But Bess looked happy.
As for me, I was a dirty little whore.
I had done such a rotten thing to Edna Parker Watson. To betray a person who has helped you and been kind to you—this is the furthest reach of shame.
I walked through more agitated days, and slept fitfully through even worse nights.
I did everything I was told to do, and caused no trouble to anyone, but I still could not solve the problem of how to bear myself.
—
I met Jim Larsen through my father.
Jim was a serious, respectable, twenty-seven-year-old man who worked for Dad’s mining company. He was a freight clerk. If you want to know what that means, it means that he was in charge of manifests, invoices, and orders. He also managed outgoing shipments. He was good at mathematics, and he used his skill with numbers to handle the complexities of route rates, storage costs, and the tracking of freight. (I just wrote down all those words, Angela, but I myself am not sure what any of them actually mean. I memorized those sentences back when I was courting Jim Larsen so that I could explain his job to people.)
My father thought highly of Jim despite his humble roots. My father saw Jim as a purposeful young man on the rise—a sort of working-class version of his own son. He liked that Jim had started out as a machinist, but through steadfastness and merit had quickly worked his way up to a position of authority. My father intended to make Jim the general manager of his entire operation one day, saying, “That boy is a better accountant than most of my accountants, and he’s a better foreman than most of my foremen.”
Dad said, “Jim Larsen is not a leader, but he’s the reliable sort of man that a leader wants to have beside him.”
Jim was so polite, he asked my father if he could take me out on a date before he’d ever spoken to me. My father agreed. In fact, it was my father who told me that Jim Larsen would be taking me on a date. This was before I even knew who Jim Larsen was. But the two men had already worked it all out without consulting me, so I just went along with their plan.
—
On our first date, Jim took me out for a sundae at the local fountain shop. He watched me carefully as I ate it, to check that I was satisfied. He cared about my satisfaction, which is something. Not every man is like that.
The next weekend, he drove me to the lake, where we walked around and looked at ducks.
The weekend after that, we went to a small county fair, and he bought me a little painting of a sunflower after I’d admired it. (“For you to hang on your wall,” he said.)
I’m making him sound more boring than he was.
No, I’m not.
Jim was such a nice man. I had to give him that. (But be careful here, Angela: whenever a woman says about her suitor, “He’s such a nice man,” you can be sure she is not in love.) But Jim was nice. And to be fair, he was more than merely nice. He possessed deep mathematical intelligence, honesty, and resourcefulness. He was not shrewd, but he was smart. And he was good-looking in what they call the “all-American” way—sandy-haired, blue-eyed, and fit. Blond and sincere is not how I prefer my men, given a choice, but there was certainly nothing wrong with his face. Any woman would have identified him as handsome.
Help me! I’m trying to describe him, and I can barely remember him.
What else can I tell you about Jim Larsen? He could play the banjo and he sang in the church choir. He worked part time as a census taker and was a volunteer fireman. He could fix anything, from a screen door to the industrial tracks at the hematite mine.
Jim drove a Buick—a Buick that would someday be traded in for a Cadillac, but not before he had earned it, and not before he had first purchased a bigger home for his mother, with whom he lived. Jim’s sainted mother was a forlorn widow who smelled of medicinal balms and who kept her Bible tucked by her side at all times. She spent her days peering out the windows at her neighbors, waiting for them to slip up and sin. Jim instructed me to call her “Mother,” and so I did, even though I never felt comfortable around the woman for a moment.
Jim’s father had been dead for years, so Jim had been taking care of his mother since he was in high school. His father was a Norwegian immigrant, a blacksmith who had not so much sired a son as forged him—shaping this boy into somebody unerringly responsible and decent. He’d done a good job making this kid into a man by a young age. And then the father had died, leaving his son to become a full adult at the age of fourteen.
Jim seemed to like me. He thought I was funny. He’d not been exposed to much irony in his life, but my little jokes and jabs amused him.
After a few weeks of courtship, he began kissing me. That was pleasant, but he did not take further liberties with my body. I didn’t ask for anything more, either. I didn’t reach for him in a hungry way, but only because I felt no hunger for him. I felt no hunger for anything anymore. I had no access anymore to my appetites. It was as if all my passion and my urges were stored up in a locker somewhere else—somewhere very far away. Maybe at Grand Central Station. All I could do was go along with whatever Jim was doing. Whatever he wanted was fine.
He was solicitous. He asked if I was comfortable with various temperatures in various rooms. He affectionately started calling me “Vee”—but only after asking permission to give me a nickname. (It made me uncomfortable that he inadvertently settled on the same nickname my brother had always called me, but I said nothing, and allowed it.) He helped my mother repair a broken horse jump, and she appreciated him for it. He helped my father transplant some rosebushes.
Jim started coming around in the evenings to play cards with my family. It was not unpleasant. His visits provided a nice break from listening to the radio or reading the evening papers. I was aware that my parents were breaking a social taboo on my behalf—namely: consorting with an employee in their home. But they received him graciously. There was something warm and safe about those evenings.
My father came to like him more and more.
“That Jim Larsen,” he would say, “has the best head on his shoulders in this whole town.”
As for my mother, she probably wished that Jim had more social standing, but what could you do? My mother herself had married neither above nor below her class, but at exact eye level to it—finding in my father a man of the same age, education, wealth, and breeding as herself. I’m sure she wished I would do the same. But she accepted Jim, and for my mother, acceptance would always have to be a stand-in for enthusiasm.
Jim wasn’t dashing, but he could be romantic in his own way. One day when we were driving around town, he said, “With you in my car, I feel that I am the envy of all eyes.”
Where did he come up with a line like that? I wonder. That was sweet, wasn’t it?
Next thing you know, we were engaged.
—
I don’t know why I agreed to marry Jim Larsen, Angela.
No, that’s not true.
I do know why I agreed to marry Jim Larsen—because I felt sordid and vile, and he was clean and honorable. I thought maybe I could erase my bad deeds with his good name. (A strategy that has never worked for anyone, by the way—not that people don’t keep trying it.)
And I liked Jim, in some ways. I liked him because he wasn’t like anybody from the previous year. He didn’t remind me of New York City. He didn’t remind me of the Stork Club, or Harlem, or a smoky bar down in Greenwich Village. He didn’t remind me of Billy Buell, or Celia Ray, or Edna Parker Watson. He damn sure didn’t remind me of Anthony Roccella. (Sigh.) Best of all, he didn’t remind me of myself—a dirty little whore.
When I spent time with Jim, I could be just who I was pretending to be—a nice girl who worked in her father’s office, and who had no past history worth mentioning. All I had to do was follow Jim’s lead and act like him, and I became the last person in the world I had to think about—and that’s exactly how I wanted it.