For Esmé, With Love and Squalor Read online

  “Do it again.”

  “Impossible.”

  “Why?”

  Boo Boo shrugged. “Too many low-grade officers around, for one thing.” She changed her position, taking up a cross-legged, Indian squat. She pulled up her socks. “I’ll tell you what I’ll do, though,” she said, matter-of-factly. “If you’ll tell me why you’re running away, I’ll blow every secret bugle call for you I know. All right?”

  Lionel immediately looked down at the deck again. “No,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  “Because.”

  “Because why?”

  “Because I don’t want to,” said Lionel, and jerked the tiller for emphasis.

  Boo Boo shielded the right side of her face from the glare of the sun. “You told me you were all through running away,” she said. “We talked about it, and you told me you were all through. You promised me.”

  Lionel gave a reply, but it didn’t carry. “What?” said Boo Boo.

  “I didn’t promise.”

  “Ah, yes, you did. You most certainly did.”

  Lionel resumed steering his boat. “If you’re an admiral,” he said, “where’s your fleet?”

  “My fleet. I’m glad you asked me that,” Boo Boo said, and started to lower herself into the dinghy.

  “Get off!” Lionel ordered, but without giving over to shrillness, and keeping his eyes down. “Nobody can come in.”

  “They can’t?” Boo Boo’s foot was already touching the bow of the boat. She obediently drew it back up to pier level. “Nobody at all?” She got back into her Indian squat. “Why not?”

  Lionel’s answer was complete, but, again, not loud enough.

  “What?” said Boo Boo.

  “Because they’re not allowed.”

  Boo Boo, keeping her eyes steadily on the boy, said nothing for a full minute.

  “I’m sorry to hear it,” she said, finally. “I’d just love to come down in your boat. I’m so lonesome for you. I miss you so much. I’ve been all alone in the house all day without anybody to talk to.”

  Lionel didn’t swing the tiller. He examined the grain of wood in its handle. “You can talk to Sandra,” he said.

  “Sandra’s busy,” Boo Boo said. “Anyway, I don’t want to talk to Sandra, I want to talk to you. I wanna come down in your boat and talk to you.”

  “You can talk from there.”

  “What?”

  “You can talk from there.”

  “No, I can’t. It’s too big a distance. I have to get up close.”

  Lionel swung the tiller. “Nobody can come in,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Nobody can come in.”

  “Well, will you tell me from there why you’re running away?” Boo Boo asked. “After you promised me you were all through?”

  A pair of underwater goggles lay on the deck of the dinghy, near the stem seat. For answer, Lionel secured the headstrap of the goggles between the big and second toes of his right foot, and, with a deft, brief, leg action, flipped the goggles overboard. They sank at once.

  “That’s nice. That’s constructive,” said Boo Boo. “Those belong to your Uncle Webb. Oh, he’ll be so delighted.” She dragged on her cigarette. “They once belonged to your Uncle Seymour.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “I see that. I see you don’t,” Boo Boo said. Her cigarette was angled peculiarly between her fingers; it burned dangerously close to one of her knuckle grooves. Suddenly feeling the heat, she let the cigarette drop to the surface of the lake. Then she took out something from one of her side pockets. It was a package, about the size of a deck of cards, wrapped in white paper and tied with green ribbon. “This is a key chain,” she said, feeling the boy’s eyes look up at her. “Just like Daddy’s. But with a lot more keys on it than Daddy’s has. This one has ten keys.”

  Lionel leaned forward in his seat, letting go the tiller. He held out his hands in catching position. “Throw it?” he said. “Please?”

  “Let’s keep our seats a minute, Sunshine. I have a little thinking to do. I should throw this key chain in the lake.”

  Lionel stared up at her with his mouth open. He closed his mouth. “It’s mine,” he said on a diminishing note of justice.

  Boo Boo, looking down at him, shrugged. “I don’t care.”

  Lionel slowly sat back in his seat, watching his mother, and reached behind him for the tiller. His eyes reflected pure perception, as his mother had known they would.

  “Here.” Boo Boo tossed the package down to him. It landed squarely on his lap.

  He looked at it in his lap, picked it off, looked at it in his hand, and flicked it—sidearm—into the lake. He then immediately looked up at Boo Boo, his eyes filled not with defiance but tears. In another instant, his mouth was distorted into a horizontal figure-8, and he was crying mightily.

  Boo Boo got to her feet, gingerly, like someone whose foot has gone to sleep in theatre, and lowered herself into the dinghy. In a moment, she was in the stern seat, with the pilot on her lap, and she was rocking him and kissing the back of his neck and giving out certain information: “Sailors don’t cry, baby. Sailors never cry. Only when their ships go down. Or when they’re shipwrecked, on rafts and all, with nothing to drink except—”

  “Sandra—told Mrs. Smell—that Daddy’s a big—sloppy—kike.”

  Just perceptibly, Boo Boo flinched, but she lifted the boy off her lap and stood him in front of her and pushed back his hair from his forehead. “She did, huh?” she said.

  Lionel worked his head up and down, emphatically. He came in closer, still crying, to stand between his mother’s legs.

  “Well, that isn’t too terrible,” Boo Boo said, holding him between the two vises of her arms and legs. “That isn’t the worst that could happen.” She gently bit the rim of the boy’s ear. “Do you know what a kike is, baby?”

  Lionel was either unwilling or unable to speak up at once. At any rate, he waited till the hiccupping aftermath of his tears had subsided a little. Then his answer was delivered, muffled but intelligible, into the warmth of Boo Boo’s neck. “It’s one of those things that go up in the air,” he said. “With string you hold.”

  The better to look at him, Boo Boo pushed her son slightly away from her. Then she put a wild hand inside the seat of his trousers, startling the boy considerably, but almost immediately withdrew it and decorously tucked in his shirt for him. “Tell you what we’ll do,” she said. “We’ll drive to town and get some pickles, and some bread, and we’ll eat the pickles in the car, and then we’ll go to the station and get Daddy, and then we’ll bring Daddy home and make him take us for a ride in the boat. You’ll have to help him carry the sails down. O.K.?”

  “O.K.,” said Lionel.

  They didn’t walk back to the house; they raced. Lionel won.

  * * *

  For Esmé – with Love and Squalor

  * * *

  Just recently, by air mail, I received an invitation to a wedding that will take place in England on April 18th. It happens to be a wedding I’d give a lot to be able to get to, and when the invitation first arrived, I thought it might just be possible for me to make the trip abroad, by plane, expenses be hanged. However, I’ve since discussed the matter rather extensively with my wife, a breathtakingly levelheaded girl, and we’ve decided against it—for one thing, I’d completely forgotten that my mother-in-law is looking forward to spending the last two weeks in April with us. I really don’t get to see Mother Grencher terribly often, and she’s not getting any younger. She’s fifty-eight. (As she’d be the first to admit.)

  All the same, though, wherever I happen to be I don’t think I’m the type that doesn’t even lift a finger to prevent a wedding from flatting. Accordingly, I’ve gone ahead and jotted down a few revealing notes on the bride as I knew her almost six years ago. If my notes should cause the groom, whom I ha
ven’t met, an uneasy moment or two, so much the better. Nobody’s aiming to please, here. More, really, to edify, to instruct.

  In April of 1944, I was among some sixty American enlisted men who took a rather specialized pre-Invasion training course, directed by British Intelligence, in Devon, England. And as I look back, it seems to me that we were fairly unique, the sixty of us, in that there wasn’t one good mixer in the bunch. We were all essentially letter-writing types, and when we spoke to each other out of the line of duty, it was usually to ask somebody if he had any ink he wasn’t using. When we weren’t writing letters or attending classes, each of us went pretty much his own way. Mine usually led me, on clear days, in scenic circles around the countryside. Rainy days, I generally sat in a dry place and read a book, often just an axe length away from a ping-pong table.

  The training course lasted three weeks, ending on a Saturday, a very rainy one. At seven that last night, our whole group was scheduled to entrain for London, where, as rumor had it, we were to be assigned to infantry and airborne divisions mustered for the D Day landings. By three in the afternoon, I’d packed all my belongings into my barrack bag, including a canvas gas-mask container full of books I’d brought over from the Other Side. (The gas mask itself I’d slipped through a porthole of the Mauretania some weeks earlier, fully aware that if the enemy ever did use gas I’d never get the damn thing on in time.) I remember standing at an end window of our Quonset but for a very long time, looking out at the slanting, dreary rain, my trigger finger itching imperceptibly, if at all. I could hear behind my back the uncomradely scratching of many fountain pens on many sheets of V-mail paper. Abruptly, with nothing special in mind, I came away from the window and put on my raincoat, cashmere muffler, galoshes, woollen gloves, and overseas cap (the last of which, I’m still told, I wore at an angle all my own—slightly down over both ears). Then, after synchronizing my wristwatch with the clock in the latrine, I walked down the long, wet cobblestone hill into town. I ignored the flashes of lightning all around me. They either had your number on them or they didn’t.

  In the center of town, which was probably the wettest part of town, I stopped in front of a church to read the bulletin board, mostly because the featured numerals, white on black, had caught my attention but partly because, after three years in the Army, I’d become addicted to reading bulletin boards. At three-fifteen, the board stated, there would be children’s-choir practice. I looked at my wristwatch, then back at the board. A sheet of paper was tacked up, listing the names of the children expected to attend practice. I stood in the rain and read all the names, then entered the church.

  A dozen or so adults were among the pews, several of them bearing pairs of small-size rubbers, soles up, in their laps. I passed along and sat down in the front row. On the rostrum, seated in three compact rows of auditorium chairs, were about twenty children, mostly girls, ranging in age from about seven to thirteen. At the moment, their choir coach, an enormous woman in tweeds, was advising them to open their mouths wider when they sang. Had anyone, she asked, ever heard of a little dickeybird that dared to sing his charming song without first opening his little beak wide, wide, wide? Apparently nobody ever had. She was given a steady, opaque look. She went on to say that she wanted all her children to absorb the meaning of the words they sang, not just mouth them, like silly-billy parrots. She then blew a note on her pitch-pipe, and the children, like so many underage weightlifters, raised their hymnbooks.

  They sang without instrumental accompaniment—or, more accurately in their case, without any interference. Their voices were melodious and unsentimental, almost to the point where a somewhat more denominational man than myself might, without straining, have experienced levitation. A couple of the very youngest children dragged the tempo a trifle, but in a way that only the composer’s mother could have found fault with. I had never heard the hymn, but I kept hoping it was one with a dozen or more verses. Listening, I scanned all the children’s faces but watched one in particular, that of the child nearest me, on the end seat in the first row. She was about thirteen, with straight ash-blond hair of ear-lobe length, an exquisite forehead, and blasé eyes that, I thought, might very possibly have counted the house. Her voice was distinctly separate from the other children’s voices, and not just because she was seated nearest me. It had the best upper register, the sweetest-sounding, the surest, and it automatically led the way. The young lady, however, seemed slightly bored with her own singing ability, or perhaps just with the time and place; twice, between verses, I saw her yawn. It was a ladylike yawn, a closed-mouth yawn, but you couldn’t miss it; her nostril wings gave her away.

  The instant the hymn ended, the choir coach began to give her lengthy opinion of people who can’t keep their feet still and their lips sealed tight during the minister’s sermon. I gathered that the singing part of the rehearsal was over, and before the coach’s dissonant speaking voice could entirely break the spell the children’s singing had cast, I got up and left the church.

  It was raining even harder. I walked down the street and looked through the window of the Red Cross recreation room, but soldiers were standing two and three deep at the coffee counter, and, even through the glass, I could hear ping-pong balls bouncing in another room. I crossed the street and entered a civilian tearoom, which was empty except for a middle-aged waitress, who looked as if she would have preferred a customer with a dry raincoat. I used a coat tree as delicately as possible, and then sat down at a table and ordered tea and cinnamon toast. It was the first time all day that I’d spoken to anyone. I then looked through all my pockets, including my raincoat, and finally found a couple of stale letters to reread, one from my wife, telling me how the service at Schrafft’s Eighty-eighth Street had fallen off, and one from my mother-in-law, asking me to please send her some cashmere yarn first chance I got away from “camp.”

  While I was still on my first cup of tea, the young lady I had been watching and listening to in the choir came into the tearoom. Her hair was soaking wet, and the rims of both ears were showing. She was with a very small boy, unmistakably her brother, whose cap she removed by lifting it off his head with two fingers, as if it were a laboratory specimen. Bringing up the rear was an efficient-looking woman in a limp felt hat—presumably their governess. The choir member, taking off her coat as she walked across the floor, made the table selection—a good one, from my point of view, as it was just eight or ten feet directly in front of me. She and the governess sat down. The small boy, who was about five, wasn’t ready to sit down yet. He slid out of and discarded his reefer; then, with the deadpan expression of a born heller, he methodically went about annoying his governess by pushing in and pulling out his chair several times, watching her face. The governess, keeping her voice down, gave him two or three orders to sit down and, in effect, stop the monkey business, but it was only when his sister spoke to him that he came around and applied the small of his back to his chair seat. He immediately picked up his napkin and put it on his head. His sister removed it, opened it, and spread it out on his lap.

  About the time their tea was brought, the choir member caught me staring over at her party. She stared back at me, with those house-counting eyes of hers, then, abruptly, gave me a small, qualified smile. It was oddly radiant, as certain small, qualified smiles sometimes are. I smiled back, much less radiantly, keeping my upper lip down over a coal-black G.I. temporary filling showing between two of my front teeth. The next thing I knew, the young lady was standing, with enviable poise, beside my table. She was wearing a tartan dress—a Campbell tartan, I believe. It seemed to me to be a wonderful dress for a very young girl to be wearing on a rainy, rainy day. “I thought Americans despised tea,” she said.

  It wasn’t the observation of a smart aleck but that of a truth-lover or a statistics-lover. I replied that some of us never drank anything but tea. I asked her if she’d care to join me.

  “Thank you,” she said. “Perhaps for just a fraction of a m
oment.”

  I got up and drew a chair for her, the one opposite me, and she sat down on the forward quarter of it, keeping her spine easily and beautifully straight. I went back—almost hurried back—to my own chair, more than willing to hold up my end of a conversation. When I was seated, I couldn’t think of anything to say, though. I smiled again, still keeping my coal-black filling under concealment. I remarked that it was certainly a terrible day out.

  “Yes; quite,” said my guest, in the clear, unmistakable voice of a small-talk detester. She placed her fingers flat on the table edge, like someone at a seance, then, almost instantly, closed her hands—her nails were bitten down to the quick. She was wearing a wristwatch, a military-looking one that looked rather like a navigator’s chronograph. Its face was much too large for her slender wrist. “You were at choir practice,” she said matter-of-factly. “I saw you.”