Authors: Marjorie Lee
Brad shuddered.
"Oh, don't worry," she assured him. "I was thirty in June and nothing happened so I guess she was wrong. But the night before my birthday I didn't go to bed at all."
"Scared?"
"Well, that; and besides, I figured I might just as well be awake when it hit me so I could see what it felt like."
That
would
be interesting, Brad agreed; to die on your feet; for the
experience,
one might say.
Well, it was true, she argued. After all, if you didn't experience things what would you have to write about?
Then she was a writer? Yes. Along with responsibilities to a husband and three children she was a free-lance writer. And Yes: she had been published: short stories in the slicks, a number in the qualities, and a raft of verse. Marc? Marc was a lawyer. The firm name was quite familiar
—one of the top ones in town: Bendheim, Blatz, and Mendes-Cohen. (Browne? I wondered, hating myself for it, what
Browne
had been before the Change.)
How had they met, Brad asked.
"I had this apartment in the Village," she said, "and they were having this cocktail party next door. I'd been working on some assignment and I was wearing a shirt and an old pair of slacks that were worn out clear through; and when this boy came over and asked me to go to the party I just went
—I mean right that
minute;
and I got all engrossed in a conversation with somebody, and I guess you know what happened: I forgot to keep my legs crossed. So that's when Marc began to notice me, and four weeks later we got married. About a year after, when I asked him what it was that could possibly have been so attractive about me at that party, he said, Well, I'll tell you: it was simply a matter of not having been able to resist the view.'"
"And how did your mother feel about
that?"
I asked, when we had stopped laughing.
"You mean the marriage? Oh, she just got a friend of hers in New York to check on his professional position and his family background and his standing as a member of the Mill Pond Country Club and when she found out he was terribly top-drawer she decided he was a lovely boy who should have his head examined and gave it two years
—which was awfully ungenerous of her: hers lasted eight."
"Proving," Brad said, "that, once more, she was wrong."
"Yes," Frannie agreed. "But that's only because Marc is a saint. I mean how would
you
like to come home and get nine pages for dinner?"
"Does he mind?" I asked.
Oh, not horribly, she supposed; at least not nearly as much as some men might. One day perhaps, though God only knew
which
day, she would make it all up to him by banging out a crazy little novel.
"Why wait?" Brad wanted to know.
"It hasn't happened yet."
"What hasn't happened yet?"
"It.”' she answered thoughtfully. "The crazy little Plot..."
After dinner we separated and I lost track of her. I didn't think of her again till it was time to go and I couldn't find Brad. I tried the school kitchen. Brad was big on Kitchen Romance: there was always the excuse of having gone to help so-and-so with the ice cubes. But there was no one there. It was only after I'd swallowed a pride that was quite used to being swallowed and asked for clues to his whereabouts that I lifted the shade in the Sixes room, looked out into the moonspattered parking lot, and saw him standing at the window of Frannie's convertible.
"... and we'll call you," he was saying. "Spend an evening
—the four of us."
"Fine. You'll love Marc."
"You sure?"
"Positive. Everybody loves Marc."
"Do you?"
She thought for a minute; not for the answer but because, perhaps, the answer was too big to give. "A lot," she said finally.
"Then I," sighed Brad, "shall find him unendurable."
I lowered the shade. It was an old routine; a broken record; the first chapter of the inevitable soap opera I'd lived through, over and over and over, for twenty-three years.
Enter, Frannie Browne,
I thought, as I walked across the dark room to the door.
It was about two weeks before I saw Frannie again. She came over to Wingo one afternoon to pick up Petey for a dentist appointment. I was out of my office getting a breath of air.
"Hi!" I called to her across the playground. She turned and ambled towards me. She was still in blue-jeans, and a clean white boy's shirt with the sleeves rolled up. Her shorn hair, sun-bleached in a streaky variance from brown to blonde, was wet at the ends from a recent shower. On her feet she wore a pair of ancient moccasins, one split from the sole so that her toes came through. Standing beside her (though I was barely taller) I felt like an absolute mountain both size and age-wise. "How've you been?" I asked.
"Just fine." In the daylight her eyes behind the black-rimmed goggles were green.
"Nice party here the other night," I offered.
"Hate crowds. Agoraphobia. Know of any cut-rate couches?"
"You? You strike me as the sort of girl who gets along all right. Why dabble in the Unknown?"
"Hey, watch it." She smiled. "You're at Wingo. At Wingo Freud is God."
Gretchen, the Fives teacher, walked over then and changed the subject. "Petey's doing beautifully," she told Frannie. "Made the Fall adjustment like an eight-year-old. You should have seen him at Circle Time the other morning. Told everybody about his summer in Bermuda." She turned to me. "Frannie has the most incredible kids," she said. "I had Stu and Blair several years ago before they switched to Llewellyn. They're all terrific. Don't quite know how she does it...!"
"I wanted them,"
Frannie murmured with a simplicity which barely hid the reciprocal barb.
Gretchen had no children of her own; nor, for many reasons (of which Brad was foremost) did I.
I was to meet the Brownes en masse the following Friday evening. Frannie called the night after the playground episode and though Brad had a salesmen's meeting to attend on Friday evening he said he'd duck it. His status at Maclntyre Printing, Inc. was wobbly as it was, what with hungover mornings and midnoon homecomings, and I suggested we make it for another time. But Brad insisted.
"Here we go again," I said in the car on our way over. "Henry Bradford: Boy Lochinvar."
"You're out of your mind," he said with a smile. "What is she? A little kid with big glasses and bitten nails."
Frannie met us at the door wearing khaki shorts, a tattersall shirt, and the same torn moccasins. Marc stood behind her, and I felt immediately that we would be friends. There was a clean niceness about him. His face was long and thin with a receding hairline on either side of a still stubborn forelock that made it seem even longer. His nose sort of swooped, veering off-center a little, giving him the look of a Modigliani. The rest of him, though, was decidedly masculine: his arms and his legs in their gray flannel shorts were tanned and muscular and covered with a dense blond down. (It's funny how a woman's limbs are impossible with hair, but a man's look like hell without it.) I saw Brad give him an envious once-over. In spite of a face that had launched a thousand female ships, Brad was built frailly enough to look better clothed than not.
"... and this is Marc," Frannie was saying with a pride I couldn't help but notice. At which point the brood came sailing down the stairs. Petey, I knew. Stu was a larger version, handsomer, less elfin, with, beneath the social surface, a hint of dark moods not unlike Frannie's. Blair, a girl
—though I shouldn't have guessed by the name—was charming: half-colt, half-Nereid, she reminded me of meadows and translucent seashells.
At the start of things I saw in Frannie the same closed shyness I'd seen during the first moments of our meeting at the Wingo dinner. But here, on home ground, it took no more than one gin and soda to open her up. When that happened she turned on a record player that had speakers in every room of the house, including the downstairs John.
The Brownes had two sets of recordings:
His
and
Hers,
as Frannie put it.
His
was long-hair: symphonies, concertos, chamber music, and a deafening supply of what Frannie irreverently called
Wopera.
Hers consisted of the songs of the Thirties, rendered by Ella Fitzgerald, Lee Wiley, Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughan, and a few others: Dorothy Carliss, for instance, who, to me, sounded too refined to live; and somebody else I'd never heard of named Mabel Mercer, who seemed to be going through the agonizing process of losing her heart, soul, and voice all at the same time.
When Frannie began Mabel's
Little Girl Blue
for the third round, Marc put his foot down.
"I've got my own troubles," he said. "Let her go tell it to her analyst."
"She probably has!" Frannie countered with a loyalty one might have displayed in defense of a dearly beloved relative.
Then, having got through half of her second gin and soda, she folded, Turk-sit, on the floor.
"You're so materialistic!" she said to Marc, knitting her brows in a critical frown. "Or maybe I mean
—
representational.
Just because she can't
sing
—
you think she can't
sing!
You know what I mean?"
Nobody seemed to, quite.
In any case, we did listen to it all over again:
Old girl, you're through. You might as well surrender. Your hopes are getting slender. Why won't somebody send a tender Blue Boy to cheer up Little Girl Blue...?
On which last phrase Mabel gave up the ghost and wept.
"Now, doesn't that just
do
something to you?" Frannie insisted.
"Yes," Marc answered. "It depresses me!"
I found it a bit depressing myself. After twenty-three years in a marital harem, having now reached the questionably mellowed age of forty-six, I was in no condition to be reminded of
old
girls who were
through.
"You got a
sick-identification,"
Marc told Frannie. "Anybody suffers, you have to get right in there and suffer along with them!"
"How come all women?" Brad cut in.
"What?"
"How come all female vocalists; no males."
She thought a minute. Then, with her own brand of earnest patness: "A person always favors celebrities of the same sex; on the deepest level, that is. Residual education-need: return to the original source: girl babies learn how to become women through their mothers; boy babies how to become men through their fathers."
"Where'd you get all that?" he asked. "You been head-shrunk?"
"Uh-uh," she answered, rattling her glass to get more coldness off the ice cubes. "Not me. It's just an armchair hobby of mine, that's all. The idea of actually lying down on an honest-to-God couch turns my blood off. If I go to a party and find there's an analyst there I make up a headache and leave. I've got this feeling I'm running wild in a pasture and the whole damned bunch of them are after me with their butterfly nets waving..." She shuddered.
"Poor Butterfly..." Marc chanted in the Puccini manner. "She has flit from the Voo... doos..."
Which must have reminded Frannie of the threat of
His
collection; so to stave him off she jumped in with five different versions of
I Get a Kick Out of You.
"I'm studying it," she said. "You know
—like some people spend their lives interpreting
Hamlet?
Take Ella: she does it sort of masochistically. But with Ethel Merman it's a whole other thing: she does it like she fully intends to kick him right the hell back!
My Funny Valentine
—that's another one. Mary Martin worships the guy; but Mabel's full of pity. You get the feeling she may be singing it to Toulouse-Lautrec..."
"You amaze me," Brad said.
"Do I really?" she asked, crinkling her nose in utter disbelief. "Do I
really?"
It must have been nearly midnight when the others came: Jeri and Len Perloff, and Marian and Jeff Deitz. Drop-ins from Meade's Manor to Llewellyn were, in spite of distance, nothing in the Browne circle. I did wonder, though, why, since most of their friends lived in Meade's Manor, the Brownes had chosen a house so far away. Later I decided that this was due to Frannie's need to keep at arm's length from anything which might serve to link her with a circumscribed group of any kind.
Freedom from molds
was one of her favorite phrases,
Marc, born in Boston, had come to New York when he was two and had spent the better part of his premarital leisure on the Number One Course of Westchester's Mill Pond Country Club. His affiliation had lasted until Frannie appeared on the scene, presenting in rather unminced terms her views on snobs and social segregation. This, added to his own inchoate rebellion against a rock-solid background, had led to the break.
* * *
The Perloffs were, hereditarily, Old Meade's Manor. Len was, anyway. Jeri had trekked the social mile from Caulfield. You know how some people say:
I don't care about money per se, I just care about what it can do?
Well, I think that's how Jeri felt about Meade's Manor. Unlike a good many other residents, she didn't need it for spiritual sustenance: she just liked having it there
in case.
Pragmatic and purposeful beneath her carefree exterior, she played both sides of all teams. At the moment she was doubling between hausfrau-and-mothering and account-executing for one of the large advertising agencies in the city. Never one to slip up on a chance for personal development, she had fast become, through the influence of colorful colleagues, a collector of lithographs, a reader of
Partisan Review
and
Peanuts,
a bosom pal of four stage designers and two Zen-Buddhist painters, a near-authority on progressive jazz, a student of the recorder, and patroness (emotionally) of an Irish-American bullfighter.
A slave to fashion fads, she could be glimpsed during any sunny lunch-hour in town, swinging down Madison Avenue in a costume right out of a circus poster by Dali. She was a beanpole redhead, and a short blue sheath over a pea-green leotard was apt to garner attention. It was said by Jeri herself that on attending an exhibit of avant-garde sculptures by craftsmen well known throughout the world two young male spectators had circled her silently and then, turning to each other, had whispered simultaneously:
"Whose is that?"