“Not even for dinner,” he answered. He had to turn right around and get back to the city, he explained, so he wouldn’t miss another day of training.
“And how long is Vivian staying?”
“Up to you,” said Walter, shrugging as if he couldn’t care less what happened to me, or where I stayed, or for how long.
In a different sort of family, more probing questions might have followed. But let me explain my culture of origin to you, Angela, in case you have never been around White Anglo-Saxon Protestants. You need to understand that we have only one central rule of engagement, and here it is:
This matter must never be spoken of again.
We WASPs can apply that rule to anything—from a moment of awkwardness at the dinner table to a relative’s suicide.
Asking no further questions is the song of my people.
So when my parents got the message that neither Walter nor I was going to share any information about this mysterious visit—this mysterious drop-off, really—they pursued the matter no further.
As for my brother, he deposited me in my house of birth, unpacked my belongings from the car, kissed my mother goodbye, shook my father’s hand, and—without saying another word to me—drove straight back to the city, to prepare for another, more important war.
TWENTY-TWO
What followed was a time of murky and contourless unhappiness.
Some engine within me had now stalled, and as a result I went limp. My actions had failed me, so I stopped taking action. Now that I was living at home, I allowed my parents to set my routine for me, and I dumbly went along with whatever they proposed.
I breakfasted with them over newspapers and coffee, and helped my mother make sandwiches for lunch. Dinner (cooked by our maid, of course) was at five thirty, followed by the reading of the evening papers, card games, and listening to the radio.
My father suggested that I work at his company, and I agreed to it. He put me in the front office, where I shuffled around papers for seven hours a day and answered phones when nobody else was free to do so. I learned how to file, more or less. I should have been arrested for impersonating a secretary, but at least it gave me something to do with the bulk of my days, and my father paid me a small salary for my “work.”
Dad and I drove to work together every morning, and we drove home together every evening. His conversation during those car rides was more like a collection of rants about how America needed to stay out of the war, and how FDR was a tool of the labor unions, and how the communists would soon be taking over our country. (Always more fearful of communists than fascists, was dear old Dad.) I heard his words, but I can’t say I was listening.
I felt distracted all the time. Something awful was clomping around inside my head in heavy shoes, always reminding me that I was a dirty little whore.
I felt the smallness of everything. My childhood bedroom with its little, girlish bed. The rafters that were too low. The tinny sound of my parents’ conversation in the mornings. The sparse number of cars in the church parking lot on Sundays. The old local grocery store with its limited collection of familiar foods. The luncheonette that closed at two o’clock in the afternoon. My closet full of adolescent clothing. My childhood dolls. It all cramped me, and filled me with gloom.
Every word coming out of the radio sounded ghostly and haunted to me. The uplifting songs and the sorrowful ones alike filled me with disheartenment. The radio dramas could barely hold my attention. Sometimes I would hear Walter Winchell’s voice on the air, bellowing out his gossip, or sending forth his urgent calls for intervention in Europe. My belly clenched at the sound of his voice, but my father would snap off the radio, saying, “That man won’t rest until every good American boy is sent overseas to be killed by the Huns!”
When our copy of Life magazine arrived in the middle of August, there was an article about the hit New York play City of Girls, that included photos of famed British actress Edna Parker Watson. She looked fantastic. For her primary portrait, she wore one of the suits I’d made for her the previous year—a deep gray number with a tiny, tucked waist and a fiercely chic bloodred taffeta collar. There was also a photo of Edna and Arthur walking through Central Park, hand in hand. (“Mrs. Watson, despite all her success, still praises marriage as her favorite role of all. ‘Many actresses will say that they are married to their work,’ says the stylish star. ‘But I prefer being married to a man, if given the choice!’”)
At the time, reading that article made my conscience feel like a rotting little rowboat sinking into a pond of mud. But thinking about it today, I have to say that it enrages me. Arthur Watson had completely gotten away with his misdeeds and lies. Celia had been banished by Peg, and I had been banished by Edna—but Arthur had been allowed to carry on with his lovely life and his lovely wife, as though nothing had ever happened.
The dirty little whores had been disposed of; the man was allowed to remain.
Of course, I didn’t recognize the hypocrisy back then.
But Lord, I recognize it now.
—
On Saturday nights, my parents and I went to our local country-club dances. I could see that what we had always so grandly called the “ballroom” was merely a medium-sized dining room with the tables pushed to one side. The musicians weren’t terrific, either. Meanwhile, I knew that down in New York City, the Viennese Roof was open for summer at the St. Regis, and I would never dance there again.
At the country-club dances, I talked to old friends and neighbors. I did my best. Some of them knew I’d been living in New York City and they tried to make conversation about it. (“I can’t imagine why people would want to live all boxed up on top of each other like that!”) I tried to make conversation with these people, too, about their lake houses, or their dahlias, or their coffee-cake recipes—or whatever seemed to matter to them. I couldn’t work out why anything mattered to anyone. The music dragged on. I danced with anyone who asked while noticing none of my partners with any specificity.
On weekends, my mother went to her horse shows. I went with her when she asked me to go. I would sit in the bleachers with cold hands and muddy boots, watching the horses go round and round the ring, and wondering why anybody would want to do that with their time.
My mother got regular letters from Walter, who was now stationed on an aircraft carrier out of Norfolk, Virginia. He said the food was better than you’d expect, and that he was getting along with all the guys. He sent best wishes to his friends back home. He never mentioned my name.
There was a rather headachy number of weddings to attend that spring, as well. Girls whom I’d gone to school with were getting married and pregnant—and in that order, too, can you imagine? I ran into a childhood friend of mine one day on the sidewalk. Her name was Bess Farmer, and she’d also gone to Emma Willard. She already had a one-year-old child whom she was pushing in a pram and she was pregnant again. Bess was a sweetheart—a genuinely intelligent girl with a hearty laugh and a talent for swimming. She’d been quite gifted in the sciences. It would be insulting and demeaning to say of Bess that she was nothing but a housewife now. But seeing her pregnant body gave me the sweats.
Girls whom I used to swim with naked in the creeks behind our houses back when we were all children (so skinny and energetic and sexless) were now plump matrons, leaking breast milk, bursting with babies. I couldn’t fathom it.