How strangely distrustful Aunt Esther was! Just like Daddy, though with a different way of expressing it. Essie said, “If you’re afraid being a model is just a way of being a prostitute, I don’t see what good that would do Doug. He wants me to succeed. He says I have great looks, though I can’t see it myself. I think I’m kind of homely.”
Her aunt’s squinting eyes flared, for a moment, almost into circles. “Darling, no—you’ve got it. It doesn’t show all the time, but it shows in photographs. When I see some of them, it’s almost like Pop has become an angel. My dad was a beautiful man, but in you it’s gone somewhere. We just don’t want to put our feet wrong. I moved down here to please your dad and I’ve lost what city savvy I ever had.”
Her aunt’s praise felt like an X-ray bringing up in white the secret inside her ribs, the thing that told her that she was the center of the universe and that there would be no misstep. Uncle Peter, oblivious of this Wilmot transaction occurring beneath his nose, set a cloudy brown drink before his wife, with a little lurch that produced too loud a click, and said, “Essie, what can I tempt you with? I know you don’t approve, but a little glass of sherry? A rum-and-Coke, very weak, Scout’s honor.” But he held up the fingers that mean horns, as a joke. People who drink like you to drink. Though she had stopped going to church a year or two after being confirmed, staying home with Daddy and the Sunday paper instead, she was still Presbyterian enough to fear alcohol. It ate lives, in from the edges, lurking in cupboards and becoming the secret reason for every gathering of two or three, and one day people woke up and realized that liquor had stolen their lives away. Also, drinking made you fat and puffy, and her face needed all the bony structure she could give it.
“You shouldn’t offer the girl a drink when she’s driving,” Aunt Esther told him. She rarely said anything to her husband this contrary. She had wanted him, back there before Essie was born; she had paid the price in scandal for him; she had made herself his; this was her bed and by damn she would lie in it. These weathered marriages from the Twenties surrounded Essie like Delaware’s shallow smoke-blue hills. When she thought of them at all, her aunt and uncle and her parents and the doomed marriage of Uncle Jared and Aunt Lucille, it was as beaten-down monuments to the cowardice and stolid timidity of this older generation. She was determined to have a lot of men and to be captive to none of them.
“Aaahh,” Peter said in self-defense, shamed for a second, caught at corrupting a girl. “Essie could drive the road with her eyes closed. She has a good head on her shoulders.” And he took the opportunity, as she sensed he would, to place a puffy strong hand on either side of her skull, with its short haircut, and squeeze, hard and soft, for what seemed a long while. Essie put up with it; it was a kind of farewell.
James Patrick Wilmot lived in the Park Avenue apartment owned by his mother and stepfather, Mr. Traphagen. Mr. Traphagen—an old Dutch name—was a frustrated artist who, after thirty years spent in his family’s china-and-porcelain-importing business located on Pearl Street, had retired early to concentrate on painting. To better concentrate he spent, with his reluctant wife, more and more time in Maine, and was still up there, stoking a woodstove and watching the storm waves break on the rocks, in early December. Essie knew this much from her aunt and father. Daddy had little to say about his sister-in-law, except: “It would take a saint to be married to Jared, and Lucy was no saint. Her father avoided Sing Sing by the skin of his teeth. As to the boy, it’s a wonder he’s not a juvenile delinquent. She was too pregnant with him to come to your mother’s and my wedding, but she showed up with him in her arms at Esther’s, and stole the show. He has those black-Irish good looks, don’t know where from. Old Jimmy McMullen was a homely devil—always looked like a truck-loader in his tux.” All this family lore, Essie thought, was coming out of the bushes to boost her on her way.
She had been primed with instructions how to get from Penn Station to the Times Square Shuttle and then up the East Side to Eighty-sixth and Lexington, all on a dime token. But she was an hour early and walked instead up Fifth Avenue, drinking in the caustic city air, the stony cold, the carols broadcast out onto the sidewalk, the Salvation Army dinging their nervous bells, the yellow taxis and snorting green buses, the swift-moving crowds with their averted, flitting faces. There were lavish, glittering, nodding, rotating Christmas windows from Lord & Taylor’s on up to Saks and Bonwit’s, of Santa Clauses and three Magi in three skin colors, of people in sleighs and fur muffs from old-time New York. She had been here only twice before—with her parents to the World’s Fair and the other time to go to the Radio City Music Hall and see the Rockettes—but the city fell open before her like a chocolate apple, in crisp glossy pieces, perfectly intelligible. The numbered side streets were like rows and rows of books that some day she would read. The avenues flew straight ahead of her to a vanishing point that was Harlem. At the corner of the park with its bronze statues she turned right until she struck Park, and then walked north, inhaling exultantly though her feet had begun to hurt, to the Traphagens’ address. The doorman gave her name into a little loudspeaker, which squawked in return. An elevator operator in white gloves and a maroon uniform with brass buttons took her to the right floor; a little mincing maid in a black dress trimmed in crisp white opened the door to her. So many people, to serve just you. In the parqueted apartment foyer a half-moon marquetry table held a vase of fresh flowers—mums and glads with a green backing of ferns and what she recognized from her years in the greenhouse as eucalyptus and leatherleaf.
The living room held a piano and sofa so big there seemed several of each. The space in the room, which several islands of glossy, nappy furniture tried in vain to fill, went back and back, as if a camera were tracking forward, and velvet-curtained windows gave on brick and granite cliffs and sharp-edged deep valleys where automobiles crawled far below. She had been here before, in the movies. Patrick entered from some other room of the vast apartment and was predictably tall and handsome and gentle. She had to perch forward on her chair to hear him talk, describing his life with an amusing, drawling diffidence, like James Stewart with Cary Grant’s class and Robert Taylor’s moody eyebrows. Only his hair was upright, like Farley Granger’s, and like her own when the hairdresser didn’t flatten it. He was a student at New York University, down in Washington Square, majoring in fine arts though he didn’t think he’d try to be a painter; he’d seen the effort break old Trap’s heart. Trap? His stepfather. How sophisticated, Essie thought, to have a stepfather, and your real father off owning a mountain in Colorado. A piece of a mountain, actually. With the war over, there was no profit any more in the copper leavings and pillars, but Jared—he called his own father “Jared,” just like that, one man speaking of another, distant man—and his partners had great hopes for developing the slopes into a ski resort. Recreational sport was becoming big business. Families getting out and doing things together, that sort of middle-class folderol. Essie was fascinated by the traces of herself in Patrick—a Wilmot way of holding his head to one side, as if listening for something; a prim fineness to the gestures of his hands and a dry cut of his lips—and felt herself, much more wholeheartedly and maturely than when sitting on the bleachers with Benjy Whaley, swooning forward into love.
All around them, as they talked, she trying to match his gentle voice with one equally soft and diffident, the apartment spread its wealth and silence and amplitude of unseen rooms. There were many antique family things and some modern boxy furniture such as Aunt Esther and Peter had but bigger and more expensive, and over all a romantic tinge of neglect, a sense of absent owners, who had brought the decor to a certain high pitch and then wandered away, bored, leaving the windows dusty and the fabrics fading. Yes, her cousin said, he would like to go with her when she had her interview with Mr. Wexler. There were other agencies, better agencies, but since Wexler had already expressed interest, had seen her portfolio, let’s begin with him. A bird in hand, et cetera. He would make the call for her, he knew a ch
ap, actually, who had worked for Wexler. No trouble, honestly. He’d like to do it, he was between terms and bored fairly silly. He talked rapidly, in his murmuring voice, as if seeking to hypnotize her. No, in answer to an earnest question of Essie’s, he had no doubts, having seen her now in the flesh. She was a gem, wanting only—with some embarrassment, Patrick made vague and agitated gestures in the air—polishing. Voice and acting lessons, perhaps, once she was established here in the city. To Method, or not to Method, that was the question. An in joke, he explained. Of course there was a limit to what could be taught, they can’t make a silk purse, et cetera, but these coaches have techniques, there are little tricks, ways of connecting with yourself, your inner self.… Everything would happen, he was confident. For years he had been hearing about her from dear Aunt Esther. In fact, his mother was always talking about driving down to Delaware for a visit, but … No matter, the mountain at last had come to Mohammed. Now, she must let him take her out for a little lunch, and then he could point her in the direction of a museum—she must go to the Modern, his mother was one of its founding spirits—or over to Broadway, the overrated Great White Way, rather dreary in daylight, actually, for all of its gigantic signs and pathetically palatial movie houses. Some people came to New York and then went and sat in a dark movie house, could you believe it?
But Essie had visions of a movie right here, in this lovely quiet set. He thought she knew nothing, a rube, but she did know some things. “Before any of that,” she said, “I wonder if I could take a b-bath? I w-worked up a terrible sweat, walking all the way, I was so excited. This city is absolute heaven.”
“No,” said Patrick, with a primness she was not sure was a joke. “Heaven is quite elsewhere.” She wondered how much he had been raised a Catholic. They took everything so literally, straight from the priests. Essie was grateful that her God was a Protestant one, Who gave you credit for some brains and let you work things out for yourself, at least until you died.
In her bath, she kept waiting for him to come in and see her naked, the tops of her breasts gleaming up from the bubbles. She had found some of his mother’s fragrant soap in a cabinet but the tub had been so long unused there were dead spiders in it, and one living, and the water thumped out with a burst of rusty brown. Still, an abundance of mirrors gave her back in angled slices her pink-and-white perfection. Waiting to share her pleasure in herself, she thrust one taut ankle and rosy-toed foot out of the soapy water, and then the other, admiring the fine straight tendons that jumped up, and the wandering veins like rivers of delicate aquamarine. She leaned back so her nape got wet and soapy and moved her eyes from one corner of the bathroom ceiling to the other, and then oppositely, making an X. All her nerves were tensed against the click of the door opening, as it would have in any movie—amusingly in a comedy, scarily in an intrigue mystery—but eventually the bubbles all had popped and the water clammily cooled. Draped in a beige towel with a scratchy monogram, she went in search of Patrick. The little maid came down the hall, looking startled to see her, but Essie smiled vaguely through her, knowing that servants were just love’s furniture. She walked on, barefoot across the textures of parquet and Oriental carpet and polar-bear rug, into the study, masculine with books and maroon leather, where Patrick was pretending to read a magazine. It was called The New Yorker—she had never heard of it, it wasn’t on the rack at Addison’s Drug Store—and the cover had a chalky drawing of white-faced shoppers walking at night along where she had just been, past a store window holding a Christmas tree and a hollow-eyed, sinister Santa Claus.
Perhaps he was truly reading it; he didn’t seem to hear her and looked up only as she let the towel drop. Patrick winced, and his moody blue-black eyebrows scowled. He jumped up to retrieve the damp towel off the polar bear’s massive square head, where she had dropped it, and to push it back at her, hiding her tender, radiant front. His breathing was heavy and entwined with her awareness of her own; he gave her a light cool kiss on the cheek and said in his rapid voice, as if trying to restore her hypnotized mood, “You’re absolutely lovely, you know, but shouldn’t you be saving yourself?”
“Who for?” she asked, correcting this to, “For whom? You’ll do fine.”
“Well, that’s it, darling. I won’t. I won’t do fine. I know that much about myself at this point. Sorry. Oh, my. You must let me explain during lunch. Do get your clothes on—you’ll scandalize poor Marie.”
She had things to learn in life, Essie knew that. But her sense of herself was that she would be looked after, now, and not allowed to fail. There were too many eyes on her, ghostly and real. This particular embarrassment she deflected by picturing, as she walked away, back to the bathroom and her clothes, her naked back receding in the rectangular frame of his vision, the towel clasped casually to her chest where he had thrust it, the lithe white lengths of her legs and the unrepentant seesaw of her buttocks spelling out to him what he had with such curious gallantry renounced. Maybe, she thought, he had a fiancée. But no, he explained at lunch, the problem was that from about the age of fourteen he had found himself in the unfortunate position of being attracted only to boys. His mother had no idea; old Trap, who was somewhat queer himself, guessed, but said nothing. Boarding school—Choate, in Wallingford, Connecticut—had made it all beautifully, horrifyingly clear. Well, it was his problem. He patted her knee, there at the little round table of the restaurant, where the menu was all in French. They had an affinity: two Wilmots with a touch of outlaw. Maybe all Wilmots had a touch of outlaw.
As though nothing awkward had happened, he took her to the museum, on the far side of an Episcopal church. Such gaudy colors, such toylike shapes! And all being looked at so seriously, by men in fitted suits with double-breasted coats and women in the latest long bell-shaped skirts and wasp-waisted suits decreed by Dior. Then, as the short day drew in, making her cheeks sting with its cold, Patrick walked her down Broadway to the Times Square subway station, and told his country cousin how, in that vast underground of cement and steel and hurrying bodies, to find the IND Eighth Avenue line to Penn Station. On the train back to Wilmington she had time to reflect that sex was at the heart of show business, but was not worn, actually, on its sleeve.
She couldn’t believe Patrick was really homosexual. She felt she could bring him around, if he’d just let her. The only homosexual in Basingstoke was an old man who lived in one of the rooms above Krauthammer’s; the high-school boys used to play awful pranks on him, but he never got mad or went to the police, as if he had no rights. He just snuck around like a beaten dog, bent with weird longing, hoping to get lucky. Here in New York it wasn’t quite so bad; there were enough of them to make a society, and not such a secret society at that. The arts, especially minor arts like window-dressing, were dominated by them. She felt it a kind of comforting accreditation, actually, at the model agency, to have a poof bring her in.
The glamour trade was run by types who didn’t exist in Basingstoke. Wexler was a busy bald short man who snarled, “Show us the legs, dear,” and said of the sheaf of photos Doug Germaine had sent him, “Some of these I like. Girl next door, with a little devil in her. Take off five pounds and do something about your hair; it’s out of control. Also it’s a little dead. Lighten it, darken it, something. O.K., young lady. You want to come try your luck in town, we’ll put you in our files. No promises, no guarantees. Client satisfaction’s a slippery thing. Some girls come in here you think, ‘Jeez, what a knockout!’ but in black-and-white, nothing happens. Something about the nose, usually. What you ask of a nose, basically, is that it stays out of the way. The eyes, the mouth—there’s the action. Your nose, well, it could be tuned up but it’s not a big problem right now. I hope you thank God every night for those teeth. Your mom and dad must have spent a fortune.”
“Not a penny,” Essie said. “Ama—my grandmother—said brush after every meal, especially when you had dessert. I’ve had four cavities in my whole life. She said it was all the iodine in the local spinach.
My brother, Danny, has terrible teeth, but then he’s a complainer about everything.” She liked Wexler. She felt he liked her, in his rude Jewish way. These were her people, show people—like Jack Oakie and Jack Haley in the movie where one of them was shivering and put the stutter into the song about “K-K-K-Katie.” She had been cast up on the shore of the Delaware and adopted by nice natives but in her heart knew she belonged to another race and spoke another language; the movies and radio had brought her news of her real people and now she was crossing the border to them.
“Seven fifty an hour is where our girls start; some get up to twenty-five. Minus our ten percent. Sounds like a fortune, but it’s only working time. Conventions, a lot of the old bucks will ask you for a date. Handle it with dignity. Any girl takes bed money we hear of it, she’s out. Runway shows, less of a problem. Right, Pat? You said you’re cousins?”
Patrick nodded. “First. Non-kissing.”
“You taking a cut?”
“Not a penny, to re-coin a phrase.”
“Maybe she could use an agent—somebody to push her. You, Pat, you seem like a nice well-mannered guy, but I don’t get much feeling of push. Hustle—there’s no substitute. With a girl’s looks, you don’t have all day. Sorry, Essie, if I sound like a cynical shit.”
“No, no. I know. Do you think I should leave high school and come to New York now?”