The Players Come Again Read online

  Where did the boys come from? I can scarcely remember. In Dorinda’s circle, they were a source simply tapped, from boys’ schools, her parents’ friends’ children, dancing classes; one of the boys—Len, the one with whom I early became paired off—had been picked up at a summer farm Dorinda had once visited, where he was working to save money for college. Did he and I immediately recognize each other as from a different class? He was to become my first, my sweetest, my only lover. When I was not yet sixteen, he and I half sat or lay on the couch or floor like the others, necking, kissing, to (can it have been always?) César Franck’s only symphony.

  The music was played on a Capehart, an unbelievably elegant record player. Those of us who did not have to put one record at a time on our players (and the records then were 78 rpm; it took four or five recorded on both sides for a symphony) had at best a device that dropped them in turn one upon the other; these records had, of course, been manufactured so that all of them were stacked to play on one side, then the lot turned over to play on the other. But as the records piled up they slipped and scratched, causing most of us to abandon these recordings in favor of the old-style records which we turned over and changed by hand.

  But the Capehart, which occupied a huge cabinet, had its own special mechanism. Mechanical hands emerged and turned the record. After the record had been played on both sides, the hands flung it to the other end of the cabinet where it landed on a felt-covered slide. Sometimes the Capehart became angry—at the music, at us, at being overworked?—and it would fling the records across the room. We laughed and applauded and stacked them up again. I always mean to ask Dorinda or her mother what finally became of the Capehart. When long-playing records came in, it doubtless went the way of all obsolescent objects in our culture.

  Nellie was very popular at our school and with our group; and life between the three of us, Dorinda, Nellie, and I, seemed an unending conversation of discovery about life and plans for our, as we then believed, unconventional futures. What did we imagine our lives would be? I have tried to remember what we said to each other, tried to hear our voices separately rather than melded, as they are when I recall them, into a chorus. Well, perhaps I should say chorus with leader, for Dorinda’s was the dominating voice, the one who set our tone and orchestrated our debates. This was not only because her family and her money were supporting both Nellie and me; it was because we two were on the quiet side, and Dorinda was forthright: she knew what she wanted and what she meant to say. Neither Nellie nor I could ever have imagined, let alone prophesied, that Dorinda would revert to a conventional destiny. Not even Nellie’s experience of Europe seemed more authentic than Dorinda’s, since Dorinda had visited Europe, and had Europe visit her, all her life. And the only experience I could offer, of poverty and thrift, was not one I had any desire to emphasize.

  What did we talk of all those hours? The imagined sex lives of our teachers, the actual lives of our classmates’ families, at least as we had observed and interpreted them.

  “Her father’s had a mistress for years,” Dorinda would say; I remember that discussion of a particularly rich and elegant family whose sad last offspring was in our class.

  “What is a mistress?” Nellie asked. I remember that I too did not know what the term meant (however unbelievable that seems these days), and was glad that Nellie had asked.

  “It’s a concubine,” Dorinda said, giving an explanation wholly satisfactory to our bookish selves.

  “What do women have?” I remember asking. I hated the way men were the heroes of everything.

  “Women take lovers,” Dorinda said. “I know Nellie’s mother did, before Nellie was born, of course.” This last was added, quite illogically, to keep from hurting Nellie. We never attacked each other, and argued only about principles.

  “Even after,” Nellie said, as though this was little more than a matter of correct information. “Everyone knew.”

  By that time, of course, we had all boned up on the works of Emmanuel Foxx, and we honored Nellie’s paternal heritage. Only Len and I admitted to each other that we did not find Foxx’s writing riveting. I was guilty about this: after all, he was writing about a woman, and, interested in women, I could find few enough books that portrayed them in other than romantic modes. Perhaps I sensed, without being wise enough to know, that what Foxx had produced was not a woman’s thoughts, but a man’s fantasy of a woman’s thoughts. Despite Len and my doubts, which we kept to ourselves (my only disloyalty to Dorinda), Nellie existed in a golden glow whose reflection illuminated Dorinda almost as brightly, and even shone sufficiently on me to make me envied. I was consciously happy as part of the trio, and considered myself blessed. That is an emotion I read little of in other people’s accounts of their youth, but for me it was quite simply a magic time.

  By now, I was telling my mother almost nothing of my daily (or nightly) life, though no doubt she knew enough of that crowd to have her suspicions. She spoke to me openly and sternly about the dangers of pregnancy and of letting boys get the better of me. I did not want her advice nor, after parrying Dorinda’s grandfather, did I need it. I intended to live my own life, take my experience where I might, and have a proud profession. Fortunately, Len was an honorable soul and did not challenge these naive decisions; also Dorinda’s sexual adventures provided enough vicarious experience to keep Nellie and me on the straight and narrow while we watched with delight and wonder Dorinda on her primrose path. So, at least in the beginning, I followed my mother’s advice after all but, I assured myself, only coincidentally, and for my own reasons.

  Sometime in 1955, as I was rushing around a department store (of which there were many in those days cheek by jowl along Fifth Avenue), I met Eleanor Goddard in the nightwear department. The publishing house for which I worked had decided to send me to London, and I recognized the need for decent pajamas of the sort all women then wore. (Oddly enough, nightgowns, or nothing, seemed to come back with the women’s movement.) I was not preparing for a romantic encounter, but for the possible invitation to stay with someone, or to share a hotel room. It had been two years since I had seen Dorinda’s mother, and I babbled most of this out when we had scarcely got past our surprised hellos. Dorinda’s mother, listening in her quiet way to my rather long-winded account, latched on to only one word: London.

  “I wonder if I might ask you to do me a kindness while you’re there,” she said.

  “Of course,” I said. “Anything.” I did not think of Dorinda and her family as often as I used to, but I never lost the sense of owing them almost everything except my literal birth and first twelve years. I used sometimes to imagine how I could ever pay them back. Much older now, I understand that their gifts, freely given without sacrifice, were generous enough, but not nearly as lovely nor as dearly bought as the bare minimum, as I saw it, my mother provided for me.

  “Gabrielle Foxx is still in London,” Dorinda’s mother said. “Emmanuel’s widow,” she added after a moment, not wanting to assume I ought to know. She need not have worried; the story of Emmanuel Foxx and the beautiful aristocratic girl he had run off with were as unforgettable to me as any history I knew. “We haven’t heard from her in a very long time. Emile used sometimes to write; Gabrielle was never a great writer. Might you drop in on her while you are in London?” Emile, I recalled after only a moment’s effort—for he was fated from birth to be a minor player in the Foxx drama—was Emmanuel and Gabrielle’s son and Nellie’s father.

  “Of course,” I said again. She wrote the address out for me on a pad she carried in her purse (she was always organized, always prepared; how else could that complicated household be run; I had always understood that).

  “I’ll call you when I get back,” I told her. “If there seems to be any sort of problem, I’ll cable from London.” But I knew, short of imminent death, I would save my story for when I returned. Talking face to face to Dorinda’s mother and father about something so impor
tant as the Foxx family was not to be denied me, I saw little of Dorinda these days, but her family still held a kind of fascination for me that time could not lessen. “How is Dorinda?” I asked with a certain note of apology in my voice. I ought not to have had to ask.

  “Fine. Quite wrapped up in being a mother.”

  Dorinda had transmogrified herself, as completely, I chose to think, as a prince under a spell becomes a frog. It was unlikely now that this frog would ever be recalled to earlier radiance with a kiss, or by any other means. From the wildest of rich, mad, daring young women, hungry for sex and reckless adventure, Dorinda had, all in one day, it seemed, ordained the end of her giddy youth. She had married a surgeon, a man so dull and pompous that one could scarcely bear to spend an evening with him except for Dorinda’s sake, and produced two children within her first five years of marriage. The giddy joy she and Nellie and I had felt at being only children, bound to no siblings but each other, freely chosen, had somehow led Dorinda to deny her own offspring the same opportunity. Perhaps she feared where it might lead.

  “Dorinda is pregnant again,” her mother said. “I’m sure she’d be glad to hear from you.” And thanking me again for my promise about Gabrielle Foxx, she left me to the contemplation of pajamas and a suitably ladylike robe. As I indicated my choice to the saleslady, I remembered Dorinda, like Virginia Woolf’s Sally Seton, running naked through the halls of the Jersey house, daring her parents’ proper guests to catch a glimpse. And now she had ended like Sally Seton, dully married, a lady, a mother several times over, all but unrecognizable.

  Although we all three went to different colleges, we kept in close touch during those years; Nellie and I, for our different reasons, were hard-working, sober young women, content to have one boyfriend at a time ourselves yet eager to be stirred, amazed, sometimes horrified by Dorinda’s accounts of her adventures. She had begun by sleeping with the chauffeur one summer at the Jersey shore. Her parents had bought her a small runabout—to this day I can render every inch of that car, although I have forgotten so many of the faces from that time. It was gray, a Ford coupe, as they were called, with room only for two (three at a squeeze) in the front, and a rumble seat in the back. Nothing, not convertibles nor the various status cars that have come and gone in the course of my life, ever carried one hundredth of the glamour of that small Ford coupe.

  The car appeared on Dorinda’s seventeenth birthday (always in the summer, always marked by glorious presents and celebrations; to this day, July 13th seems to me full of promise and nameless glee when I can scarcely remember the birthdays of those much closer to me now). The chauffeur was instructed to teach Dorinda to drive; he was a handsome young man, courteous and well mannered, doubtless holding that job because of some health reason, to earn money for his aging mother, something noble. I can’t remember why he wasn’t in the army; perhaps he had some unnoticeable but fatal illness—certainly it vastly increased his charms for us to think so.

  Dorinda, eager to be rid of her virginity, seduced him in the car. When she told us about it, Nellie and I feared the nice young man would lose his job (that this was our fear tells me now a good deal about attitudes of the time), but we need not have worried. Dorinda got him to teach Nellie and me to drive. He behaved with perfect propriety toward the two of us, though we simultaneously dreaded (and hoped?) that he would exact the same price from us.

  Dorinda’s sexual adventures continued from the year of the Ford coupe, becoming ever more daring, ever more random and, it seemed to Nellie and me, undiscriminating. There was also at this time the occasional rich scion who dallied with Dorinda until she told him, as she always did sooner or later, that she was Jewish. (She did not look Jewish, and having a gentile mother was, in fact, not Jewish by Jewish law, but she could never resist shocking anyone. She did not marry a Jew, however, and passed serenely into the higher reaches of New York’s WASP world, as it came to be called.)

  It was at about this time when, as I now realize, Dorinda’s mother must have begun to guess at her daughter’s sexual exploits that she and I became closer. We were both, I now see, outsiders in that family into which Nellie was, after all, born; we were gentiles, we were conservative by nature, and made uncomfortable by flamboyant behavior. During our college years, I went to see Dorinda’s mother, who had by this time asked me to call her Eleanor, whenever I came to New York. I used to contemplate the possibility that she was my mother, that I had been handed over to my housekeeping parent for mysterious reasons never to be known. Certainly we understood each other far better than either of us understood our assigned partners in the mother-daughter dyad.

  I know now that Eleanor was basically a conservative, unquestioning person, readily accepting the mores of her own class and the class into which she had married. Even so, I gave her little enough credit for understanding much more than her duties as a wealthy man’s wife. I know now that she, unlike my mother and Dorinda, comprehended the abyss I straddled because she straddled it herself. Then, I wanted more of life than Eleanor’s rich woman’s destiny—even though these women were supposed to be the freest, most handsomely endowed of all the women I saw in my youth. No matter what my feelings about my mother, I saw that she was, as a widow and working person, her own woman, even if employed by others. Eleanor worked just as hard at her glamorous life. Certainly she worried more, moment by moment, than my mother and seemed always invisibly to tremble with anxiety and fear. So I suppose I had some justification for thinking her incapable of autonomy or self-reliance. What was the point, I thought, of being rich if it only led to stress and anxiety? Eleanor worried before meals and after them, she worried about the yearly moves to and from the Jersey shore, she worried about the state of the country house, Sig’s impulsively invited guests (no wonder there was always enough food for the sailors), and above all, I suspected, she worried about the richly born people with whom she had to interact as if her past had been like theirs.

  Because I understood instinctively the terrors of Eleanor’s life, it is easy enough to say now that I lacked a role model. Of course I did, but at least I had a chance at education, a chance to prepare myself, should I wish, for a nondomestic profession. That my mother ran houses for other women only made her a fool in my eyes; she was no less a domestic slave than the women she worked for. And, unlike Dorinda, I could not admire Hilda, who had married a famous man’s son. She had still, I thought, followed one of those few narrow paths allowed to women, using her sex to buy her way into an interesting life. Looking back now, I am almost certain that my mother disapproved as heartily of Hilda’s marriage to Emile as did Eleanor herself. But my mother never spoke to me about her views of the families she worked for, least of all the Goddards. And it was part of Eleanor’s code never to convey this to anyone except, I now see, eventually and only by implication, to me.

  Eleanor and her sister-in-law Hilda, who married Emile Foxx, came from wildly disparate backgrounds and classes, but they were alike in being denied a chance even to go to college, much less to prepare for a career not emphatically female. So Eleanor had the choice of training to be a nurse, a schoolteacher, or a secretary, and chose the latter because she had had enough of nursing and children as the oldest in her large family. And Hilda, rich, spoiled, indulged as the recipient of all the luxuries the well-off could afford, had only her beauty and sense of adventure, inevitably sexual, to suggest a way of life. When Eleanor and Hilda met as sisters-in-law, they shared nothing but the husband-brother (his devotion to his sister probably surpassed that to his wife) and the table around which they occasionally, at the Jersey house and for family celebrations, together sat.

  At the time Eleanor and I spoke in the nightwear department Hilda had died two years ago from cancer. Hilda’s was a life of almost catastrophic waste and misfortune, all arising from the necessity of the rich to raise their women to be beautiful objects of devotion without purpose and without sufficient discipline to live a life beyond the mat
erialistic aims of their families.

  These girls were educated at elegant schools, which never for a moment suggested to them the possibility of their undertaking a profession. Women worked only because they had to, and it was the pride of these successful men, as it was the pride of my mother’s sisters’ husbands, that their women need never lift a finger outside of their homes or the time they gave as charity in a noblesse oblige mood. My mother worked because my father, having died, could not support her. Had he deserted us, it would have come to the same thing. My aunts, like the daughters in the wealthy Jewish families for which my mother worked, had not gone to college. Either college was considered too expensive and unnecessary for women like my aunts and Eleanor, or too dangerous for women like Hilda. By the time of Dorinda and my generation, women of the upper middle class were, as an assumed right, sent to college by their wealthy fathers. I was able therefore to look back at that deprived generation of Hilda’s and understand what her situation must have been, wherein her desperation lay. Her sexual escapades, unlike Dorinda’s, lasted for life, as did her instability; it was almost as though if she stopped to ask herself what she was doing, she would vanish into thin air. And when the coming war found her in Europe, forced finally to think, to question her circumstances, she went mad. Dorinda’s father had to have her anesthetized and brought to America under the care of two nurses aboard one of the last civilian ships to make the ocean crossing.

  To Eleanor, Hilda must have seemed like a mutant, or a creature from an unknown species. There is a picture of them together in the garden of the New Jersey house, before Hilda had met Emile, when Eleanor had just become a Goddard daughter-in-law. They are standing with the grandfather, his arm around his beloved and beautiful daughter Hilda. Eleanor stands at their side, her hair carefully done, her clothes exactly right, her stance awkward. It would be two years before Dorinda and Nellie were conceived, Dorinda after much effort, Nellie almost as an incidental event. I too was yet to be born. It was impossible for me to look at that snapshot without placing the three of us, Dorinda, Nellie, and I, into a sort of cloud of the unborn hovering above the picture. What my mother’s life was like at that time never interested me in the slightest.