The Players Come Again Page 3

  All of this, of course, I learned later. In 1941, awaiting Nellie Foxx’s arrival, I knew only that her grandfather had written an impressive and in some ways obscene book whose publication had been won by the efforts of the enlightened—including Dorinda’s father—against the benighted, the protectors of public morals. Foxx’s female hero masturbated, menstruated, fantasized, but was forever distinguished from Joyce’s Molly Bloom by her high intelligence, her allegiance to her women friends, her ambivalence toward men, whom she admired, emulated, and despised, and her sexual attraction to women. It was a scene of lesbian lovemaking that had got the book banned, although in 1941 Dorinda and I did not know that, Dorinda claiming to be an expert only in heterosexual cavortings. Young people today find it hard to believe, but we did not even know the word lesbian, nor the possibility of such activity. Like Queen Victoria, we thought only men had the equipment or the nerve for sexual experimentation; we had of course heard of male homosexuals and referred to them, sneeringly, as “fairies” or “thataway.” We were the children of our time.

  What I chiefly recall (as opposed to having flashed before me as a memory) is the amazing generosity of Dorinda and her family. Dorinda had adopted me as bosom friend, and her parents allowed me to be her almost constant companion. For example, when Dorinda was given something, I was given something too. As with cameras: in order to help out some German refugees, Dorinda’s father bought cameras from them, Leica M3s, and he gave the best one to Dorinda, and another, for some reason inferior, to me. We became photographers, good photographers, and even years later, when single-lens reflex cameras were almost universal, I stuck to my old Leica with its range finder and its heavy metal case. I have it yet, and when I take it for some repair, I am told it will fetch a handsome price if I ever decide to sell it and join the contemporary camera world. I keep it, not from sentiment, but from admiration. It is, in my opinion, the best camera ever made.

  But it was not alone in such generous gifts that the Goddards expressed themselves. They made me part of their family, without ever making me feel like a poor relation. The maid who picked up and washed Dorinda’s dirty clothes would seek mine in my suitcase where I had hoped to conceal them: in a short time they were returned to me, cleaned and ironed. The maids never treated me in any way as an inferior, and I know: now that Dorinda’s mother must have assured this by giving them extra money and talking to them. My mother spoke sometimes of whether or not I ought to tip the maids as a guest in the house, but nothing ever came of this. We decided that a child would not have been expected to hand money to a servant.

  I feared horribly that the arrival of Nellie would signal my expulsion from this paradise. Nellie would become the substitute companion, and I would gradually be dropped. My mother had been troubled by my friendship with people as rich and elevated as Dorinda’s family, and now, with Nellie’s coming, she warned me I would suffer what she had always feared: the betrayal of my trust and the discomfort of my return to the life she was able to offer me, a life not only ordinary but tense and threatened.

  The miracle is that this never happened, that we continued as three, that Dorinda never, until many years later at least, felt anything but loyalty to us both. And since she had the money, and we did not, we all shared in it. Dorinda told us she was practicing socialism on a small scale; no doubt she was closer to what in later years would be called, with a sneer, a Lady Bountiful, but I can testify that her benevolence, involving no evident privileged class and no bureaucracy, seemed simply ideal.

  My mother worked as a housekeeper in the various homes of the very rich. I had met Dorinda because my mother had been lent by a New Jersey neighbor to Dorinda’s mother during a summer week. In those days, the coast of New Jersey was known as the Jewish Newport; I have recently read in an autobiography by Peggy Guggenheim that she despised it: the huge houses, the many servants, the roses and hydrangeas which alone would grow in that climate. I came upon the Peggy Guggenheim book quite by accident not too long ago, and it brought back to me those heavenly summers; only to a Guggenheim could they have seemed tacky. To me, they were the good life, and whenever the good life was invoked, whether of Cole Porter on the Riviera or the Kennedys in Hyannis Port, the picture of that life, even in my mature and worldly mind, was New Jersey in the years before and during World War II.

  I suppose I seemed a challenge to Dorinda when we met; we were twelve years old. My mother had got permission to bring me with her to Dorinda’s house; I was the perfect child of an upper servant—quiet, unobtrusive, observant, full of longing. But Dorinda, who was always looking for new adventures and new worlds to conquer, snapped me up, ordered me to accompany her to the beach club, to the tennis court, to the riding stables. She gave me her clothes, her enthusiasms, her aching affection. The only miracle in this was that, despite the suddenness of her attentions, and the remarkable generosity of her family when importuned with my needs and requirements as Dorinda saw them, despite even the arrival of the glamorously derived Nellie, Dorinda’s loyalty to me never faltered.

  In time I came to see that my mother, schooled in a harsh world, was frustrated by this constancy. It belied the lessons she had determined to teach me, of the perfidy of friends, the danger of circumstances, the likelihood of disaster. And this lesson was reinforced and repeated, not only by my mother but by her four sisters, whose whole “take” on life was the prevention of disaster. Life was not to be lived, let alone experienced; it was to be outwitted.

  Only three of the aunts actually imposed their views upon me; the other one had run off with someone else’s husband, and dared not show her face. Propriety was all. When, in college, I read George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, I saw in Maggie Tulliver’s aunts my own relations. But my mother, unlike Maggie’s, was not weak. She was the oldest and the strongest of them all. The sisters were part of what could, no doubt, be called a matriarchy; certainly they had been produced by their mother, a woman of extraordinary power and attraction. Their father, apart from his inevitable part in the fertilization of eggs—and certainly I would have suggested even in my youth that these women were the result of parthenogenesis had I known the word—played no part in the family drama. My grandmother had early discovered that he was competent at nothing but drinking and throwing money away and she left him to it, supporting the family and directing its passage through life.

  The three ever-present sisters—and I thought of them more as my mother’s sisters than as my aunts, almost as though they were aspects of her, or a kind of chorus chanting again her pronouncements—were married, all of them to men who made good livings and were able to provide their wives with smart clothes, a good decorator, and vacations the need of which always mystified me, for they did nothing all year, having a maid and, when in due time they each produced two children, a “girl” who looked after them. That my mother was a kind of servant was a fact they were forced to overlook because she was so much the dominant figure in their lives that they could not operate without her. They lied about her work to their friends, recognizing perhaps that while they had “girls” to help out, in the world where my mother worked children had nannies (as Peggy Guggenheim wrote, often one for each child) and, later, governesses. Dorinda was at the governess stage when we met, and from that governess I, together with Dorinda, learned to speak and read French. Fortunately, I was less quick at this, as at everything, than Dorinda; perhaps that was why I was never a threat in that way.

  In the years between the time when Dorinda and I met and the time when Nellie came, books were the chief source of our fantasies and the major topic of conversation. I remember with particular clarity when we read Elizabeth Bowen’s The Death of the Heart, and both dreamed that a filmmaker would decide to make a movie of that novel and cast one of us as Portia, the adolescent heroine. Neither of us had any doubt that, should we be spotted by a movie director as stars so often had been, or so magazines such as Life told us at the time, Dorinda would be the
one. She was slim and ethereal-looking with good bone structure of the Garbo sort and wide-set blue eyes. I was fuller of figure, although athletic, and anything but ethereal. But we were, in school and after, together so constantly, I was able to imagine that some of Dorinda’s qualities rubbed off on me.

  Have I mentioned that Dorinda’s family, at her earnest request, had arranged for her school to grant me a scholarship? Perhaps they took me because I might add an interesting, lower-class note, perhaps because Dorinda’s family, having been generous in their donations, must be listened to, perhaps because the Head of the school, interviewing me, thought she spotted promise: I shall never know. But I transferred just before high school to Dorinda’s school, known as Miss Hadley’s, where we wore uniforms and did not, happily for me, compete about clothes. My mother used to say that the only competition seemed to be about who could be the sloppiest. I adored the school.

  Of course we did not read anyone as contemporary as Elizabeth Bowen in class, but the library was encouraging about current fiction, so we were wonderfully up to date and yet, it occurs to me, read “good” books, well written, delicate, and sophisticated. If we missed much, we learned the sound, the precision, of proper English prose. How old-fashioned I, who have always been so radical, must sound.

  I particularly recall Elizabeth Bowen because she had (I must have read this later) a profound sense of place. She said somewhere that place was more important to her than character; having become a storyteller myself, I recognize that place has never especially inspired me or moved me except as it can be evoked by a sudden, sharp memory. Descriptions of places always seemed to me tedious, and to this day I become impatient with authors who insist upon describing all the furnishings in a room before they will allow their characters to enter it or, once there, to speak. Yet I should describe the house on the New Jersey coast because it was, as a place, so central to our youth, and the years of our triumvirate.

  The house and grounds occupied an entire block, the house at one end, the garage at the other, and enormous gardens and lawn between. In those days, the rich did not have swimming pools and tennis courts on their own property: they belonged to clubs for those purposes. Their homes were for relaxation. So, if there was to be a picnic under some trees on the lawn, a table would be set up, food brought out by the servants, and a cloth spread. The house itself was built for the summer: it had a porch on two sides, with rockers and swings. One entered the house always through the front door off the porch, into an enormous living room (as I thought of it), with a stair on one side sweeping upward to the bedroom floors; at the extreme top of the stairs was a skylight with stained glass; the living room was open to that skylight, which formed part of its ceiling. In the center of this room, in a comfortable chair, would sit Dorinda’s grandfather, the maker of the fortune. As any of Dorinda’s friends entered, he would greet them: “Hello, my dear!” and beckon them to him. Each of Dorinda’s friends answered that beckoning only once for he would grab his victim, sit her on his lap, and begin to stroke her, gradually moving his hand toward her private parts, and where her breasts were beginning. After the first time, each of us learned to greet him cordially, while circling at a safe distance around his chair toward the staircase, or the dining room off to the back, well out of his reach.

  I have often reflected since that Dorinda never warned her friends about her grandfather, but confirmed their experience with a sort of “now you know” shrug. What her motives were in the matter, whether she thought we all ought to find out for ourselves as the quickest way to useful knowledge, or whether she disliked mentioning the antics of the dirty old man, I never asked and never learned. I can only say that the one experience with him was not bad enough to be called child abuse—we were, after all, in the open in the middle of a busy house—and it taught me something about sex that seemed, thereafter, essential: men took it from you if they could. I found this not frightening, but useful knowledge, of the sort I doggedly collected.

  Dorinda had a suite of rooms to herself; her French governess had one room, often empty in the summer as she took her vacation to France and then, as the war came, elsewhere; there was a room for a guest. Dorinda’s own room, both here and in New York, was, at her request, fixed up as a sitting room. After Nellie came, she and I shared the twin beds in the guest room. In New York, Nellie had her own room, and I stayed overnight only occasionally. But my memories are, mainly, of the house on the Jersey shore.

  In the evenings there, we neatened ourselves up for dinner, which was served in the large dining room with Grandpa at the head of the table. He used to interrupt the conversation with bursts of song and totally inappropriate observations, either to the conversation or the occasion, and at the end of every meal he would always struggle to his feet and make the same loud and tiresome remark about that meal being over. I always averted my eyes from this embarrassing, because unchanging, scene. But no one ever complained of his habits, or made him feel anything but the head of the household which, financially, he doubtless was. Dorinda’s father now headed the business his father had made so successful—it had been founded in the previous generation as a small enterprise—and it is somehow characteristic of the time that I never knew what the business was. I remember thinking that they made money, which was true, God knows. Recently I asked Dorinda what the business had been—the family was long out of it—and she said that they had been investment bankers of some sort, so I had been largely right after all.

  As soon as we heard of Nellie’s arrival, we began to read the famous book by Emmanuel Foxx. He had written others, of course, before and after, but this was the one that had made him famous, the one they had to fight to get published in the United States and England. Dorinda and I had been too young at the time of the trial allowing the book’s publication to take notice. Dorinda heard all about it at home; her father was closely involved with the whole matter, and he was not a man to consider confidentiality a rational mode nor to temper his stories to the young. When Nellie was coming, therefore, Dorinda suddenly remembered the stories, and found a copy of the famous novel in the summer house: actually, the family had copies of all the first editions from many countries, and much of the conferencing at the time of the trial had taken place on the Jersey shore.

  Because we were bookish, we had less trouble finding the salacious parts of the book than we might have had in 1941 at age fifteen. For the most part, the accounts of his heroine’s thoughts were, to us, endlessly boring as, I suspect, they were to many. But he provided the reader with moments of heightened prose describing sexual experiences; we read these with enormous delight. Alone, I might have pretended to be unimpressed, even not to understand, but Dorinda’s forthrightness made that impossible. So we smacked our lips, and thought of the delights that awaited us. They were nothing like the thoughts with which we had previously identified, of Elizabeth Bowen’s Portia.

  In those days, days hard to recall after the sexual and other revolutions of our time, it was repeatedly and annoyingly said of girls that they were “sweet sixteen and never been kissed.” Dorinda and I snorted at this, although it partly described us: if not sweet, we had not “necked,” as we all called it. Life offered far too few opportunities. But by the time we were sixteen, we were the triumvirate; we had all been kissed, and the next summer at the Jersey shore, we went to the dances arranged by the USO to meet sailors. No sexual adventures came of these dances, but we liked to ask the boys to the house for dinner three at a time, an intrusion that Dorinda’s mother, as usual, took in her stride; there was always enough food. When we all were at dinner, Dorinda’s grandfather would catch sight of their white uniforms somewhere around the second course, and start singing a naval song from Gilbert and Sullivan. We girls giggled and smirked at the sailor boys’ discomfort. We felt like women of the world.

  In the winters in New York my mother did not live “in,” but shared an apartment with me in the lower floor of a private house between
Columbus and Amsterdam avenues in the Eighties. It was a largely Irish neighborhood then, and Irish girls would shout at me from the stoops because, as was instantly evident to them, I was different. The degree to which I accepted this as a fact of life, to be borne but not reacted to either externally or internally, came to astonish me in later years. Perhaps the sneers of the Irish children did not impress me because it did not touch my real life, lived with Dorinda and Nellie.

  That winter, the winter before Pearl Harbor, we began to have parties with boys in Dorinda’s living room. Her parents willingly cleared out; her grandfather, who during the winters lived with his nurse in a hotel, had not to be considered. Not that we ever did consider him; he was like a domestic totem, bowed to, steered clear of, little noticed in the present demanding world of each day.