Читать книгу Under the Rose - Flavia Alaya - Страница 18

6

In most cultures, just to be an adolescent girl is to be confused about the safety of knowledge. In me, a girl at the American midcentury, with part of my personal consciousness already under a gag rule, the confusion may have bordered on hysteria.

Self-knowledge, elusive at best, was for me over the rainbow. I knew desire, boon friend, boon enemy. I knew it as ravaging sometimes as the fever that had gripped me in the summer of my menarche. It clung like a second skin to everything I wanted to know, to do, as if knowing could not stop before the locked door of the body, as if all knowledge were carnal. Everything except the crystal theorems of geometry or the majestic and imperturbable balance of chemical equations—even book-stuff as well-upholstered as Vanity Fair—seemed to demand a working pretense of innocence. Innocence: the last effrontery of the newly gendering girl-mind—not merely denying to others that one knows what one knows, but denying it to oneself.

Sometimes I actually believed in my own innocence. Why not? Like some picture of Dorian Gray, I found in the mirror a more and more radiantly blank girlhood face, a face that did not give me away, though behind it might twist the woman taken in sin, tensing for the blow of the first stone.

If I exaggerate these intersections of feeling, it is not perhaps beyond their significance to my story. I am convinced that sexual curiosity is a metaphor for all curiosity. And I believe in what has been called epistemophilia, which is not the love of knowledge but the love of knowing itself. This, then, may be the story of a certain defiant receptiveness to wayward knowledge, a story about my epistemophiliac way of loving to know, my slow and thwarted and even pitifully innocent way of resisting a forced unknowing. Mine but also maybe a bit of everywoman’s.

For now that I (secretly) wanted to know everything, the capsule I had once used to wrap safely about me as I moved through the world seeing and unseen seemed to have become an imposed and suffocating bell-jar. Train trips to New York and back were carefully circumscribed, every movement had to be accounted for, every deviation from routine approved. Until I was graduated from high school and considered old enough to take a job, July and August at home were sheltered stretches of time—if “shelter” is the word for such a witches’ brew of repression and conflict among Carlo and Ann and me. Friends could not visit while my parents and Lou were out working, which was always the better part of the day and evening. Not even Janet, who lived two doors away in the same semidetached row on Sickles Avenue.

Still, the summer after my junior year in high school, Janet filled a brief need for escape. On good beach weekdays I was allowed to go with her to Glen Island, a short local bus trip away. We could walk downtown to shop. I could visit her at her house if her mother was at home. Nevertheless, being her friend was like an initiation into a strange religious rite. She was All-American Girl personified. She could have modeled for the first Barbie, except that she wore her satiny brown hair in a short pageboy which she frequently smoothed with the palm of her hand, and had a cheekbone spitcurl. Janet wore her day-of-the-week panties on the right days of the week, making sure they fit discreetly under the neatly cuffed boy-shorts that showed off her long, tan, shining, smooth-shaven legs in bobby sox and penny moccasins. This was a uniform, I realized, and got my own. And when we went to Glen Island, I studied how to be coy and make myself nonchalantly invisible behind my shades, and swoon on cue at every evenly toasted lifeguard with the obligatory patch of white ointment on the bridge of his nose.

Janet, I came to see, was everything I wasn’t. She was the only child at home, her parents having legally separated. She attended a Catholic girls’ high school. She went routinely to confession and to Sunday mass, hated to read, ate something made of hamburger every day, never did dishes, and repainted her fingernails at least three times a week. Our conversations were like her swimming—strong to start, but a few minutes out of her depth and she made for shore. Yet behind that wide-eyed Stepford face with the pouty rosebud mouth, that babydoll way of licking her painted fingertips and touching them to her bangs, lurked a knowing woman—more knowing than anyone among my M&A circle of New York City school chums—a woman with serious boyfriends and drive-in movie dates and an authority about soul-kissing that, had my mother known about it, would have thoroughly justified her putting her house to the torch. And yet it was my mother herself who might have said of Janet that butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth.

We had chores, at my house, and Janet was never an excuse for not doing them. Cooking was one, and specifically mine, but I considered it salvific. I was already learning to do a few things well, as people will who love to eat, and I not only still loved to eat but was newly enraptured by the miraculous chemistries of breads and soups. We often saved other chores for the absolute end of the day, just before our parents came home—“we” meaning my brothers as well as my sister and me, until Lou was recruited into store duty—to be done in what we termed with desperate hilarity “record time,” as we raced furiously about the house with vacuum and dust-cloths and sponges in the last minutes before the car lights flashed in the driveway.

The rules guarding what we did in their absence were strict. We mostly obeyed them. There were some pardonable minor violations they couldn’t see to rebuke. Once Lou was gone, there were some unpardonable major ones we didn’t tell.

Carlo’s temperament had not softened as he grew. Certainly not toward Ann and me, whom he seemed to despise with a dull and motiveless malignancy. Being a boy he had a certain license to be less often at home. Ann and I, alone together, might quarrel and make our peace. But he would burst in on us suddenly or after a petulant lull like a stalking, and fly into a bullying, hectoring rage. He seemed to drive at us, to hate us in some essential way, to target our fresh shame about ourselves, our uneasy new womanhoods, and attack us there, where the mind and flesh were tenderest, first with filthy words and then physically, brutally, with his hands, hunting Ann down with some special demon anger when she fled him, pummeling me when I stood in his way, taunting us, crowing when we wept, laughing when we screamed. And then he would dare us to phone and tell, fearless, having nothing to lose, as if he knew the only thing we could betray was our own shame. We would huddle together in our room, even there not feeling completely safe. I would try to console her outrage and pain. Sometimes I couldn’t. Sometimes I could not console myself.

I read. I read to escape, but also to know. Perhaps, obscurely, to know where such demon hatred could come from that seemed to come from so much more than my brother’s private little soul.

This was a universe where Janet feared to tread, and I did not try to recruit her. I took most of my lonely reading ration from my father’s library, many of its volumes bound in factory-tooled leather just as they had come, one by one, from subscription book clubs. The double-column, small-print Shakespeare I had already devoured, cover to cover, taking lessons in old bawdy from its treacherous pages, discovering the powerful, the talky, the free, the cross-dressing women Janet would never have understood. When we weren’t dancing, Ann and I took turns standing on the round-backed Chippendale chair pretending it was the Globe balcony and trying out our favorite parts.

I moved more surreptitiously now to Boccaccio, to Zola, both of them powder kegs from which I might have blown up my captivity from the inside. Had my father actually read them? My mother discovered a copy of Zola’s Nana under my pillow, a weary, blue, illustrated clothbound edition from the twenties that I had turned up in a casual dig through the abandoned reliquary of the basement. She had flipped its pages, seen the sensuous line drawings, the large buttocks, the bare breasts and upturned nipples.

She looked terrified. Betrayed. “Where did you get this?”

But she knew I was no longer afraid of her anger. She was almost more astonished, I think, that such a book could be found in her house than that I should be reading it. Darkly, she said that my father would have to be consulted. But nothing happened, and I found it again weeks later, untouched, layered with a thin new bloom of dust, as I was polishing the highboy on her side of the bed.

How had I not internalized this censoring father she invoked, of whom I was actually afraid, whose sleeping violence kept even my mother’s soul in check, who seemed transparently to stand for God? Except in my beloved Boccaccio, who opened another continent of Italianness to me, every female sexual transgression I had read of, including Nana’s—especially Nana’s—had been punished either by a tragic or a miserable, lingering death. Why didn’t I think this would happen to me?

I plowed on like a termite, consuming virtually everything that lay behind the glass doors of the oak curio cabinet and the secretary desk, including Pearl Buck’s Good Earth, with its scene of solitary childbirth somewhere in the hills of China, until I turned up an oversized leather-bound volume with the title Animal Magnetism, pontificating some strange metaphysics of the body and containing a chapter, oblique but unmistakable, on masturbation. What was this cruel disorder, it protested, but a clear sign of mental and moral derangement, especially in girls and women, root cause of other more dire and unnamable disorders?

I may have questioned the authority of my father, but I had not yet learned to question the authority of print. Perhaps I needed another tyranny, a white light overthrowing my confused conscience with its bold, dogmatic simplicity. I believed it instantly, fearing it more than mother and father together. Thrown into a panic of remorse, I hated my hands. I hated the way they had shaped angel-lovers out of the achingly warm clay of my own pleasure. I thought, this, then, is the real meaning of sin, that so ready, so lovely a release from my bewildering anxiety is the bomb that will actually destroy me, and not just hereafter, which I had consoled myself could somehow, someday, be rearranged, but here. Now.

It sounded almost too much like the magical, punishing Sicilian moral universe of my mother, and yet perhaps overcorrecting for this small inward bite of disbelief made me even more fierce. Faith was what I wanted, not skepticism, pure cleansing faith, mind and body, every shred of disbelief burned away, my soul fired in the kiln of purity to the most perfect ceramic.

To my mother’s wary but happy surprise, I began to accompany her to evening novenas. Janet joined me in a religious retreat for young women at St. Gabriel’s, where an itinerant monk lashed the certain impurity of our girlish hearts, flash-scorched them, crisped and pulverized them as if they had been nothing but used palm fronds burnt for Ash Wednesday’s ashes, warning us that Christ’s exquisite suffering was incalculably multiplied by each failure of ours to preserve a body undefiled.

I have no idea what Janet felt. I suspect she went home and soul-kissed her way to delirium the following week at the movies. I remained mortified. And yet I still did not know how to confess my own sin, this sin unnamed among the Ten Commandments. So I went to confession in a sweating agony one sultry Saturday afternoon in August, and told the priest behind the grille that I had committed adultery.

When I returned to school in the fall, Judy wondered about my odd solemnity, but there were subjects on which even we two were not yet ready to speak. I cosseted my new chastity. I prayed the rosary to myself on the train and stopped at St. Gabriel’s to light candles on the way home from the railway station. I kept Christmas with an intensity bordering on lunacy, and my sister (who had clung intransigently to Santa Claus, well past the age of reason) delighted to follow me. Throughout the next Lent my devotions to the Stations of the Cross were unremittingly hot-hearted—I dreamed of turning to devotional art and sculpting a series of them myself. On Good Friday, I attended a three-hour devotion to the Passion and choked back scalding tears as the priest spoke Jesus’s poignant “Why hast thou forsaken me?” from the cross.

And yet while fear drove me, fear and some diverted channel for the ecstasy of loving, I think I knew somehow that the fear was not so much fear of God as of my own defiant inner refusal.

•

Christians were the oddity at Music & Art, teachers and students. On Jewish holidays, about four of us out of thirty would show up in a homeroom staffed by a substitute. It did not seem especially outlaw to leave school quietly, once we had officially clocked in in the morning, make a dash from 135th to the subway at 125th Street, head down to West 42nd Street on our school passes, and spend the livelong day at a favorite, cheap, all-day moviehouse watching a triple bill of quirky cult things like The Maltese Falcon and King Kong and maybe a Magnani or an early Bergman, movies that took me way beyond the Cinema Paradiso of Our Lady of Mount Carmel’s basement, and would never have made it to New Rochelle. No sex films, heaven forbid—the Times Square porn-flick industry was still a sinister gleam in somebody’s eye—though I didn’t bring conversation about them home. And we could still clock back in on Convent Avenue for the last roll call of the day.

Yet I made no long-lasting friendships with other Christians on these runs. They usually included Judy. They were fun. That was all. The rest of the year I seemed to need to cultivate attachments with my politically conscious and activist Jewish classmates. I can remember feeling oddly thrilled when a parent on the Upper West Side speculated about the Hebrew origin of my surname. Maybe it had something to do with being at an ethnic crossroads together. But I had no clue at the time to the social dynamics of “othering,” and in any case, though I didn’t discuss it, I was still caught up in my Catholic passion. I hadn’t yet begun to imagine a theory I came to develop later on, and to find quite credible: that my father’s roots, which some relative had historically traced to Spain four centuries ago, had originally been Jewish, and that his family had migrated to the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies during the excesses of the Inquisition. This notion, whatever its modicum of truth, would at some time come to seem very important to me. It is now. I still let myself be teased by the mystery of how Sant’Elia—the prophet Elias of the Old Testament—had ever come to be patron saint of the Alaya village of Sperone.

These high school get-togethers on the Upper West Side (which I am sure I explained oddly to my father, so as to be able to attend them) were, as I say, often political, or had a political hidden agenda. We would discuss enlisting in demos at the UN, or circulating petitions against HUAC witch-hunts. Or we would strategize our opposition to the loyalty oaths then being foisted on our teachers. It seemed as if the pulse of the world were in our caring hands. Coming of age in extraordinary times, jolted out of all naïvete about a warless future or the benignity of the bomb by the sudden outbreak of the war in Korea, we were the generation fated to be present at the birthing of both the peace movement and the movement for civil rights. Perhaps it was not precisely bliss to be alive or to be young, but for me it was another near-religious universe, one that seemed to recruit pure energy, indifferent to sex, consciously striking out across the color line, embracing difference, including my own.

What we didn’t know we felt, and guessed, and feared. Yet I don’t remember feeling fear for my private political soul, nor even precisely for my private survival. Ever since our old days in Arizona in wartime I had nursed an intuition that there was nothing that could happen out there, no social circumstance in the big world that wasn’t capable of rupturing our so-called personal lives. In this sense, my father had transmitted a vivid political consciousness to me. But I could see, now, here, that we could struggle to rearrange the equation, not to be passive, merely, and let it happen.

My father had written to Roosevelt once, complaining of how the government had treated him. But that had been a personal act, to protest a wrong done to himself. Since then he had grown hostile to movements, movements that in any case he had always been too proud to join. Resettled now among New Rochelle’s posttenement Italian Americans, his politics had morphed into a rather supercilious, Republican worldview—a hatred of taxation, a fierce pride about self-help, unease about the business impact of the coddling ministrations of the New Deal, and a fear of what would happen to our Way of Life with the sudden in-migration of impoverished Puerto Ricans, who by now had transformed our old Italian East Harlem into El Barrio. It was as if all social help had turned sour now that he himself didn’t need it anymore.

Maybe it was mere peer pressure on my side, but I like to think that I had been in some sense inoculated against my father’s politics, that straight from the East Harlem tenements as I had come, my lungs still exhaled a bit of the radical live air of Vito Marcantonio, that a few brain cells still stored memory-prints of sainted anarchists. I like to think there was a certain intercultural, working-class camaraderie packed into the marrow of my bones at those tap-dance classes at Hull House on East 116th Street, where all the varicolored pigtails bounced together to the same thumping beat.

I became connected, at any rate—it was too soon, too hard to say I became “identified,” “committed.” My red diaper classmates were sunk into politics by the taproot, with an educated passionate intensity. Their interest in the trial of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg was not just spectatorial, like mine. The sadism of blacklisting must have come literally home.

And yet even for them it was—it needed to be—a performance of belief. In this seedtime of Beat and the sixties they wore their politics on their bodies. The girls defined the look in peasant blouses and skirts, laced sandals, scarves, dangling earrings. Everybody played the guitar, and those who didn’t sang—folk songs, of course, songs with ironclad pedigrees from Woody Guthrie to Pete Seeger direct. I sang them too. I let my hair grow out again, and wore it again in a single braid down my back. I forgot about my rosary beads when I was with them. I kept my little silver Miraculous Medal and my Sacred Heart scapular in the bottom of my saddlebag. And I fell in love with Jewish boys, though their hearts were more disciplined, and they did not fall in love with me.

And then at last April approached May, M&A was ending, and “Weeeell?,” spoken in that long expectant drawl, was the first, exasperating thing out of Judy’s mouth whenever we met in sculpture class or life drawing or the lunchroom.

Our embarrassment was becoming replete. I should say my embarrassment. Judy’s mother hadn’t made her a gown for the senior prom, as my mother had for me, on the impregnable theory that wishing (or more precisely, willing, praying, pleading privately with all the saints, lighting candles) could make it so. Maybe I have suppressed my own fixation on this prom-date, but I look back in wonder: who actually wanted it more, she or I?

Perhaps it would finally prove, among other mother-flattering things, that I could be the girl my father would approve her for creating. For though he routinely missed mass himself, he loved our churchgoing, smooth Sunday-morning look in gloves and heels almost as much as he despised this cheap, “teen-age” prom culture. And yet he knew the prom to be a rite of female passage, and rites of female passage he understood. I can imagine a curious mixture of dread and longing in his mental anticipation of my first symbolic moment as another man’s woman.

The dress my mother made me was a checked taffeta affair in navy and gray, strangely subdued elegance for a fashion climate that favored pastel chiffons. It had a long full skirt, drop sleeves over a fitted bodice, and her hallmark featherstitching around the neckline. Pretty as it was, I could not actually see myself wearing it, which, right there, as any visualization expert will tell you, was deadly. It held itself erect on a hanger over the sewing machine like a proud beauty, straight through the prom season.

In a kind of giddy desperation, I even asked several Jewish boys to take me, moving on to another and another as each said no. Judy couldn’t believe me. I couldn’t believe myself. I remember something wistful and long-coming in their rejections that seemed to make them painless. And yet it was if I had been inviting them as a favor to somebody else.

Judy said we should go out anyway, the two of us, though neither of our special prom budgets had included the contingency of an unprom, and I knew it was not a category of expense my father recognized. My mother must have persuaded him that it was the only possible balm for my grievous disappointment. Only whatever we did, she said, was going to have to get me back to the New Haven RR in time for the train.

It was a perfect prom night. Hitting the darkening street after a movie at the Carnegie, I know we both felt that same stab, like two Alices forced to keep this side of the looking-glass. There was something as ripe as strawberries in the air. Across 57th Street the Automat was still bustling—we’d been there before the show, gloriously nickel-and-diming our dinner, popping up and down from the marbleized table as each new food fancy struck us, aesthetically overdosed on bright brass and the magic of pie wedges and radiant meringues behind shimmering convex shields of glass.

“We’re kinduva couple, aren’t we,” I observed, rather dolefully, as we made for the subway. Judy giggled agreement. We were: short and tall, wearing our rhyming blue cottons with the waistlines we pronounced “awhmpeer,” the simple dresses we’d cut from the same pattern and then stitched independently, mine under my mother’s expert eye. We had matching shawls to keep off the night air.

We took the A train down to the Battery, stood up all the way, frantic with laughter as the updraft on the subway car ballooned our skirts. We took a ride on the Staten Island Ferry, still just a nickel each way in 1952, across the bay and back.

We let the wind on the deck fling our hair into tangled streamers and whip our dangling copper earrings till we almost lost them. Judy took hers off and I screwed mine in tighter, as tight as I could bear. We still had the deck to ourselves—no other prom-nighters yet, making their own romance of the cheap sea ride. The salt spray the flywheel kicked up flicked into our eyes and mouths. We faced the wind gasping, hugging our flapping shawls tight about us. We laughed about how much better this was than going to the prom. We have never changed our minds.

Judy’s grandfather was already gone. Her grandmother died that summer. This was sad, but an enormous relief too, and Judy and Muriel slowly unraveled themselves from their Christian Science cocoons and shook their damp bright wings in the sunshine like a pair of butterflies. After so intense a confrontation with her parents’ too implacable faith, the Mature Parent was now exploring other religions. Once, she asked me to unravel the long tale of my multiple namings, how I had been christened Flavia Maria Immacolata and then added two more names, Anna and Rosa, at my confirmation, and what this all meant. Poor simply Judith Ann Lawrence felt severely disadvantaged. In retaliation, she dubbed me “Fluffy Mary the Immaculate.” I winced.

“Your Catholicism,” Muriel would say. “It’s about the bleeding Jesus Christ, if I may say so, isn’t it. Death, death, death.” I had rather thought it was about the Virgin Mary, St. Ann, etc., etc., but she had a point. There was that crucifix too, and all those bloody Stations of the Cross.

I had been about to leave for the railway station and she held me, growing thoughtful again. It was as if I were a wise child who could deal with profound questions—nothing in her of that secret intent to outwit me I sensed in so many well-intentioned adults. She seemed to enjoy what I was, where I was, without the need to impose higher standards, greater expectations. Enough of these in our lives—in hers no less than mine, maybe more. She smiled. She said, as if to assure me I was not entirely responsible for the murky history of Catholicism, “Much to be said for confession.”

I kissed her good-bye, thankful for the gracious exit line. Judy had me by the hook. “Oh, Fluffy Mary,” she pronounced, “do be careful going home.”

That fall, Judy decided to continue studying art, part-time, in New York. I actually envied her, though I was the one entering Barnard on scholarship. There had been remarkably little fuss about what I would actually do with my life, when it finally came down to it, because I didn’t make the fuss I might have over where I would go to college to learn how to do it.

For, all credit to the power of my mother’s immovable certainty that gifts like mine and my sister’s shouldn’t be wasted, it had been understood that I would go to college, always, and when I graduated M&A with honors, it had been understood that I would attend a very good school. My own researches into what this meant for me (Syracuse, Bard, other colleges with strong arts programs) became ultimately irrelevant. I could see this the moment my brother Lou, new Columbia College graduate, dispatched the wisdom that Barnard College, across the street from Columbia, would be quite acceptable. This reassured my uneasy father, who could feel me slipping away, and who could easily paint the dangers to my bewildered, conflicted mother of any school I could not commute to from home exactly as I had to high school—same train to the 125th Street station on the New Haven line, same bus to the West Side, different transfer, to the Broadway bus going downtown instead of up.

My mother hated to see me disappointed at not continuing my art, but there seemed to be no right answer to the question, “What will you do?” For I saw myself with long hair, alone, in a loft some day, painting, sculpting, writing poetry. Unfortunately, so did they. So did he. It was decidedly not a pretty picture.

My mother felt she had lost her fight if she hadn’t made us both happy. “Wouldn’t you rather be a teacher?” It was her idea of bliss.

My poor father had his hands full, between the two of us. I said, OK, OK. I will become a chemical engineer. I meant it. And yet he might have known he was in danger. Who but a perverse and wayward daughter, out to break your heart, would go straight from a high school sculpture award to a college degree in chemical engineering?

Ah, but at least there would be no more lies! Other Barnard women got on the train in Larchmont, in Pelham and Mount Vernon. They looked so beautiful to me. So fine. How could Columbia boys write “Cattle Crossing” on West 119th Street, where Milbank Hall looked out over the tennis courts?

I almost instantly lost my faith. No, that’s wrong. I almost instantly let myself see it, that last sweet shred of it, in another, more ironic perspective. When I wrote my first essay for Miss Tilton’s freshman English class, it had been supposed to be a paragraph, two at most: “Describe something. Anything,” she had said. “Let it be carefully observed.” I had described a rosary.

When we met in our first conference, she seemed very guarded, impossibly shy. Her bony hand twitched nervously before her thin, schoolmarm lips. But behind that well-fringed fluttery lid in a deep eyesocket there was a fine, gray-eyed gaze.

She placed my paper before me, quizzically. I stared at it. It was typed, as she had asked, double-spaced, as she had required, folded neatly, obligingly, lengthwise down the middle. There was nothing else on it, no marks, no comments. Nothing. I looked up in despair.

“Hmm,” she said, apologetically.

Reflective, pregnant pause.

“I think you can write,” she said. “But try this assignment again.”

At first I was stung, insulted. It had been the rosary, obviously. Italian Catholic girl, not fitting Barnard stereotype, being hammered, if ever so nicely, Massachusettsly, into the intellectual mold. But it was too late to resist. I already loved her, and seemed to know what she was, who she would be for me, from her brilliant questions in class, from the way she had of silently, patiently stroking meaning out of a text, out of us. And from her streaky wood-grained hair and skin-and-bones body in dry, dark blue spinsterwear.

She was right: the thing had been carefully observed, but I had not observed the mind observing it. I knew this, suddenly. I loved knowing it.