I first met Virginia Darley Leake, as she was christened, Ginny Doll as she was called by her mother and aunts, when she and I were about fifteen, both of us daughters of families who had recently emigrated from Virginia to New York, mine from Richmond, hers from Lynchburg the town that, until I grew up, I a.s.sumed was spelled "Lenchburg." My father disliked professional Southerners, and would never answer invitations to join their ancestral societies. However, on one summer evening when he was feeling his age and there was absolutely no prospect of anyone dropping in to hear about it, he succ.u.mbed to momentary sentiment and went downtown to a meeting of the Sons and Daughters of the Confederacy. He came back snorting that they were nothing but old maids of both s.e.xes, just as he"d expected; he"d been trapped into seeing home a Mrs. Darley Lyon Leake who"d clung to him like a limpet when she"d found they both lived on Madison Avenue, and he warned my mother that he was afraid the woman would call-his actual phrase for Mrs. Leake being "one of those tiny, clinging ones you can"t get off your hands-like peach fuzz."
Mrs. Leake-a tiny, coronet-braided woman with a dry, bodiless neatness-did call, but only, as she carefully explained to my mother, for the purpose of securing a Southern, presumably genteel playmate for her daughter. My mother was not Southern, but she shared her caller"s opinion of the girls Ginny Doll and I brought home from school. The call was repaid once, by my mother with me in tow, after which it was understood that any entente was to be only between us girls; my parents and Mrs. Leake never saw each other again.
On that first call I had been relieved to find how much the Leake household, scantily composed of only three females-Mrs. Leake, Ginny Doll and Ida, the cook-still reminded me of our own crowded one, in its slow rhythm and antediluvian clutter. Three years spent trying to imitate the jumpy ways of my New York girl friends had made me ashamed of our peculiarities; it was comforting to be reminded that these were regional, and that at least there were two of us on Madison Avenue.
With the alchemic sn.o.bbery of her kind, Mrs. Leake had decreed that the intimacy must be all one way; Ginny Doll could not come to us. So it was always I who went there, at first I didn"t quite know why. For, like many of the children introduced to me by my parents, and as quickly shed, Ginny Doll was a lame duck. It would be unfair to suggest that she and her mother were types indigenous only to the South; nevertheless, anybody down there would have recognized them at once-the small woman whose specious femininity is really one of size and affectation, whose imperious ego always has a socially proper outlet (Mrs. Leake wore her heart trouble on her sleeve), and whose single daughter is always a great lumpy girl with a clayey complexion. At fifteen, Ginny Doll was already extremely tall, stooped, and heavy in a waistless way; only her thin nose was pink, and her curves were neither joyous nor warm; her long hand lay in one"s own like a length of suet just out of the icebox and her upper teeth preceded her smile. One glance at mother and daughter predicted their history; by producing a girl of such clearly unmarriageable aspect, the neatly turned Mrs. Leake had a.s.sured herself of a well-serviced life until her own death-at a probable eighty. After that, Ginny Doll"s fate would have been clearer in Lenchburg, for the South has never lost its gentle, feudal way of absorbing its maiden ladies in one family sinecure or another. But up here in the amorphous North, there was no foretelling what might happen, much less what did.
Ginny Doll also had manners whose archaic elegance I remembered from down home-it was these that my mother had hoped I would reacquire-but unfortunately hers were accompanied by a slippery voice, with a half-gushy catch to it, that gave her a final touch of the ridiculous. Still, I found myself unable to desert her. It appeared that I was her only friend (although her importunities were always so restrained that it took a keen ear to hear the tremor in them), and after I had gone there a few times I felt guilty at not liking her better, because I felt so sorry for her.
For it appeared also that my father had been accorded a signal honor in being allowed past their threshold. Mrs. Leake was not a widow as we had a.s.sumed, but a deserted woman, and it was because of this that nothing more masculine than the old pug, which she sometimes boarded for a rich sister-in-law, was ever allowed past her door. According to Ginny Doll, her mother had done nothing to merit desertion, unless it was having committed the faux pas of marrying a Texan. Indeed, her position was so honorable that conscience money from the sister-in-law, the husband"s sister, was the means by which she was quite adequately supported. Still, there was a stain upon them-it was the fact that Mr. Leake still lived. Somehow this fact committed them to an infinite circ.u.mspection, and was responsible for the exhausted, yet virulent femininity of their menage. It was also to blame for Mrs. Leake"s one perverted economy, for which Ginny Doll was never to forgive her-her refusal to get Ginny Doll"s teeth straightened. When approached by the sister-in-law, Aunt Tot, on this matter, she would reply that she wouldn"t use conscience money to tamper with the work of the Lord. When approached by Ginny Doll, her reply came nearer the truth: "You didn"t get them from me." As I came to know the Leakes better, I concluded that the stain was increased by the fact that Mr. Leake not only was, but was happy somewhere. Although Ginny Doll never spoke of him, I saw him clearly-a man still robust, with the slight coa.r.s.eness of the too-far-south South, a man barreling along somewhere careless and carefree, a man who knew how to get peach fuzz off his hands.
By this time the household had won me, as it was to win so many-in later years I could well understand Ginny Doll"s unique position in the Party. How it must have salved Party spirits, after a hot day in the trenches of the Daily Worker, to enter an authentic version of that Southern parlor inside whose closed circle one sits so cozened and elite, pleating time"s fan! Our famed hospitality consists really of a welcome whose stylized warmth is even more affecting than genuine interest, plus the kind of stately consideration for the trivial that makes everybody feel importantly human-Ginny Doll did both to perfection. In my case, it was summertime when I met the Leakes, and our people do have a genius for hot weather. Inside their living room the shades were drawn cool and gray, white dust covers were slippery under bare legs, and a music box was set purling. No one was ever there long before Ida, a frustrated artist with only two to feed, came in bearing an enormous, tinkling tea which she replenished at intervals, urging us to keep up our strength. When, during the first of my visits, Ginny Doll happened to remark, "Your father is truly handsome; with that ahngree hair of his and that pahful nose, I declare he looks just like a sheik!" I took it for more of her Lenchburg manners. It was only later that I saw how the idee fixe "Men!" was the pivot from which, in opposite ways, the two Leakes swung.
When I was sixteen, my parents gave me a coming-out dance. After a carefully primed phone call to Mrs. Leake by my father, Ginny Doll was allowed to attend, on the stipulation that he bring her home at the stroke of twelve. At the dance I was too busy to pay her much mind, but later I heard my parents talking in their bedroom.
"She ought to take that girl back to Lenchburg," said my father. "Up here, they don"t understand such takin" ways, "less a pretty face goes with "em. That girl"ll get herself misunderstood-if she gets the chance."
"Taking ways!" said my mother. "Why she followed the boys around as if they were unicorns! As if she"d never seen one before!"
My father"s shoes. .h.i.t the floor. "Reckon not," he said.
The next day, Ginny Doll telephoned, eager for postmortems on the dance, but I"d already been through that with several of my own crowd, and I didn"t get to see her until the end of the week. I found that she had spent the interval noting down the names of all the boys she had met at my house-out of a list of forty she had remembered twenty-nine names and some characteristic of each of the others, such as "real short, and serious, kind of like the Little Minister." Opening her leather diary, she revealed that ever since their arrival in New York, she had kept a list of every male she had met; my dance had been a strike of the first magnitude, bringing her total, with the inclusion of two doctors, the landlord and a grocery boy, almost to fifty. And in a special column opposite each name she had recorded the owner"s type, much as an anthropologist might note "brachycephalic," except that Ginny Doll"s categories were all culled from their "library," that collection of safely post-Augustan cla.s.sics, bound Harper"s, Thomas Nelson Page and E. P. Roe which used to be on half the musty bookshelves in the Valley of Virginia. There was a Charles Brandon, a Henry Esmond (one of the doctors), a Marlborough and a Bonnie Prince Charlie, as well as several other princes and chevaliers I"d never heard of before. A boy named Bobbie Locke, who"d brought a flask and made a general show of himself, was down as D"Artagnan, and my own beau, a nice quiet boy from St. Mark"s, was down as Gawain. My father was down as Ra.s.selas, Prince of Abyssinia.
I remember being impressed at first; in Richmond we had been taught to admire "great readers," even when female, and almost every family we knew had, or had had, at least one. But I also felt a faint, squirmy disquiet. Many of the girls I knew kept movie-star books, or had pashes on Gene Tunney or Admiral Byrd, but we never mixed up these legendary figures with the boys who took us to Huyler"s. I was uncomfortably reminded of my father"s cousin, old Miss Lavalette Buchanan, who still used more rouge than you could buy on Main Street, and wore gilt bows in her hair even to the Busy Bee.
From then on, my intimacy with Ginny Doll dwindled. Now and then I dropped by on a hot summer day when no one else was around and I simply had to talk about a new beau. For on this score she was the perfect confidante, of course, hanging breathless on every detail. After each time, I swore never to go back. It was embarra.s.sing where there was no exchange. Besides, she drove me nuts with that list, bringing it out like an old set of dominoes, teasing me about my fickleness to "Gawain." I couldn"t seem to get it through her head that this was New York, not Lenchburg, and that I hadn"t seen any of those boys for years.
By the time I"d been away at college for a year, I was finished with her. Ginny Doll hadn"t gone-Mrs. Leake thought it made you hard. My mother occasionally met Ginny Doll on the avenue, and reported her as pursuing a round that was awesomely unchanged-errands for Mamma, dinners with the aunts, meetings of the Sons and Daughters-even the pug was the same. The Leakes, my father said once, had brought the art of the status quo to a hyaline perfection that was a rarity in New York, but one not much prized there. Who could have dreamed of the direction from which honor would one day be paid?
The last time I saw her was shortly after my engagement had been announced, when I received a formal note from the Leakes, requesting the pleasure of my and my fiance"s company on an afternoon. I remembered with a shock that long ago, "down South," as we had learned to say now, within that circle of friends whom one did not shuffle but lost only to feud or death, a round of such visits was de rigueur. I went alone, unwilling to face the prospect of Ginny Doll studying my future husband for n.o.ble a.n.a.logues, and found the two Leakes behind a loaded tea table.
Mrs. Leake seemed the same, except for a rigidly "at home" manner that she kept between us like a fire screen, as if my coming alliance with a man rendered me incendiary, and she was there to protect her own interests from flame. Ginny Doll"s teeth had perhaps a more ivory polish from the constant, vain effort of her lips to close over them, and her dress had already taken a spinster step toward surplice necklines and battleship colors; it was hard to believe that she was, like myself, twenty-three. We were alone together only once, when I went to the bathroom and she followed me in, muttering something about hand towels, of which there were already a dozen or so lace-encrusted ones on the rod.
Once inside, she faced me eagerly, with the tight, held-in smile that always made her look as if she were holding a mashed daisy in her mouth. "It"s so exciting," she said. "Tell me all about it!"
"I have," I said, referring to the stingy facts that had been extracted over the tea table-that we were both history instructors and were going to teach in Istanbul next year, that no, I had no picture with me, but he was "medium" and dark, and from "up here."
"I mean-it"s been so long," she said. "And Mamma made me dispose of my book." It took me a minute to realize what she meant.
She looked down at the handkerchief she always carried, worrying the shred of cambric with the ball of her thumb, the way one worries a ticket to somewhere. "I wondered," she said. "Is he one of the ones we knew?"
The Leakes sent us a Lenox vase for a wedding present, and my thank-you note was followed by one from Ginny Doll saying that I just must come by some afternoon and tell her about the wedding trip; Mamma napped every day at three and it would be just like old times. I never did, of course. I was afraid it would be.
Ten years pa.s.sed, fifteen. We had long since returned from abroad and settled in East Hampton. My parents had died. The vase had been broken by the first of the children. I hadn"t thought of Ginny Doll in years.
Then, one blinding August afternoon, I was walking along, of all places, Fourteenth Street, cursing the mood that had sent me into the city on such a day, to shop for things I didn"t need and wouldn"t find. I hadn"t found them, but the rising masochism that whelms women at the height of an unsuccessful shopping tour had impelled me down here to check sewing-machine prices at a discount house someone had mentioned a year ago, on whose door I"d just found a sign saying "Closed Month of August." In another moment I would rouse and hail a cab, eager enough for the green routines I had fled that morning. Meanwhile I walked slowly west, the wrong way, still hunting for something, anything, peering into one after the other of the huge gla.s.s bays of the cheap shoe stores. Not long since, there had still been a chocolate shop down here, that had survived to serve teas in a cleanliness which was elegance for these parts, but I wouldn"t find it either. New York lay flat, p.o.o.ped, in air the color of sweat, but a slatternly nostalgia rose from it, as happens in the dead end of summer, for those who spent their youth there. This trip was a seasonal purge; it would be unwise to find anything.
"Why, Charlotte Mary! I do declare!"
I think I knew who it was before I turned. It was my youth speaking. Since my parents died, no one had addressed me in that double-barreled way in years.
"Why-why Ginny Doll!" Had she not spoken, I would have pa.s.sed her; she was dressed in that black, short-sleeved convention which city women were just beginning to use and looked, at first glance, almost like anyone. But at the gaspy catch of that voice I remembered everything about her. Here was the one mortal who must have stayed as much the same as anyone could, preserved in the amber of her status quo.
"Why, believe it or not, I was just thinking of you!" I said. It wasn"t strictly true; I had been thinking of Huyler"s, of old, expunged summers to which she faintly belonged. But early breeding stays with one, returning at odd times like an accent. I can still tell a half-lie, for the sake of someone else"s pleasure, as gracefully as anybody in Virginia.
While she extracted the number and names of my children, I revised my first impression of her. Age had improved her, as it does some unattractive girls-we were both thirty-seven. She still stooped heavily, as if the weight of her bust dragged at the high, thin shoulders, but she was better corseted, and had an arty look of heavy earrings and variegated bracelets, not Greenwich Village modern, but the chains of moonstones set in silver, links of carnelians and cameos that ladies used to bring back from Florence-I remembered Aunt Tot.
Something about her face had changed, however, and at first I thought it was merely the effect of her enormous hat (how had I missed it?)-the wide-brimmed "picture" hat, with an overcomplicated crown, often affected by women who fancied a touch of Mata Hari, or by aging demi-mondaines. Later, I was to find that this hat was Ginny Doll"s trademark, made for her in costume colors by the obscure family milliner to whom she still was loyal, whose fumbling, side-street touch saved the model from its own aspirations and kept it the hat of a lady. At the moment I thought only of how much it was just what Ginny Doll grown up would wear-one of those swooping discs under which romantic spinsters could visualize themselves leaning across a restaurant table at the not-impossible man, hats whose subfusc shadows came too heavy on the faces beneath them, and, well, too late. Here was her old aura of the ridiculous, brought to maturity.
"And how is your mother?" I asked, seeing Mrs. Leake as she still must be-tiny, deathless companion fly.
"Mamma?" She smiled, an odd smile, wide and lifted, but closed, and then I saw the real difference in her face. Her teeth had been pulled in. She had had them straightened. "Mamma"s dead," said Ginny Doll.
"Oh, I"m sorry; I hadn"t heard-"
"Six years ago. It was her heart after all, think of it. And then I came into Aunt Tot"s money." She smiled on, like a pleased child; until the day of her death, as I was to find, she never tired of the wonder of smiling.
"But don"t let"s stand here in this awful heat," she said. "Come on up to the house, and Ida"ll give us some iced tea. Oh, honey, there"s so much to tell you!"
"Ida," I said, enchanted. "Still Ida? Oh I wish I could, but I"m afraid I haven"t time to go all the way up there. I"ll miss my train."
"But I don"t live uptown any more, darlin", I live right down here. Come on." I gave in, and instinctively turned east. Toward Gramercy Park, it would surely be, or Irving Place.
"No, this way." She turned me west. "Right here on Fourteenth."
I followed her, wondering, used as I was to the odd crannies that New Yorkers often seized upon with a gleefully inverted a.s.sumption of style. From Union Square just east of us, westward for several long blocks, this was an arid neighborhood even for tenements, an area of cranky shops being superseded by huge bargain chains, of lofts, piano factories, and the blind, shielded windows of textile agents. n.o.body, really n.o.body lived here.
We turned in at the battered doorway of a loft building. Above us, I heard the chattering of machines. To the left, the grimy buff wall held a signboard with a row of company names in smudged gilt. Ginny Doll took out a key and opened a mailbox beneath. I was close enough to read the white calling card on it-Ginevra Leake.
At that moment she turned, holding a huge wad of mail. "Honey, I guess I ought to tell you something about me, before you go upstairs," she said. "In case it might make a difference to you."
In a flash I"d tied it all together-the hat, the neighborhood, the flossy new name, my mother"s long-gone remark about unicorns. It wouldn"t be need of money. She had simply gone one Freudian step past Miss Lavalette Buchanan. She"d become a tart. A tart with Ida in the background to serve iced tea, as a Darley Leake would.
"I-what did you say?" I said.
She looked down tenderly at her clutch of mail. "I"ve joined the Party," she said.
Familiar as the phrase had become to us all, for the moment I swear I thought she meant the Republican Party. "What"s that got-" I said, and then I stopped, understanding.
"Honey love," she said. The moonstones rose, shining, on her breast. "I mean the Communist Party."
"Ginny Doll Leake! You haven"t!"
"Cross my heart, I have!" she said, falling, as I had, into the overtones of our teens. "Cross my heart hope to die or kiss a pig!" And taking my silence for consent, she tossed her head gaily and led me up, past the Miller Bodice Lining, past the Apex Art Trays, to the top floor.
Ida opened the door, still in her white uniform, and greeted me warmly, chortling "Miss Charlotte! Miss Charlotte!" over and over before she released me.
I don"t know what I expected to find behind her-divans perhaps, and the interchangeable furniture of Utopia built by R. H. Macy-certainly not what confronted me. For what I saw, gazing from the foyer where the abalone-sh.e.l.l lamp and the card tray reposed on the credenza as they had always done, was the old sitting room on Madison Avenue. Royal Doulton nymph vases, Chinese lamps, loveseats, "ladies" chairs, and l.u.s.ter candelabras, it was all there, even to the Bruxelles curtains through which filtered the felt-tasting air of Fourteenth Street. Obviously the place had been a huge loft, reclaimed with much expense and the utmost fidelity, "Lenchburg" Ascendant, wherever it might be. Even the positions of the furniture had been retained, with no mantel, but with the same feeling of orientation toward a nonexistent one. In the bathroom the rod held the same weight of ancestral embroidery. The only change I could discern was in the bedroom, where Ginny Doll"s nursery chintz and painted rattan had been replaced by Mrs. Leake"s walnut wedding suite and her point d"esprit spread.
I returned to the parlor and sat down on the loveseat, where I had always sat, watching, bemused, while Ida bore in the tray as if she had been waiting all that time in the wings. "The music box," I asked. "Do you still have it?" Of course they did, and while it purled, I listened to Ginny Doll"s story.
After Mrs. Leake"s death, Aunt Tot had intended to take Ginny Doll on a world cruise, but had herself unfortunately died. For a whole year Ginny Doll had sat on in the old place, all Aunt Tot"s money waiting in front of her like a Jack Horner pie whose strands she dared not pull. Above all she craved to belong to a "crowd"; she spent hours weakly dreaming of suddenly being asked to join some "set" less deliquescent than the First Families of Virginia, but the active world seemed closed against her, an impenetrable crystal ball. Finally the family doctor insisted on her getting away. She had grasped at the only place she could think of, an orderly mountain retreat run by a neo-spiritualistic group known as Unity, two of whose Town Hall lectures she had attended with an ardently converted Daughter. The old doctor, kindly insisting on taking charge of arrangements, had mistakenly booked her at a "Camp Unity" in the Poconos. It had turned out to be a vacation camp, run, with a transparent disguise to which no one paid any attention, by the Communist Party.
"It was destiny," said Ginny Doll, smiling absently at a wall on which hung, among other relics, a red-white-and-blue embroidered tribute to a distaff uncle who had been mayor of Memphis. "Destiny."
I had to agree with her. From her ingenuous account, and from my own knowledge of the social habits of certain "progressives" at my husband"s college, I could see her clearly, expanding like a Magnolia grandiflora in that bouncingly dedicated air. In a place where the really eminent were noncommittal and aliases were worn like medals, no one questioned her presence or affiliation; each group, absorbed in the general charivari, a.s.sumed her to be part of another. In the end she achieved the reclame that was to grow. She was a Southerner, and a moneyed woman. They had few of either, and she delighted them with her vigorous enmity toward the status quo. Meanwhile her heart recognized their romantic use of the bogus; she bloomed in this atmosphere so full of categories, and of men. In the end she had found, if briefly, a categorical man.
"Yes, it must have been destiny," I said. Only kismet could have seen to it that Ginny Doll should meet, in the last, dialectic-dusted rays of a Pocono sunset, a man named Lee. "Lighthorse Harry" or "Robert E.," I wondered, but she never told me whether it was his first name or last, or gave any of the usual details, although in the years to come she often alluded to what he had said, with the tenacious memory of the woman who had once, perhaps only once, been preferred. It was not fantasy; I believed her. It had been one of those summer affairs of tents and flashlights, ending when "Party work" reclaimed him, this kind of work apparently being as useful for such purpose as any other. But it had made her a woman of experience, misunderstood at last, able to partic.i.p.ate in female talk with the rueful ease of the star-crossed-and to wear those hats.
"I"m not bitter," she said. He had left her for the Party, and also to it. Her days had become as happily prescribed as a belle"s, her mail as full. She had found her "set."
"And then-you know I went through a.n.a.lysis?" she said. She had chanced upon the Party during its great psychiatric era, when everybody was having his property-warped libido rearranged. Hers had resulted in the rearrangement of her teeth.
"The phases I went through!" She had gone through a period of wearing her hair in coronet braids; under her a.n.a.lyst"s guidance she cut it. With his approval-he was a Party member-she had changed her name to Ginevra. He would have preferred her to keep the teeth as they were, as a symbol that she no longer hankered after the frivolities of cla.s.s. But they were the one piece of inherited property for which she had no sentiment. Too impatient for orthodontia, she had had them extracted, and a bridge inserted. "And do you know what I did with them?" she said. "He said I could, if I had to, and I did."
"With the teeth?"
She giggled. "Honey, I put them in a bitty box, and I had the florist put a wreath around it. And I flew down to Lenchburg and put them on Mamma"s grave."
Something moved under my feet, and I gave a slight scream. It wasn"t because of what she had just said. Down home, many a good family has its Poe touch of the weirdie, my own as well, and I quite understood. But something was looking out at me from under the sofa, with old, rheumy eyes. It was the pug.
"It"s Junius! But it can"t be!" I said.
"Basket, Junius! Go back to your basket!" she said. "It"s not the one you knew, of course. It"s that one"s child. Let"s see, she married her own brother, so I guess this one"s her cousin as well." Her tone was rambling and genealogical, the same in which my old aunt still defined a cousinship as once, twice or thrice removed. And I saw that the tip of her nose could still blush. "Old Junius was really a lady, you know," she said.
When I rose to leave, Ida followed us to the hallway. "You come back, Miss Charlotte," she said. "You come back, hear? And bring your family with you. I"ll cook "em a dinner. Be right nice to have you, "stead all these tacky people Miss Ginny so took up with."
"Now Ida," said Ginny Doll. "Charlotte," she said, "if there"s one thing I"ve learned-" Her moonstones glittered again, in the mirror over the credenza. It was the single time she ever expounded theory. "If there"s one thing I"ve learned-it"s that real people are tacky."
I did go back of course, and now it was she who gave the social confidences, I who listened with fascination. Once or twice she had me to dinner with some of her "set," not at all to convert me, but rather as a reigning hostess invites the quiet friend of other days to a brief glimpse of her larger orbit, the better to be able to talk about it later. For, as everyone now knows, she had become a great Party hostess. She gave little dinners, huge receptions, the ton of which was just as she would have kept it anywhere-excellent food, notable liqueurs and the Edwardian solicitude to which she had been born. As a Daughter and a D.A.R., she had a special exhibit value as well. Visiting dignitaries were brought to her as a matter of course; rising functionaries, when bidden there, knew how far they had risen. Her parlor was the scene of innumerable Young Communist weddings, and dozens of Marxian babies embarked on life with one of her silver spoons. The Party had had its Mother Bloor. Ginny Doll became its Aunt.
Meanwhile we kept each other on as extramural relaxation, the way people do keep the friend who knew them "when." Just because it was so unlikely for either of us (I was teaching again), we sometimes sewed together, took in a matinee. But I had enough glimpses of her other world to know what she ignored in it. No doubt she enjoyed the sense of conspiracy-her hats grew a trifle larger each year. And she did her share of other activities-if always on the entertainment committee. But her heart held no ruse other than the pretty guile of the Virginian, and I never heard her utter a dialectical word. Had she had the luck to achieve a similar success in "Lenchburg" her response would have been the same-here, within a circle somewhat larger but still closed, the julep was minted for all. She lived for her friends, who happened to be carrying cards instead of leaving them.
She did not, however, die for her friends. Every newspaper reader, of course, knows how she died. She was blown up in that explosion in a union hall on Nineteenth Street, the one that also wrecked a delicatessen, a launderette and Mr. Kravetz"s tailoring shop next door. The union had had fierce anti-pro-Communist troubles for years, with beatings and disappearances for years, and when Ginny Doll"s remains, not much but enough, were found, it was taken for granted that she had died in the Party. The Communist press did nothing to deny this. Some maintained that she had been wiped out by the other side; others awarded her a higher martyrdom, claiming that she had gone there equipped like a matronly Kamikaze, having made of herself a living bomb. Memorial services were held, the Ginevra Leake Camp Fund was set going, and she was awarded an Order of Stalin, second cla.s.s. She is a part of their hagiolatry forever.
But I happen to know otherwise. I happen to know that she was on Nineteenth Street because it was her shopping neighborhood, and because I had spoken to her on the telephone not an hour before. She was just going to drop a blouse by at Mr. Kravetz"s, she said, then she"d meet me at 2:30 at McCutcheon"s, where we were going to pick out some gros-point she wanted to make for her Flint & Horner chairs.
I remember waiting for her for over an hour, thinking that she must be sweet-talking Mr. Kravetz, who was an indifferent tailor but a real person. Then I phoned Ida, who knew nothing, and finally caught my train. We left on vacation the next day, saw no papers, and I didn"t hear of Ginny Doll"s death until my return.
When I went down to see Ida, she was already packing for Lynchburg. She had been left all Ginny Doll"s worldly goods and an annuity; the rest of Aunt Tot"s money must have gone you-know-where.
"Miss Charlotte, you pick yourself a momento," said Ida. We were standing in the bedroom, and I saw Ida"s glance stray to the bureau, where two objects reposed in nature morte. "I just could"n leave "em at the morgue, Miss Charlotte," she said. "An" now I can"t take "em, I can"t throw "em out." It was Ginny Doll"s hat, floated clear of the blast, and her false teeth.
I knew Ida wanted me to take them. But I"m human. I chose the music box. As I wrapped it, I felt Ida"s eye on me. She knew what n.o.blesse oblige meant, better than her betters. So I compromised, and popped the teeth in too.
When I got home, I hid them. I knew that the children, scavengers all, would sooner or later come upon them, but it seemed too dreadful to chuck them out. Finally, it came to me. I taped them in a bitty box, masqued with a black chiffon rose, and took them to our local florist, who sent them to a florist in Lynchburg, to be wreathed and set on Mrs. Leake"s grave.
Nevertheless, whenever I heard the children playing the music box, I felt guilty. I had somehow failed Ginny Doll, and the children too. Then, when Mr. Khrushchev"s speech came along, I knew why. I saw that no one but me could clear Ginny Doll"s name, and give her the manifesto she deserves.
Comrades! Fellow members of Bourgeois Society! Let there be indignation in the hall! It is my duty to tell you that Ginevra Leake, alias Virginia Darley, alias Ginny Doll, was never an enemy of Our People at all. She never deserted us, but died properly in the gracious world she was born to, inside whose charmed circle everyone, even the Juniuses, are cousins of one another! She was an arch-individualist, just as much as Stalin. She was a Southern Lady.
And now I can look my children in the eye again. The Russians needn"t think themselves the only ones to rehabilitate people posthumously. We Southrons can take care of our own.
The Woman Who Was Everybody.
AT A QUARTER OF eight, young Miss Abel was prodded out of sleep as usual by the harsh clanging of the bell in the church around the corner. It went on for as much as forty or fifty times, each clank plummeting instantly into silence, as if someone were beating iron against a stone. She did not get up at once, but lay there, seeing herself rise with the precision of a somnambulist, go from bathroom to kitchenette in the blind actions which would dissolve the sediment of sleep still in her eyes, in her bones. In her throat, a sick resistance to the day had already begun its familiar mounting, the pulse of a constant ache on which sleep had put only a delusory quietus. Lying there, she wondered which unwitting day of the past had been the one on which she must have exchanged the bright morning dower of childhood, that indolent a.s.surance that the day was a nimbus of possibilities, for this heavy ache that collected in the throat like a catarrhal reminder that as yesterday was dusty, so would be today.
There had been nothing in her childhood, certainly, to warrant that early dowered expectancy, nothing in the girlhood spent in her mother"s rooming house near that part of the Delaware River consecrated to the Marcus Hook refineries, where the great fungoid tanks bloomed oppressively over all, draining the frontal streets like theirs, which were neither country lanes nor town blocks, but only in-between pa.s.sageways where the privet died hardily, without either pavement or neon to console one for its death. In that bland, unimpa.s.sioned climate the days had been blurred exhalations of the factories, the river and the people, dragging on into a darkness that was like the fainter, sooted, interchangeable breath of all of these. Perhaps the days had rung with expectancy for her, nevertheless, because from the first, for as long as she could remember, she had been so sure of getting out, away. As, of course, she had.
She swung sideways out of bed and clamped her feet on the floor, rose and trundled to the bathroom, the kitchenette. Boiled coffee was the quickest and most economical; watching the grounds spray and settle on the bubbling water, she took comfort from the small action. Everywhere in New York now toasters clicked, clocks rang, and people rising under the weight of the new day took heart from each little milestone of routine, like children, walking past a strange paling, who touch placatingly every third picket, hoping this will bring them through safe.
Fumbling without choice for one of the two dresses of the daily requisite black, she peered out the window into the alley beyond. The slick gray arms of the dwarfed tree, which grew, anonymous and mineral, from its humus of dust and concrete, were charitably fuzzed with light, and above them the water tanks and girders of the roofs beyond stood out against the fine yellow morning, clarified and glistening. Night could still down the city, absorbing it for all its rhinestone effrontery, but the mornings crept in like applicants for jobs, nuzzling humbly against the masked granite, saying hopefully, "Do you suppose ... is there anything to be made of me?"
Behind her, except for the unmade bed, the room had the fierce, wooden neatness of the solitary, beginning householder. She turned from the window and made up the bed swiftly so that the immobile room might greet her so, with all its rigid charm of permanence, at nightfall. Now there was nothing out of place except the letter from her mother, read and left crumpled on the table the night before.
None of the rooms in the house at Marcus Hook had ever really belonged to her mother, her sister Pauline or herself. The changing needs of the roomers came first-the workmen who had a wife coming or a wife leaving, the spinsters who made a religion of drafts and the devotional bath, the elderly male and female waifs who had to "retrench" farther and farther back into the cheapest recesses of the house, until the final retrenchment, to the home of a relative, could be delayed no longer.
The family, forever shifting, took what was left over. The best times would have been when the three of them slept in the big front sitting-room together, had not these also been the bad periods when the larger rooms went begging, and they and the most unimportant, delinquent roomer were almost on the same footing. But at all times, mornings the kitchen was never clear of "privilegers," evenings the parlor creaked and sighed with those for whom solitude was the worst of privileges. And late at night when, in no matter what bed or room one might be, there was still the padding in the corridors, the leakage of faucets, then the house rumored its livelihood most plainly of all, having no being other than in the sneaked murmurs, the soft crepitations of strangers.
She sipped the coffee, ate a roll, smoothing out her mother"s letter. "Mrs. Tregarthen, she lived in New York once, says you are down in a terrible neighborhood and for the same money you could get into a business girls club. The Tregarthens still have the sitting-room thank G.o.d. I am so glad you are fixed in the Section Manager job, all that time you studied was not wasted after all. They say even the elevator girls have to be college now. You must be on your feet a lot too, be sure you have the proper shoes. Will you use the store discount and buy Pauline a white dress for graduation, size 14, something not fancy I can dye later. Let me know how much. I am so glad of the discount."
No use to explain again to her mother that she could only buy dark "employee" clothes for herself on the discount. She would send Pauline the dress and take care of the difference herself. All the four years of her scholarship her mother had worked to help her out, in mingled pride and worry over this queer chick who asked nothing better than to waste her real good looks over the books, after something, G.o.d knows what all, except that you could be sure it was something that couldn"t be touched or twisted to use, and at best could only be taught. Her mother had been right. The year she was graduated Ph.D."s were a dime a dozen, and the colleges had still less use for Miss Abel, A.B. She had learned that "getting out" meant, sooner or later, having to "get in" somewhere else. But her mother was pleased, now that she was fixed in her job. And glad of the discount.
Now that she was ready, she stared possessively at the safe sh.e.l.l of the room, all she had been able to salvage of her dream of solitary, inviolate pursuit. Each morning she had to resist the binding urge to stay, nestled in familiarity. She forced herself to put her hand on the k.n.o.b of the outer door, meanwhile contrarily building up the temptation of the ideal day. Projecting herself into the rea.s.suring feel of the chair, she saw herself settled there for hours, retreated into the subtle stream of a book, hugging emotions siphoned through another"s words, immolating herself happily on the altar of a problem, an impa.s.se, which might be dropped as one awakens from a dream, with the closing of the book. She wrenched the door open quickly and shut it behind her, giving it a shake to test the lock.
Once outside, she felt lighthearted, the decision for that day, at least, being over. Down here the neighborhood eased itself into living with the unconstraint of a slattern who has no plans. Across the street, in front of the Olive Tree Inn for Homeless Men, one of the flophouses run by the city, a few rumpled b.u.ms lounged like fallen dolls, staring vacantly with their frayed, inoffensive look. They were the safest people in the world to live among, she thought, for one could no more focus on their ident.i.ties than they on the world around them; in their eyes there was never the shrewd look of the striving, but only the bleared gentleness of humiliation, and their dreams were not of women.
As she walked the long blocks westward to the BMT, the streets filled with people who had the crisp silhouette of destination, but as she neared them, going down the subway stairs, she could see the mouths still swollen with the unreserve of sleep, under the eyes the endearing childish puffs of the rudely awakened. Since she was travelling uptown against the morning rush, she got a seat almost at once and, settling into it, looked at the people opposite, who bobbed up and down with the blank withdrawal of the subwayite. Some mornings, translating them into their animal counterparts, she returned to the lidded stare immured in the bravely rouged, batrachian folds of some old harridan, traced the patient, naglike decline of a nose, watched the gibbon antics of the wizened messengers of the garment district as they pushed their eternally harrying, dwarfing packages. Once inside the store where she worked, exposed to them "on the floor," they all became the customer, the enemy, sauntering along freely in their enviably uncaged day, striking at her with the inimical, demanding shafts of their eyes, but here, until then, she could feel a wave of tenderness, of identification with them, which possessed her with a pity that included herself.
Thinking of the varied jobs toward which the people in the car were travelling, she remembered the prying regard of Miss Shotwell, the head of the store"s "interviewing," and heard again the chill beads of words which had dropped from the deceptive, ductile bloom of her face.
"We can get any number of college graduates these days. We"re only interested in those with a real vocation for merchandising." The protuberant eyes scrutinized with a glance which seemed to come from the whole eyeball.
"I worked in a store for a year before I went to college. And all my summer jobs were in department stores." She had sat there quietly, trying to shine with vocation, but thinking of those sweating miserable summers which had helped make possible the long winter hibernations in the libraries, she had wished herself back among the books, feeling the nausea of the displaced.
"H"mmm." The sedulously fluffed hair bent over the folder on the desk between them. "Your extracurricular leadership record was really very good." The head c.o.c.ked to one side as if deliberating an article of purchase, then bent to the folder again in a gesture either habitual or posed, for the folder was closed. "Philosophy major, fine arts minor. That"s not so good. We"d rather have it business administration, let"s say, or mathematics."
"Something-more concrete?"
"Exactly," said Miss Shotwell, bringing her head back to center, her face obviously readied for the fulsome courtesies of rejection.
Behind the chic camouflage of her own smart appearance, that slick armor which she had learned to a.s.sume with the wiliness of the job-hunter, she had felt shaken with hatred for these people who had the power to let you in, who could annihilate, with a dainty, deprecatory finger, spheres of value which were not their own.