Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk Read online

  “We’ll need to think about it. And possibly pray. We’ll let you know.”

  Both of us had parents helping us, and both of us wanted badly to get out from under that arrangement: to enjoy the abundant fruits of independence that the flowering of financial solvency yields with its growth. We had both been applying for jobs like crazy, but neither of us wanted merely to be the confidential private secretary to a man of great importance, which, to date, were the only kinds of replies we’d been getting. And so we kept trying.

  Abe and Dickie stepped forward then, greeting Miss Lockhart.

  “Another commendable afternoon’s entertainment,” said Dickie, shaking Miss Lockhart’s hand, causing her to blush and rustle, the scent of her lemon verbena sachets rising from the folds of her high-necked blouse.

  “Thank you, Mr. Prestwick,” she said, hewing to formality, though he’d told her last month that she could call him by his Christian name.

  Miss Lockhart did not offer her hand to Abe, as she knew he was Jewish, a fact that her bigoted heart could tolerate, but only barely.

  “May we help tidy up the performance space, while the ladies put away their costumes?” said Dickie, placing a neat square hand on the back of one of the folding chairs, beginning to collapse it. Abe did the same.

  Strapping, I suppose, one could have called Dickie, his men’s eights crew days at college still much in evidence in his shoulders, broad from rowing.

  Abe was shorter, snappier, and had a goofy handsomeness that made me want to laugh whenever I saw him, which is what Helen said she liked best about him. He was a suave and competent clown whose curly hair rarely stayed stuck down no matter how he pomaded it. When we met them months ago, that first night after the ballet, I immediately liked Abe better, but was physically attracted to Dickie. There could be no resisting.

  That night, after we’d folded our togas away and gotten Miss Lockhart’s benediction, they took us to dinner, as was often the case, to a place in the neighborhood. I felt acutely aware of the passage of time.

  “Alas, May is not a month that is spelled with the letter R,” said Helen, gazing at the menu with a forlorn air only partly put on.

  Since we’d begun seeing them in February, we’d dined almost exclusively on her favorite: oysters Rockefeller, awash in butter and parsley, chased with plenty of Champagne at a speakeasy.

  Late spring, though, almost summer, and that old guideline for safely dining on shellfish necessitated a change. Now was the season of medallions of lamb or aiguillettes of striped bass, a datum which made me, that evening, as Dickie ordered roast duck with asparagus tips au gratin for me, unaccountably sad—not because of the foodstuffs, but the change of season.

  Though I could tell that Dickie’s and my couplehood was not long for this world, I ate mostly left handed, Dickie holding my right tight with affection.

  Dinner was nevertheless delightful, full of bons mots from Abe and Helen. We waited on her, indulging her as always, as she got dessert. I liked sweets all right, but I never ordered them. I had a good metabolism then, but why test it? Besides, I liked to save room for my treat of choice: the cocktails we’d be off to later. Even then I could drink almost as much as the men, a capacity which wowed Abe but worried Dickie, though he tried to act as if it didn’t matter.

  Helen’s confectionery weakness then was Venetian ice cream. She tucked into it with a dainty silver spoon, making her way through each melting layer with careful determination.

  “One of these days I’ll whisk you away to the actual Venice, in Italy,” Abe said with admiration as Helen cleaned her plate with an efficiency that was both robust and ladylike.

  “You know, Abe, I wish I’d thought of this sooner,” I said, “but we should have told Miss Lockhart that we’d like to give the money from the play to the Brooklyn Federation of Jewish Charities.”

  “Wit of the staircase, Lily,” said Abe, paying the check. “It’s all right. I don’t worry about people like her; she can’t really hurt me. Just keep it for the cause of making it easier for me to see Helen without asking anybody’s permission.”

  Sometimes they took us down to Chumley’s in the West Village because Dickie knew that I scribbled poetry, and the place was popular with the drinkers in that set. I had not met with much poetic success yet, but I was flattered all the same.

  That night, though, they took us to the Puncheon Club on Forty-Ninth Street in Midtown, better known as 21. We went there because it was closer, and because it had tables the size of small yachts and oceans of the best booze to be had in post–Volstead Act Manhattan.

  Unprepossessing aside from a large iron gate, 21 resided in a row of brownstones. It maintained a large clientele among the Yale men in the city, including Dickie. He was pals with Jack and Charlie, the proprietors. When the eyeball behind the peephole peeped upon us there in the May dusk, we were given immediate entrance.

  We had told Miss Lockhart we were off to a tea room, but instead of tea, we ordered sidecars for Abe and Helen and whiskey old-fashioneds for me. Dickie’s drink was the Barbary Coast, which contained both Scotch and gin, an admixture that caused me, silently, to question, as I often did, his taste.

  “Olives?” said Dickie, passing around the small complimentary plate that came with each table.

  “No thanks, but could you hand over that candied ginger?” said Helen.

  Cosmopolitan—that’s what Abe and Dickie were. Debonair. Dickie especially. His suits fit him like perfect plumage, giving him the look of a man who was going places.

  And he likely was, being one of those people positioned naturally, in terms of wealth and family background, to be destined for success. Yet for all that—perhaps because of all that—Dickie had few significant long-term goals. He was gifted, rather, with a joyous irresolution that made him seem to live wholly, unlike anyone else I’d yet met, in the present. Even sitting there, munching the free salted nuts that came with the cocktails as an invitation to get thirstier, his presence felt momentous. Not as in big and important, though he did fill a room, but as in one who inhabited each moment as and by a moment.

  The room was warm, the thick air blown by fans. Our cocktail glasses sweated condensation, leaving rings on the table and damp on our hands. I wiped mine on Dickie’s pant leg, mostly as an excuse to touch his thigh.

  There was live music, as ever and, as ever, we danced. Dickie was immaculate on the dance floor, but Abe, less polished and more improvisatory, was the better dancer. We danced to “Whispering.” To “Linger Awhile.”

  “What do you say we linger a while elsewhere?” said Dickie, squeezing my waist and leading me from the dance floor.

  Meaning what did I say we head back to his place and go to bed together.

  “I thought you’d never ask,” I said, though he always asked, just as Abe asked Helen, and we both said yes, and would meet up back on our floor of the Women’s Christian Hotel later that night.

  Dickie’s apartment wasn’t a far walk from 21, but in our tipsy haste, we took a taxi, Dickie paying. Windows down, hair gently blown, I could hardly wait to be alone in private.

  One might find such wildness shocking. But people had sex even back in those days.

  True, I had been brought up in strict, Victorian style. Reading books and dreaming dreams, drinking chocolate sodas, and spending summers at the broad Atlantic. Mother, in my youth, made me eat my daily stint of Cream of Wheat. Anti hand-holding, pro girlish pride. “Girls should always turn aside,” she’d say, reminding me of the protocol for a boy attempting a kiss. “Anything you love is a joy and a care,” she’d say. And, “Dinosaurs are gone, but fleas persist,” when I spoke of my ambitions—her way of making a point about the dangers of wanting to be too immense.

  But I didn’t listen, not really.

  Self-taught, I learned how not to hang around the front stoop too long waiting to be properly kissed. Not to say I kissed promiscuously. But some desires could not be commanded.

  I had first gone
to bed with a boy when I was in college at Goucher: a philosophy student from the University of Maryland. Physically attractive but mentally pedantic, he was forever explaining some pretentious point about Kant. “I Kant stand it when you talk that way!” I said once, but humor was lost on him. He drew out the old saw about puns being the lowest form of humor, which struck me as idiotic. Puns require the minute manipulation of language on its most fundamental level! A pox on John Dryden, or whomever, for saying that in the first place, and a pox on that philosophy student for being so full of received ideas. He and I did not endure. And sleeping with him had not been all pyrotechnics and roses, to be honest, as both of us had been ardent virgins.

  But I knew that, like anything I set my will to, I could get better at it. And I did.

  In those handful of years between Goucher and Manhattan, I lingered in Washington. Or rather malingered.

  A classmate told me of an opening in a publicity firm. Slightly vague as to what publicity actually was, I walked into the office and demanded an interview with the president. The surprise was that I got one, and the following Monday started work. Luck, pure and simple. My first assignment was to make a speech before a group of women I was supposed to organize for a fund-raising drive. I was scared to death, but I ended up being a natural. Plus, I learned by working there the best way to be stylish—stocking seams always straight, nose never shining, lipstick never faded, coiffure always in curl or wave—without being one of those women other women are prone to hate.

  I passed three years there, jotting poems in my free time, cherishing with pride a few clippings and the memory of what sweet things the professor in English composition had said about my college themes. My boss was a blowhard who grunted and snorted and stripped his gears over every little thing, but was ultimately harmless.

  The next boy I went to bed with was a law student from Georgetown, an assistant to my father. We were involved. For a while. It would have been a match to make my parents proud—someone following my father in his chosen vocation, someone to keep me close to home in Washington—but I couldn’t.

  What’s bad in a sweetheart becomes unbearable in a husband.

  I’d become so bored that I bored myself. I broke it off with my law student, who quickly found an aspiring housewife to embark on the becalmed seas of the life he desired. Bully for her. At the end of 1925 I at last resolved, above parental protest, to send myself off in my Aunt Sadie’s wake to Manhattan.

  Off to the Empire State’s bright diadem. A charming and perceptive woman ready to charm and perceive.

  Romantically, I arrived unburdened by propriety, no blushing maid. One could say I was “fast,” but the pace felt right. One could say I was “loose,” but I never felt myself far from the tightest self-control. I would have liked a companion-spouse, maybe. I would have considered that possibility of a mate for life. But they, all of them, to a man—even and maybe especially the ones who fancied themselves urbane, like Dickie, like Abe, or the most rebellious—secretly or not-so-secretly aspired toward a middle-class ménage.

  Dickie had decided recently that, in the interest of being chic, he ought to wear cologne. That evening his bedroom smelled like citrus and spice.

  “Very nice,” I told him. “What is it?”

  He handed me the bottle, and I stood before the vanity, watching him undress me in the dim ochre light of a single lamp. We wanted to see each other, but not to let people outside see in.

  “Du Coq?” I said, reading the label and laughing, thinking that I had to tell Helen, who would appreciate that my lover would wear a perfume so aptly named.

  “What’s so funny?” said Dickie, kissing my neck; necking was then a popular terme d’art.

  “Nothing,” I said. “I just like that your perfume is so cocky.”

  I removed the cap and put my nose to the sprayer, finding to my dismay that up close it had an almost urinary note. I felt grateful that Dickie hadn’t chosen to wear it that night.

  “It’s not perfume,” said Dickie. “It’s cologne.”

  I ignored his concern with being manly and slipped his suit jacket off his rowing-team shoulders and onto the floor.

  After we’d finished, I had to hurry home. I was never able to stay overnight. Dickie understood, obviously. Walking me back to the Christian Women’s Hotel, he kept a hand on my elbow. He spoke what might be considered pillow talk, but upright and ambulatory and without the pillows.

  “Maybe one day we can stay together longer,” he said. “When you get your own place.”

  And that is how that night went, and how all our nights went, until we parted, inevitably, not with enmity, but with incredulity on his part: He, like the rest, could not believe that I really was not on the prowl for permanent union. Or he thought that he would be the one who made me realize that deep down inside, I surreptitiously was.

  I kissed him quickly, for an instant, on the lips, then rapped my knuckles on the glass of the Christian Women’s Hotel door once he was down the street and out of sight. Helen and I were friends with the doorman, who let us enter by this method instead of ringing and getting in trouble over curfew.

  * * *

  The last time I saw Dickie was at the first party that Helen and I threw at our brand-new place: the sixth floor of the six-floor walk-up in Murray Hill. He came bearing booze. He did not stay the night. I did not want him to. It would have been impractical, for one—the place being too small, with Helen in the bedroom and Abe in there with her, and I in the room designated for living. But that aside, I could feel it was over, and I told Dickie so.

  He explained to me calmly that he knew I was only saying that because of the upheaval of moving to a new place and because of my mistaken ideas about where my “career”—he sneered semi-intentionally as he said that word—might take me.

  “You’ll call me up again, Lillian,” he said, placing a hand at my waist as we stood in the doorway, me trying to see him out, him seeking to stay. “I bet you will in under a week’s time.”

  But I didn’t. I was too busy. Doing new things—writing new poems and learning a new trade and meeting new people. New men eventually.

  In the month prior to that party Helen had gotten her job in advertising illustration at R.H. Macy’s, and thanks to her, I’d gotten mine there, writing advertising copy.

  When Helen had told me to apply that June, after she was hired on, I had been leery. I had not entirely enjoyed the PR work in D.C. But advertising, I found, was a different and entirely more rideable beast.

  With the pure driven vision of Phoebe Snow glimmering in my mind, I sent out my rhyming application letters—not only to R.H. Macy’s, but all over the place, just in case. Thanks to Helen and some mild exaggeration on my résumé—or a bit of finesse, as she suggested I call it—R.H. Macy’s took me on on a trial basis, and I tried and tried until they agreed to keep me.

  Ginny had moved out of the Christian Women’s Hotel that first weekend in July, too. Independence Day indeed. She became a journalist, and we invited her to that first party, as well, full of goodwill and gratitude at being so free. A few years later Ginny would have to return to Kansas City to help her parents after the crash and through the Depression, settling in to work for the paper there. But Helen and I, we stayed in the city.

  We couldn’t stay that way forever, Helen and I, living together, but while we did, everything was charmed. We never fought, we never felt crowded. We gave one another everything we required by way of fun and friendship, and the only necessity either of us could not get from the other was male companionship.

  Before that party, we stood together on our fire escape, smoking and waiting for the guests to show up. The ravines of the city as seen from that vantage were sublime: Some of the other fire escapes strewn with shirts hung to dry, and clouds shifting overhead, dyed red by the sunset.

  The following Monday I came home from work and paused to get the mail, our first delivery there.

  I looked it over in the lobby—two
letters for Helen and two for me. One was from my mother in D.C., expressing her worry at my ability to maintain an income steady enough to support this excursion into independent living, insulting as ever without meaning to be. “My darling girl,” she called me, and “my beloved child,” making me feel somehow even older than my twenty-six years.

  The other, to my surprise, was from Abe. Seeing his return address and fluid handwriting, I thought at first that there must be a mistake and that he’d meant to write Helen, whom he was still seeing, even though Dickie and I, as of the last forty-eight hours, were officially uncoupled.

  But no, it really was for me.

  “My Dear Miss Poisonfish,” he addressed me, good-humoredly. Then, “In all seriousness, Lillian, Lily, most appealing Miss Boxfish, I fear you’ve broken poor Dickie’s heart, and poisoned the well of his zest for life, at least temporarily. I do not think this will make much difference, but since I hate seeing my pal so crestfallen and downcast, and since selfishly I adore the pleasure of your company on our double dates: Reconsider?”

  The lobby felt stifling, and I crumpled both letters, one per fist, thinking to throw them in the trash bin near the stairs before I walked up, reluctant to carry such burdens to our rented heights.

  Then the feeling passed and I felt all right. I loved them both, but neither Abe nor my mother had any purchase on me. They could say what they liked, and I would love them still, but I would not change my behavior, would not change my mind. I smoothed the letters flat again, replacing them in their respective envelopes, and kept them.

  So for that first year of freedom, until the lease was up and we each had enough money to acquire our own places, Helen and I lived like happy cliff dwellers with our kitchenette and our combination shower and bathtub.

  We had all we needed: work to do, vegetables and fresh milk and money to pay for them, even though they weren’t cheap. I think they would’ve sold autumn leaves for fifty cents a bunch if they could have found a market for them. It was a bandit city then, as it would always remain.