Borrowed Finery: A Memoir (8 page)

Mary Barthelmess, a few years older than I, gave me a pair of rose-colored beach pajamas she had outgrown. When I tried them on, I was stung on my rear end by a bee trapped inside the cotton folds. I had learned it was dangerous to complain within my mother’s hearing. My hand flew to cover my mouth and hold in my startled cry.

Several weeks earlier, I had murmured to Daddy that I had a toothache. My mother just then entered the room. In a neutral voice she said, “I’ll fix that for you.” She turned, smiling, to my father. “Would you put her in the rumble seat?” It may have seemed to him that she had nothing in mind but a short drive in the open air, but I heard sounds of distant thunder.

She drove on the steep, curving hills that rose across from Malibu. Through the back window, I saw how rigidly she held her back, how stiff her neck was, as she drove like the wind and I was shaken like a rattle.

The drive lasted twenty minutes or so—the drive lasted forever. When we returned to the beach house, she emerged from the car and stood like a statue for a moment, staring at me in the rumble seat with her great dark eyes, her face stony. “Do you still have a toothache?” she inquired politely. Driving me on the mountain roads had not lessened her rage but intensified it.

*   *   *

One afternoon I found my father slouched in a canvas chair on the “captain’s bridge,” a bottle of gin on the floor next to his right foot. “Colonel Fear,” he called out, in a stupefied voice. I glanced quickly back at the door, thinking someone might be there. No one. “Have you ever met him? Ah, if you’d met him, you’d not forget him,” he muttered. Briefly his bloodshot blue eyes came into focus. He saw it was me. “And whose little girl are you?” he inquired, in a comical falsetto voice. When I laughed, he said, “I knew when I took you to the Adirondacks that I’d won you. I licked up a bit of salt I’d spilled on my hand, and you said, ‘You’re funny,’ and that’s how I knew.”

It was true that he had won me. Part of the time he was an ally, part of the time a betrayer. I was not afraid of him, only of what he might do. One afternoon when he dropped me into the ocean, and I was sputtering as I dog-paddled—though by that time I had overcome my terror to some extent—he asked me whom I’d prefer to be stranded on a desert island with, Vin Lawrence or himself. Perversely, I said, “Vin!” to his bobbing head a few yards away. He laughed, swallowed water, swam to me, and held my arm all the way back to the beach.

*   *   *

Vin Lawrence told me about an evening walking along the beach with my father. He said that earlier they had lifted a few glasses. As they walked, they found themselves treading on hundreds of tiny fish puffing and flopping on the sand. My father threw them back into the ocean, handfuls at a time. The surf flung them up on the beach again. “He was frantic,” Vin said. When I grew up, I learned the fish had come to the beach to mate and then to die.

*   *   *

One night, along with an actor, Minor Watson, my father drove us to Venice Amusement Park. The roller coaster’s dark coil lifted up from the surface of the black water and flung its length farther into the darkness. Only a few small bulbs hung from a wire, casting a dim light on the narrow tracks. Daddy persuaded me to try the ride. I was reluctant. Still, I stepped after him into one of the open cars where Minor Watson was already sitting, a vague, kindly smile on his face.

We plunged and ascended. I howled to be let off, howled in fright, clutched my father’s jacket until, as the track leveled out, the car slowed down before coming to a halt.

Dazed, I stumbled along the pier until I heard my father’s voice calling me. I turned around to see Daddy and Minor standing together in front of a glaringly lit shooting gallery, their faces in shadow. I felt I didn’t know anyone in the world, and no one knew me.

Daddy picked up a rifle chained to the counter, shot, hit a target, and won a stuffed animal. On our return to Malibu, he drew the car up in front of a sprawling estate in Santa Monica.

“Pal, take this creature to the door,” he said, as he handed me the toy, “and give it to anyone who answers the bell. Whoever the hell it is, tell him the bear is for your cousin, Douglas Fairbanks.”

The task restored some balance I’d lost on the roller-coaster ride, and I did it willingly. I walked up a long path to the front door and rang an ornate bell. After a while, it was answered by an old man in some sort of costume. He peered down at me and asked, “Yes, miss?”

I handed up the bear and repeated my father’s message. The old man accepted both words and toy and said he’d pass them on to Mr. Fairbanks when he returned from the studio.

*   *   *

The last day I spent at Malibu Beach, Uncle Elwood appeared on the sand wearing a black bathing suit.

I don’t know how he had arrived there. I knew he had come to see me. I took his hand and led him across sand warmed by the morning sun and into the foaming surf, urging him on, elatedly, until we were both dog-paddling in the Pacific. He came the next day and then, as far as I knew, returned to Balmville.

Within a month or two of his visit, I too returned to the minister’s house on the hill, with whom or how I don’t recall.

I thought I might burst with happiness, freed from a yearlong curse, as though I were a girl in a fairy tale.

Uncle Elwood told me he had stood on the roof of the old stable to watch the California-bound train make its way north on the east bank of the Hudson River, the train I had been on with Aunt Jessie.

One afternoon I saw a taxi pause at the bottom of the driveway. An elderly woman emerged from the passenger seat.

It had been raining on and off for days. The driveway was impassable for most cars except for Uncle Elwood’s doughty old Packard. I watched the woman make her slow way through the rain and mud.

At last she stood in the hall, laughing with what I took to be embarrassment at her disheveled state, at the mud on her shoes.

“Paulita,” she said. My heart sank. She was my Spanish grandmother, come to take me away. Her duties with her Spanish relative in Cuba were lighter; she would not be traveling there every year. At some moment during the grim hours that followed each other like links in a chain drawing me away from Uncle Elwood, she looked at me for a long moment and then said to him, “She is of my blood.”

It was far worse than a fairy-tale enchantment. My parting from the minister was an amputation.

Long Island

Once upon a time, there were four brothers, Fermin, Leopold, Frank (also known as Panchito), and Vincent. There was a sister, too, Elsie, youngest of them all. Two of the brothers, Leopold and Vincent, lived with their mother, my grandmother, Candelaria, in a small brick house on Audley Street, in Kew Gardens, Long Island. I went to live there in 1930.

Fermin, the oldest son, was married to Elpidia, a peasant woman born in a small Cuban village. They lived in a section of New York City then known as Spanish Harlem with their two daughters, Isabel and Natalie. Eventually, a third daughter was born, Alicia.

Frank was employed by a pharmaceutical company as a salesman. His work required him to travel in South America, a good market for drugs. In his youth, he had played baseball and had almost made it into the major leagues. He was the most American of his mother’s five children, at least externally.

Vincent, small of stature, with no visible waist, kept up his trousers with suspenders. He accompanied singers or violinists on the piano and was sometimes away on tour. Most afternoons he left the brick house swiftly and silently on mysterious errands. When he was home, he practiced the piano all day long, or so it seemed to me.

When Frank dropped in for a visit after months away in Peru or Argentina, Vincent didn’t look up from the keyboard until he had completed the piece he was playing. With a sliding glance at his brother, he would say, “Oh. Hello. Frank.”

He spoke English with a severe and glacial precision, seeming to bite each word like a coin to test its genuineness before letting it go.

After I had been living on Audley Street a month or so, he followed me into the bathroom one morning. I was sitting on the toilet. He turned on a tap in the sink so the sound of water flowing covered the trickle of my urine. “You see?” he stated grimly. He repeated the two words, providing his own echo.

My father once said mockingly, “Vi-cen-tīc-o plays the am-pīc-o … and says everything twice.”
Two
must have held an eerie numerical spell over Vincent. As well as repeating words twice, he tripped twice every time he climbed a flight of stairs.

Leopold lived on the top floor of the house in a studio-like room with a skylight. A large drawing board tilted at an angle was the first thing I saw when the door opened. At its top was a narrow trench holding several drawing pencils and the razor blades he sharpened them with. Each razor bore a thumbprint-shaped smudge of black powder from the veins of lead that ran through the pencils.

Leopold was an art director at Macfadden Publications. He showed me a photograph of Mr. Macfadden, posing as the world’s strongest man in a
True Story
magazine advertisement for a product or an exercise—I forget which—guaranteed to make weaklings strong. He wore bathing trunks that revealed his tanned chest and arms sheathed in muscles that resembled dark taffy. He looked very old—which, Leopold explained, made his muscular development the more remarkable.

Leopold was away on vacation when I arrived at the house on Audley Street. I suffered from piercing earaches in the first few weeks. My grandmother, alarmed by my anguished cries, telephoned the minister for help. When I learned he was coming, my weeping ceased. But I knew, a desperate knowing, that he would stay only a few hours. The earaches diminished in intensity. That time Uncle Elwood visited me in Kew Gardens was the last time I saw him for many years. We wrote each other periodically.

My heart had grown dull. Sorrow, and the changes in my life that were its cause, had worked its desolation upon me.

Leopold changed that. He taught me chess and swung me in the air, and his large-hearted laughter lifted my spirits. When I opened the door to his room, I breathed in the buoyant aroma of the Cuban cigars he smoked. His deep-set dark eyes were like my mother’s except for their tenderness of expression. His stride was graceful, wary, and indomitable, like a big cat’s.

When Vincent was away and only my grandmother and Leopold were in the house, I rested safely in the present.

But when Vincent returned to Audley Street from his engagements, I stayed outdoors after school. I played with neighborhood children or by myself until it was the hour when Leopold would arrive at the Kew Gardens railroad station. I watched from a living room window as he walked up the narrow cement path, too narrow to accommodate his stride; he stepped off it, now and then, onto patches of rusty-looking grass on either side.

I would run to the hall in time to see him greet his mother and bend down to kiss her cheek—none of the other brothers kissed her—and after I’d waited awhile, I’d go upstairs and knock on his door. He would open it and smile down at me.

On sunny weekends, his studio, as he called it, was radiant with light. It was a different world from the bleak floor below. I slept in the same bed with my grandmother if Vincent was home. He always took my small room and bed.

“Have the sheets been changed?” he’d call out in the hall, without troubling to see if there was anyone within range to hear him. I could sense his rage, suddenly flaring up like a banked fire.

Once in a great while, Fermin visited. The fire of his rage was
not
banked. He maintained a grim silence around us, breaking it only to mutter furiously into my grandmother’s ear. I knew she felt his heated breath. While she listened, her expression was one of strained submission, not so much a response to what he was telling her as the habitual mode of her being.

She had been born in northern Spain. After a sea voyage to Cuba, she was married to my grandfather, the owner of a sugar plantation, Cienegita. The marriage had been arranged by her parents with the advice of their cousin, Luisa Ponvert, owner of Olmiguero, a neighboring plantation.

Widowed at an early age, my grandmother came to the United States with her five children soon after the end of the Spanish-American War. During its last days, Cienegita was burned to the ground by what she described as a band of carpetbaggers, who left intact only the machinery for boiling the sugarcane.

Her father offered her $5,000, a very large sum in those days, to return to Spain. But she wanted to live in the country her husband had loved and often visited on plantation business.

She was sixteen when she first arrived in Havana. One afternoon, before meeting her bridegroom, she told me she had stepped onto the balcony of the house in Havana where she was staying temporarily with family friends. She was on the fourth floor, and to see the street more clearly she knelt down, pushed her head through two bars of the balcony’s railing, and then couldn’t withdraw it. A crowd gathered on the street. Some people laughed; some looked worried. Eventually she was freed from the grille, not much the worse for wear. The crowd had distracted her from her own plight and kept her amused and interested.

*   *   *

When my mother was nineteen, she gave birth to me. At some point during her pregnancy, she also went to the house on Audley Street, and my father with her. But he and Leopold, whom he’d met in the navy during the early months of U.S. involvement in the war in 1917, left at once to board a tramp steamer bound for South America. As he left the house, my mother raced after him and hurled a bottle of sauce at his back. It missed, he told me, and he and Leopold ran off to sea like careless, triumphant boys.

At a port in some Central American country, they disembarked and went to a hotel where my uncle smilingly, languidly, remarked that he didn’t feel like translating that day. He sat down in a handy chair and lit a cigar, listening with the air of a remote linguistic connoisseur to the struggle of a local fellow, who claimed to be bilingual, to comprehend and convert to Spanish my father’s questions about the cost of room and meals and then to turn the clerk’s answers into a dim semblance of English.