Growing Up (32 page)

By the age of fourteen Mimi was wise about the nature of public charities. The police came two or three times a week with bags of stale buns and rolls collected from Camden bakeries. Mimi noticed that the matron and her friends removed the choicest sweets for themselves before setting out the leftovers for the children. The Christmas parties were the worst humiliations. The decent people of Camden were full of Christmas goodwill and eager to do something for misbegotten children, so the inmates of the Sheltering Arms had to be trotted out on Christmas day to stand in local gathering halls and look delighted while each was handed a small gift. Some Christmases there were three or four parties a day at which the orphans were expected to beam with gratitude.

Mimi came to think of Christmas as an occasion when the well-to-do used life’s losers to improve their day. Her refuge was books. She had a hungry mind and she read greedily, fairy tales mostly, and books like
Sarah Crewe
in which poor unfortunate children were brought happiness by the hand of beneficent Providence. In high school she enrolled in the college preparatory course. Shocked by such foolish nonsense, the matron ordered the school to transfer her into the business course.

Mimi packed her suitcase and ran away. The police brought her back to the Sheltering Arms next morning. She quarreled with the matron about church. The matron belonged to a fundamentalist Protestant sect presided over by two women preachers who practiced faith healing in services in which hysteria ran high. She insisted that the children of the Sheltering Arms attend these rites. Devoted to the Catholic Church, Mimi was outraged. She wrote to the Catholic bishop of Camden for help. She was being compelled to sin, she told him. She hoped someday to become a nun but now was being torn from her faith. Could the Church intercede for her?

The bishop replied. He wanted her to come see him. She did. Her faith in the Church, she thought, had been well placed. Then
she discovered it hadn’t. There was nothing he could do to help her, the bishop said. It was her duty to go back to the Sheltering Arms and serve God by being obedient. That shattered her faith in the Catholic Church. She never returned to it.

When she was sixteen and had been four years in the orphanage she ran away again. This time she was cannier. Instead of carrying a suitcase she dressed herself in three layers of clothing and fled to the far side of Camden. She had hoarded just enough money to rent a room. To explain her lack of luggage she told the landlord, “I’ve just come from out West, and all my suitcases have been lost.”

She obtained a Social Security card under the name Judy Grant and took a job in a grocery. A few weeks later she was spotted there by a woman she’d met in the matron’s church. Instead of taking her back to the Sheltering Arms, however, the woman offered to take her into her home at Egg Harbor. Mimi moved again, found work in an Egg Harbor clothing factory, and had her first taste of romance—with her benefactress’s son. He had just been called into the Army and wanted a girl to remember.

She was seventeen when her father reentered her life. Dropping out of the blue as casually as if he’d “disappeared” only five days before instead of five years, he told her he was living in Maryland, outside Annapolis. Had a house there with a nice couple named Bill and Bertha. He’d like to try to put the family together again. Wouldn’t she come and live with him?

Mimi had reason to say yes. She’d become a scandalous figure in Egg Harbor, and it had cost her the love of her Army warrior, who was in Texas. Neighbors had written him that she had been seen driving out evenings with a middle-aged married man of racy reputation. Her first love was infuriated with her and told her and the entire community that all was over between them. Mimi felt herself the object of community scorn. She grasped the opportunity to move to Maryland.

Her father, who was passing through Egg Harbor en route to someplace else, gave her directions. She was to get off the train at Glen Burnie on the appointed day, and he would meet her and take
her to their new home. When she arrived at Glen Burnie a week later, he wasn’t there yet. She waited. Four hours later he still hadn’t appeared. Nor did he appear for four or five days after she’d found her way on her own to Bill and Bertha.

“He’s just disappeared for a few days,” said Bertha. “He’ll come back before long.”

He did come back, and he stayed a few days, and then he left again and didn’t come back at all. It didn’t matter. Mimi was a skilled survivor now. She had befriended people who lived in Severna Park, a middle-aged couple with thirteen children. They invited her to live with them. It was a pleasant house and a pleasant time with pleasant people. One of them had a job in Baltimore at Montgomery Ward’s. Soon Mimi had a job there too.

When the mother of the house announced she was expecting her fourteenth child, Mimi decided to move again. A newspaper ad led her to a rooming house on Mount Vernon Place in the center of Baltimore, where, early in 1946, I happened accidentally into her life.

My mother, at this time, had been considering what sort of woman might be qualified to help me make something of myself. Though she never said so, I suspected she thought I might eventually snare an heiress. Mimi’s biography, therefore, wasn’t one to make her cry out with enthusiasm.

My own interest in Mimi was not high-minded when we first met. In that period I was still struggling to become a sinner. After my unheroic war in Dixie I’d come back to Baltimore feeling much too grown up to go back to college and taken a job in the central post office. It was idiot work—eight hours a day shoving letters into sorting cases—but it was good pay and financed my late nights of searching for lewd women in downtown saloons.

It looked as if my effort to become a seducer would succeed only in bankrupting me. The barflies who guzzled my weekly paycheck came in two varieties: those who lost all motor control before the bars closed and those who at two
A.M
. suddenly remembered dear old mothers waiting up anxiously for them at home.

The person who saved me from celibacy and cirrhosis was
George Winokur. It was George who in high school several years before had tried to save me from conviction by the Honor Society. We had become good friends afterwards at Hopkins, possibly because we complemented each other so well. George was boisterous where I was sedate, outgoing where I was shy, chunky and square-cut where I was long and angular. He was a scientist, I was a dabbler in the shabbier suburbs of the arts. Where I was sly, George was blunt. George could also make enough noise for both of us.

“You’re wasting your time on bar girls,” he blared at me in a restaurant one evening in a voice that felt like a load of gravel being dumped on the nerve ends. “The place we’ve got to crack is the Peabody.”

The Peabody Institute of Music was situated on Mount Vernon Place. George, who was now in the University of Maryland Medical School, was well versed in Baltimore’s sexual geography. The densest concentration of available women, he said, was Mount Vernon Place, where apartments were packed with sex-crazed musical females. Their desperation, George believed, arose from the fact that most male music students were homosexual. He assured me that musical people, though singularly dumb, were so sexually depraved that we could acquire platoons of budding sopranos for the price of a Coke and a hamburger.

We began prowling this Bohemia after dark. Girls did not pounce upon us. “Let’s ring some doorbells,” George said, nudging me into a dark vestibule to look for a doorbell with a feminine name beside it. It was hard to resist George. We rang doorbells. Sometimes a girl, sometimes a woman far gone in years would come to the door, and we would introduce ourselves if she looked sex-starved or say we’d rung the wrong bell if she looked too angry or too long in the tooth, and in every case the door was slammed against us.

“We’re not getting through to the real Bohemians,” George growled one night while we sipped coffee in the Vernon Grill.

“Maybe there aren’t any Bohemians.”

“They’re here. We have to get a foot in the door, that’s all.”

I was ready to write off Bohemia as a desert when George phoned to say a medical friend of his had opened doors for us. He had arranged blind dates for us with two Peabody girls. The four of us went to the movies. The girls were not overheated. Mine informed me while Bette Davis was speaking that she preferred not to be touched on the knee. We returned them to their rooming house and were invited into the communal parlor for genteel conversation. I had made the genteel conversation and risen and was ready to leave when the parlor door opened and a third girl walked in. It was my date who introduced her. “This is Mimi,” she said.

I sat down again. When they put us out an hour later, my life had been irrevocably changed. I didn’t realize it, of course. Love is a madness that masquerades under a hundred rational disguises, and at first I mistook it for healthy lust.

Out on the street, the girls back in the rooming house, I found myself unwilling to let go of the evening and urged George into the Vernon Grill to discuss it over coffee. We disposed of our two dates quickly. “Dumb,” George said. He’d tried to discuss Dostoyevsky and drawn blank stares while theorizing about Raskolnikov’s need to suffer punishment. What could you expect of music students? “The Peabody Institute,” he growled. “It would be more accurate to call it the Peabrain Institute.”

“What did you think of Mimi?”

“Now that’s a very interesting case,” he said. “Very interesting. She doesn’t have any education, but one thing she isn’t is dumb.”

“Nice body, too,” I said.

George esteemed the female body but had a profound respect for brains. “That Mimi presents a highly interesting possibility,” he said. “You and I could probably do with her what Henry Higgins did for Eliza Doolittle.”

I knew neither a Higgins nor a Doolittle. “It’s Shaw’s
Pygmalion
,” George explained, and told me the plot: two elegant gentlemen taking an ignorant girl off the streets, filling her with learning, brushing her to a high polish. It was a beguiling idea. I
liked the notion of playing the elegant gentleman and turning our rough diamond into a glittering jewel.

“Her mind is good and, better yet, almost untouched,” George said. “Not quite a tabula rasa, but as close as we’re likely to find. We could shape that mind.”

I knew we could.

“The first thing she’ll have to read is Arthur Koestler’s
Darkness at Noon,”
said George.

“And
Studs Lonigan and The Grapes of Wrath
,” I said.

This was the birth of a long campaign the two of us undertook to turn Mimi into a creature who could pass for a princess.

It was not easy to get our project started, though. When I phoned Mimi a few days later she’d forgotten meeting me and, no, she couldn’t go out next night, she had something else to do. I phoned her a week later, and again she had something to do. Obviously she didn’t like me. I tried to put her out of my mind, but three weeks later an old Navy friend from New York came to town, and I phoned her and suggested we all go to the movies and maybe she could get one of the Peabody girls to come along for my friend. She agreed, not because she wanted to see me, I soon discovered, but because she thought New York men were glamorous. The date was a disaster. Ignoring me, she spent the evening charming New York, and the two of them left the Peabody girl and me alone to exchange icy smiles.

To hell with her, I decided. If she had so little moral character that she could ignore an upright man like me for the tawdry glitter of New York, she wasn’t worth thinking about. I kept thinking about her anyhow. After a few weeks I phoned her again. She agreed to go to the movies with me. Alone this time. When I brought her home, she permitted a courtesy kiss at the door. Just one. Its formality angered me. I’d been nothing to her. Nothing. I wouldn’t call her again.

Next week I called her again. Again she granted the courtesy kiss and sent me away. “That’s it,” I told myself. “I’m through with her.”

I phoned her a few days later. This time, after the meaningless
good-night kiss, she patted me on the shoulder and gave me a smile, as though she remembered having seen me someplace before.

That spring I went back to Hopkins, partly under my mother’s badgering—“You’ll never amount to anything spending the rest of your life in the post office”—partly because the G.I. Bill would pay the tuition and free me from the tedium of post-office labor. At the same time Mimi moved out of her rooming house and took a small apartment a few doors away with a friend named Jennie, who was serving an apprenticeship as a department-store buyer. Between them they had enough income to swing the rent. It was George who first learned they had an apartment, and he immediately proposed that he and I try to turn it into a center for Bohemian weekend revelry with our male friends and any women Jennie and Mimi chose to admit. To promote this effort I decided to make an all-out effort to ingratiate myself with Mimi. I invited her to make an excursion to Washington. She said she’d like that. She had never seen Washington.