The Last of Her Kind, page 7
Once, when we were riding the subway together, a beggar entered the car. Ann filled his paper cup with bills, blushing at his thanks. When he had moved on to the next car, I turned to say something to Ann and saw that she was crying.
There were those to whom I told this story who found it irritating. There were those who would not believe Ann’s tears had been sincere. And wasn’t it a bit show-offy, giving a panhandler a wad of bills? And what did such generosity mean anyway, when the giver herself was so rich?
Complicated people are easy to misunderstand, and I believe this was the case with Ann. But when she said, “I would give anything to have had your parents instead of mine,” what could I say? I had stopped feeling anger when she came out with this sort of remark. But how was I supposed to respond? What could I do to help Ann?
“One thing you could do for me, you could come with me when I see my parents.”
I had met the Draytons only briefly, once, the year before, when they came to take Ann home from school—not long enough for me to form much of an opinion about them. I knew they came into the city fairly often for one thing or another. They had subscriptions to various concert and theater programs. Ann never went along to these events. She had no interest in highbrow culture. “Too many people get left out.” Show her a black orchestra conductor! And she didn’t approve of the contributions her parents made to large cultural institutions like Lincoln Center. Though she knew it was useless, she was constantly badgering her father to donate money to her own causes, and in a constant rage over his ready excuse: “Now, Ann, you don’t really know in whose hands that money ends up.” Much better the arts. But the Draytons were also big givers to programs to save American wildlife and wilderness. “Because animals and trees are more important than people?” their daughter fumed. To be fair, her parents did, through their church, give to Connecticut’s poor. But Ann was not appeased, not when “they could give so much more.” When I learned that what the Draytons did give altogether to various charities each year amounted to many times the cost of our entire college tuition, I was speechless. So they were sharing their wealth, weren’t they, in a pretty big way? So they couldn’t really be called bloodsucking parasites?
Ann set me straight. “Most of that money is tax deductible, don’t forget. Do you think they would give a penny if it weren’t?” I didn’t know. But from the way Ann talked, you would have thought her mother had stolen the money she spent on clothes and antiques from welfare mothers and the North Vietnamese.
It pained Ann unbearably that the family fortune derived from patents for medical equipment. “Anything as essential as a device that makes a medical procedure safe or feasible ought to be freely available to all.” This old argument came back to me not long ago, when, at a dinner, I was seated next to a woman who lectured me about doctors (she’d just learned I’d been married to one), who, according to this woman, had a moral obligation to treat people for free.
Medical care was only one of a long list of things Ann thought the people should get for free.
It was a Sunday, and the Draytons had tickets to a matinee. Ann agreed to meet them for brunch if she could bring me along. But hadn’t they always told her any friend of hers from school was welcome to come along! We met at the Café des Artistes on West Sixty-seventh Street. This was in the years before that restaurant had become such a popular place, before the flashy awning had been put up—a time when, from the street, it gave such a muted, clubby impression you would not have thought it was even open to the general public. Ann had told me we’d be going either there or to the Russian Tea Room, because those were her parents’ favorite restaurants near Lincoln Center. Ann hated them equally. She, of course, would have preferred Chinatown, one of those holes-in-the-wall where only Chinese people went. But even if her parents had been willing to try such a place, Ann’s reverse snobbism wouldn’t have let them. “People like my parents don’t deserve the real thing.”
“You just missed the mayor,” said the coat-check girl—woman—and Ann shot her a look that said Die. (That summer, at Bonwit’s, a saleswoman had informed me in exactly the same tragic tone that I had just missed Lee Radziwill.)
I had asked Ann if we had to dress for this occasion, and she had rolled her eyes (“Of course not!”). Now I went all hot as we entered the dining room in our jeans and I saw all those suits and pearls.
We were late—Ann had made sure of it—and the Draytons were waiting for us. Mr. Drayton stood when he saw us.
“Oh, Turner, please, you know how I hate that,” Ann scolded as she threw herself onto her chair.
“Yes, dear, I know,” he said, but remained standing nevertheless until I, too, had sat down. Maybe this would not have occurred to me had it not been for the coat attendant’s remark, but I was struck by how much Mr. Drayton resembled the man we had just missed. Which is to say, good-looking in a bland, middle-aged, senatorial way. He and his wife were one of those couples (and I, at least, have seen many of them) who look so much alike they might be related by blood: brother and sister. With the Draytons the resemblance was so strong they might have been twins. Ann had once complained to me that her parents looked like figures in a wax museum. And so they did, in a way. But so did most people in that room, and so to the eyes of youth did just about every middle-class white person over thirty—perhaps because to our minds they were figures in a museum.
They had already finished one round of martinis while waiting for us and now ordered another. I wondered what “dry” could possibly mean.
Turner and Sophie: both pale like Ann and blond like Ann and thin like Ann. But there was more of a family resemblance between husband and wife than between either parent and child.
It’s always a shame when the daughter turns out plainer than the mother. Mrs. Drayton had poreless skin and a generous mouth. She wore her long hair in a twist (her kind of woman loosened her hair only in private). I liked the color. It looked as if ashes had been evenly combed through it. (In her husband’s case, the ashes had been not combed but tousled in.) But her blue eyes were cold, and I didn’t like the cold way they scrutinized me, though of course it was done slyly. She made me want to hide my hands, but I thought I remembered hearing that it was bad manners not to keep both hands always in sight at table.
I had been reading The Great Gatsby. It was on the reading list for one of my courses. Because it was the shortest book on the list, I had picked it to write about for my midterm paper. Now I looked for signs of Daisy Buchanan in Sophie Drayton. Was it really something you could hear—when a voice was “full of money”? I cocked my ears.
She had the unnerving habit of not keeping her gaze on you during conversation but constantly letting it slide somewhat off to the side, as if someone or something were coming up behind you.
He had the unnerving habit of behaving as if he were having the time of his life, a bluffness, a kind of pumped-up geniality or jauntiness that, for me, went with his bow tie—an “act” that thwarted whatever desire you might have had to know what he was really thinking or feeling. He was—reaching back for a word no one ever uses anymore—debonair. “Let’s all have something nice, a nice omelet, what do you say, or some very nice crab salad.” I did not know then that these mannerisms were common among people of his class.
“Look at this place.” Ann spoke for my ears only from behind her open menu. I supposed she meant all the murals of women depicted as cavorting wood nymphs, for which the restaurant was known. From our table we had a good view of Girl on a Swing. They certainly were striking. Under other circumstances it might have been a treat for me to be there. Some years later, when there were so many other places to choose from—I mean trendier restaurants with much better food—I would mystify friends by wanting always to return to the Café des Artistes. (“But it’s all tourists now!” “Nobody goes there anymore!”)
When Ann had asked me to come along, to help her get through this meeting with her parents, I’d thought of it as a simple favor. But this turned out not to be the case. Once it was over, I would spend the rest of the day nursing a headache. Closing her menu, Ann announced that nothing appealed to her and she would make do with just the bread and some ice water. It must not have been the first time she had done such a thing, because her parents showed no surprise. Her mother said only, “I hope you’re eating enough at school, Dooley.” To which Ann made no response—whether because her mother had used the offending name or for another reason, I didn’t know. (But mark how her father bowed to her wish to be called Ann, and her mother did not.) I myself was thrown by Ann’s announcement. Was I supposed to follow suit? I didn’t feel right ordering if Ann wasn’t going to order, too. As if sensing my confusion, Mr. Drayton exclaimed, “We’ll be crushed if you turn out to be on a bread-and-water diet, too!” But his wife said nothing, and I was thrown again. Nudging me under the table, Ann said quietly, “Eat.”
I ordered some nice eggs Benedict because that’s what Mrs. Drayton said she was having. But I didn’t like poached eggs, especially not with glop all over them, and besides, I was too nervous to eat. I had been nervous from the moment we walked in. It had to do first of all with the wrong clothes—not that Ann appeared in the least troubled by this. (The Draytons, of course, were well dressed, both in the same dark shade of gray, which enhanced their twinnish appearance.)
Given everything I’d heard about them, I expected at least some sign of snobbism or high-handedness from the Draytons, a certain tone with the waiter, for example. But in fact it was Ann who snapped at the waiter—“Didn’t I just say?”—when he wanted to make absolutely sure she was not going to order any food. Watching him retreat, Ann said, “Am I the only one who finds it weird that people like waiters and servants are so often forced to wear uniforms like tacky tuxedos?”
In the end, she did not even eat the bread.
When they found that nothing they could ask Ann was going to get her to talk about herself, her parents naturally turned to me—and how were my classes this semester?—not guessing, of course, that this was a topic about which I had little to say.
It was now that they began—the first pangs on the right side of my head.
Ann would not eat. She would not talk. We were as tense around that table as if we were hostages. The Draytons and I acted our parts as if in a play. I asked them about their matinee, which brought the conversation, briefly, to life. They had discovered the ballet only recently, they said, and they were hooked. They could not get enough of Balanchine, whoever he was. It would never have occurred to me that I, too, would be hooked on Balanchine one day, with my own subscription to the City Ballet. (But then, that “dry, straight up, with an olive” would ever trip off my tongue was also inconceivable.)
I had not been paying attention to the music that was playing over the sound system, but now I picked up Judy Collins: “Both Sides Now.” It was a song I associated with the last days of high school, a lifetime ago. My throat tightened.
When the waiter had brought us dessert menus, Mr. Drayton said to me, “You must have something.”
“Can’t you see she’s not hungry?” said Mrs. Drayton.
But clearly Mr. Drayton had guessed that it was not lack of appetite that had kept me from finishing those eggs. “Ah, but dessert is different, isn’t it?” he said in his exuberant way. “And the desserts here are scrumptious.” Such a silly word. Such a nice man. What did he care whether I had dessert or not? It was just kindness, really. His eyes were soft with it. The sort of kindness I never forget.
The next instant it was as if someone had thrown open a window or a door to the outside air. All the lights in the room shivered and dimmed. The menu dropped from my hand. Ann knew at once. Ann, with her exquisite antennae, her passionate empathy—she was like an angel or some other spirit at such moments. She put her arm around my shoulders and told her parents, “You guys should know something. George’s sister is missing. She ran away in August, and no one knows where she is.”
Mr. Drayton was the first to speak. “I am so, so, terribly, terribly sorry.” Blood had surfaced to his face in a way that made it look as if he had been pinched hard on both cheeks.
Mrs. Drayton needed to catch her breath. “Your poor mother.” And the voice in which she said this was completely different from the voice in which she had said everything else.
No one had dessert.
My head was hurting on Both Sides Now.
Bellevue Hospital. The city morgue. The girl is naked under the sheet. There is a mirror on the wall, angled for better viewing from outside the booth. I am not allowed to stand too close. I am asked to stand outside the booth and look through the Plexiglas. The police had told me this day might come, I should be prepared. Now. Was I ready? The girl is dead and naked under the sheet. The attendant lifts the sheet at one end, exposing just the head, with the long, pale hair brushed straight out from the crown, and the bare shoulders. I stare at the shoulders and think: prom gown.
The dizzy dancing way you feel.
I stare at the hair and wonder who brushed it and arranged it so. I wonder if her being naked means that naked was how she was found. Such a buzz in the playground some years ago: MARILYN FOUND DEAD. “And did you hear? They found her naked.”
As Mr. Drayton was paying the check, Ann said, “We could have eaten five times in Chinatown for that.”
“No thanks,” said Mrs. Drayton. “I don’t want all that MSG.”
That girl did not even look like Solange. Only the coloring was the same. And of course, the age. Because it was not Solange, the police did not give me any information. What would they do if no one identified her? How long would they keep her? And then? A tender profile. Skin tight and smooth and ripe-looking, but with an unnatural sheen, like the skin of fake fruit. And even though it wasn’t Solange, I thought of the deer.
“You are such a racist, Sophie.”
“What?” Mrs. Drayton tried to laugh. “Now I’m a racist because I don’t like Chinese food?”
“No, Sophie, you’re a racist because you’re a racist. But it’s the way you shuddered when you said it.”
Mrs. Drayton had shuddered; I noticed it, too.
“I was shuddering at the MSG!”
“Sorry, but we might have to ask you to come in and do this again sometime.”
The inside of my skull lined with barbed wire.
“Sorry, we know it’s though. A dead kid ain’t no pretty picture.”
He was on his feet, he was giving his wife his hand, helping her to get up from the table. “I think we should go now, or we’ll be late.” He moved gracefully and he spoke cheerfully, as if the exchange between mother and daughter had never happened, as if we all didn’t know they still had more than a half hour to kill before the performance and the theater was right there. But his face—I may have been the only one to see it, I may even have imagined it—his face was the face of defeat.
Outside, Ann said she wanted to walk home. Someone was digging thumbs into my eyes, it was chilly November, and the dorm was fifty blocks away, but I wanted to walk, too. When we said goodbye to her parents, Ann asked her father for whatever cash he could spare. As he took out his wallet and handed over a couple of twenties, I wondered why he didn’t ask her what the money was for, and whether maybe he knew without asking. Ann and I headed up Broadway, stopping in different stores until we got the twenties broken down to singles. The farther north we went, especially after Eighty-sixth Street, the more boarded-up windows and broken glass and beggars we saw.
“Observe,” said Ann, reaching into her pockets, distributing alms. “The richest nation in the world.”
Drunks in doorways raised their bottles to her. A woman pushing a shopping cart with all her possessions started to bawl.
There but for fortune go you and I.
“The world’s greatest city. Capital of the twentieth century. Where people pay two dollars for a martini.” Or a penny less, as I recall, for a full steak dinner at Tad’s Steak House.
I asked Ann why her parents hadn’t had more children—families of three were uncommon then—and she said, “When I was growing up and I used to pester them with that same question, they kept saying that all they ever wanted was me. I was supposed to believe I fulfilled all their parental desires—and I guess I did. Of course, I thought it was rotten of them to deny me at least one sibling. But I’d say one pregnancy was more than enough for poor Sophie. My god, pregnancy is uncomfortable. It gives you stretch marks. Labor is painful. I mean, Sophie doesn’t even like to sweat. And that whole generation was so alienated from their bodies they wouldn’t even have natural childbirth, for god’s sake. Most of them wouldn’t even nurse their own kids! That was for peasants. If rich women could pay poor women to incubate their babies for them, they’d do it. If the revolution fails, that may well be the wave of the future. Frankly, I can’t imagine Sophie having a baby. And besides, can you imagine the two of them having sex?”
They were over forty. The thing was, I had to admit, neither easy nor pleasant to imagine.
Ann and I both thought we wanted to have children someday. But Ann insisted, “Only if it’s not in the conventional bourgeois way.”
Now that we were alone, the tension had eased, and what with the fresh air and the walk, my head throbbed less, and I realized how hungry I was.
We were both hungry. About ten blocks from the dorm, we stopped at a Puerto Rican lunch counter that Ann had discovered and where she was greeted by the owner and his wife with warmth. We had pork stripped from a whole roasted pig that sat in the window, fried plaintains, and rice and beans. We were both starving, our plates were piled high, and we ate every bite. It was the real thing, and it was scrumptious.
But afterward, scourged by the thought of millions of famished Biafrans, Ann was upset with herself for pigging out. She would skip her next three meals as a penance.
