Queenie (3 page)

At Oscar’s, I’ve learned a lot of it. “Over at Oscar’s,” the most comforting words always. To be sent there on an errand when I was six, to run in to tell how I’d been kept at school, or still later to study in his huge library; it’s been a second home. Which means the place that teaches you all your apples don’t have to be in number one.

In the days when Oscar is a full-time impresario, the one that people think of along with Sol Hurok, a lot of personalities get used to Oscar Selwyn’s little adopted girl running in and out, and I get to know them well enough to have to be careful to keep them out of conversation later; it’s not standard, even at the High School for Deforming Arts, our rude name for it, to have sat on some of the famous knees I have. I sometimes felt Aurine sent me to Oscar’s on purpose. In the confessions of courtesans, which bulk so large on her one-shelf boudoir library, these ladies, mostly too royal by that time to be called girls, often began their careers by being dandled on the knees of great men. Mostly, though not always, I sat at them.

“What’s your school, dear?”
asks a knee, and on reply murmurs to others in the circle,
“Ah yes, the last of the finishing schools classy enough for the déclassées.”

Later I confuse Aurine by asking if some project or possession is classy enough for us, privately resolving if so to have none of it.

Giorgio, who once went with me to one of Oscar’s soirees, called it the School for Sotto Voce, and wouldn’t go back. “They’re refining your taste, Queenie. By insulting what you are.” It’s easier for a girl to be a by-blow, even without his classy one-side parentage. I learn a lot there.

Like having the greatest actor of his day purify my English, and a modern playwright quarrel with him over a construction in it. For what I hoped was forever. Only to see them join arms depressingly soon, to listen to a bull-and-bears ringmaster from Wall Street, a few knees down.

I learn what Aurine and the girls never gave a moment’s thought to, but women nowadays are so nervous about—how men talk among themselves. It’s what Mile. Maupin, if you remember, dressed in drag and set forth to discover, though if she’d been me she’d not have needed to. If most men talk to each other like the personalities did, it’s not what I’ll set out to see the world for. “There must be something more to men than what they talk about,” I report to Giorgio, who said, “Oh I dunno—that’s what we think about you.” He’s fourteen then, like me, but precocious.

They talk about us of course, maybe that’s it. At least at Oscar’s. There’s some subtle thing about womantalk that turns famous men commonplace.

Oscar says if my lot is to marry a commonplace one, I’m to remember that.

He often slips and says “marry” these days, even in Aurine’s hearing. And once he asked me, finding me reading the Maupin, if I thought all men were swine, and I answered truthfully, “No, only Tekla’s.” After which the separate dinners began.

I know they worry over how to keep my viewpoint fresh, though they don’t share the same viewpoint on what it should be. One thing they don’t have to fret over: I’ll never be a dyke. The day comes, even for a girl on the knee of the greatest name in Hollywood, when she knows she better get off.

Oscar’s always been shyer with me than his friends have; after all none of them has legally adopted me. But although Aurine keeps her own maiden name, the restaurateur’s Amidon, he always introduces me proudly enough, “My ward, Queenie Raphael.” His real name. Selwyn is for theatrical. Or sometimes, depending on the man, “My ward, Alexandra Dauphine Raphael.” Not bad, by my aunt’s bookshelf. But I don’t mind; I’ve got a lot of Oscar’s bookshelves inside me by now, as well.

Giorgio admits he misses the library after he stopped going there; he says he couldn’t use a man’s house in the daytime if he wouldn’t go to his parties at night; he was the most honest boy I ever knew. He said Oscar’s was where we each came to terms with our possible paternities. Only, since he knew his all too well, while I sat reading all the romances, in the dark winter days after school, he read the facts.

Those winter afternoons, over by the time I went off to school, are like a piano under which we still lie, not touching anymore, building our separate trains, hunting their terminals. Reading all the old novels and confessions I can find, and some accidental history, I see that lots of fathers have died before the kids were born. But not so many mothers have…

If I’m really Aurine’s child by whomever, instead of being her niece, then she may be concealing my real age by several years, which is natural. On my own evidence, I’ve always felt older than I am, but then girls do.

On Gran’s evidence, if I’m her other daughter’s child, then by the date Gran seemed to think I was born, my mother was in her grave at the time…

Giorgio and I go up to Woodlawn once to check her headstone, all in order; she died two days after my birthday, not before. But a whole year before, if I can trust Granny’s shaky reference. I can’t. As Giorgio said, Gran was a wonderful old lady, but there was never any reason to
trust
her.

…Since Gran was away at the general time of my birth, taking care of her restaurateur’s last years in Villefranche, she couldn’t testify for certain which of her twin daughters I came out of. And at the end of her life—a little woman with pouchy cheeks, saying “It’s where I keep my wisdom,” sitting at our fireside like a nannie and with a nannie’s name, Em Harrison—she mixes up the two like a pudding made of daughters. And nods like the nursegirl she’d been before the Frenchman took her out of his house to be his cashier—“Whose girl are you, what does it matter? Mine!” She’s in Woodlawn too…

“What if I was twins, too, really,” I say to Giorgio. “I mean, what if there were two babies, one for Alix and one for Aurine—and one of us died?” I divide the flowers I’d brought and put some on each grave; it’s fascinating when life’s like a confession about you. “Maybe the twins had you together, kind of a Siamese job,” says Giorgio.

My own final belief is that I am my mother’s daughter, but Aurine is jealous of it, and doesn’t mind anybody thinking I’m hers. Especially since, though my mother was pretending to be married at the time, though not intensely, to a man I’ve no reason to suppose was my father, there’s a rather strong chance, around the time I was seeding my way in from angel country, that I could have been Oscar’s.

…Which could be true of Aurine also, if I want to go back to that angle; he was sleeping with both of them. Granny’s viewpoint being, “It was all right for Alix, being kind of in wedlock, which is a mistake in the first place. But it was real naughty of Aurine to horn in on it…”

Therefore my aunt’s jealousy: if I’m Oscar’s, she’d rather I be thought hers.

I notice nobody ever blames Oscar. Once I carefully ask them, “We girls were discussing in biology—if a man is sleeping with twin women, can he always tell which?” Oscar chokes, and begins smoothing a few homburgs. But Aurine merely picks the top from a bunch of Malagas he’s just brought, and sends me upstairs with it. “The twin can always tell,” she said.

Let’s face it, Miss Piranesi, we’re a flighty lot, worse than the Polynesians, but I don’t mind. We are a lot. A family unit. I never had to take it on love. They gave it to me. “If that’s the way they want it,” I say to Giorgio as the cemetery darkens, “I live with my uncle and aunt.” It doesn’t make leaving any easier.

But once I do, Miss P., won’t I be in a position very like Gran at my age, when she left the nuns, over the same doorstep she’d once been found on? ’Twasn’t religion that weighed on her, she said, or morals either; the world socked her with summat more serious. “’Twas that the guff I was brought up on, girl, wasn’t most other people’s guff.”

…Oh Gran, even if that turns out to be true, you and the girls still gave me the best guff you had! I didn’t hear about the mysteries of life, I got the recipes…

Like how the hair on that part of a woman should be brushed with an English hairbrush only. Housekeeping, that’s what the profession is really! I learn what’s “good” for my body just the way I learn lemon oil is good for mahogany. And what’s good for me in a man’s, in the warning that the way a man is formed—they never say “hung”—maybe isn’t everything. And—how to thumb a man’s eyeballs if he really means force.

Or like when Martyne, ex-Martha from Chattanooga, drops by for one of Aurine’s mint juleps, I listen closely: Aurine always gives the recipe. “Jigger bourbon, crushed ice, mint, put the glasses in the fridge for an hour,” this last slower, with the eyes closing. Then breathless, “Jigger of brandy at the last.” Then she opens her eyes, says “It’s the before and the after makes everything,” and I know she’s talking about love—and that she once had somebody from Dixie. She never makes juleps in front of Oscar.

Bad language I never get from the girls; their tongues have a crook in them like a tea drinker’s pinkie—they’re ladies, not whores. Gran is franker. “Dirty language a man can get from his wife.” And it’s just as hard to learn the baby facts of life as in a normal household anywhere. Only the girls’ temperaments, like their skins, are brighter, their ideas on it not so drear. Cabbage babies or Macy ones?—at six I know better; babies come from Argentina—
“Olé!”
or from Rio where Giorgio had, or when more workaday, at least from Aurine’s dream-basement, where on a trip there she’d once bought six café filtres with silver suck-straws, and a bain Marie—the Galeries Lafayette. If anything, babies came in bain Maries.

There’s no nonsense about wanting them, of course. But if we somehow get there, good grace to us—and a handmade layette. And adoration everlasting, from all the mothers in the set. Plus constant courting presents from the gentlemen, who continue but may not be the same.

“Oh Giorgio,” I say as the cemetery gate closes behind us, “remember that bridge party at Nila’s?” Where the only real ugly duckling among us kids, and the youngest, pops that pop question: “Where do I come from?”

…There’s a full house that day, and each girl with her trademark. Hunks of Polish amber on the Slavs. Afternoon aquamarines on the Gabor types. A tiny French girl in three kinds of black. A Russian in riding habit and an Irish girl in Russian boots, one Andorran, one from Lichtenstein, and a Hungarian said to have the most beautiful backside in the New York area (two dimples). A pair of Spanish sisters like out of Lorca—how they ever separate is not known, and an Italian goiter-beauty named Alba, in a plain dress with a hundred seams, and a gold wedding band. And of course all the differing heads, billowing and coronet-braided, plus Tekla with her Swedish mannish and Riviera headband.

And the hostess herself, like a beautiful slim toucan, with a nose like little Ugly.

“Only he can’t wear on his head what she does,” Giorgio whispers to me—a frill of silk-petaled peonies and black water lilies balanced on an artfully streaming back-string. Maybe someday he will.

“Where do you come from, my plum—” she says to Nose Junior, in a voice like a warm accordion—a lot of them talk to us like that. “You came down a diamond drainpipe, darling! That’s where you got that purple scratch on your heinie!” And maybe those pimples. But she grabs him to her breast, looking at the others. “Yes, you just squeaked through.”

And four full tables of contract bridge look down at him, their eyes radiant…

In the subway from Woodlawn, I say to Giorgio, “I never have to wonder whether I was wanted or not. We all knew I wasn’t. At school, I wish you could see the hangups of some of those who were.” Giorgio doesn’t go to school; on insistence of his father’s family, meaning dollars, he’s tutored. “Well, I have to hand it to you,” he says. “You don’t look as if you just squeaked through.”

Now…Giorgio. Not that I ever want you two attractive people to really meet, Miss Piranesi, outside my Platonic dialogues. He’s out of the country now. But he’s often on one of my mental clouds, overlooking me; you’re still new to the job. On a lonely or a horny night, or a decisive one, this rooftop, as Granny would say, is fair damn populated.

Gran liked Giorgio, or thought he would do all right, which was the same thing to her. It’s his mother, Tekla, she considered the idiot; in fact the whole set cherishes Tekla, as a good bad example for them.

“What chimps she always has!” says Aurine, after a fracas.

And it’s true, Tekla’s men may roar like lions, or look like hyenas, but in the end, they’re always chimps.

Tekla is the type gets beaten up by bruisers. Who aren’t always even bruisers; she brings it out in them.

In a house, I understand, the girl who takes care of customer demand for that sort of thing is called a donkey—though of course Tekla has never been in a house.

Her parents had a circus act in Stockholm—she ran away because she didn’t want to be the bottom of the pyramid, even one made of girls. With her build she can take punishment, and give. Not to Giorgio, though he’s never let her coddle.

Always in sandals—you can’t throw a punch from heels—Tekla’s feet are like a scrubwoman’s hands, red-knuckled and practical; the rest of her is like a six-foot Rhine Maiden with a shiner just fading out or in.

Giorgio’s built like her, only more of it, except for his dark coloring and his feet, which are Papa’s. Plus a certain Latin narrowness to the face. He’s something to see—in the movies if he’d take offers; he says it would be bad for his heredity.

His father was a famous playboy from the pampas who married heiresses for a living; I suppose he couldn’t whack
them
. So practiced up on Tekla. And leaves her for the usual reason: She started wiving him. Later when Giorgio’s father dies of a bust appendix while bear-hunting in Moldavia where his wife has taken him too far from penicillin, Tekla immediately has Giorgio’s appendix removed—he’s been camp-counseling in the Canadian Rockies since he was twelve “going on sixteen.”

“Heredity,” she says. “I’m against letting it work out.”

Gran’s still alive then. “Oh you don’t have to worry,” she says. “That boy’s pure non-chimp.”

Tekla has heard the word. “Giorgio’s father was different!”

Since she usually only says this about the incoming ones, not the outgoing or gone, I tell Giorgio this later.