He didn’t kiss me, but he put his hand on my breast. He continued to smoke whilst squeezing my breast through my brassiere and dress. I know I should have felt angry or violated, and I did try to, but his expression was distracted, as if he was doodling on a pad whilst mulling over another thing. Mainly I felt very confused. He had been looking at my forehead, but as he squeezed for the third time, he looked into my eyes. And let go immediately. “Places to go, people to see, Mary.” He walked backwards to the door, removing his cigar from his mouth for long enough to place a finger over his lips and wink. I wish there was someone I could have written to after that, someone I could have written to to explain how awful it was to have someone touch you, then look at you properly and change his mind.
Mr. Cole was at home when Katherine and I returned from our walk, sitting in an armchair with Mitzi on his lap. Mitzi opened her arms to Katherine, inviting her to join the tableau. Katherine regarded her parents with frozen eyes and swerved around them, opting for the dining room, where a coloured maid in a white cap stood beside a stacked trolley, covering the table with trays full of vol-au-vents that no one would eat.
“How much time do I have to get away before the ladies descend?” Mr. Cole asked. He seemed genuinely worried. Mitzi squeezed his neck and cooed that he was a grumpy bear, wasn’t he, wasn’t he.
Mitzi hosted her women’s club only once a month, so it was tolerable. The wives of her husband’s colleagues would gather at the Coles’ apartment and fill it with cigarette smoke. Nothing was consumed but cocktails and crudités; everyone was trying to reduce. They’d go around in a circle, these women, each telling the others what she’d been reading, what she’d seen at the theatre or at the pictures, which art exhibition was most divine. Katherine and I would barricade ourselves into my room or hers, with a chair against the door in case Mitzi had too much to drink and was suddenly possessed with a desire to display her offspring. We sprawled in a nest of our own laps and legs, reading and crunching animal crackers. Katherine swore she wouldn’t have anything to do with any goddamn women’s club when she grew up. My only reply was, “Don’t say ‘goddamn.’” Sooner or later Katherine will be expected to contribute to her mother’s gatherings, and having endured it once, the next time will be easier, and so on until this brief moment when Katherine and I are in perfect agreement is lost, and it’ll be strange to both of us to remember that we ever understood each other. Katherine is completely different from me, and it’s more than just the fact that her father’s money will erode her until she is no longer abrasive to the rest of her social set, until she is able to mingle and marry amongst them quite contentedly. It’s also that she’s already very pretty. A little long in the nose, but on the whole, very pretty. After a while it will seem odd that she has these looks and makes no attempt to use them. Why doesn’t she smile and bat her eyelashes, the way her mother must have practically from birth? I wanted to tell her. Don’t look at people so strongly, Katherine Cole. Let your gaze swoon a little. Don’t speak so firmly; falter. Lisp, even. Your failure to do these things made me mistake you for someone like me.
“Katherine is improving in English literature,” I told her parents, because I felt I should say something. Then I hurried to my room. Katherine joined me when the clock struck seven. And there we stayed, safe from the clinking of glasses and the lilting sound of civilised conversation. Katherine had been teaching herself how to read Tarot, and she told my fortune, laying down card after card, telling me what each one was supposed to predict. They were all bad cards. A heart spiked with sword blades, a lightning-struck tower, a demon holding a man and a woman on the same chain, a hooded figure walking away from cups that lay empty on the ground. She was taken aback; she reshuffled the cards. “Let’s start again,” she said.
“Let’s not,” I said. “That’s cheating.” We put on shoes and coats and slid past the lounge and out the front door. In the garden at the side of the building, we knelt by the pond and fed the koi. There had been more rain earlier in the evening, so we turned up plenty of their favourite food without much effort. The fish surged to the surface of the water and ate the earthworms live from our fingers. Lamps lit the rosebushes as bright as day and sirens sounded and resounded, their screams strangely pure, choral. I had been all over this city on my own, looked down from its heights, looked up from its swarming pavements — I’d spoken to no one; everyone passed me by at a clip. It occurred to me that I was unhappy. And it didn’t feel so very terrible. No urgency, nothing. I could slip out of my life on a slow wave like this — it didn’t matter. I don’t have to be happy. All I have to do is hold on to something and wait.
Once Katherine was asleep I read and marked her illustrated history project on the Church of England. I had to give her a C because she spoilt an otherwise thoughtful piece by suddenly concluding that the Church of England was Anne Boleyn’s “fault.” A Church is not the “fault” of anybody. Next, I set about preparing a lesson on stars, galaxies, and planets, poring over fat books I had withdrawn from the public library on Katherine’s ticket. There was so much information. I had to select things that would interest her, place them strategically alongside the things that were bound to bore her, the figures and units of measurement, in such a way as to disarm her objections to the important facts. I didn’t finish until one a.m., and by then it was too late to reach for my typewriter and add to the other pages I had been accumulating. So I sat beside the typewriter in the dark, and I pretended that I was working at it; then I pretended that all the work was finished, and I touched the keys that would make the page say
THE END THE END THE END
November 9th, 1936
Mary Foxe
85 East 65th Street, Apartment 11
New York City
Mary,
Many thanks for your letter of November 1st. Here is what I propose: to have my secretary wait for you this Saturday at one p.m., in order to collect the pages you want me to look at, and to buy you a consolatory lunch if you’re hungry. Salmagundi, on Lexington and 61st, is a personal favourite of mine — if you object to the time, place, date, or all three, then please say so by return. Otherwise, save your stationery.
Yours most chastened,
The abominable, contemptible, vile, execrable, etc.,
Mr. Fox
177 West 77th Street,
Apartment 25
New York City
I telephoned Katherine at the Long Island house. Mitzi answered, and I told her that this was an impromptu French oral examination, to keep Katherine’s skills elastic.
“Bonjour,” Katherine said, when she came to the phone. She was slightly out of breath — all that tennis. “Comment ça va?”
“Got a letter from Mr. Fox,” I said.
She laughed, and I heard her clap her hands. “What did he say? Did he sock it to you?”
She stopped laughing as she soaked up the realization that I couldn’t speak. I was in too much of a state.
Once I’d recovered I asked, “Why did you send it, Katherine?”