The Tight White Collar (4 page)

For a little while after Wilfred left, Irene was the town martyr and she played the part to the hilt. She was the woman wronged, deserted, abandoned and left with a small child to bring up alone. A woman who worked hard every day and kept her house and her child neat and clean. Everybody in Cooper's Mills marveled at Lisa, so sweet and well brought up, a regular little lady, the town said. But after a year or so the tragedy of Irene and Lisa became part of the town's everyday life and nobody exclaimed or sympathized any more. Lisa grew up, alone for the most part, because her mother was so busy all the time with her job at the mill office. It was only if Lisa did anything the least little bit wrong that Cooper's Mills remembered. If Lisa's white gloves were dirty or if she forgot and said “ain't,” then Irene would get that frozen look on her face and her lips would tighten and she would say, “For heaven's sake, Lisa, remember who you are!”

Lisa could not remember just when her mother had given up the battle against loneliness and poverty and dirt. She only knew that by the time she was sixteen, Cooper's Mills had dismissed Irene with the most final words of all.

“She drinks,” said Cooper's Mills of Irene.

And it was true. She did.

At sixteen, Lisa was a slim, pretty girl with long brown hair, big hazel eyes and more self-reliance than is either usual or expected in girls of that age. She had learned the first step on the road to maturity on the day she had gone to the school nurse in tears, terrified that she might be bleeding to death, and she had never attempted to discuss anything with Irene after one abortive attempt.

“Don't be common,” Irene had said, wrinkling her delicately boned nose at the idea of anything physical. “For heaven's sake, Lisa, remember who you are!”

Lisa was never very sure who she was. At school, she was just another Canuck kid, brighter than most, but the daughter of mill people all the same, while at home she was the very ladylike daughter of a
grande dame
.

“Lisa, cut that sandwich up into quarters before you wrap it up to take to school.”

“But, Mama, none of the other kids—”

“I don't care about the others,” cried Irene, immediately enraged. “And don't call me Mama. For heaven's sake, Lisa, remember who you are!”

“Yes, Mother.”

“Lisa! Don't sip your coffee so that I can hear you, and don't spill any of it in the saucer!”

“But it's hot and I couldn't help it, I—”

“Lisa, a lady does not make excuses. For heaven's sake, Lisa, remember who you are!”

“Lisa, break your roll up into smaller pieces.”

“Lisa, sit up straight.”

“Lisa, don't chew your fingernails.”

“For heaven's sake, Lisa, remember who you are!”

It was not until she was sixteen and fell in love with Christopher Pappas that Lisa thought she knew who she was at last.

Christopher Pappas was the son of two people to whom everyone in Cooper's Mills referred as the Greeks Who Run the Fruit Store on Main Street. If you worked in the mills and you wanted a pound of grapes, a package of cigarettes, a newspaper or a magazine you sent one of your children to the Pappases' store.

“Run down to the Greeks and get me a pack of Luckies,” you said. Everybody did.

Their first names were Aphrodite and Costas and they worked eighteen, sometimes twenty, hours a day in the store where they sold everything from condoms to pomegranates. Chris was the eldest of six children and really the only one who counted to Aphrodite and Costas because the other five were girls. Aphrodite wanted her son to go to college to become a dentist but Costas, although he did not know it, echoed the words of Ferguson Cooper.

“It don't take no four years at no college to learn howta count money,” said Costas in his heavily accented voice. “Whaddya want, huh? We gotta good business here, but no! It ain't good enough for my son, huh? No. My son, he's gotta have a job where he can wear a white collar allda time. I tell you somethin', boy. A white collar can get goddamn tight, especially when your kids are bawlin' from empty stomachs.”

Chris did not want to be a dentist as his mother wished, nor did he want to go into the store with his father. He didn't know what he wanted except that it was to get away from his foreign-talking, foreign-acting, foreign-thinking parents and away, far, far away from Cooper's Mills.

California, thought Chris wistfully. Or Alaska. I'll bet it's clean in Alaska with all that snow and ice.

The first things he ever noticed about Lisa St. George were that her white socks were always spotless and that sometimes he could discern the outlines of hard little nipples under her sweater. At sixteen, Chris was almost six feet tall with a head of dark, curly hair and a pair of very large dark eyes. He also had the swarthy complexion and fine lips of his ancestors and it was inevitable that he be classified as “tall, dark and handsome,” by the girls who attended the Cooper's Mills high school.

“And on top of everything else,” said many an envious classmate, “he's gotta go and be elected captain of the basketball team and be a senior when he's only sixteen.”

The fact that Chris was in his last year of high school at his age was due to the fact that he had received a double promotion in the fourth grade and had never lagged behind since, but others in his class had a different interpretation of the facts.

“A brain,” they said.

“Yeah, but you can't hold that against him,” said his defenders. “He's okay anyway.”

Chris never really asked Lisa for a date, in the beginning. It was just that both of them always seemed to be in the library in the evening and when the building closed at nine o'clock, Chris would offer to drive Lisa home. Sometimes they stopped for a Coke at Durocher's drugstore, but more often Chris would drive to the outskirts of town and park by the river. There was so much to talk about, things that neither one would have dreamed of discussing with anyone, and that came so easily between the two of them.

“You know something?” asked Lisa.

“No. What?”

“Well, I mean, did you ever think of praying the same way you'd think about throwing a stone into a lake?”

“Do you mean something about circles? The way one circle gives way to another and another?”

“Yes. It just keeps making circles, the stone you throw, I mean. And you never really know where the circles end.”

“Well, at the edges of the lake, I imagine.”

“Yes, but what if it's a great big lake?”

“Well, how big?”

“Well, as big as the whole world, for instance.”

“Well, that's space, I guess.”

“Chris, do you think very much about God?”

“Not any more than anybody else, I guess. I guess that it's just—Well, what I mean is that God is something everybody has to make up his own mind about. That's all.”

“But does it scare you, Chris? Sometimes doesn't it scare you a little? I mean, about being here and everybody being alive and nobody really knowing why.”

“Gee, Lisa, to tell you the truth I never really thought much about it one way or the other.”

After about three months, everyone at school took it for granted that Lisa and Chris were going steady and Lisa suddenly found herself accepted by a whole new group of girls. This was the group that went in for smoking, drinking warm beer out of cans and heavy petting. On Monday mornings the girls in this group got together in the ladies' room at the high school and compared notes and Lisa listened, fascinated, to the remarks that bounced back and forth between the white-tiled walls.

“Listen, before I go out with him again I want to hire a good referee.”

“Well, you know Bobby after he's had a few. Then he says that his name is not Bobby at all—but Boddy!”

“How do you spell that, dear? Body or Bawdy?”

“If my mother knew about Jim! I mean, his mother belongs to the Ladies' Aid and everything, with my mother, and they, all the ladies, I mean, think that Jim is an absolute saint. Good God!”

“Last night Don bet me a dollar that he could make me moan before he was done with me and you know what? I had to pay him!”

“Lisa, I'll bet Chris is really something when he gets going. I mean, those dark Latin types just seem to smolder and smolder until they catch fire.”

“He's wonderful,” said Lisa and felt that she was dying a little because she could never come right out and admit that Chris had never even kissed her.

“Come on, Lisa, tell.”

Lisa tried an enigmatic smile but her thumping heart and aching facial muscles told her that it did not work.

“That's private,” she said. “I'm no kiss-and-tell girl.”

During all the nights she stayed awake after leaving Chris, Lisa wondered wretchedly why he had never even tried to kiss her good night. She was afraid that it was because she was unattractive, cold looking, and to be cold was worse than anything according to the girls in the Ladies' room at school. But, perhaps it was because she was behaving as her mother had always taught her to behave. Like a lady. And maybe boys didn't go for ladylike types. Look at her own father. He hadn't wanted to live with a lady. He'd run off with a beer joint waitress. Lisa tossed and turned and got up and looked at herself in the mirror and went back to bed and wept.

As for Chris, he lay awake with a thumping heart and an ache in his groin.

Lover's nuts, he told himself as he rubbed his sore parts gently.

But every time he rubbed he had an erection and had to run quickly to the bathroom and finish behind the locked door because Aphrodite Pappas was a notorious examiner of sheets. And every time, while it was happening, his vision was of Lisa. Lisa, naked and still, letting him get on top of her, put it into her, letting him do anything he wanted with her.

It was all craziness, thought Chris whenever he leaned, haggard and limp, against the bathroom wall. He didn't even have guts enough to kiss her, let alone anything else. If he kissed her she might get scared, and if she got scared she wouldn't go and park with him by the river and then he'd have to be content just to look at her in school.

Finally, in the spring, Lisa failed a French exam and, as she said to herself later, it was well worth getting a poor grade for the semester and the devil from her mother because that evening, in the parked car by the river, Chris put his arms around her as she wept and then he wiped her eyes with his handkerchief and then he kissed her for the first time.

“God!” he said fervently, “I've wanted to do that for so long.”

“I was afraid that you didn't want to do it at all,” whispered Lisa.

They kissed with the soft, dry kisses of inexperience but as the weeks went by Chris began to experiment with all the things he had heard and read about. He explored the soft, warm inside of her mouth with his tongue and his hands found the buttons on her blouse, the hook of her brassiere, and both of them trembled uncontrollably when he caressed her breasts.

“Beautiful, beautiful,” whispered Chris as his lips found her tight little nipples.

“Please,” said Lisa. “Please.” And she did not know why she begged him, nor for what.

To Lisa and Chris, as to many young people in the United States and to the majority in northern New England, the idea of sex was not an entity in itself. Sex was the hand within the glove of love. The words, “I want you,” existed for Lisa and Chris only as words to be spoken after “I love you,” because if one loved, deeply and truly, then sex was all right. It was justifiable and could be enjoyed without guilt.

“Lisa, I love you.”

“And I love you, Chris.”

“How much?”

“All there is, darling. All there is.”

“Darling, do you want to?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, honey, I want you so much.”

“And I want you.”

“Honey, sometimes with girls—I mean, I read in a book that sometimes it hurts a girl the first time.”

“I don't care. I love you. I belong to you.”

“Not in the car.”

“No. Not in the car.”

“Outside? On the ground?”

“Yes.”

Chris had been graduated from high school less than a month and was working in the fruit store with his mother and father when Lisa told him that she thought she might be pregnant.

“Oh, my darling,” said Chris, “you'll have to go to the doctor's at once. Tomorrow morning.”

“I can't,” said Lisa, suddenly frightened. “If I go to Dr. Dorrance he'll run right to my mother and tell.”

“I could take you to Boston or someplace like that. Nobody knows us down there. I haven't got much money, though.”

“No, wait. There's Dr. Cameron over at Cooper Station. In fact, there's two of them over there. The old one and the young one. I'll go see the young one. He wouldn't tell on anybody. At least, I don't think he would.”

“Honey?”

“What?”

“If you are, you're going to have to tell your mother anyway. We'll have to get married.”

“Nobody
has
to marry me, Christopher Pappas,” cried Lisa, crying out in her fear and uncertainty, crying out because she knew she loved Chris and Oh, God, what if he didn't really love her and was just trying to do the right thing now that she was caught. “Nobody
has
to!” she said.

“Honey,” he said against her cheek. “Honey, I didn't mean it that way. I only meant that we'll be getting married sooner than we expected to, that's all. I love you, darling. I love you with all my heart and soul and brain and body.”

“Darling,” she whispered, and was quiet again. “I love you, too.”

“Then nothing else matters,” said Chris, feeling the old, old words on his tongue without even knowing that they were old. “Nothing matters at all as long as we have each other.”