Off Season (25 page)
But I had no real sense of how others viewed me, and was surprised when one young man or another asked me out to the movies or to a St. Albans dance, or even asked me to dance in the evenings at the club. My father would say, “Do we know his people? I don’t think we do. Why don’t you bring him here for dinner, or let me take you both somewhere fancy,” and I would refuse the invitation. So far I had no real wish to go out. The thought vaguely threatened. Would we get lost and end up in the dark part of town where the shadows were alive? Would my escort get drunk and desert me, or worse? Would someone see the helmet?
I have no idea what sort of reputation I had among the young of Washington at that time. They were almost a different species from me, erratic and brightly plumaged and apt to fly off and do anything at all. I doubt that they gave the reclusive girl on Kalorama Circle a thought, except as a silent, slightly awesome swimmer.
Aunt Tatty kept her oar in. Somehow she never completely despaired of us, the eccentric Constable
père et fille
. She was forever at the ready with suggestions for clothes, social events, projects, vacations. Her own daughter, Charlotte, had, by the time I was in my junior year at the Cathedral School, vanished into Sweet Briar in a swirl of clothes and invitations and friends—the right kind of friends, her mother exulted.
Tatty Glover’s world had shrunk considerably. Her husband, Uncle Charles Glover, had died on the back nine at the Chevy Chase golf course several years previously, and though he had a grand funeral at the Cathedral and burial at Arlington, having been a three-star general attached to NATO in Europe for many years before retiring to Washington, I had little sense of loss. I had known him only as a gruff, beige-all-over man who occasionally shared dinners with us at the club and vanished immediately afterward to play poker dice in the men’s bar with other retired generals. I assumed he was genuinely mourned by his wife and only child, but had little sense of their loss, either. All I knew was that Aunt Tatty had, as a miffed Flora once put it, done moved in.
She had dinners with us perhaps twice a week, and she and my father would sit in the sitting room afterward and talk, he in his chair, Tatty in the one that had been my mother’s and was now mine. I did not know what they talked about, as I could not bear giving up my chair and felt vaguely annoyed that she roosted so comfortably in my mother’s. So I went to my room, ostensibly to study, but usually to watch television and read. I know that I read a great deal of folklore and many scurrilous best-sellers, but I don’t remember much of the television, except for having a vague crush on Peter Gunn. When Aunt Tatty left I would go back down and make hot chocolate for my father and me, and we would resume our comfortable communion. The rest of Washington society might, as Aunt Tatty said, find our way of living strange, to put it mildly, but I found it as comforting as sliding into warm water. I didn’t even know who Washington society was.
I thought perhaps Tatty and my father talked mainly of comfortable, trivial things because, whenever I left my room, I heard their talk rise and fall gently, as on a mild surf. But there was one night when it broke its seemly boundaries and they were almost shouting. I crept out of bed, shushing Wilma, who was jingling and shuffling in anticipation of a late night snack, and positioned myself on the stairs to spy, as once I had, obsessively, on my mother.
“She’s almost seventeen,” Aunt Tatty hissed. “Has she ever had a single date? Does she have any friends? So far as I can tell, what she does for fun is that eternal swimming and sitting here by the fire with you in her mother’s chair, chatting. George, can’t you see that you’re making her into a pale little version of Elizabeth—or is that the idea?”
I could not hear my father’s reply, but I heard the anger in it. I didn’t blame him. The idea was—unthinkable, terrifying. But for a long time afterward I wondered secretly if, when he smiled at me across the hearth rug, he saw her.
“. . . do some things for her,” Aunt Tatty went on. “Arrange some invitations to cotillions. The dancing class was a success, after all, wasn’t it? She’s a good dancer, and you don’t have to talk a lot while you’re dancing if you don’t want to.”
I would never tell anyone what agony those strictured and structured evenings at Miss Crenshaw’s dancing class were, but I did emerge from them a proficient dancer, a skill I determined I would use as little as possible. Aunt Tatty had won that round.
“Or let me have some little dinners for her and invite some of the young men she should know. Everybody’s mother does it. It can’t take the place of coming out, of course, but I can’t imagine either of you are going to let that happen. I do know that Elizabeth very much wanted her to come out—”
“Come out of what?” my father asked, genuinely puzzled. I cheered silently from the stairs.
“Make her debut. George, honestly. How can you have lived in Washington all this time and not know that the girls in our families are presented to society? Oh, for God’s sake, why do I keep trying? All right, then, let’s talk about college. Have you even thought about that? I thought she might want to look at Sweet Briar, or Hollins, or Randolph-Macon; they’re close enough so she could get home every weekend, if she wants to. Surely you and Elizabeth talked about that. I mean, you were always so sure about Jeebs . . . mathematics, of course. And speaking of Jeebs, does he ever come home?”
“Jeebs ‘alone has looked on Beauty bare.’” My father smiled. Aunt Tatty looked confused.
“Jeebs is so far gone into numbers that when he does come I expect equations to come out of his ears. I don’t mind that, Tatty. Certainly I miss my son, but I understand what passion for a life’s work can be. It’s hard for him here without Elizabeth. And he has a girlfriend. He promises to bring her home to meet us soon.”
“Oh, wonderful,” Aunt Tatty cried. “At least maybe there’ll be one wedding to plan. I don’t suppose you’ve considered that Lilly will marry eventually. That is, if you ever let her out to meet anyone suitable.”
“We haven’t talked about it,” my father murmured. My ears and cheeks flamed. Marry? Who could I marry who wouldn’t rip me out of the tapestry my father and I had created? As a matter of fact, who would want to marry me at all?
“So school . . .”
“She’ll go to George Washington, of course. We have a very fine English department, if I do say so. Lilly is wonderful at English and literature.”
“So this is okay with her? It’s really what she wants? Elizabeth mentioned Wellesley once. And Bennington . . . though, of course, I mean,
Bennington
. . .”
“That’s months away, Tatty! And that’s enough of this talk for now. My God, you’d have been a great success in the KGB.”
Aunt Tatty was offended, as she should have been, and took her leave in a huff. But she was back by summer, apparently having forgotten or decided to forgive. That year we took our month’s vacation at the Cloister at Sea Island, Georgia, and Tatty came with us.
“Lovely,” she said, approving of the beautiful old hotel and its lush, perfect grounds and seemly beach club overlooking its seemly beach. It was thronged with attractive families and children, though I saw few people my age. So I had long beach walks with my father, and swam in the adult pool or the ocean while he read his book in an umbrella chair and Aunt Tatty napped, and we met for decorous cocktails before dinner in the dim little ballroom, and I danced with him to the tunes of the current Lester Lanin trio, and we had a lovely dinner at our usual table with our usual waitress, and then played bingo, and finally had graham crackers and milk in the lobby and were off to bed in crisp, lavender-smelling sheets, me with Aunt Tatty, he in the room next to us.
It was a vacation almost identical to the ones we’d taken over the years at the Greenbrier, and the Grand Hotel at Point Clear, and once even the distant and exotic Broadmoor. I didn’t really mind where we went as long as I could swim.
The spring I turned eighteen, the one before I was to enter George Washington in the fall, Wilma died. I went to sleep that night with a blanket thrown over the two of us against the spring chill, and he snuggled into my side as he always did, groaning his pleasure, and did not wake up again. I think I knew even before I came fully up out of sleep; my father and Flora and Emma heard my cries even before I was aware I was making them and were in my room when I came fully awake. My arms were around Wilma, and he was cool. He had the same goofy, glad-to-see-you smile on his face, but he was cool.
All the grief I had held in for my mother, carefully folded away somewhere inside me, came tumbling and spewing out. I cried desperately, crazily, inconsolably, for days. I could not eat, and there was no question of school, as I broke into tears as easily as I breathed. My father, his own face streaked with tears, held me and comforted me as best he could.
“He had a grand, long doggy life, baby,” he said. “I can’t imagine a happier life for a dog. And he just . . . went to sleep. It’s just the way he’d have chosen, all snuggled up with you. We can get another dog—”
“No!”
And we did not. Never, as long as my father lived, did we have another dog. I could not have loved it, and I could not have borne losing it, either. He knew that without my saying so.
Aunt Tatty came over and tried to take charge of me.
“Darling, you’ve simply got to stop crying,” she said, hugging me. “We have to go on; it’s what people have to do. I don’t think you cried like this for your mother.”
I had not, of course. Wilma was the one who turned that key. My endless tears were for her as well as for Wilma. It was the last great gift he gave me, the ability to mourn my mother.
We buried him under a great, drooping hydrangea bush in the back garden. It already had a Wilma-shaped depression in the dust under it; it was where he dug himself in and slept on the hottest days. When my father finished digging his grave and we laid him in it, wrapped in a favorite old comforter from my childhood, yellow strewn with pink daisies, my tears stopped. They simply stopped. And from that moment, something was different in me. Something that wondered, if it did not speak the wonder aloud, what the green lawns of Wellesley would be like. What the weathered old walls of Bennington, so far away in Vermont, held within them.
Who I would be if I was . . . not me.
I did not speak of this new thing to my father. But I knew that it would emerge of its own sooner or later. How could it not? More than my childhood had gone with Wilma.
Two weeks later, when I was still mourning him, my father said he would take me to dinner someplace special, someplace we had never been. Tatty would go, too. I was to choose. I remembered a small, darkly lit Italian restaurant on Wisconsin Avenue that I had passed several times; it always smelled wonderful, and I always heard sounds of laughter from inside.
“I want to go to Luigi’s,” I said.
“Darling, Wisconsin Avenue?” Aunt Tatty said.
“Luigi’s it is,” my father said gallantly. “I’ll make reservations for Friday night.”
On Friday afternoon he called to say that he had a late faculty meeting he could not miss and was sending a taxi to pick up Tatty and me and would join us at the restaurant. So, in the violet spring twilight of Georgetown, Tatty and I alit from the cab and made our way into Luigi’s. Rock music was booming into the street from inside, and louder laughter followed it. Tatty looked at me.
“Are you sure, Lilly? Grenville’s is just up the street.”
“Positive,” I said.
We walked in, Tatty behind me. When I stopped dead, she bumped into me.
The loudest laughter was coming from a knot of young men at the bar. One of them, with a laugh like a triumphal cry of Renaissance brass in the last notes of an opera, turned and looked at me. He was still laughing; joy and exuberance and pure maleness ran off him like honey, like smoke. He was taller than the rest, and lean and tanned, and his hair was long, a silky red blaze to his shoulders, and he had a neat goatee and mustache of the same wildfire red. His teeth flashed white in all that bronze.
“My God, Bitsy! Bitsy Randolph! Come here to me! Where have you been all this time, you gorgeous creature?”
And he started toward me, arms outstretched, laughing.
I walked toward him, as unconscious of moving as a robot. I felt my own mouth curve up into a smile.
When he was only feet away from me, he stopped and said, “Oh, God. Sorry. I got the wrong girl.”
His arms were still stretched toward me.
“No, you didn’t,” I said, and walked into them.
W
hat do you remember the most about your wedding?” Kitty Howard said to me a couple of years ago.
We were lying on our stomachs on the old dock that rambled drunkenly from Kitty’s bed-and-breakfast inn, on a spit of swampy land that bordered a sort of hiccup in Chesapeake Bay, near Ware Neck. Why anyone wanted to sleep and eat cinnamon buns on this beautiful but desolate and mosquito-haunted piece of Virginia earth remained a mystery to me all the long days of our friendship, but somehow Kitty’s charming little pre-revolutionary house, leaning precariously toward the bay, seemed perpetually full of wayfarers eager to get away from Washington or Richmond or even Williamsburg. Most were young families in SUVs, eager to give their bored children a firsthand look at their country’s birth state as it was before malls and ye-olde-colonials moved in, or groups of gray-haired ladies wearing no-nonsense walking shoes or Wellingtons and studying bird books at breakfast. I don’t think Kitty made a lot of money off them, but it was enough to keep the Ware Neck Inn open and enough to allow Kitty to pursue her heart’s passion, which was painting. If she wasn’t very good, she wasn’t bad, either. I had several of her landscapes in our house, across the peninsula on the James River near Claremont.
I turned my head and looked at her. Her face was resting on her arms and the aqueous stipple of light from the slow green water below us made her look fragile, mythic, drowned: a lady o’ the lake. Nothing could have been farther from the truth; Kitty Howard was full bosomed, loud, sometimes bawdy, always funny, and loving in the extreme. She was as loyal and nurturing a friend as I ever had, and if her loving-kindness often extended to some of the husbands of our strange, archaic plantation society, I couldn’t have cared less. Many of the women of our part of the Tidewater cared, though, and consequently Kitty had few women friends except me. I spent a great deal of time with her, for I was alone much of the time when Cam was out of town on a project and the girls were too young to leave. Kitty was wonderful company. I couldn’t say as much for most of the other women in Cam’s crowd, which, of course, was now mine. I thought they were vain, shallow, and self-righteous. They thought I was a rather elitist hermit. All of us, I think, were right, at least in part. It was a situation that might have made me restless and unhappy, for I had lived much of my life here and might have found that life isolating and unfulfilling. But I didn’t. I never had. I had Kitty and the girls and my sculpting. And I had Cam. Always I had Cam. I could not imagine wanting anything more.