years older than she was, talking about formula versus breast feeding, sleeping patterns and behavioral problems, and future nursery schools, just the way her own mother had with her and her sisters.

When Ed graduated from college Peggy brought Peter, who was a toddler, to the ceremony. There were a lot of veterans in Ed’s class, older and more mature than the usual college boys, and many of them had wives and children too. Peter was a placid child, and he was well behaved. “I wonder if he’ll remember this,” Ed said.

They moved to the suburbs, finally, to Levittown, a new development on Long Island on the site of what had once been potato fields. The identical neat little houses with their peaked roofs stretched into the horizon as far as the eye could see. Their area hadn’t been landscaped yet, which gave it a strange, military feeling. Peggy got a driver’s license and drove Ed to the train every morning so he could go to work in the city, and picked him up at the station at night.