“You can’t,” said Reenie. “They wouldn’t have you. You’re not a Catholic.”
“I could become one,” said Laura. “I could join up.”
“Well,” said Reenie, “you’ll have to cut off your hair. Underneath those veils of theirs, a nun is bald as an egg.”
This was a shrewd move of Reenie’s. Laura hadn’t known about that. If she had one vanity, it was her hair. “Why do they?” she said.
“They think God wants them to. They think God wants them to offer up their hair to him, which just goes to show how ignorant they are. What would he want with it?” said Reenie. “The idea! All that hair!”
“What do they do with the hair?” said Laura. “Once it’s been cut off.”
Reenie was snapping beans: snap, snap, snap. “It gets turned into wigs, for, rich women,” she said. She didn’t miss a beat, but I knew this was a fib, like her earlier stories about babies being made from dough. “Snooty-nosed rich women. You wouldn’t want to see your lovely hair walking around on someone else’s big fat mucky-muck head.”
Laura gave up the idea of being a nun, or so it seemed; but who could tell what she might fall for next? She had a heightened capacity for belief. She left herself open, she entrusted herself, she gave herself over, she put herself at the mercy. A little incredulity would have been a first line of defence.
Several years had now gone by—wasted, as it were, on Mr. Erskine. Though I shouldn’t say wasted: I’d learned many things from him, although not always the things he’d set out to teach. In addition to lying and cheating, I’d learned half-concealed insolence and silent resistance. I’d learned that revenge is a dish best eaten cold. I’d learned not to get caught.
Meanwhile the Depression had set in. Father didn’t lose much in the Crash, but he lost some. He also lost his margin of error. He ought to have shut down the factories in response to lessened demand; he ought to have banked his money—hoarded it, as others in his position were doing. That would have been the sensible thing. But he didn’t do that. He couldn’t bear to. He couldn’t bear to throw his men out of work. He owed them allegiance, these men of his. Never mind that some of them were women.
A meagreness settled over Avilion. Our bedrooms became cold in winter, our sheets threadbare. Reenie cut them down the worn-out middles, then sewed the sides together. A number of the rooms were shut off; most of the servants were let go. There was no longer a gardener, and the weeds crept stealthily in. Father said he would need our cooperation to keep things going—to get through this bad patch. We could help Reenie in the house, he said, since we were so averse to Latin and mathematics. We could learn how to stretch a dollar. That meant, in practice, beans or salt cod or rabbits for dinner, and darning our own stockings.
Laura refused to eat the rabbits. They looked like skinned babies, she said. You’d have to be a cannibal to eat them.
Reenie said Father was too good for his own good. She also said he was too prideful. A man should admit when he was beat. She didn’t know what things were coming to, but rack and ruin was the likeliest outcome.
I was now sixteen. My formal education, such as it was, had come to an end. I was hanging around, but for what? What would become of me next?
Reenie had her preferences. She’d taken to reading Mayfair magazine, with its descriptions of society festivities, and the social pages in the newspapers—the weddings, the charity balls, the luxury vacations. She memorized lists of names—names of the prominent, of cruise ships, of good hotels. I ought to be given a début, she said, with all the proper trimmings—teas to meet the important society mothers, receptions and fashionable outings, a formal dance with eligible young men invited. Avilion would be filled with well-dressed people again, as in the old days; there would be string quartets, and torches on the lawn. Our family was at least as good as the families whose daughters were provided for in this way—as good, or better. Father ought to have kept some money in the bank just for that. If only my mother had remained alive, Reenie said, everything would have been done up right.
I doubted that. From what I’d heard about Mother, she might have insisted I be sent to school—the Alma Ladies’ College, or some such worthy, dreary institution—to learn something functional but equally dreary, like shorthand; but as for a début, that would have been vanity. She’d never had one herself.
Grandmother Adelia was different, and far enough removed in time so that I could idealize her. She would have taken pains with me; she’d have spared no scheme or expense. I mooned around in the library, studying the pictures of her that still hung on the walls: the portrait in oils, done in 1900, in which she wore a sphinx-like smile and a dress the colour of dried red roses, with a plunging neckline from which her bare throat emerged abruptly, like an arm from behind a magician’s curtain; the gilt-framed black-and-white photographs, showing her in picture hats, or with ostrich feathers, or in evening gowns with tiaras and white kid gloves, alone or with various now-forgotten dignitaries. She would have sat me down and given me the necessary advice: how to dress, what to say, how to behave on all occasions. How to avoid making myself ridiculous, for which I could already see there was ample scope. Despite her ferretings in the society pages, Reenie didn’t know enough for that.
The button factory picnic
The Labour Day weekend has come and gone, leaving a detritus of plastic cups and floating bottles and gently withering balloons in the backwash of the river’s eddies. Now September is asserting itself. Though at noon the sun is no less hot, morning by morning it rises later, trailing mist, and in the cooler evenings the crickets rasp and creak. Wild asters cluster in the garden, having rooted themselves there some time ago—tiny white ones, others bushier and sky-coloured, others with rusty stems, a deeper purple. Once, in my days of desultory gardening, I would have branded them weeds and pulled them out. Now I no longer make such distinctions.
It’s better weather for walking now, not so much glare and shimmer. The tourists are thinning out, and those remaining are at least decently covered: no more giant shorts and bulging sun-dresses, no more poached red legs.
Today I set out for the Camp Grounds. I set out, but when I was halfway there Myra came by in her car and offered me a lift, and I’m ashamed to say I accepted it: I was out of breath, I’d already realized it was too far. Myra wanted to know where I was going, and why—she must have inherited the sheep-herding instinct, from Reenie. I told her where; as for the why, I said I just wanted to see the place again, for old times’ sake. Too dangerous, she said: you never knew what might be crawling through the undergrowth out there. She made me promise to sit down on a park bench, out in plain view, and wait for her. She said she’d come back in an hour to collect me.
More and more I feel like a letter—deposited here, collected there. But a letter addressed to no one.
The Camp Grounds isn’t much to look at. It’s a stretch of land between the road and the Jogues River—an acre or two—with trees and scrubby brushwood on it, and mosquitoes in spring, from the swampy patch in the middle. Herons hunt there; you can sometimes hear their hoarse cries, like a stick scraped on rough tin. Now and then a few bird-watchers poke about in the woebegone way they have, as if looking for something they’ve lost.
In the shadows there are glints of silver, from cigarette packs, and the pallid, deflated tubers of tossed condoms, and discarded squares of Kleenex lacy with rain. Dogs and cats stake their claims, avid couples sneak in among the trees, though less than they used to—there are so many other options now. Drunks sleep under the denser bushes in summer, and teenaged kids sometimes go there to smoke and sniff whatever they smoke and sniff. Candle stubs have been found, and burned spoons, and the odd throwaway needle. I hear all this from Myra, who thinks it’s a disgrace. She knows what the candle stubs and spoons are for: they are drug paraphernalia. Vice is everywhere, it seems. Et in Arcadia ego.