Beautiful Girl Read online

  Dropping her robe, as no one watches, she steps into the shallow end of the rough concrete oval; as the cool sliding water reaches her waist she begins to swim a gentle breaststroke, her legs in a practiced frog kick, to the end of the pool. There she reaches for the edge, and, holding on, she looks back at the group in the clearing, in the sun, who are not watching her. Harry (big Harry: this distinction is to become ironic in a few years, when his son grows so much larger than he), big Harry is telling a story; Jessica can catch echoes of his precise and somewhat finicky voice, not quite hearing what he says.

  Tom is looking at Irene, so small and blond, preening herself in the sun, in Tom’s gaze. And Jessica wonders how that would be, to be a woman looked at by men, aware of the power of one’s face, one’s small and desirable body. She can’t imagine it, and she lets go of the end of the pool, to swim back slowly, in the cool and concealing water.

  She gets out quickly, and in a single gesture she picks up and puts on her robe. Elaborately Tom hands her the drink that he has made for her. His gestures always seem to mock themselves. (Is Jessica for the first time observing this? She has a sense of heightened powers, of newly and acutely sensing what is around her.)

  Harry McGinnis is a Classics professor, which was Jessica’s field of concentration at Randolph-Macon, and he sometimes teases her about what he terms her desertion, her flight to modernity. He also teases her about what he calls her radical ideas; he says that Negroes have smaller brains than white people, making Jessica furious—but does he mean it? No one knows, least of all Jessica.

  Today, which is all around an odd day, she decides to tease Harry. Well, why not? (So what?) “Well, Harry,” she begins, “I’ve just spent the most wonderful morning reading Mrs. Virginia Woolf. Of course you couldn’t be persuaded to read any lady after Sappho?”

  Pleased—he enjoys a little argument, although he has the Southern male’s generations-deep distrust of intelligence in women—Harry responds with more than usual gallantry: “Well, if anyone could persuade me, it would be you, Miss Jessica.”

  Staring at the neat brown patch of hair on his chest, Jessica is wondering where to go from there when Tom breaks in: “Speaking of modernity,” he somewhat loudly says (is that what they were talking about?), “have you good people heard the news that Benny Goodman is going to play in Carnegie Hall? Ben-ny Good-man.” His isolation of each syllable is replete with contempt.

  Anti-Semitic. This horrifying word, or perception (which is not entirely new: from time to time he has said certain not nice things about his Jewish students), enters Jessica’s mind, and it is in fact so horrifying that she must force it out (Hitler, Jews in Germany—of course Tom is not like that). Defensively she says, “I really can’t see what’s so terrible about that.”

  Lifting his head, for one instant Tom glares as though Jessica were a student (a Jewish student?) and then he turns to Harry and he says, “Jessica really only likes hymns. Episcopal hymns, of course. She’s always humming them, although a little off-key.” And he laughs, as though he had spoken kindly, or even amusingly.

  Turning from him (something unbearable has risen in her chest), Jessica looks over toward her children.

  Devlin is still there on the steamer rug, a towel obediently draped around his shoulders, but Avery has got up and walked around to the side of the pool, where young Harry is lying in the sun. She squats there beside him, much less beautiful than he; she seems to be saying something, but whatever it is Harry does not answer, nor even turn toward her. Avery is in love with Harry. Blindingly, Jessica sees and feels this, as at the same time she tells herself that it is absolutely impossible: Avery is only nine, many years too young for a feeling of that sort. Impossible.

  “Ben-ny Good-man,” Tom says again. “What do you imagine he’ll play—The Flight of the Bumblebee’?”

  “Silly, you’re thinking of Jack Benny.” Irene laughs, tinklingly.

  “Well, I suppose I should concede that there is some difference between them.” Tom draws in his chin, raising his head in a characteristic gesture of defiance. But then, since it was Irene who spoke, he turns aside and allows his stern expression to dissolve into a laugh.

  But suddenly, then, there is a tremendous sound, an explosion of water. All the grown-ups turn to see young Harry floundering in the pool—to see Avery, who has evidently just pushed him in, whose face is terrified, appalled.

  Everyone screams at once—everyone but Jessica and Avery, who are staring at each other, frozen, across the pool.

  Young Harry, from the pool to Avery: “You little bitch—”

  Tom: “Avery, how dare you, damn you—”

  Irene: “Harry, honey, your stomach’s all scraped—”

  Big Harry to his son: “Don’t you ever let me hear you use language like that, and to a girl—”

  At the sound of that splash something within Jessica has itself exploded, the day has exploded, and for a moment she is immobilized (as Avery is). Jessica hears all those shouts as though they were distant voices. But then in a rush she gets up and hurries around to where Avery is, Avery still standing beside the pool, beside the place where Harry was lying. Jessica grasps her daughter’s arm. She pulls her around to the other side of the pool and then up the twig- and pebble-strewn slate steps, almost dragging her along, toward the side yard and the house.

  Where the lawn begins Jessica stops; she turns to face Avery and to grasp her shoulders. And she begins to shake her daughter, saying loudly, terribly, “What’s the matter with you, are you in love with Harry McGinnis? Are you in love?”

  Shaking her until they are both weeping.

  THE TODDS

  Alternatives

  It is the summer of 1935, and there are two people sitting at the end of a porch. The house is in Maine, at the edge of a high bluff that overlooks a large and for the moment peaceful lake. Tom Todd and Barbara Rutherford. They have recently met. (She and her husband are houseguests of the Todds.) They laugh a lot, they are terribly excited about each other and they have no idea what to do with what they feel. She is a very blond, bright-eyed girl in her twenties, wearing very short white shorts, swinging long thin legs below the high hammock on which she is perched, looking down at Tom. He is a fair, slender man with sad lines beside his mouth, but not now! Now he is laughing with Babs. Some ten years older than she, he is a professor, writing a book on Shelley (O wild West Wind), but the Depression has had unhappy effects on his university (Hilton, in the middle South): 10 percent salary cuts, cancellation of sabbaticals. He is unable to finish his book (no promotion); they rely more and more on his wife’s small income from her bookstore. And he himself has been depressed—but not now. What a girl, this Babs!

  The house itself is old, with weathered shingles that once were green, and its shape is peculiar; it used to be the central lodge for a camp for underprivileged girls that Jessica Todd owned and ran before her marriage to Tom. The large, high living room is still full of souvenirs from that era: group pictures of girls in bloomers and middies, who danced or, rather, posed in discreet Greek tunics, and wore headbands; and over the fireplace, just below a moldering deer’s head, there is a mouse-nibbled triangular felt banner, once dark green, that announced the name of the camp: Wabuwana. Why does Jessica keep all those things around, as though those were her happiest days? No one ever asked. Since there were no bedrooms, Tom and Jessica slept in a curtained-off alcove, with not much privacy; two very small rooms that once were storage closets are bedrooms for their children, Avery and Devlin. Babs and her husband, Wilfred Rutherford, have been put in a tent down the path, on one of a row of gray plank tent floors where all the camper girls used to sleep. Babs said, “How absolutely divine—I’ve never slept in a tent.” “You haven’t?” Jessica asked. “I think I sleep best in tents.”

  A narrow screened-in porch runs the length of the house, and there is a long table out there—too long for just the four Todds, better (less lonely) with even two guests. The porch widens at its
end, making a sort of round room, where Tom and Babs now are, not looking at the view.

  Around the house there are clumps of hemlocks, tall Norway pines, white pines, and birches that bend out from the high bank. Across the smooth bright lake are the White Mountains, the Presidential Range—sharp blue Mount Adams and farther back, in the exceptionally clear days of early fall, such as this day is, you can see Mount Washington silhouetted. Lesser, gentler slopes take up the foreground: Mount Pleasant, Douglas Hill.

  Beside Babs in the hammock lies a ukulele—hers, which Tom wants her to play.

  “Oh, but I’m no good at all,” she protests. “Wilfred can’t stand it when I play!”

  “I’ll be able to stand it, I can promise you that, my dear.”

  Her accent is very Bostonian, his Southern; both tendencies seem to intensify as they talk together.

  She picks up the instrument, plucks the four strings as she sings, “My dog has fleas.”

  “So does Louise,” he sings mockingly, an echo. Tom is fond of simple ridiculous jokes but he feels it necessary always to deliver them as though someone else were talking. In fact, he says almost everything indirectly.

  They both laugh, looking at each other.

  They are still laughing when Jessica comes out from the living room where she has been reading (every summer she rereads Jane Austen) and walks down the length of the porch to where they are, and says, “Oh, a ukulele, how nice, Barbara. Some of our girls used to play.”

  Chivalrous Tom gets up to offer his chair—“Here you are, old dear.” She did not want to sit so close to the hammock but does anyway, a small shapeless woman on the edge of her chair.

  Jessica is only a few years older than Tom but she looks considerably more so, with graying hair and sad brown eyes, a tightly compressed mouth. She has strong and definite Anglo-Saxon notions about good behavior. (They all do, this helpless group of American Protestants, Tom and Jessica, Barbara and Wilfred, which they try and almost succeed in passing on to their children.) Jessica wears no makeup and is dressed in what she calls “camp clothes,” meaning things that are old and shabby (what she thinks she deserves). “Won’t you play something for us?” she asks Babs.

  “Perhaps you will succeed in persuasion where I have failed,” says Tom. As he sees it, his chief duty toward his wife is to be unfailingly polite, and he always is, although sometimes it comes across a little heavily.

  Of course Jessica feels the currents between Babs and Tom but she accepts what she senses with melancholy resignation. There is a woman at home whom Tom likes too, small, blond Irene McGinnis, and Irene is crazy about Tom—that’s clear—but nothing happens. Sometimes they kiss; Jessica has noticed that Verlie always hides Tom’s handkerchiefs. Verlie also likes Tom. Nothing more will happen with Babs. It is only mildly depressing for Jessica, a further reminder that she is an aging, not physically attractive woman, and that her excellent mind is not compelling to Tom. But she is used to all that. She sighs, and says, “I think there’s going to be a very beautiful sunset,” and she looks across the lake to the mountains. “There’s Mount Washington,” she says.

  Then the porch door bangs open and Wilfred walks toward them, a heavy, dark young man with sleeves rolled up over big hairy arms; he has been washing and polishing his new Ford. He is a distant cousin of Jessica’s. “Babs, you’re not going to play that thing, are you?”

  “No, darling, I absolutely promise.”

  “Well,” Tom says, “surely it’s time for a drink?”

  “It surely is,” says Babs, giggling, mocking him.

  He gestures as though to slap at the calf of her long leg, but of course he does not; his hand stops some inches away.

  Down a wide pine-needled path, some distance from the lodge, there is a decaying birchbark canoe, inside which white Indian pipes grow. They were planted years back by the camper girls. Around the canoe stands a grove of pines with knotted roots, risen up from the ground, in which chipmunks live. Feeding the chipmunks is what Jessica and Tom’s children do when they aren’t swimming or playing on the beach. Avery and Devlin in their skimpy shorts sit cross-legged on the pine needles, making clucking noises to bring out the chipmunks.

  A small chipmunk comes out, bright-eyed, switching his tail back and forth, looking at the children, but then he scurries off.

  Devlin asks, “Do you like Babs?” He underlines the name, meaning that he thinks it’s silly.

  “She’s O.K.” Avery’s voice is tight; she is confused by Babs. She doesn’t know whether to think, as her mother probably does, that Bab’s white shorts are too short, that she is too dressed up in her pink silk shirt for camp, or to be pleased at the novel sort of attention she gets from Babs, who said last night at dinner, “You know, Avery, when you’re a little older you should have an evening dress this color,” and pointed to the flame-gold gladioli on the table, in a gray stone crock.

  “Her shorts are too short,” says Devlin.

  “What do you know about clothes? They’re supposed to be short—shorts.” Saying this, for a moment Avery feels that she is Babs, who wears lipstick and anything she wants to, whom everyone looks at.

  “Mother doesn’t wear shorts, ever.”

  “So what? You think she’s well dressed?”

  Devlin is appalled; he has no idea what to make of what she has said. “I’ll tell!” He is desperate. “I’ll tell her what you said.”

  “Just try, you silly little sissy. Come on, I’ll race you to the lodge.”

  Both children scramble up, Avery first, of course, and run across the slippery pines, their skinny brown legs flashing between the trees, and arrive at the house together and slam open the screen door and tear down the length of the porch to the cluster of grown-ups.

  “Mother, do you know what Avery said?”

  “No, darling, but please don’t tell me unless it was something very amusing.” This is out of character for Jessica, and Devlin stares at his mother, who strokes his light hair, and says, “Now, let’s all be quiet. Barbara is going to play a song.”

  Babs picks up her ukulele and looks down at it as she begins her song, which turns out to be a long ballad about a lonely cowboy and a pretty city girl. She has an attractive, controlled alto voice. She becomes more and more sure of herself as she goes along, and sometimes looks up and smiles around at the group—at Tom—as she sings.

  Tom has an exceptional ear, as well as a memory for words; somewhere, sometime, he has heard that ballad before, so that by the time she reaches the end he is singing with her, and they reach the last line together, looking into each other’s eyes with a great stagy show of exaggeration; they sing together, “And they loved forevermore.”

  But they are not, that night, lying hotly together on the cold beach, furiously kissing, wildly touching everywhere. That happens only in Tom’s mind as he lies next to Jessica and hears her soft sad snores. In her cot, in the tent, Babs sleeps very soundly, as she always does, and she dreams of the first boy she ever kissed, whose name was not Tom.

  Some years later, almost the same group gathers for dinner around a large white restaurant table, the Buon Gusto, in San Francisco. There are Tom and Jessica, and Babs, but she is without Wilfred, whom she has just divorced in Reno. Devlin is there. Devlin grown plump and sleek, smug with his new job of supervising widow display at the City of Paris. Avery is there, with her second husband, Stanley.

  Tom and Barbara have spent the afternoon in bed together, in her hotel room—that old love finally consummated. They are both violently aware of the afternoon behind them; they are partly still there, together in the tangled sea-smelling sheets. Barbara presses her legs close. Tom wonders if there is any smell of her on him that anyone could notice.

  No one notices anything; they all have problems of their own.

  In the more than ten years since they were all in Maine, Jessica has sunk further into her own painful and very private despair. She is not fatter, but her body has lost all definition, and her cloth
es are deliberately middle-aged, as though she were eager to be done with being a sexual woman. Her melancholy eyes are large, terribly dark; below them her cheeks sag, and the corners of her mouth have a small sad downward turn. Tom is always carrying on—the phrase she uses to herself—with someone or other; she has little energy left with which to care. But sometimes, still, a lively rebellious voice within her cries out that it is all cruelly unfair; she has done everything that she was taught a wife is expected to do; she has kept house and cared for children and listened to Tom, laughed at his jokes and never said no when he felt like making love—done all those things, been a faithful and quiet wife when often she didn’t want to at all, and there he is, unable to keep his eyes off Babs, laughing at all her jokes.

  Tom has promised Barbara that he will leave Jessica; this winter they will get a divorce, and he will apply for a teaching job at Stanford or U.C., and he and Babs will live in San Francisco; they are both in love with the city.

  Avery has recently begun psychoanalysis with a very orthodox Freudian; he says nothing, and she becomes more and more hysterical—she is lost! And now this untimely visit from her parents; agonized, she questions them about events of her early childhood, as though to get her bearings. “Was I nine or ten when I had whooping cough?”

  “What?” says Jessica, who had daringly been embarked on an alternate version of her own life in which she did not marry Tom but instead went on to graduate school herself, and took a doctorate in Classics. (But who would have hired a woman professor in the Twenties?) “Tom, I’d love another drink,” she says. “Barbara? You too?” Late in her life Jessica has discovered the numbing effects of drink—you can sleep!

  “Oh, yes, divine.”

  Sipping what was still his first vermouth, Devlin repeats to himself that most women are disgusting. He excepts his mother. He is sitting next to Babs, and he cannot stand her perfume, which is Joy.