In the Beauty of the Lilies (33 page)

Whereas over in Red Lion everything was new and sunny even in the dead of winter. Instead of dumb calendars with dressed-up Scotties and a greasy religious picture of Jesus praying in a purple robe at a conveniently flat rock while a single spotlight brought out the planes of His face, the Pulsifers had framed prints by Bonnard and Matisse in wild colors and shapes and actual oil paintings done by a friend of theirs of the marshes and the derelict old houses along the Canal. Instead of
Reader
’s
Digests
and
Saturday Evening Posts
limply getting out of date in a stained-maple magazine stand next to Daddy’s armchair they had something brand new called
Flair
with a hole right in the cover and
Life
with all its shiny photos of people in the limelight. On the bookcase on Locust Street there were sun-bleached fat cloth spines with names like Thornton Wilder and Edna Ferber and Sinclair Lewis from before the war, when Momma used to read novels, and an awful assortment of books in dismal dull colors dragged down from Paterson about the Bible and God along with O. Henry and Kipling, and on the lowest shelf, more depressing still, a whole row in crumbling yellow-brown leather of something called
The Popular Encyclopedia
that Essie had never opened, it smelled so of the dead past; whereas the Pulsifers had lying around still in their bright jackets new books by modern authors like Philip Wylie and Anne Frank and Ernest Hemingway and Ross Lockridge, Jr. And then that fall they had bought themselves a television set, the first Essie had ever seen in a home. It was like a little movie right there in the living room, a free movie that was running in a fishbowl. To Essie the images the tube produced looked fuzzy and dirty, worse than B pictures out of Universal, and not so much like a movie as like one of the skits at high school, some man getting into a woman’s dress and falling
around on high heels, and messy, everything slapdash and underrehearsed, these women knocking each other around in the roller derby and this man with all these rings on his hands playing in a kind of cellar by the light of some candles: it turned her stomach a little, like too much candy, to look at it for long. But the three Pulsifer boys flicked it on as soon as one banged into the house and kept it on as they went in and out, with their noise and sports equipment and friends. They were rich spoiled brats, compared to her friends in Basingstoke. Uncle Peter would come home from work and find the two Esthers in the kitchen or out in the screened sunporch underneath the redwood deck. “Which twin has the Toni?” he would say, stooping to kiss his thin-lipped wife but wanting, Essie could feel, to kiss
her
. Uncle Peter had come back from his wartime duty in Washington with all of his youthful bounce restored; he was baby-bottom bald on top of his head and had frizzy amber-gray hair on the rest. With his wartime contacts and new understanding of how government does things, he had established an independent practice in New Castle. Except for days when he wore dark suits to court or down to Dover, he wore tweedy sports coats and gray flannel pants and polished brown loafers. Boys and men had an attractiveness that was mixed up with power, with the ease with which they moved in the world, and on this scale Uncle Peter was about a six. “And how is my knockout niece, Basingstoke’s answer to Claudette Colbert?”

It dated him, that he thought of this star, though perhaps there was a resemblance. Lauren Bacall would have been more flattering, if he ever went to the movies. He and Aunt Esther spent most of their weekends at their country club, playing golf or tennis doubles and having dinner with other
people about their age. Sitting through a movie would be an insult to their intelligence and a waste of their time.

“She can’t decide if she should move to New York,” Esther explained. “I just told her to take her shot. What the hell.” Aunt Esther still wore her hair in a big coiled pigtail and when she smoked or was thinking up a wisecrack narrowed her eyes so much that they were just the tiniest slivers of blue, sagging down in the outer corners. Just being with her, Essie made an effort to keep her own eyes wide open, in case a squint ran in the family.

Uncle Peter sometimes stopped off for a drink or two on his way home, so that pink blazed in his meaty face. “You’ve got yourself a haircut,” he said to Essie. “The New Look!” He put down his briefcase and too roughly squeezed the exposed back of Essie’s neck; she hunched her shoulders to shake him off. Still, she didn’t want to be rude, she liked it here in his house too much.

She explained to him, as if in apology for her fashionable hair, “This Doug I keep mentioning sent my photos to a friend of his called Wexler in a New York model agency but it took months to get a reply out of him and now all he’s said is if I’m ever in New York why don’t I come by for a chat?”

“I don’t like the address he’s given her,” Aunt Esther told him. “It’s in Chelsea, on West Nineteenth Street. There was nothing down there but speakeasies and dry cleaners in my day. If it’s legit, how come it’s not further uptown?”

“What do you know?—you’re talking twenty years ago. Subway fares were a nickel then, too. If they’re willing to look our Essie over, what has she got to lose?”

“Look her over with what in mind?” Aunt Esther asked. “Some of these so-called model agencies—”

“I can take care of myself,” Essie said, wondering if she
could. Boys and back seats in Basingstoke were one thing, high-powered agencies in New York were another.

Uncle Peter asked aloud, “Who’s game for a drink?” and answered himself in a high squeaky voice: “ ‘I am, sir,’ said Tiny Tim, casting off his crutches.” He was lit, all right.

“She needs somebody to look after her,” Esther said, brushing off as tedious her husband’s pranks. “I was thinking, what about Patrick?” To Essie she said, “Your cousin. How well do you know him?”

“I remember him once coming to Locust Street, one time when Uncle Jared had come east. But that was before the war. I was ten or so. He seemed very grown-up and stuck-up. He thought Danny and I were little rubes, he made that plenty clear.”

“He’s not much more than a year older than you, actually. He was a babe in arms at our wedding. But when Lucille and Jare split she began running with this arty monied crowd, so I guess he grew up fast. He never had a man around to model himself after.” There was some meaning here Essie didn’t get; she could tell by the way Aunt Esther’s eyes checked out her face, before resuming: “Jare was out west with his damn fool mountain. But any port in a storm. Patrick knows the ropes, or some of the ropes. Pete’s right, it can’t do you any harm to go talk to him before you get in any deeper with people like Doug, who’s out to just milk you for his own sake, and this Wexler, who may or may not be on the up-and-up.”

How strangely distrustful Aunt Esther was! Just like Daddy, though with a different way of expressing it. Essie said, “If you’re afraid being a model is just a way of being a prostitute, I don’t see what good that would do Doug. He wants me to succeed. He says I have great looks, though I can’t see it myself. I think I’m kind of homely.”

Her aunt’s squinting eyes flared, for a moment, almost into circles. “Darling, no—you’ve got it. It doesn’t show all the time, but it shows in photographs. When I see some of them, it’s almost like Pop has become an angel. My dad was a beautiful man, but in you it’s gone somewhere. We just don’t want to put our feet wrong. I moved down here to please
your
dad and I’ve lost what city savvy I ever had.”

Her aunt’s praise felt like an X-ray bringing up in white the secret inside her ribs, the thing that told her that she was the center of the universe and that there would be no misstep. Uncle Peter, oblivious of this Wilmot transaction occurring beneath his nose, set a cloudy brown drink before his wife, with a little lurch that produced too loud a click, and said, “Essie, what can I tempt you with? I know you don’t approve, but a little glass of sherry? A rum-and-Coke, very weak, Scout’s honor.” But he held up the fingers that mean horns, as a joke. People who drink like you to drink. Though she had stopped going to church a year or two after being confirmed, staying home with Daddy and the Sunday paper instead, she was still Presbyterian enough to fear alcohol. It ate lives, in from the edges, lurking in cupboards and becoming the secret reason for every gathering of two or three, and one day people woke up and realized that liquor had stolen their lives away. Also, drinking made you fat and puffy, and her face needed all the bony structure she could give it.

“You shouldn’t offer the girl a drink when she’s driving,” Aunt Esther told him. She rarely said anything to her husband this contrary. She had wanted him, back there before Essie was born; she had paid the price in scandal for him; she had made herself his; this was her bed and by damn she would lie in it. These weathered marriages from the Twenties surrounded Essie like Delaware’s shallow smoke-blue hills.
When she thought of them at all, her aunt and uncle and her parents and the doomed marriage of Uncle Jared and Aunt Lucille, it was as beaten-down monuments to the cowardice and stolid timidity of this older generation. She was determined to have a lot of men and to be captive to none of them.

“Aaahh,” Peter said in self-defense, shamed for a second, caught at corrupting a girl. “Essie could drive the road with her eyes closed. She has a good head on her shoulders.” And he took the opportunity, as she sensed he would, to place a puffy strong hand on either side of her skull, with its short haircut, and squeeze, hard and soft, for what seemed a long while. Essie put up with it; it was a kind of farewell.

James Patrick Wilmot lived in the Park Avenue apartment owned by his mother and stepfather, Mr. Traphagen. Mr. Traphagen—an old Dutch name—was a frustrated artist who, after thirty years spent in his family’s china-and-porcelain-importing business located on Pearl Street, had retired early to concentrate on painting. To better concentrate he spent, with his reluctant wife, more and more time in Maine, and was still up there, stoking a woodstove and watching the storm waves break on the rocks, in early December. Essie knew this much from her aunt and father. Daddy had little to say about his sister-in-law, except: “It would take a saint to be married to Jared, and Lucy was no saint. Her father avoided Sing Sing by the skin of his teeth. As to the boy, it’s a wonder he’s not a juvenile delinquent. She was too pregnant with him to come to your mother’s and my wedding, but she showed up with him in her arms at Esther’s, and stole the show. He has those black-Irish good looks, don’t know where from. Old Jimmy McMullen was a homely devil—always looked
like a truck-loader in his tux.” All this family lore, Essie thought, was coming out of the bushes to boost her on her way.

She had been primed with instructions how to get from Penn Station to the Times Square Shuttle and then up the East Side to Eighty-sixth and Lexington, all on a dime token. But she was an hour early and walked instead up Fifth Avenue, drinking in the caustic city air, the stony cold, the carols broadcast out onto the sidewalk, the Salvation Army dinging their nervous bells, the yellow taxis and snorting green buses, the swift-moving crowds with their averted, flitting faces. There were lavish, glittering, nodding, rotating Christmas windows from Lord & Taylor’s on up to Saks and Bonwit’s, of Santa Clauses and three Magi in three skin colors, of people in sleighs and fur muffs from old-time New York. She had been here only twice before—with her parents to the World’s Fair and the other time to go to the Radio City Music Hall and see the Rockettes—but the city fell open before her like a chocolate apple, in crisp glossy pieces, perfectly intelligible. The numbered side streets were like rows and rows of books that some day she would read. The avenues flew straight ahead of her to a vanishing point that was Harlem. At the corner of the park with its bronze statues she turned right until she struck Park, and then walked north, inhaling exultantly though her feet had begun to hurt, to the Traphagens’ address. The doorman gave her name into a little loudspeaker, which squawked in return. An elevator operator in white gloves and a maroon uniform with brass buttons took her to the right floor; a little mincing maid in a black dress trimmed in crisp white opened the door to her. So many people, to serve just you. In the parqueted apartment foyer a half-moon marquetry table held a vase of fresh flowers—mums and glads
with a green backing of ferns and what she recognized from her years in the greenhouse as eucalyptus and leatherleaf.

The living room held a piano and sofa so big there seemed several of each. The space in the room, which several islands of glossy, nappy furniture tried in vain to fill, went back and back, as if a camera were tracking forward, and velvet-curtained windows gave on brick and granite cliffs and sharp-edged deep valleys where automobiles crawled far below. She had been here before, in the movies. Patrick entered from some other room of the vast apartment and was predictably tall and handsome and gentle. She had to perch forward on her chair to hear him talk, describing his life with an amusing, drawling diffidence, like James Stewart with Cary Grant’s class and Robert Taylor’s moody eyebrows. Only his hair was upright, like Farley Granger’s, and like her own when the hairdresser didn’t flatten it. He was a student at New York University, down in Washington Square, majoring in fine arts though he didn’t think he’d try to be a painter; he’d seen the effort break old Trap’s heart. Trap? His stepfather. How sophisticated, Essie thought, to have a stepfather, and your real father off owning a mountain in Colorado. A piece of a mountain, actually. With the war over, there was no profit any more in the copper leavings and pillars, but Jared—he called his own father “Jared,” just like that, one man speaking of another, distant man—and his partners had great hopes for developing the slopes into a ski resort. Recreational sport was becoming big business. Families getting out and doing things together, that sort of middle-class folderol. Essie was fascinated by the traces of herself in Patrick—a Wilmot way of holding his head to one side, as if listening for something; a prim fineness to the gestures of his hands and a dry cut of his lips—and felt herself, much more wholeheartedly and maturely
than when sitting on the bleachers with Benjy Whaley, swooning forward into love.