Brown-Eyed Girl (9 page)

“Oh, I know, I know,” Sam said, running his now-free hand up and down her arm. “I heard all about the big endowed chair. Fact is, Sal, you and I might be seeing each other around campus—the governor tells me he's thinking about appointing me to the University Board of Trustees next spring.” He dug a card out of his wallet, gave it to her. Branch Homes on the Range. Mr. Laramie Real Estate. Work phone, pager, cellphone numbers. He pulled a fancy pen out of his pocket and wrote his home number on the back, but said, “Cellphone's best. Most private.” He patted the phone hanging from his belt, like that ought to reassure her that they could have intimate conversations which would be conducted, on his end, at Hasta la Pasta! Sheesh.

“Wow. Uh. Wow,” she managed. Time to split, really. “Thanks again, Egan. See you around, Sam.” Byron Bosworth and one of his cronies walked into the room, freezing at the sight of her, and she realized it was long past time to punt. She was a quarterback who'd just been brutally sacked in her own end zone, being taken off the field in a motorized cart.

Egan tried the hug thing again but she made him settle for squeezing her shoulder. Sam was a lot smoother, managing to swoop an arm around her waist before she knew it, to wrap his sure, hard fingers around her ribs. Why the hell had she worn a spandex T-shirt? She felt as if she were getting a chest x-ray. The Boz and his friend glared at her from the hostess station, openly hostile. The hostess blew on her nails and thought about seating those two losers sometime, if she felt like it. The waitress bore down suddenly on Sally and Egan, hoping to act like she cared before Egan could stiff her on the tip. Sally backed out of Sam's grasp. Sam made a pistol with his thumb and forefinger and pointed at Sally, a gesture that shouted “Realtor.”

“Call me anytime. Soon, angel,” he purred, unloading his Look one more time.

Chapter 10
She Never Married

Waking up Saturday morning to a clear sky, a clean house, and Maude's banana bread, Sally felt she inhabited fresh space. She drank coffee, she ran. She had no trouble clearing her mind for a day at work. She had all day Saturday to herself, and an Edna dinner party to look forward to that night. It was time for a quick summary of the second phase of Margaret Dunwoodie's life.

She'd left West Texas as a little child, and after that had never been out of Wyoming. What could Meg possibly have thought, Sally wondered, of New York? Her biography didn't say. She hadn't told Edna.

There weren't many women in the newspaper business in those days, and most newspapermen prided themselves on a citified vulgarity they mistook, in Meg's opinion, for honesty. They tested her, cursing and spitting and telling rude stories, smoking repulsive cigars and talking endlessly about vicious boxing matches, big bloody steaks, women who wore their clothes a little too tight. They claimed to love nothing better than running out in the middle of the night to see a gun-shot corpse splattered on a sidewalk, to be the first to tell some woman she was a widow. They'd show this cowgirl the difference between writing her hayseed term paper on
Paradise Lost
and writing a real story.

Meg hated the hazing, but she had learned from her mother that anything a man thought he could or should do, a woman could do, and should if she thought it might get her anywhere without compromising her character. She had started out running errands for the “boys” who worked the beats and wrote the stories on clattering black typewriters, chewing up their stogies, sneaking bottles of bootleg rye whiskey out of their bottom desk drawers. She learned to smoke cigarettes and hold her liquor when they began to ask her along to prowl their favorite after-hours speakeasies.

Did they hit on her? Did she have a special friend? A lover? Who did she know, besides reporters?

An editor gave her a big break writing obituaries, then another, reporting a story about a man who had hung upside down from the arm of a telephone pole for fifty-two hours, as a publicity stunt. Against her own best judgment, Meg wrote the story as if it were a thrilling escapade, when she knew it was only a pathetic, ultimately pointless bid for someone to notice. She wrote about how the man had lost his job, how his children begged him to do something big, how his wife took care of him during his ordeal by hauling up a basket of cookies on a rope. She climbed the pole and interviewed him personally. The story got Meg an assignment as a beat reporter.

Sally knew the poem Meg had written about the episode, full of tired color and irony, which had made its first public appearance in
Rocks and Rage
.

The city desk editor would try, from time to time, to get her to take on a woman's job at the paper. Write an advice column, he urged. Society notes, he offered. How about recipes? Meg replied that she was as good a news-hawk as any goddamn man, thank you very much.

Sally would look among the boxes for a photo of Meg as a
World
reporter. She imagined her with a cigarette dangling from her lips as she furiously tapped out the latest tale of murder, of the busting of a bootlegging ring or the apprehension of a notorious, heiress-bilking bigamist.

The editors of the
World
loved, more than anything else, publicity. A hard-nosed, fearless news-hen was a novelty they could exploit. Especially a goodlooking blond who wore slim, short dresses and bobbed hair like a mannequin. After a while, they began to put her on stories in which she was, herself, the news peg. A photographer went along to take pictures of her. Flying in a blimp wearing goggles, a leather helmet, a silk scarf. Trying out the new and dangerous sport of water-skiing in a jaunty bathing suit. Jazz-dancing in white satin, in the arms of a screen idol, at the Cotton Club in Harlem.

Later, she would recall this strange, complicated scene in the smoky poem, “Ellington.”

But Meg didn't want to be the spectacle. And she didn't want to write fluff. So she looked for another job. The
Toronto Star
was looking for a Paris correspondent. A couple of years before, that had been Ernest Hemingway's beat. Now it would be Meg's.

Paris. She was there for twelve years. She'd arrived in 1929, stayed through hard times, modern madness, political strife, explosive art and thought and sensory richness and heady, sometimes scary café conversation all the way to the time when the Nazis marched into the city, cheered on by the cowardly, the despicable, and, perhaps, the confused. For nearly twelve years, she'd written about artists and novelists and critics, about turbulent European politics and breathtaking locales, first for the
Star
, and then for Reuters News Service. Meg watched, appalled, as Germany moved ever more ruthlessly on its neighbors, as one country after another fell. Heard, and reported, rumors of unthinkable atrocities and plans for horrors even more unimaginable.

And finally, the surrender of France. The bad and the opportunistic bowed the Fascists down the Champs-Élysées, through the Arc de Triomphe, while the rest of France hid or raged, plotted insurrection, or, more commonly, wore its confusion and fear and ambivalence with a blank face. Meg had left.

Eleven years of volatile, full, exhilarating, terrifying life. And what had she said about it? The official biography said nothing more.

So on to the interview with Edna:

EDNA
: Tell me about Paris.

MEG
: It was an interesting place to be....
(pause)
...I met some interesting people.

EDNA
: Who?

MEG
: Artists . . . musicians . . . mountain climbers . . . revolutionaries. Bankers. The artists and the musicians were usually more interesting than the revolutionaries. For that matter, some of the bankers were more interesting than some of the revolutionaries.

EDNA
: Which artists?

MEG
: Some of the famous ones. Picasso. Braque. Gertrude's people. I preferred less self-importantly avante-garde stuff. Giselle Blum was a very good friend of mine.

EDNA
: Blum?

MEG
: Yes. A painter, portraits mostly. I met her through her brother, Paul Blum. He was a banker who wrote pieces for the
Economist
. I met him climbing in the Alps. A fascinating man. He played the viola. They came from a very wealthy, old, established French Jewish family. They lived in a beautiful house in the Faubourg St. Honore. Every Tuesday they hosted a musical evening. Such music! String quartets, brass choirs, solo pianists. They printed up programs on rag paper—I kept them all. You'd listen to this heavenly music, and afterward they would open up the doors into the dining room for a champagne supper. I'd never imagined such things existed.

EDNA
: What happened to Giselle Blum?

MEG
: The Nazis sent her family to the camps. Paul was killed in the Resistance. It was a great tragedy. There were so many great tragedies.

EDNA
: Did you know the tragedy was coming when you left?

MEG
: Yes. And no. The Blums were liberals; they had many radical friends. Men who fought in the Spanish war, who warned of what was coming. Men whose families had nothing. They'd come to the Tuesdays looking gaunt and shadowy, chain-smoking black cigarettes, with their eyes closed all through the concerts. And when supper was served, they ate as if they'd never stop starving. I remember one very young man who asked if they'd mind if he took a package of food home, and Paul was so ashamed that he packed up everything on the spot and had it delivered to the boy's family.

They said the fascists would spread hell all over the world, and we all agreed that was so. But I was comfortable. Most of us were. The Blums had everything, had seen anti-Semitism come and go in France over the years. It was impossible to believe the Nazis would actually do what they said they intended.

EDNA
: You left in 1940—were you expelled?

MEG
: No. I could have stayed, but I had to come back to Wyoming. Two days before the Germans came into Paris, I received a cable that my mother was very ill. Two days after they took the city, I was on a train for Le Havre, to take a ship back to the States. As an American, I was free to go; they couldn't keep me there. Perhaps I should have stayed and joined the Resistance, but I didn't. I came home.

EDNA
: Would you tell me more about the time you spent in France?

MEG
: Perhaps another time.

There was no other time. And now the longest part of her life, half a century back in her home state, seemed to take up so very little space in her official story.

Meg had spent the remainder of the interview relating the trials of her return to Wyoming. The long hours spent nursing her terribly frail mother, the quarrels with her rich and increasingly cantankerous and conservative father, who was certain that Jewish bankers were driving the world to ruin. Mac had joined Lindbergh's America Firsters. He had always admired Charles Lindbergh. He also believed that Roosevelt declared war on the Axis because he was secretly Jewish. Gert had always been a tempering influence on Mac, but she died in 1942 and he kept getting worse.

Meg needed to get away from Mac, but she found that all the time she had been away, she had missed her own mountains more than she had understood. Reuters was eager to have her back, but she didn't want to leave Wyoming. What kind of work could she do?

The University of Wyoming was, like many wartime businesses, in the grip of a manpower shortage. Women, there as elsewhere, filled in. Meg found a job teaching composition and creative writing. But unlike the millions of women who got laid off when the Johnnies came marching home, Meg managed to hang onto her job by making herself a fixture in the English department. She would teach four generations of Wyoming kids how to write a clear sentence, how to construct an expository essay, how to use poetic devices in prose writing, how to imagine different points of view. Her tactics included sarcasm, intimidation, and lavish use of a red pen. As she told Edna, she “discouraged the odious and encouraged the possible.”

And so it had gone, for almost fifty years. Despite the ups and downs of staggeringly small-time university politics, she taught, trekked the Rocky Mountains, quietly wrote poetry. She fished for trout, planted gardens, invested in land around Jackson Hole and Aspen, took vacations in warm places. In 1964 she hired Maude Stark to put her life in order, and it stayed in order until her death. She inherited a sizeable sum after her father died in 1966, and she became, finally, almost a part of the landscape. She never married.

The oral history interview revealed a little bit more.

As Meg had told Edna, by the 1960s, a new generation of degree-wielding academics took over most faculty positions. In their eyes, Meg appeared as a remnant of a simple time when college professors hadn't really been qualified for their jobs. One young upstart historian named Byron Bosworth, railing in the faculty senate about “standards,” tried to get her fired.

That bastard Boz. At least, Sally thought, you had to give him credit for consistency.

The prodigal daughter returned home to fifty years of more or less placid life in the high country, occasionally venturing to go public with a poem or two so good that editors must have clamored for more. A couple of little press volumes of her work. Then, after she died, the torrent of brilliance,
Rocks and Rage.

And all that money. What was it all about? Sally looked up, saw the four sets of deft hands on black and white keys, shut her eyes, and covered her face with her own hands. She would open the boxes; she would see.