Читать книгу Under the Rose - Flavia Alaya - Страница 17

5

I think I must have known, at least from the time we lived in East Harlem, that my parents still owned the house in New Rochelle and had merely rented it when we left for Arizona. It had not felt that way. The break seemed to have been made with such finality. And yet here was another sign of some original pentimento beneath the fresh skin of paint. Perhaps it had been expedient not to rush to sell during the radically changing housing market of the early war. But in what curious haste to leave was so much left behind (as we later discovered)—old store and family stuff, photos, memorabilia, my father’s sketches and drawings—the archeology of an entire epoch, stashed in cartons and chests and an old steamer trunk in the basement?

They reclaimed the house over the winter of 1947, and we moved back into it a bit at a time, slowly fitting and furnishing the stone cold rooms, with their tangy smells of freshly stripped wood and wallpaper paste topped up at each visit with the heady perfume of coffee, freshly, quickly brewed to drive out the chill the moment my father unlocked the door. That winter was indeed so frozen, so bitter and severe, that it is still used as a weather-almanac baseline. The snow relentlessly fell and fell, and then clung on, deep and hardened, through and beyond the weeks of our protracted moving. Up Third Avenue and through the Bronx my father would take us after he had shut down the store, often with the wipers on our new Plymouth churning against a light new fall of snow, past brightly lit shops pleading with January shoppers to brave the icy sidewalks and the sky-high snowpiles at the intersections. The drive grew darker and less intense along Bruckner Boulevard, and for the half hour up the Hutchinson River Parkway Ann and I usually fell asleep, curled together for warmth in the back. When we finally entered Sickles Place, layered with so much frozen snow that it crunched out loud beneath the tire chains, we would come suddenly, dreamily awake.

The rooms had shrunken, of course, as rooms one returns to after earliest childhood do. Yet it may be to this brief time, before the space of memory was refilled with rugs and lamps and chairs and all the necessary bric-a-brac of Italian American household life, that I owe my queer passion for the aesthetic of the empty house, when I felt and reclaimed its bare, precious instant of vacancy, and it was to my wondering eyes as if a cavern from a forgotten romance had been restored to me out of a frozen dream.

We were barely settled when my brothers took charge of the snowbound frontyard slope and constructed a daredevil sled jump. Lou, born leader, construction genius, ordered everyone to work who intended to use it, first bringing snow to pack, then water to pour over each carefully mounded snow layer, until it was compacted as solid as granite. Since the volunteers included not just Carlo but every neighborhood kid with half a grain of testosterone, the result was an instant circle of new friends and a jump that rose off a downhill sled run to about thirty inches high. They’d have gone higher except the slam landing after that exuberant takeoff might have shattered even the sturdiest Flexible Flyer, and eventually did a few of the less sturdy.

I helped build the jump too. So did Ann. In the end she had the good sense not to risk it. I loved the rapture of speed and the breathtaking flight into the icy air. But I quit after a try or two, before the jump had reached its full height, when the shudder that shook me as I hit the downslope racked my body with primal memories of my infant fall from that second-story window. And so the two of us, from the safe, warm, Tudor-framed tower of our bedroom above, looked down on every boy in the neighborhood—tall, short, fat, thin, black, white—risking life and limb in the service of a mad, blind, hilarious daring, not sure whether to envy or despise them.

At least I wasn’t sure. But at going-on-thirteen a girl knows there are other risks at hand, other mysteries to attend to. That spring, beneath the same high window, where the northeast side of the house shaped itself to the steep contour of the Sickles Avenue hill, there blossomed over that once icy slope the white cascading glory of a huge and insanely fragrant juniper orange bush—a little draggled at the bottom skirt where the boys had nicked it taking the curve of the sled run, but my mother said it had become all the more bountiful for the depth of the snow that had buried it that winter. It took over the air. You could not be near it without a deep, almost delirious drinking of your breath.

It was my mother’s favorite. She always called it jasmine, and the freight of all that is lovely and exotic and fragile was in the word. Ten years later, a friend and colleague in Greensboro, where I spent my first year of teaching, told me its proper name, and since then, juniper orange is what other such opulently endowed bushes are called. The one below my girlhood window—gorgeously fragrant, at once delicate and wildly louche in its June-day glory, with its soft aureole of bees and its fatal snow of petals in a matter of weeks—will always be jasmine. It loved to come into full bloom on my mother’s wedding anniversary, in mid-June. I have seen in her bridal pictures a reminiscent spray lying across her lap.

I can still smell it. I can still feel the enchantment it evokes of something like a love of my own, of the many loves that had begun to stir me more and more in books, I can almost hear the scent rushing like noise each spring through the green fuse of my adolescent heart. To think of that jasmine now is for it to be then again. I am lying abed in the full moonlight of a June night, alive, alive, in a state of soft, obedient, liquid surrender, the window ajar, and the incense of that drunken perfume rising up to me like a lover.

Vissi d’art, vissi d’amore. I lived by art, by dreams of love. What else was there to live by, except, for a while, those old movies, and the recorded operas that made music like gods out of a machine? My father, true to form, when television sets first began to be marketed in 1947, broke the bank to get one, a big-screen Dumont framed in a walnut console the size of a coffin, creating a whole new geography of desire. From the moment it was set in its place against the living-room wall it absolutely defined the space, commensurable with nothing. Its primitive children’s programming—the playschool of a new idiom for the children of the new age—fleetingly absorbed us. But it belonged to a foreign country compared with opera. Opera, ringing in ecstatic exile through the house, or pouring its fantastic heart out over the Saturday radio, signified some lost paradise regained. Bohème and Tosca for my father—and by a powerful circuitry my mother too, who swooned over Mario Cavaradossi out of an essential fidelity to her own Mario—were the very breath of cultural memory, center of a veneration more sublime and compelling than religion. I loved them, with a baffled and conflicted energy. I did not understand the words, only the sound of them somehow, and the stories were complex and inscrutable. I loved them, I think, because I did not fully understand them and yet their foreignness was my own and seemed to belong to me as a birthright. They entered me, less as sound than as imagery, darklit landscapes of incomprehensible passion, swelling the house of my mind with an idea of devotion tragic and terrible.

By now I had been enrolled in seven different schools in seven years of schooling, and in spite of being thought of by all my teachers as bright and gifted, in spite of having been trusted, while we lived in the city, to roam all over the East Side with my ready subway nickel to music lessons and art classes as well as to school, I had become rather a oddly skewed and introverted child, self-absorbed, peopling my school notebooks with faces and dancing bodies and disembodied eyes, suffering what I can describe only as a near-pathological indifference to my own visibility, as if the plumpish flesh of the body I inhabited were a kind of capsule in which I could float through the world seeing but unseen.

I had been in the first of two years at Hunter College Junior High when we moved back to New Rochelle. As schools went, it was a good place for me, a glimpse into what it meant to be a creative child while still somehow anchoring me in the real world. Hunter College was still a teacher’s college for women then. It had designed this prestigious little two-year junior academy for girls as a prep school for the even more prestigious Hunter College High. Like a handful of other special public high schools in New York, it had a selective citywide admission policy, each applicant having to pass through an intense battery of IQ and aptitude tests, personally administered over the better part of a day.

I had gone there from Mrs. Streicher’s sixth grade at PS 102. It was less a sign of her preference, perhaps, than of my own wavering sense of the reality of school that she had passed me over for the entrance exam and recommended instead my classmate Connie Colandro—bright, sweet, compliant Connie. But my mother was indignant. In one of those seizures of righteous fury for which she was famous, she marched me straight down to East 69th Street on her own, and when the results were posted I was in and Connie wasn’t. Pity Mrs. Streicher, who also happened to be a customer in Alaya’s Market. The next time she stopped at the store, crow was the special of the day, and my mother dressed it with somewhat more zest than was called for, especially since I was standing right there. But, oh, the irrepressible flutter of exultant pride, and what it taught me that day about the sweet shame of petty triumph!

Anyone but my mother might have been wary of placing me in a competitive place like Hunter, where the threat loomed of heaping even greater strain on an already oversensitized and alienated psyche like mine. The effect, as it turned out, was just the opposite. To be suddenly thrown into the midst of twenty-five girls as smart or smarter than I was, and even more talented, infused me with an ecstatic new sense of my own ordinariness. Girls like Mary Beck, who at thirteen could play “Claire de Lune” and the “Moonlight Sonata” till tears welled in our eyes, girls whose braininess and genius made me glow with the relief of a burden shared, a burden lifted. I can never remember envying their gifts. I can remember feeling only as though at last I had become the little sister in the protection of bigger ones, of girls who, even at my age or a little older, were awesomely worldly wise.

So I let down my guard and I took a friend almost as one might take a lover, with my whole heart, a girl who, for once, did not either fear or patronize me. She was Carole, a big, rather full-bodied redhead with kindly freckles and inappropriately stern, wire-rimmed spectacles, and a sweet maternal way that reminded me of Meg in Little Women. Carole seemed at least three years beyond anyone in the class in terms of physical development and already had impressive breasts in the seventh grade. She was like a mother hen, nestling me under her wing. We wrote each other long, candid, gushing letters over the two following summers, she from Queens where she lived, and I, now, from Westchester.

It was Carole, when we finally entered the eighth grade, who told me the facts of life. She could have told me in the seventh, she said, but had postponed it to spare me some of the shock she knew was inevitable. I think I strangled a cry in the lunchroom. I wasn’t sure but that I might have preferred being pushed down onto the subway tracks. I did not feel spared. I think that even had I not been mute with outrage, as I was for days, I was incapable of phrasing the central question for me, which was how so savage, so animal an act could have anything to do with the transcendent emotions I had already experienced in my fantasies of love.

Had I asked, she might have actually tried to tell me. She might actually have succeeded. Perhaps my retrospect enlarges her, but I thought her very wise. As my fury abated, I sensed the greatness of her pity for me, the greatness of her sense of the pity of it all, both of us having come face to face with a knowledge she knew I did not want to know, because she had not wanted to know it either, once. But she did know, and it was as if she had made it to still another horizon, a place where you can finally take in the stunning wisdom for a girl that love can be an emotion of the body as well as of the soul. I did not yet want to know it for myself, let alone to think it was related to something my parents felt for one another. I did not yet connect it with the moans I sometimes heard in the night, now that the thin bedroom wall was all that divided my room from theirs.

Someday I would go there, where Carole had gone, if not now. And yet how merciful for so friendship-stunted a child as I was that I would be led to that crossing by a friend as motherly as Carole and as profoundly, purely, shameless. My own mother, for all her sweet moan, could never, in the shame of her body, have told me. At least not then, and then was when I needed to know.

And the more merciful, perhaps, because it had been so chancy. I should not even have continued into the eighth grade with Carole. Schools like Hunter were meant to be among the treasured rewards of city life, off-limits to children of the suburbs like me, now officially resident in New Rochelle. A hard rule, but enshrined in law. And yet there had never seemed to be any question about my staying. I had never been asked by my parents if I preferred not to lie about where I lived, not to rise in the dark and travel two hours to get to school, not to spend my afternoons in the dingy room at the back of the store trying to do my homework until my father was ready to close up and take me home. Whether I might simply prefer to attend St. Gabriel’s in New Rochelle, as my sister did. A touch of ink on the office file and I had simply moved downtown to 326 East 78th Street, where my Aunt Carmelina’s family of Alayas legitimately showed up in the phone book.

Thus Hunter had me straight through the eighth grade, in spite of the law, in spite of the lie. When it came time to think about high school, I followed, still blind and unresisting, my mother’s relentless script for my future brilliant career. I lied my way through another competitive exam and began my ninth grade in the fall of 1948 as an art student under the illustrious aegis of the High School of Music & Art.

Had I actually been asked what I wanted, I’m not sure what I would have said. It was a choice like Bartleby’s, and I would have preferred not to make it. I think I knew that there was no bearing to lose these fugitive life-chances, even if—especially if—we could not afford to keep them honestly. And yet I could never accept the simple expediency of this fiction. I suffered it new and stinging every fearful, sneaking day. It is a hard thing for a child to lie. It was a hard thing for me to lie and still believe that in every other use of my mind I loved the truth—that the truth loved me, as I thought more passionately each day. And yet I was a good child, a dutiful child. We never discussed it. I learned to nurture this strange, regrettable gift my parents had made me of a certain stupid courage and an even more certain cunning. And some little window of clarity about hard choices, which in time might have opened on a daybreak of readiness for life, instead slapped quickly shut on a dutiful daughter’s abject little soul.

Carole’s small window on friendship—that too seemed closed now. Friends were a danger, every one a potential informer. There were strict protocols of secure intelligence: Never to bring friends home, never to speak to them of your house or your street or, God forbid, your garden—city apartments did not have gardens. Never to visit them, lest they want to visit you in return and wonder why they couldn’t, when you lived so smack in the middle of the East Side—well, didn’t you? What would you tell them? What would you stammer? Oh, God, to be fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, and never to go to parties in the city—because anywhere you went after commuter hours was a thousand miles from home, because if you stayed too late you might miss the last train. And what would you say to friends’ parents if they offered to drive you home?

No pajama parties. No sleeping over. Never, ever.

Actually, that was the only codicil of the Rule not strictly driven by the logic of the lie. Quite the opposite, since sleeping at a friend’s after the theater or a party was the single most transparent, rational solution to nearly all the other problems—except the returned invitation, which theoretically could be fudged.

And yet I lived more rigidly by this law than by any other part of the Rule, just because it was not meant to be rational, and certainly not transparent, but on the face of it plain, draconian, and opaque. Opaque to me. Generations have trod and trod, understanding what it meant, knowing it was about sex. But girls were not to understand, for breaking the chivalric code to tell them would tarnish the very innocence that made them worth protecting.

Still, by some miracle of intense mutual need there were girls who did become my friends, more memorable and perhaps more loyal because they had to be so few, and because out my dark secret (somehow more ominously illegal than some of the secrets other girls kept) would inevitably pop. And then the very frisson of it would become our bond. There was Letizia, for one. I befriended her in our first year at Music & Art because she was a brilliant painter and I had to tell her so. I could not say why she loved me, since I did not feel very lovable. Perhaps, I thought, she loved to be loved. She returned the compliment with such a funny, winsome, benevolent air that it felt lavish—theatrical—like the affection of a movie star.

She loved my name, of course. Any Letizia, captive in this New World of names, would. And she was captive, an Italian, a Pitigliani, from Rome—“Italian Italian,” as Italian Americans say. Italianness connected us, but to me it was a different kind of Italianness, a clue perhaps to the mystery I had not yet decoded, and she herself unlike any Italian girl I had ever known, a kind of Funny Girl, loping and tall, all shoulders and elbows and knees, moving her thin body both as spaciously and as awkwardly as a failed ballerina.

My father endorsed our friendship as flattering and safe, perhaps someday even useful. Neither she nor her family seemed to care a split about my sleazy little secret. “Pouf!” Letizia blew her breath with a laugh when I confessed. “So what?” The significance of this did not come home to me till years later. I knew the Pitiglianis were Jewish, but I did not understand that they had also been refugees from Mussolini’s persecutions. They seemed so happy, even frivolous, when I met them, perhaps because they were—happy to be alive, to be together, to be going home at last as soon as Letizia’s first year of high school was finished.

It seemed too hard that I should lose her as soon as I had found her. But what a sparkling good-bye-New-York-in-June it was! I made several visits to her apartment, where everything was in breezy disarray as the family packed—and shed—their American lives. Her parents, astonishingly open and kind, spoke a crisp, perfect English that struck me as both sculpted and witty, and treated me as if I were more adult than child, or just as much or as little as they were themselves. As for Letizia, I was her final, adoring American audience as well as her friend. I didn’t mind. Her performance was anodyne to the pain of detaching. She had a splendid way of acting her own emotions, of outlining them, like Matisse or Modigliani, just as her own paintings did their vivid masses of color, and I was spectator to the manifest, dancing art of her spirit, trying out her gorgeous enthusiasms—I who lived in such an ambiguous world of mixed and treacherous meanings, uncertain what it was safe to love or hate.

Brian Aherne was OK, she granted, but I must fall in love with Clark Gable. So she thought, and so did her doting parents, utterly bemused by their wild child’s cartoon of Love. They gave me an innocent permission my father—so solemn, so fearful of the seductiveness of dreaming—would never have given me. She took me with her to see Mutiny on the Bounty. She washed me in the geyser of her adoration of this splendid incarnation of virility. She told me that if I could not go instantly to see the film version of Gone With the Wind (which I confessed I hadn’t, and couldn’t), I mustn’t wait. I must instantly read the book.

And I did, but not in an instant. Never in an instant. Long after Letizia was gone, I lingered on it—over it—under and around it. I sank and plunged and wallowed in it. I palpitated and thrilled with it. I let it burn the fingertips that turned the flesh of its pages. I buried it under my pillow at night, and by flashlight read and reread it in the dark. And at last I understood what it was Carole had been trying to tell me.

The jasmine had bloomed and gone. It was draped now in big, loopy greenwear that drooped with the heat.

I was all body, that summer I turned fourteen. I needed to move—to dance. Afternoons when no one else was home, we danced, just Ann and I; we attached every scarf we could find in the house to our underwear and played La Gioconda over and over again on the phonograph, until the record began to scratch and bounce alarmingly. We could not resist “The Dance of the Hours”—mistakingly calling it “The Dance of the Seven Veils” for the vision of it—with its vertiginous brilliance and sudden inexhaustible shifts of speed. I knew it was a trope for my paradoxical soul; I knew it—my body knew it—to be about the inner unconquerable stillness that somehow held back the chaotic swift flight of time and yet also about the secret ecstatic rush within the same stillness. And we were like bacchantes, the two of us, scarves flying, flinging ourselves wildly across the long living room, crisscrossing back and forth until we were both sweating and breathless, until the soles of our bare feet were scorched and we finally slumped exhausted to the rug.

I learned how to swim in July. My mother seemed especially vigilant these days, as she accompanied Ann and me to the beach on the Sound, one dry blue-sky day after another, and sat with her tatting on a bench above the retaining wall, straining her eyes to find us now and then in the crowd. I borrowed a book from the library and studied strokes. In my zeal for the perfect crawl, sidestroke, backstroke, I forgot time, forgot to wave to Mamma, forgot to eat. Ann stayed close, struggling with the green water, and sometimes I would grab her, and hugging and splashing and laughing, we would bound out farther to a little deeper water, and I would throw her back, again and again, until once we bounded out too deep. But I was holding her in my arms, she still unable to swim. Yet I couldn’t find the bottom, and then neither of us could, flailing and thrashing the dark-green, salt-burning water; we could not get them to see us, just see us, and we were drowning, we were both of us gasping there, the black fear darkening my brain and drawing blackness down over an unending skyless minute.

Until I found it again, the muddy soft bottom, and pushed it away from my weight and threw her forward, my sister, safe. And then I remembered to lift my body and kick my found legs and move my arms, to ply them again in their smooth sockets to the shallow sandy water, to slush through the thin creamy water till I could look down and see my shining legs.

Together we found a place on the crowded arc of wet sand and sat, coughing, holding each other, trying not to cry, sputtering both of us with anger that not one of all those bathers out there—and the water had been crowded with them, hairy, big men, some of them so near—and not one, not one, had reached out an arm, a hand, to save us, they would have let us drown, right there in the midst of them, and the sun glaring down like God.

Soon after, in that same summer, I learned how to not to die of a fever that crushed me with delirium for nearly two weeks in August. And then, as soon as I was well enough to walk again, I learned how to bleed. My mother gently, blushingly, showed me what to do when it happened again.

I was thinner, I was taller. I felt strange to myself. I weighed in on the drugstore scale with a new penny and stared in joyous disbelief at the number that came printed on the little card. How had this happened? Like everything else, it had happened.

The boys in the neighborhood had picked up my brothers’ name for me. “Hey, Fat Fluffky,” they shouted from the street when they saw me back, bouncing the Spaldeen off the garage door.

“Not fat any more,” I turned and said.

Did she say that? “. . . Normal and average. . . .”

Miss Ridgeway (who had enjoined us never to call her Mrs.), the brilliantly focused little woman who taught us watercolor in our sophomore year, was accompanying a strange man one day through the classroom studio—perhaps an artist colleague or former student. Up and down the aisles they strolled, glancing to both sides, pausing when a student creation momentarily anchored their gaze. They had meant not to disturb us. All their comments had been murmured in the same passing undertone. And just so they had approached and gone by my tablemate, Judy, and me.

But we had heard it, distinctly, both of us. We had just laid down our washes, our big Faber & Faber genuine sable brushes poised to the tips of their exquisite points, waiting out that perfect degree of dryness to apply the first keystroke of wet color that would tell everything about the perfection of our technique. “These two?” she had said, softly, but in a kind of airy, dismissive way, waving the wand of her hand over us like some inverse godmother, “Just normal and average,” and then she and the strange man had moved complacently on.

The look of anguish Judy and I shot each other in that moment bonded us for life. Pegasus shot down in midflight, Icarus in meltdown, could not have suffered a more mortal hurt or fallen as far or as hard. It had been one thing to be ordinary, to be “normal and average” at thirteen, taking necessary small comfort from sharing freak-space on the circus midway. Now, taking our crafts from the hands of the masters, we had—we had been taught to have—infinitely more lofty expectations of the dynamics of being, had become initiates into the sacred mysteries of matter, of chaotic worldstuff yielding to the resistless grasp of human hand and eye. Our dreams of creation were passionate and holy, even if what we aspired to touch was the least hem of Cezanne’s garment, or John Marin’s, or Brancusi’s.

Oh, no, no. Normal and average would not do—not anymore. We had met too often in full assembly and intoned the noble poetry of our school song to the soaring music of Brahms’s First Symphony.

Now upward in wonder

Our distant glance is turning

Where brightly through ages

The immortal lamp is burning—

Our task unending,

Defending,

That realm above,

Till dull and lifeless things have caught

A beauty

That daring dreams

Have wrought—

They had told us a former student had composed the song, which only made it the more secretly endearing. Quaint, laughable in its way, no one would have denied how it stirred us to our depths just the same, how it challenged voice students all over the auditorium to more spectacular, bravura harmonies every time, making a thundering chorale out of our single, inconsequential little voices. I think we had come to believe we were defending that realm above, whatever it was.

Judy did not process the pain of this mortal wound the same way I did. Almost nothing had affirmed my existence so consistently from infancy as my little talent, that once astonishingly precocious coordination of eye and hand that had got me to Music & Art. My inner child was an artist, and I felt as my own mother might have about her, righteously outraged, burning with a flame that was not in the least hard and gemlike but bituminous, red-hot, and smoking, wishing for the power of witchcraft, for command of the evilest evil-eye, to prove to Miss Ridgeway unequivocally and forever how wrong she was.

Judy’s inner artist-child simply giggled.

“How can you?” I implored.

“Wicked Witch of the East,” she muttered roguishly, giggling again.

Judy, like Letizia, had a celluloid idol, but hers was Judy Garland. She had seen Wizard eight times before I met her, in the days before VCRs when seeing a feature film again and again meant catching every rerelease in every third-run little movie house all over town. She lived her life as if it shifted periodically into the screenplay, an intricate, whimsical weave of real and unreal and surreal, maddening and enchanting, hugging her Toto and trying to decide whether it was ever going to be Kansas anymore.

This was whenever she wasn’t wandering in the country of Pooh-sticks and Piglet. She was big, way taller than I. Unlike Winnie-the-Pooh, whom she adored, she fought her weight with the strenuous practice of yoga and dance. But Judy could never be fully strenuous. She combined her amazonic proportions with the tenderness of a Cereal Goddess, protector of small stray creatures, preferably warm and furry ones, which she might take into her den and feed with an eyedropper until they opened their eyes and began to locate the cream on their own.

Maybe I was one. We had met in bio, where in our first weeks dishy Mr. Rappaport, in what I suspect was a ploy to deflect the crushes of his more nubile girl-students in the upper rows (every one of whom would have walked barefoot to China for a touch of his nether lip), had pretended to have a crush on me. It had become a running class joke that both mortified and uplifted me. For even if he didn’t really love me—and I never allowed myself the wonder of dreaming that dream—his fictional fondness was kind, unmocking, a way of seeing me at a time when to be seen was a little like a life raft in the ocean of my bewildered and lonely selfhood. His gestures seemed so tender and genuine that they actually baffled and confused my classmates. And so they were forced to see me too, as something more than a nervous little ferret too good at math for an artist, who had maybe had one helluva good summer at fat camp.

But over that winter, in something like a female conspiracy of my mother and a pride of Spagnola aunts, there came a singular ritual of initiation into womanhood for me, and my long hair—still woven into the coarse brown braids I’d been known for—was finally cut off at the classy Richard Hudnut salon on Central Park South. For them it must have meant a great deal that I’ve forgotten. I remember only that it seemed to transfigure me for him. He must have seen, suddenly, a soulful little woman sitting there where I used to sit, a Latin lovely-to-be with an oversized mouth and dark-shaded bedroom eyes, and that new mass of soft dusky curls around her face. Looking down at me from way up on his lab-table perch, he uttered, “Oh, Flavia,” in so melting a way that it must have checked my breathing for a full, red, blinding minute and made the big girls in the back swoon with envy.

Judy was not among them. She had befriended me months ago, after all, when I was still one of those small stray creatures needing an eyedropper. She didn’t particularly care for me to bloom, or rather didn’t care if I bloomed or didn’t, locked in as a sort of Piglet to her Pooh. I forgave her. I didn’t have to forgive her. I understood. It was a kind of motherliness she had nurtured in the misery of a lonely boarding-school childhood before her own mother had finally, irrevocably, divorced her father and reclaimed her, brought her back home to the two-bedroom apartment they had to share with her old and dying grandparents, who were stolid, unregenerate Christian Scientists of upright British stock.

Judy wanted to dance with me now through worlds she had never been allowed to enjoy as a child, worlds whose blisses needed sharing. I didn’t mind. There had been plenty of childhoods missing from my life too. I think she soon came to see—and to like—that there was some peculiar something in me independent of her waifish projections, perhaps some courage to stay afloat on my own disorienting little ocean. I took from her a certain recipe for play, for skewering reality. In exchange, she found in me some key to accepting it, some seriousness and ambition she was willing to consider respecting.

Judy lived with her mother on East 81st Street, just off Lexington, a sunny fifth-floor apartment mere blocks from where I was supposed to be living. At first she was a study of puzzlement and curiosity that I made such a mystery about where home actually was. She was thrilled with the intrigue of the awful truth. Much less so her mother, Muriel, part Cereal Goddess’s Great Mother and part Mature Parent. Muriel in fact was the Mature Parent. In a tiny storage room off the parlor in which you could barely have fit a bathtub, Muriel sequestered herself to write a Hearst-syndicated column that offered advice on the sensible raising of children to every storm-tossed parent in the country three times a week, every week of the year. She encouraged her daughter to take this reputation seriously, probably because she was having a little trouble taking it quite seriously herself.

Yet Muriel lamented my predicament with a certain jaded total innocence of judgment. She herself was always short of money and knew what it meant to struggle on, to keep up an East Side appearance in her case while living from hand to mouth, nursing her Aged Ps through their long, slow dying. She measured my situation, and of course my parents’, as a sad fact of life. Maybe she thought a striver like me would have a ballasting influence on Judy, who might otherwise fly off to the tops of honey-trees.

She wished we could spend more time together. “You are always running off to some train or other,” she would say in her plummy near-British way. Her annoyance was only half self-mocking as she leapt up from her armchair and fluttered off to the kitchen. I loved how she looked when she strode away, always dressed in a pale-colored jersey gown of some flowing variety, as if she were just stepping off a temple pediment.

Judy chided her. It was no use. She was never ever even to suggest I sleep over, no matter how convenient. And Muriel would chortle in that chesty way that came from smoking too many Pall Malls when she wrote her columns.

“You know he is afraid,” she’d say, speaking as blandly of my father as if she were reading a fortune cookie, “that you will bring him an illegitimate child.”

So much for the opacity of the Rule.