Borrowed Finery: A Memoir (14 page)

Florida

I did not regret saying goodbye to my grandmother. I was going with my parents to Florida, to a house owned, and infrequently used, by a friend of my mother’s. It was an hour or so south of Jacksonville. I would be where I wanted to be at last, I supposed.

I stared at my mother, who drove holding a cigarette in one hand. Smoke and her dark hair blew toward me in the small backseat of the roadster. The top was down. The car had been bought, my father said, with movie money.

My heart was hardened toward my grandmother. I blamed her for taking me from Uncle Elwood. There were days when I forgave her nothing. Then even her walk irritated me. She had foot trouble, bunions and corns. I disliked the way she tottered about. She often said, “I know many t’ings,” and I greeted my father’s imitation of her words with more merriment than I felt, as though she could see and hear me laughing at her.

Once, she had kept me from visiting a friend in the evening. She clutched her breast as I went to the door, crying weakly,
“¡Ay, mi corazón!”
as though she were having a heart attack. I reluctantly gave in, though I was unable to believe her expression of suffering genuine. The idea that she
was
suffering, because of her anxiousness about what might happen to me, never crossed my mind.

Sometimes she tried to amuse me with stories; I was cold and refused to smile. Some days I would forget my resentment, released from the sullen sour feeling that troubled my own heart, until animosity toward her would overcome me again.

My parents took turns driving, she expertly, he clumsily. We stopped at a diner, where I ate, uneasily, two fried egg sandwiches. Elsie watched me, forming, I was sure, conclusions about my character.

South of East Jacksonville, we turned off the highway onto a sand road. It ended in a heavily wooded area where there was a scattering of homes on the banks of the broad St. John’s River. Close to a bluff stood a large, shambling, yellow-painted house inhabited by an elderly Scottish woman named Lesser, the housekeeper. She maintained an expression of bland benevolence on her face throughout the confusion of the weeks that followed, and I began to attribute it entirely to the physical configuration of her features.

The high-ceilinged rooms were large and barely furnished. Below the bluff a gray wharf on crooked posts stood in the river. Everywhere I looked were floating patches of hyacinths in whose tangled roots—I learned later—water moccasins liked to shelter.

First times
were events: the first time I had been on a car trip with my parents, the first time we’d been in a diner, the first time we had eaten supper together in the dining room of the yellow house, served by Mrs. Lesser.

My mother’s silence emphasized my father’s volubility. Nervousness pitched his voice higher than ever before. One night I spoke hesitantly of George Bernard Shaw, one of whose plays I had read recently to please my father. My mother rose abruptly from the table, overturning her chair, and ran up the stairs. Daddy followed her into the bathroom. I could hear them quarreling, and I noticed my father’s voice was pleasing even when he was angry. I stayed at the foot of the stairs, not knowing what to do.

My father appeared in the upper hall and behind him stood Elsie. She called my name. Holding a napkin carelessly in his hand, he came down and walked into the dining room, shrugging his shoulders and murmuring, “I don’t know, pal, what she’s up to.”

I went up the stairs, and my mother turned to go into the bathroom, where she sat on the rim of the tub. A fleeting impression of her inability to assume an ungraceful posture sped through my mind, along with my dread of what she would say.

“You have no right to speak to Paul about George Bernard Shaw,” she said, without raising her head. “You have no right to tie your father’s shoelaces.”

My hopes for I don’t know what withered. I was appalled by her assumption that I had been insolent—at least that’s what I thought it was that had evoked such words from her. She pushed herself upright and quelled me with a look before she walked into their bedroom.

Two or three days later, they left Florida to return to New York City. During that time, my mother was polite to me. When I looked at her, she smiled neutrally.

As they drove off, I felt they had not left me so much as forgotten my existence. I was trapped by my age, twelve. I was obligated to stay on with Mrs. Lesser.

I walked into the kitchen as soon as they had driven away. The housekeeper looked up at me from shelling peas on the counter. Her neat hair, the cleanness of her apron, and her expression all conveyed to me that she attributed disorder to moral failing, whether it was in a dusty closet or in people’s lives.

Disorder was defeat.

She kept her own counsel, she was discreet, but she rebelled secretly with her whole being against the agitation she had sensed during their stay of a few days. It was undignified to allow oneself to be baffled, though she would forgive it in children.

She took a few steps toward me and said, with a trace of a kindly smile, “We’ll have to find a nearby school for you next month.” It was during a day in August.

*   *   *

I went to a public school in East Jacksonville. Every weekday morning a school bus picked me up, and in the afternoon it dropped me off at the edge of the woods.

Spanish moss hung from tree branches and brushed against my face like thick cobwebs. One afternoon, a snake dropped from a limb onto my shoulders before it slid to the ground and twisted away. It happened so quickly, I didn’t have time for horror. Horror struck me a few minutes later when I reached the house. I must have been pale enough to attract Mrs. Lesser’s attention. She asked me what was wrong and I told her. “God preserve us!” she said.

The teacher of the seventh-grade civics class was a short man with a clever face. I sat in the last row with Lee, a tall, thin, handsome boy. Our civics textbooks were opened to conceal a travel book by Osa and Martin Johnson. We were reading it with romantic intensity, thinking of each other’s appreciation. Suddenly we sensed the teacher’s presence as we turned a page.

“Interesting,” he murmured. “But out of place, don’t you think?”

*   *   *

Matt, a melancholy boy of ten who lived in a shabby plantation house a few hundred yards from the yellow house, took me out on the river in his small motorboat to catch the swells from the big ships that sailed in and out of Jacksonville.

He advised me to jump on the wharf two or three times before venturing out on it. The thumping chased away the moccasins, which fell one by one from the wharf posts where they had been coiled and hidden, dropping into the water like thick gray ropes.

One afternoon after school, we went up a narrow stream that emptied into the big river. We ducked to avoid low branches that arched over the water. Snakes could fall on us at any moment, but we were fearless, at least for those minutes when we pretended we were sailing up the Congo.

The Scottish housekeeper employed a small black girl to do the chores she couldn’t manage because of severe arthritis in her hands. Mattie, like Matt, was ten.

One afternoon I followed her flickering shadow through the woods a minute after Mrs. Lesser told her she could go home. She led me to a clearing where a little church with two tiny windows, looking like a child’s drawing, stood as if held upright. I found a wooden crate and dragged it to one of the windows and stepped up on it.

Mattie was standing in a roughly nailed pulpit, her thin body concealed by a white robe that billowed as she swayed. She was “testifying,” as she told me later. She was a burning coal of spirit in the church, itself as makeshift as the wooden crate.

We often played in the fenced-in yard behind the yellow house. Mattie’s eyes would suddenly focus on something I couldn’t see. Turning around, I’d find the housekeeper in the kitchen doorway, her soft plump hand holding the screen door open for Mattie to come back into the kitchen, where she might have to lift something, or stir a thickening pudding, or run through the woods to the plantation house to borrow a sweet pepper from Matt’s mother.

When I arrived home one afternoon, Mattie walked toward me holding an object in her hand, a small peach-colored leather pocketbook, worn and scratched as though it had been worried by a Florida lynx, with a loose metal clasp in the form of an X. She handed it to me shyly, watching my face. Just as shyly I took it, not sure whether she was giving it or showing it to me. Was it hers? Had she found it on a road where it might have been tossed through a car window by an angry woman? No. She was making a present of it to me.

*   *   *

Lee drove me to his house half an hour distant. The day was brilliant, still. Not a leaf stirred. The narrow country road had a blue cast, and the mica in the paving was struck into sparks by the sunlight. He stopped the car.

A huge snake was stretched across the road, its middle swollen. He got out of the car, looked thoughtfully at the snake, and then bent to gather it up like wet washing and carry it to a ditch on the side of the road.

Lee had an earnest, grave quality, perhaps because he was a scientific boy. After introducing me to his mother, he took me upstairs to his room at the front of the house. The windows overlooked a branch of the river. A microscope stood on a broad table covered with plant cuttings. It was beautiful there, the big house off by itself, a research laboratory in a wilderness of trees and water. I looked at a bug and a leaf through the microscope lens.

On my thirteeth birthday, he drove to the yellow house in his Ford flivver with a gift, a very tall white lily in a small red pot.

My other friend was a girl named Marjorie. Her life was a perpetual melodrama. She would greet me with the words—or a variation of them—“Guess what’s happened to me now!”

*   *   *

That spring three people came for a few days: my father, my Spanish grandmother, and the owner of the yellow house.

Daddy arrived on a rainy afternoon, driving the car in which he and my mother had brought me to Florida in August. He had been shaken up on the way by nearly running into a dead cow lying on the road. It suddenly loomed out of the darkness in the headlights. His first day, the cow continued to loom before him in the shadows. He kept muttering “Jesus!” I could see by his face how it had shocked him, was still shocking him.

He took me with him to a bench on the bluff from which we looked down at the wharf and the river. He had something to tell me, the reason he had driven a thousand miles.

He and Elsie were getting a divorce.

I had not thought of them as married. How could it be that Elsie was enough of an organic being to have carried me in her belly for a term? What I was sure of was that fate had determined that her presence was the price I had to pay in order to see my father. But when I did see him, his behavior with me—playful, sometimes cruel, a voice of utterly inconsistent and capricious authority—confirmed my uneasiness, my ever-growing sense of being an imposter, outside life’s laws.

But he had more to tell me. The second piece of news, preceded by the word “tragic,” was that Uncle Leopold was a homosexual. I was uncertain of what that meant. What I found nearly unbearable was the idea that Leopold should now know that I knew. Daddy said it was a crucial deviation from custom. Leopold couldn’t help it, he said. What was it he couldn’t help?

I owned a secret full of danger, one that would so humiliate Leopold if I revealed it that he would cease to care for me.

My father suddenly changed the subject. “Here! I don’t want you smoking behind my back!” he said, and held out a crumpled pack of Camel cigarettes. I shook my head no, still thinking about Leopold. Soon we were wrestling, only half humorously. The outcome was that I found a lit cigarette in my mouth.

I didn’t take to smoking right away, but a few weeks later Marjorie and I lit up, coughed, and persisted.

Nothing more was said about Leopold, divorce, or cigarettes during the three days he spent in the yellow house.

The housekeeper asked him to cut down a dead tree that stood in the yard. I watched him use the ax. His face was taut with concentration as he deepened the cleft in the trunk. I put my hand to my throat. When the tree toppled, it made a noise between a groan and a shriek and appeared to me to fall in slow motion, a tree in a myth.

On the last morning, after he said goodbye to Mrs. Lesser, whom he had charmed with his half-serious attentions, I walked with him to the car. I told him I hoped someone, by now, had removed the dead cow from the road. “Dear pal,” he said, pressing my shoulder with his hand.

I watched him drive away down the sand road until the car vanished among the trees. He had taught me the rudiments of driving during his first visit with Elsie. He was a good teacher, explaining everything clearly and without impatience. I noticed, before the car disappeared, how he gripped the steering wheel and reared up in a spasm of panic, as if he expected at any moment for the car to run amok.

*   *   *

The second visit was from the owner of the house and Mrs. Lesser’s employer. Her name was Mary. She arrived with a friend, Thweeny. A few years earlier, they had both graduated from Smith College, along with the housekeeper’s daughter.

Mary had fair curling hair, and, in the mornings of the week they stayed, she wore a pale pink linen housecoat to breakfast that I admired. She was pretty, with blue eyes that resembled my father’s. She had brought me a present, a book of Katherine Mansfield’s short stories,
The Pear Tree.
She paid attention to me and behaved as if we were the same age.

Thweeny was a tall bony woman, a large rag doll whose limbs flew around like windmill sails. Her long dark hair hung down to her shoulders in strips like licorice. She was clownish and likable.

Mary told me Thweeny had been raped when she was thirteen. I knew in a general way what rape was. After I had heard about it, I looked at her with more interest.

One morning the three of us got into the car and drove to St. Augustine. Mary brought along her camera. Except for Uncle Elwood, she was the only adult who took pictures of me.