Queenie (6 page)

I remind myself how all my childhood, home from school, unlike a lot of the kids there, I don’t find only the new maid and, “No, your maw went shopping maybe, I don’t know when,” or just a note saying what’s in the icebox and the Democratic committee meeting will last until seven. I find Aurine at her afternoon’s boudoir attentions to herself.

Before I was underfoot, maybe Oscar, and other men before him, were meant to surprise her there. For she never frightens us with blue clay masks and curlers, even now. To me, back then, her rites already have a freakish charm. Dear intent clown, she and I both know, with our sidelong eyes, the solemnity of what I’m watching—a professional! What a man sees will be according to his lights, however he sees this Venus—or Lola, or Marguerite de Navarre, or Zsa Zsa—sitting on a milking stool, cooling her behind in a bowl of rose water. She’s never Marie Antoinette; she’s never dressed for it.

That day though, she’s covered to the waist with a peachy froth, scooped around her like the top of a Schrafft soda, from which her nipples poke like the garter rosettes she sometimes wore. “For a beauty mark, Queenie, but never to hold anything up, the veins dislike it.”

At eight, I too speak of all body parts with a “the” of respect. I already know that love-in-bed indents the waists “better than all those health wrestlers, the masseurs, like to tell you”—and cheaper. And I know that never in her life has she shaved her nape—from which her pinned hair that day rears like a wave topped with its own comb. “Never wear jewelry when naked, Queenie; it cheapens the bodyline.” If you have hers.

At my yell that day, she drops her toe puff, stands up in her ruff of froth—white of egg, cologne and a dusting of cochineal, a receipt against sallowness—carefully towels dry her bottom, andante, andante, then takes up the English hairbrush a decent girl will always tend her muff with, and gives it one silky stroke. I am already soothed. I feel wars can wait.

Aurine has the luck to have a mouth whose ends turn up—or other women call it luck.

“Cozier than old Mona L. by far,” says Oscar. “No man ever wants to draw a mustache on Aurine.”

Her smile, if it is one, goes for comedy or tragedy equally. Whichever, when she proceeds to wrap herself first in the alcohol towel and then in her own invention, a huge one sewn entirely of silk powder puffs, it always seems to me the air lazily stops to watch. And when she emerges, her naked back to the window opening on New York’s October air, a white cloud, tired and dirty as it must be from Fifty-Seventh Street, arranges itself nattily at her shoulder. I already understand that beauty is what this kind of thing happens to.

But Aurine’s strength is you don’t have to think about beauty with her; you can relax. “Aurine’s a radical feminist,” says Oscar. “She never stops thinking about men.”

And in this dusky boudoir, no farther from a Marseillaise than I suppose boudoirs ever are, what potion are we burning today, I am wondering—for them? And for ourselves of course, incidentally. In our house we’re against some things, including wives and marriages in my aunt’s case, and things like “the moo-mies” in Oscar’s—his name for what has been so hard on an impresario of the legit.

But against the male, in all his glory that we females loudly give him? Never. How to be against him is what I may someday have to go to college to learn. But at home?
Allons, enfants de la patrie!
Men is what we’re
for
.

So, I’m waiting. If my aunt answers my old question about war in the funny Ninth Avenue French that her father, old Achille the restaurateur, and my Gran, his cashier girl out of a convent in Wavertree, Liverpool, brought up the little Aurine their by-blow in—then the answer will be serious. If she answers in her own English—a hint of Granny Em’s limey snark-and-barl, tempered with Bergdorf-Goodman American—it will merely be practical.

Stretching, she flings up and back a marble arm, à la that bacchante statue with the grapes, used to be in the Met. A favorite pose Oscar claims is based half on her regrettable taste in art, and half on her respect for the winter price of Malagas. Then she drops to her knees, all naked flesh-art, rumples my hair to a better curl—“No braids for her, Oscar; she’s to be pretty from the start”—touches my button nose, in the face she has decreed somehow will someday be hers, pulls up my panties, and so having thoroughly shaken up destiny to let it know what it’s to do for me, she stands up to the cosmetic bar where her bookshelf is of courtesans of yore. With one long thumb smoothing the memoirs of the de Lenclos, who lasted past seventy, she answers me—girl to girl.

“Billy been on that, again, has he?” Her thumb continues its caress of old de Lenclos; is she smiling? Or sad? “Billy’s ’ad to give up steeplechase, poor old lad. Poor lad, ’e’s seventy.”

While I’m thinking what steeplechase is, comes her second answer. “
Pauvre
Billee.” Her contralto moves us both. A finger crosses my mouth. “Shhhhh,” she says.
“C’est la guerre.”

Some years later, maybe when I’m twelve, I overhear Oscar say of her to a friend—meanwhile not seeing me doing my homework in the alcove in
his
library, which is more extensive, “Aurine has a heart without envy. Penis envy.”

Well, that’s fine for her, I think, peering out at the two gents who’ve planted that barb and then settled themselves like clubmen, with a couple of gazettes from Oscar’s table of them. Sneaking out the back way, I decide it can’t be because Aurine’s being saintly about it; she’s just never that psychiatric. Then why does she have a heart without penis envy? Must be because she’s seen such a lot of them

As yet, I still haven’t had her opportunities. What hers as a child were, she’s never said. But since she was a by-blow, just like me, and in a much more formal era, I imagine she grew up much the same. I can’t think the old Frenchman went around in his BVDs when he came to call on her mother. And like Oscar, he didn’t live in the house.

As for Oscar, he’s been like a father to me in most ways. But in the exhibitionist department advised nowadays for girls’ daddies?—nothing doing. He’d no more have walked around in front of babygirl Queenie with his prick showing, than he’d put it on display at the Modern. I’ve never even seen him without a vest.

Not that there can be anything wrong, Father. Aurine would never stand for it.

As for me now, has anybody stopped to consider that in spite of bathroom play at age five, the Museum of Primitive Art at nine, the backseats of cars at ten, and from then on any number of lively arenas and propositions, a girl rarely gets to examine what she’s supposed to envy, in the calm and neutral light of day? Or of night. A girl rarely ever gets to see the male organ in a stable situation. Even in daylight, she has to take it more or less on installment. And the minute she does, I suppose it tends to disappear again. Pay now—see more later.

What I think is: What a woman like Aurine doesn’t want for herself, I can probably get along without. I’m interested in them like mad in a way, of course, but do I really want one for my own?

But then again, I argue, nobody else’s experience is yours either. And Aurine never knew Freud. Can a woman be happy and successful these days, without penis envy?…Chalk up one more reason for going to the brain factory. I have to wait till college to find out.

So every day for two weeks now, I’m hanging on the ad missions letter, each day it doesn’t come, lying here in a deck chair, talking over my anxieties with the clouds. They must know the national girl situation as well as I do. Just being pretty isn’t a score these days. To be in you have to be intellectual; even a model getting interviewed for Hollywood tells you what she reads isn’t just
Women’s Wear Daily
. It’s Sartre—on Sundays.

But it isn’t only fashion that sends us to college these days, Father. Or even parents, though few are as against it as my guardians. And we sure don’t go there to get married. If Aurine, and even Oscar in a way, can fear this, it just shows how old-fashioned they are. We go, Father, because all over America girls have questions like mine. We’re the generation after the pill generation; now we want the directions that come with it. Something better than the “Go, go, go, straight ahead,” that they had. What’s straight? Where’s ahead?

At least in the old days, when people said “Don’t!”—you knew what to
do
.

And now at last I have the college’s acceptance letter in my cool, unmanicured little mit. Sometimes, Aurine takes my fist in her own filbert fingers and looks at it. She told the Lord I had to look like her, and he bowed to that; she must have an excellent relationship with the Lord. Nothing to do with praying; something that gives her confidence. Whatever it is, she got it without getting a BA for it. But I can see my hand puzzles her. After all the trouble she took for me—with that hair, those eyes, et cetera, and above all, that waist—aren’t I going to do more with it? The only thing we seem to agree about is our napes.

Dear Auntie, how can I tell her the very real rough nature of the competition nowadays? How can I tell that beautiful pan, still without a wrinkle of its wisdom on it, that all the girls I know, laid or half-laid, are pushing into the think tanks with the same united question,
What are we competing
FOR
? And if it’s a penis, Auntie, why don’t you envy it?

So, it’s time to step inside that terrace window Aurine had cut in the brick so many years ago “to catch the pinkest light with.” And tell the two of them the letter we’re all waiting for is here.

Every afternoon they’re in the salon anyway, at their tea—which is champagne for Aurine, and for Oscar, Carpano—sitting under the remnant of the ikons which in the old days Oscar now and then bought for her at La Vieille Russie. A good investment, she always said, that a burglar wouldn’t know about. Not so easy to pawn, as it turned out, and too easy to sell. Which is in one way or another the explanation for the absence or presence of any of our goods. In the current state of our finances, if I leave home for a dorm, something else will have to disappear. That’s why they’ve been sitting there extra late these past two weeks. They’re waiting for the college to tell me. What life has in store for them.

Letter in hand, I move nearer, around a cornice from which I can see them, a beautiful florid couple sipping almost in still life, in the slanting, interior flush of sun we get up here. Or that they bring to it.

My aunt is sitting under the ikon she loves best, of all those she’s managed to keep. I see now she’s saved all the St. Georges; how come I never noticed that before? Next to her, on top of Gran’s old telly, is a fifty-dollar bill always left there for burglars, as an inducement to take both and run. Other people we know leave twenties, but Aurine’s private style is the same as her public one—Oscar says that’s what the grand style is.

He should know. His huge outline still has the nobility of the young baritone-bass who once—in Venice, at a festival, in the off-season—subbed a Baron Ochs at the opera house. His ties are still from Sulka, since Oscar Selwyn, worldwide impresario, splurged on more of them than lucky O. Selwyn, who runs a lecture bureau in a hole in Carnegie, will ever need. He is, he says, an amateur in a world he never made—and wouldn’t think of making.

Even in love he refuses to turn professional. My aunt’s cool, shepherdess shoulders, always bared for his visit, slide in and out of their curved draperies with her breath; any moment the chiffon will slip past the nipples’ edge; the eye can’t help measuring the possible fall, just as people do with steeplejacks. Familiar as he is with the forms underneath, he can’t help watching. And though he knows their perfect anchorage. When he leaves, he will kiss her hand, his hat in the other. And twenty years of this happiness have not spoiled his face.

Above them, it’s past six by the Venus with the clock in her belly that Aurine won’t get rid of and Oscar surely didn’t give her; by now he should be downstairs in his own big flat, at those serene bathroom duties which I imagine but have never seen. Afternoons are for his cronies down there, or for what’s left of his business. Mornings are my aunt’s time up here for our household or other projects outside—does she secretly visit him then? Sunday mornings he spends here, but far back as I know, he has never spent the night.

When do they do it?
puzzled my childhood much like anybody else’s. Now that I’m grown, my aunt’s rhythms of love have long since been evident; she has a kind of overall blush afterward, pink as the stucco I’m leaning on. But since it can hang on for hours, or start up suddenly, right while you’re watching her, in “a limpid laugh and a liquid eye,” to quote Sam Newber—I still can’t tell just where or when. She has to show her satisfaction of course, unlike a wife, who’s not paid for it. That’s what’s wrong with wives, says Aurine.

…“How’m I ever going to do it on my own,” I’ve often wanted to ask her. “With all
your
philosophy weighing down
my
organs?”…But now, letter in hand, I’ve no more hostility—I’ve never had much. I just want to ask the old riddles, get the old answers, and run like crazy out of here. How else can I manage what every loving young person wants to do for their older loved ones? How else can I keep them innocent?

So at last, I poke my head in, hand behind my back, and ask: “Aunt Aurine, why do there have to be wars?”

After all, a live question, no matter who asks it. Or who answers. The game is, in ten years of joking, she’s never come up with the same one.

On the double I get it.

“Countries get angry!” Aurine says. She doesn’t look at me. Oscar’s quick glance doesn’t have to tell me. She’s a country—and she’s angry. She’s having one of her English days, when Oscar says she reminds him of the Queen on the telly, reviewing her regiment….While the audience thinks to itself, maybe, of all the things that great Scotch tartan of a girl has never seen…except Prince Philip, of course. Does
she
envy
him
?…

Now my aunt raises her head, and looks at me. Above her, the ikons flame. “Something useful and proper always goes off after a war, Queenie. World War One killed off hats.” Gran’s last lover, a manufacturer of fedoras, bequeathed us this wisdom, plus one other—never trust a man in a borsalino.