Beautiful Girl (22 page)

“You’d really love it.” Judith is sure.

We go home more or less cheered.

But sometime after midnight, at some terrible pre-dawn hour, suspended between black and gray light, I begin to think of the four people whom I knew well who have died this year. Cancer (two), emphysema, a suicide. It has seemed a year of death, of thinking of death, living near it. And then I see that in my list I forgot Simon’s grandfather, who died of a heart ailment. Five.

I believe that several epidemics are going on.

•  •  •

That morning, getting up, we see that one of those violently wrenched changes in the weather has occurred, to which we in San Francisco seem fated. (It is surprising that we don’t all have pneumonia, often.) It is extremely cold; the sky is black, with menacing clouds, and a harsh wind blows, and blows. Surely now it will rain?

But it doesn’t rain. By noon the clouds have disappeared, and the day is brilliant with sunshine, although still very cold. And then, in late afternoon, the clouds come back. But still no rain.

Actually, my husband and I have not been getting along especially well. Nothing terrible, and nothing definite; simply—a slackening of whatever tensions have drawn and held us together. A lessening of warmth, of interest. We talk less. We spend more hours at home in separate rooms.

My first two husbands were both doctors. Perhaps a sculptor is too radical a change?

Are there any solutions?

My son telephones. His grandfather’s will has been read, and he will “come into,” as the phrase goes, quite a lot of money.

(Will he go to Wales?)

“Simon, that’s terrific,” I say, concealing fear (I think). “Whatever will you do with all that?”

I am notoriously stupid about money; ludicrous for me to advise him; besides he is too old.

“I think I’ll buy a pair of flats on Potrero Hill.” Potrero, across the city from Pacific Heights, is a looser, more varied neighborhood than this upper-middle-class one, where Simon grew up. “With that much of a down payment I could pay it all off soon with rents, and have some income left.”

Simon is a painter (he and this husband get along very well); this seems a wonderfully practical solution for him. I am amazed, really delighted.

“A building on top of one of the hills. I could have the top floor for a studio,” he is saying.

Sometimes Simon makes me think that there is, after all, some hope for the rest of us.

That night, half asleep, I hear a curious small steady sound, which I do not understand. But it is not the rain, which by now we do desperately need.

The next morning, still sleepy, I get up first and walk toward the front of the house, and gradually I become aware that outside, beyond the windows, something extraordinary is happening.
Snow!
I call out, “Snow!” waking my husband, alarming the cats. “Look—snow!”

It never snows in San Francisco (the last real snowfall was in 1876) but there it is: white on the rooftops of cars parked along the street, and still coming down—softly, gently, with infinite delicacy. A miracle.

Bundled in sheepskin, wearing boots, I go out for a walk. Light snow feathers my face—it is lovely!

I head for the clinic where Judith works, and there she is, also in sheepskin but hers is white; she bought it in Israel. She is coming out the door as I approach. She says happily, “A patient just canceled and I thought I’d walk down to the park. See the trees with snow.”

“Marvelous.”

People are driving more slowly than usual; everyone looks about with a sort of wonderment.

We reach the Presidio, the woods: eucalyptus, bent cypresses and pines, today are all dusted over with white, although it is no longer snowing. It is
very
beautiful, as Judith and I say to each other.

Then Judith says, “When friends from Israel come to see us, we always bring them here, and sometimes out to Muir Woods. You know, they have so few trees there.”

This remark, rather sadly spoken, remains in my mind, with echoes. And for the first time it occurs to me that we are not, after all, entirely opposed on this issue of their going to Israel. It is not as though Judith had no misgivings about their move, and I no good wishes for them.

I say, “But you’ll come back sometimes to visit?”

“Oh, of course. We’ve got our parents, and all the kids, and
you.
”

We laugh at this, but I do feel better.

That afternoon it occurs to me that perhaps some ceremony or ritual would help, and I choose the one available to my age and social group: a party. We will give a party for the Xs, a farewell party. It is strange that I had not thought of this before: my husband and I like to give parties; it is something that we do well together. We have worked out a formula that is somewhere between a cocktail party and a buffet
dinner (we both dislike both those labels). It is just a party, with a lot of food and drink.

Judith is delighted—is touched. Daniel at first demurs. “Oh, God, please, no parties.” But then he smiles and gives in.

My husband says, “Oh, good. We haven’t had one for a while.”

I begin to call friends, to invite them.

I start with another favorite friend, Nora Y, a Berkeley novelist. (Thank God the Ys are not moving anywhere.) Nora, who also loves Judith, says terrific, a party, what a good idea.

And then she says, “But are they sure they’ll like it there? I think I’d rather go to England, or southern France.”

“Oh, so would I.”

“Well, why don’t we? Let’s start an adult colony in the Dordogne, or somewhere like that.”

“Terrific.”

We laugh and hang up.

The next day I read in the paper that it has snowed in Jerusalem, where I had thought it also never snowed.

I go by to see Judith; she is busy—she says that it does sometimes snow in Jerusalem, but very rarely.

I report on the progress of the party.

It is now raining steadily, the rain we needed.

And for the first time in months almost anything seems possible.

One dark and rainy Boston spring of many years ago, I spent all my after-school and evening hours in the living room of our antique-crammed Cedar Street flat, writing down what the Ouija board said to my mother. My father, a spoiled and rowdy Irishman, a sometime engineer, had run off to New Orleans with a girl, and my mother hoped to learn from the board if he would come back. Then, one night in May, during a crashing black thunderstorm (my mother was both afraid and much in awe of such storms), the board told her to move down South, to North Carolina, taking me and all the antiques she had been collecting for years, and to open a store in a small town down there. This is what we did, and shortly thereafter, for the first time in my life, I fell permanently in love: with a house, with a family of three people and with an area of countryside.

Perhaps too little attention is paid to the necessary preconditions of “falling in love”—I mean the state of mind or place that precedes one’s first sight of the loved person (or
house or land). In my own case, I remember the dark Boston afternoons as a precondition of love. Later on, for another important time, I recognized boredom in a job. And once the fear of growing old.

In the town that she had chosen, my mother, Margot (she picked out her own name, having been christened Margaret), rented a small house on a pleasant back street. It had a big surrounding screened-in porch, where she put most of the antiques, and she put a discreet sign out in the front yard: “Margot—Antiques.” The store was open only in the afternoons. In the mornings and on Sundays, she drove around the countryside in our ancient and spacious Buick, searching for trophies among the area’s country stores and farms and barns. (She is nothing if not enterprising; no one else down there had thought of doing that before.)

Although frequently embarrassed by her aggression—she thought nothing of making offers for furniture that was in use in a family’s rooms—I often drove with her during those first few weeks. I was excited by the novelty of the landscape. The red clay banks that led up to the thick pine groves, the swollen brown creeks half hidden by flowering tangled vines. Bare, shaded yards from which rose gaunt, narrow houses. Chickens that scattered, barefoot children who stared at our approach.

“Hello, there. I’m Mrs. John Kilgore—Margot Kilgore—and I’m interested in buying old furniture. Family portraits. Silver.”

Margot a big brassily bleached blonde in a pretty flowered silk dress and high-heeled patent sandals. A hoarse and friendly voice. Me a scrawny, pale, curious girl, about ten, in a blue linen dress with smocking across the bodice. (Margot has always had a passionate belief in good clothes, no matter what.)

On other days, Margot would say, “I’m going to look
over my so-called books. Why don’t you go for a walk or something, Jane?”

And I would walk along the sleepy, leafed-over streets, on the unpaved sidewalks, past houses that to me were as inviting and as interesting as unread books, and I would try to imagine what went on inside. The families. Their lives.

The main street, where the stores were, interested me least. Two-story brick buildings—dry-goods stores, with dentists’ and lawyers’ offices above. There was also a drugstore, with round marble tables and wire-backed chairs, at which wilting ladies sipped at their Cokes. (This was to become a favorite haunt of Margot’s.) I preferred the civic monuments: a pre-Revolutionary Episcopal chapel of yellowish cracked plaster, and several tall white statues to the Civil War dead—all of them quickly overgrown with ivy or Virginia creeper.

These were the early nineteen-forties, and in the next few years the town was to change enormously. Its small textile factories would be given defense contracts (parachute silk); a Navy preflight school would be established at a neighboring university town. But at that moment it was a sleeping village. Untouched.

My walks were not a lonely occupation, but Margot worried that they were, and some curious reasoning led her to believe that a bicycle would help. (Of course, she turned out to be right.) We went to Sears, and she bought me a big new bike—blue, with balloon tires—on which I began to explore the outskirts of town and the countryside.

The house I fell in love with was about a mile out of town, on top of a hill. A small stone bank that was all overgrown with tangled roses led up to its yard, and pink and white roses climbed up a trellis to the roof of the front porch—the roof on which, later, Harriet and I used to sit and exchange our stores of erroneous sexual information. Harriet Farr was the daughter of the house. On one side of the house,
there was what looked like a newer wing, with a bay window and a long side porch, below which the lawn sloped down to some flowering shrubs. There was a yellow rosebush, rhododendron, a plum tree, and beyond were woods—pines, and oak and cedar trees. The effect was rich and careless, generous and somewhat mysterious. I was deeply stirred.

As I was observing all this, from my halted bike on the dusty white hilltop, a small, plump woman, very erect, came out of the front door and went over to a flower bed below the bay window. She sat down very stiffly. (Emily, who was Harriet’s mother, had some terrible, never diagnosed trouble with her back; she generally wore a brace.) She was older than Margot, with very beautiful white hair that was badly cut in that butchered nineteen-thirties way.

From the first, I was fascinated by Emily’s obvious dissimilarity to Margot. I think I was somehow drawn to her contradictions—the shapeless body held up with so much dignity, even while she was sitting in the dirt. The lovely chopped-off hair. (There were greater contradictions, which I learned of later—she was a Virginia Episcopalian who always voted for Norman Thomas, a feminist who always delayed meals for her tardy husband.)

Emily’s hair was one of the first things about the Farr family that I mentioned to Margot after we became friends, Harriet and Emily and I, and I began to spend most of my time in that house.

“I don’t think she’s ever dyed it,” I said, with almost conscious lack of tact.

Of course, Margot was defensive. “I wouldn’t dye mine if I thought it would be a decent color on its own.”

But by that time Margot’s life was also improving. Business was fairly good, and she had finally heard from my father, who began to send sizable checks from New Orleans. He had found work with an oil company. She still asked the
Ouija board if she would see him again, but her question was less obsessive.

The second time I rode past that house, there was a girl sitting on the front porch, reading a book. She was about my age. She looked up. The next time I saw her there, we both smiled. And the time after that (a Saturday morning in late June) she got up and slowly came out to the road, to where I had stopped, ostensibly to look at the view—the sweep of fields, the white highway, which wound down to the thick greenery bordering the creek, the fields and trees that rose in dim and distant hills.

“I’ve got a bike exactly like that,” Harriet said indifferently, as though to deny the gesture of having come out to meet me.

For years, perhaps beginning then, I used to seek my opposite in friends. Inexorably following Margot, I was becoming a big blonde, with some of her same troubles. Harriet was cool and dark, with long gray eyes. A girl about to be beautiful.

“Do you want to come in? We’ve got some lemon cake that’s pretty good.”

Inside, the house was cluttered with odd mixtures of furniture. I glimpsed a living room, where there was a shabby sofa next to a pretty, “antique” table. We walked through a dining room that contained a decrepit mahogany table surrounded with delicate fruitwood chairs. (I had a horrifying moment of imagining Margot there, with her accurate eye—making offers in her harsh Yankee voice.) The walls were crowded with portraits and with nineteenth-century oils of bosky landscapes. Books overflowed from rows of shelves along the walls. I would have moved in at once.

We took our lemon cake back to the front porch and ate it there, overlooking that view. I can remember its taste vividly. It was light and tart and sweet, and a beautiful lemon color. With it, we drank cold milk, and then we had seconds and more milk, and we discussed what we liked to read.