I dont kiss, p.17
I Don't Kiss, page 17
That evening at The Barn it was the same thing. I danced with the girls I knew and laughed with our gang out on the balcony. Tim never came out there for a cigarette. He was steering very clear of me. I closed my mind to it. I was just the sixteen-year-old who was leaving soon to go back to Ohio. Sunday we went to church on the hill. Tim wasn’t there although he appeared briefly at an after-church garden party at Lowell Thomas’s sister’s home. His parents were there as well as his brother and all the other Catholics, who had been to church down in the village. He didn’t look at me. I didn’t look at him.
And then we went to the house for lunch. I had already packed before we went to church and soon after doing dishes, which I helped Annie with, we left for the city. Uncle Anchor said that he wanted to get back before it got dark and the traffic got too heavy. Annie and I sat in the back. The trunk was full of vegetables, I felt like a package that was being shipped from here to there.
In the car I thought of Aunt Marie’s nephew Eddy. Earlier in the summer Eddy and his younger sister Barbara had come for a weekend. Eddy was exactly my age I had been told and I was going to enjoy their visit very much. I hated the idea. At that point I was very thick with Lonny and Will and didn’t look forward to having to hang out with two kids from Pennsylvania. I was sure that they were going to be just as ill at ease at Quaker Colony as I had been. I had had a hard enough time myself and here I was at the heart of my own Quaker Colony
crowd. Let them shift for themselves.
To my surprise Eddy was dark and handsome. His shining eyes lit up his face, as did his white teeth smiling out of his tanned face. Both Barbara and he were rather at ease with Aunt Marie and Uncle Anchor and they were both engagingly chatty and friendly. I began to fall a little in love with Eddy.
I fell a little further when he went to the lake and in his trunks. Eddy was revealed to have a nice, muscular body. Despite his handsome face and nice body Eddy was not at all taken with himself and was determined to please. By the time we got to The Barn for the usual Saturday evening dance I was pleased to be in Eddy and Barbara’s company. I introduced them to all my friends and we hung about in corners chattering and laughing.
Eddy danced with Jean Marshall at my suggestion. Later when I danced with Jean she said, “Eddy thinks you are just wonderful. He couldn’t stop talking about you. He thinks you are so clever and talented and intelligent and, well, he just went on and on.”
“Oh, he just couldn’t think of anything else to talk about I’m sure,” I said, as we swung into our version of the tango. They gave prizes every Saturday night and Jean and I often won, particularly if they played a Charleston. Where could I have learned the Charleston Certainly not from my mother. But I knew many variations of it and taught them to Jean. I don’t think Uncle Anchor and Aunt Marie probably liked this very much either. It was calling attention to yourself in a theatrical way. It was not at all the style of Quaker Colony.
Eddy and I never advanced beyond our mutual admiration society of two and he left the next day without ever telling me any of his thoughts. But there had definitely been some electricity there and now I sat in the car and wondered why Eddy hadn’t been in my life instead of Tim. Then we could have both gone back to our homes in Pennsylvania and Ohio after some exciting, romantic encounters and we could have stayed in touch and who knows? Perhaps we could be lovers forever. That was the way my thoughts ran as we scooted back down the Taconic and slipped over the Spuyten Devil back into Manhattan in the darkening end of the day. I had no way of knowing that handsome Eddy would be killed in an accident while he was in training to become an air force pilot.
That was still years in the future. Now he seemed to be such a much better choice of lover than Tim.
Aunt Marie wanted me to come down to the office for lunch on Monday so she could take me shopping. Before I left the apartment I called Tim’s office. A secretary answered. I asked if Tim was there and she told me that he was busy and asked if she could take a message. I left my name and told her I would call back. I didn’t want to leave the apartment number.
Aunt Marie took me to Schrafft’s where we had white lunch. Vichyssoise, a chicken salad sandwich on white bread, milk and coconut cake for dessert. Aunt Marie didn’t have the milk. We both loved that lunch.
Then she took me to Brooks Brothers and bought me a very nice suit, a shirt and two suitcases. She didn’t like their ties but took me to the Scotch Shop on the lower level at Rockefeller Center to pick out a tie. I chose a black watch plaid tie that would go very well with my new covert cloth suit. Brooks Brothers had promised that they would alter the cuffs and the suit would be ready the next day. Aunt Marie said that I could go pick up the suit myself.
Back at the office she ushered me into Uncle Anchor’s office where he wrote me a check for two hundred dollars for my summer's work. “This is what we agreed to pay you and this is what I’m going to pay you,” he said, “even though you’re leaving a week early.” His tone was not pleasant. He seemed to feel that he had come up with the short end of the stick in agreeing to pay me so much money when I had been not at all satisfactory. I wondered if Reggie had told him that I never went to the Jersey shore to visit his first wife after I had requested to do so. I thanked him politely and went back to the apartment. I got there before five o’clock and called Tim’s office again. Again the secretary said that he was busy.
That evening Annie and I had dinner together. Aunt Marie and Uncle Anchor were going out to a formal dinner. As we were finishing our meal they emerged from their room. Aunt Marie was in a long fitted mustard colored dinner dress with a high collar. Over the collar she was wearing a ruby necklace I had never seen before.
“Was that dress made to wear with that necklace?” I asked her. She looked at me appreciatively. “You're a smart boy, Peter,” she said. She gave me a sound appraising look, as though she had found a cohort in her continuing battle with life. But her cohort was about to depart. Uncle Anchor was in white tie and tails with a top hat. It was definitely his look. He never looked better in his life. “Well, there you have it,” I thought to myself. “They’ve made it. This is what their life is all about. Ruby necklaces and top hats.” They swept out and I went up to the bedroom above to read. I was finishing My Antonia by Willa Cather. I’d brought it in from the country with me. It was the last of Aunt Marie's collection of Willa Cather on my reading schedule. Now I was done.
There was really nothing to do on Tuesday. Annie was cleaning the apartment as I had breakfast. A glass of milk and Wheaties. After my breakfast I went back upstairs and finished my book. Annie was in the kitchen when I left. I gave her the Willa Cather book to take back to the country. I didn’t want to bother Aunt Marie. I told her I would have a sandwich down town and was going to pick up my suit at Brooks Brothers.
There was a Chock Full of Nuts just up Madison Avenue from Brooks Brothers. The black girl who served me had a badge on her uniform that read “Cecilia.” I ordered the nut and cream cheese sandwich and an orange drink. I wondered if Uncle Anchor would walk by while I was there. The office was just a few blocks up the avenue. When I had been with him before and we passed a Chock Full of Nuts he always looked inside and said, “Sure is.” And I would laugh. Today I didn’t think he was far wrong.
After I picked up my suit I decided to go to Tim's office. I had never been there but I had the address. It was between Fifth and Sixth Avenues on 47th Street. I didn’t know what I would say to him when I got there. It was on the fifth floor. One of those beige painted floors with long hallways stretching away. I found the door with 504 painted on it. There was a receptionist behind a low wooden partition. “May I tell him who is here?" she said.
“Tell him Peter, Peter Miller,” I said. I felt better because I was carrying a Brooks Brothers box in navy blue trimmed in yellow. I wasn’t a complete hick.
She listened and without hanging up said to me, “I’m sorry, he’s gone out.”
“When will he be back?” I said.
“When will he be back?" she repeated into the telephone.
“He’s gone for the rest of the day,” she then said as she placed the phone back in its cradle. “Do you want to leave a message,” she said.
“No,” I said, and left. I walked back to the apartment. It was a very long walk but I had nothing to do. I didn’t want to go back to those silent high-ceilinged rooms and sit about by myself. It was beginning to rain when I turned off Madison Avenue onto 73rd street.
Annie was there when I got back. She told me that Uncle Anchor and Aunt Marie were going directly to a dinner party and then the theater from the office and would be back late. She had prepared a dinner for me to eat by myself. She was going to the movies with her friend Mrs. Taggart, another house keeper in the neighborhood. She asked me if I wanted to come along. I told her that I was planning to stay home and read. I didn’t know what I was going to read but I would find something on the bookshelves in the apartment.
After Annie left I tried to read. I found The Rains Came by Louis Bromfield. But I couldn’t concentrate on it. It was raining harder. I got up off the bed and took my raincoat out of the closet and went downstairs. I walked down the huge staircase into the lobby. The doorman looked up at me and said, “Servants use the back stairs,” in a loud voice.
I said, “Are you mad? I’m Mr. and Mrs. Hawthorne’s nephew.”
He looked frightened. “Sorry. No one ever uses the staircase.”
“I do,” I said.
I walked over to Fifth Avenue to hail a cab. It was raining hard. By the time one stopped my hair was plastered flat to my head and the shoulders of my raincoat were soaked through.
I gave him Tim’s address. The streets were a wet black streaked with yellow and red and green and blue from the neon signs, stoplights and store windows as we whipped down Fifth Avenue.
I didn't even think whether I should be doing what I was doing or not. I just did it, as though I was some kind of automaton. I paid the cab and stood under the shallow canopy over Tim’s front door. I rang the bell. There was no intercom. Whoever was there had to come down to open the door or lean out the window. Legs appeared on the stairs and a face appeared in the small glass of the door. It was Tim. He opened the door and said, “Christ, what are you doing here?"
I started to cry. I had nothing to say. I didn’t know what to say. Tim took me into his arms and the door slammed shut behind him. There we stood under the yellow bulb over the door, the rain pouring down around us. I put my face into the place between his head and his shoulder. The tears poured out of me, wetting his shirt collar.
“There, there, there,” he said, “it’s going to be all right. You’re going to be all right.” I cried harder. He held me tighter. “There, there, there,” he repeated.
“Here, stay right here. I’m just going up and get my rain coat."
With one arm around me he fumbled in his pocket, found his key and opened the door. He pushed me into the corner behind the door and ran upstairs. Very quickly he returned wearing a raincoat and carrying an umbrella. “Let’s go over to the coffee shop,” he said. “Charlie’s upstairs. I can’t take you up there.”
He kept one arm around me under the umbrella as we found our way to Sheridan Square. I was sobbing and mumbling things like, “I didn't know what else to do. You were always busy when I called and you weren’t there when I came to your office today.”
Tim said, “I was there. I just thought it was a terrible idea for you to come there. Come on, let’s go in here and get you a cup of coffee.”
“I don't drink coffee,” I said tearfully.
“You're going to tonight,” Tim said, pushing me into a booth.
I did drink a cup of coffee with a lot of milk and sugar. It was disgusting. Tim said in a low voice leaning across the table, “Look, you’ve got to be sensible. I would just love to take you away to a desert island somewhere and fuck you silly for the rest of my life. You’re the best fuck I've ever had or probably ever will have, but things just don’t work that way.”
“I thought you loved me,” I said. I must have looked a sight. Red eyes and a swollen face, wet hair and a soggy rain coat.
“I don’t know about that,” Tim said. “I'm sure I could fuck you for a very long time and not get tired of it. Is that love? You’ve got my love if it is. But I can’t afford to move somewhere with you. Christ, I can hardly support myself. And what would your uncle and aunt say? I’d never be able to show my face at Quaker Colony again. Hell, I’d never be able to show my face anywhere. Shacking up with a sixteen-year old. A sixteen-year old guy!”
I cried some more. No one in the coffee shop was paying any attention to us. This was Greenwich Village. Handsome blond men with crying teenage boys was an old story down here.
To do him credit Tim took me back to my uncle and aunt’s in a cab, and held me in his arms during the trip. The cab driver kept peering at us in the rearview mirror but didn’t say anything. By the time we pulled up in front of the palazzo I had pulled myself together. Tim didn’t get out and he didn’t kiss me but he held me very tightly before I got out.
“Your Uncle and Aunt are here,” the doorman said as he opened the door. “Thank you.” I said. I turned. Tim’s hand was up in the back window of the cab as it pulled away.
Uncle Anchor was already in bed when I came in. Aunt Marie came into the hall in her peignoir. Are you all right? I’m sorry that we couldn’t be here to take you out to dinner your last night in New York.”
“I'm just fine,” I said. “I went out for a walk so I could sleep well and it was raining harder than I thought it was.”
“Good-night, dear,” she said. I had never heard her say that before.
My train left at seven the next evening for Ohio but I was packed and ready by noon. I didn’t go out at all that day but stayed upstairs in the guest room. I finished The Rains Came and started Leave Her to Heaven. Aunt Marie came home from the office early to take me to the train. Uncle Anchor was busy. We were at Grand Central Station by six o’clock. Aunt Marie went on board the train. The Wolverine, with me to make sure I was well installed in my roomette. I was going to change in Detroit the next day to go on to Ohio. I would finally have to change and get a bus in Massillon for my home town.
We kissed good-bye in the corridor of the train. Aunt Marie pointed out where the dining car was and left a half an hour before the train was due to pull out. She had to go to a party that evening and was just going to make it.
As the train pulled out I wondered whom I was going to sleep with back in Ohio. As it turned out I slept with just about everybody before I got out of that town. But none of them were Tim.
Chapter 27
Aunt Marie Speaks, Finally
In later years, much later, Aunt Marie and I never discussed that summer or Tim Harrison. His name never came up. I had rather forgotten him. I assumed she had.
But once sitting about the living room of her “new house” she said apropos of nothing. “Your uncle and I often thought later that we left you alone too much that summer.” I didn’t reply. We were perilously close to bringing up Tim Harrison, which was a subject I thought we had long ago silently made a pact to never discuss. I still didn’t. I let the remark drop and she didn’t follow up on it.
Yet it wasn’t prudishness that kept her from talking about it. I visited her once in those later years with handsome Phillipe from Paris and she said discreetly as we stood at the foot of the stairs, “Do I put you together in the same bedroom or not?” This was new protocol for her but she was game to give it a try at eighty plus. I laughed and hugged her. “Oh, definitely not.” I said, “Put him in the green bedroom.”
The green bedroom was always the least of the color-coded guest bedrooms at the old house and Aunt Marie had kept the same tradition in this house, although the bedrooms were much smaller with a faint feeling of morel about them. Even so, blue was still the best bedroom, yellow the next best, green the one that was used when the house was really full.
Aunt Marie only mentioned Tim Harrison once to me in what was for her a direct fashion. It would have been indirect for anyone else. She spoke to me, again out of the blue, perhaps while taking a small constitutional across the much smaller lawn in front of the house. I can imagine it now. The leaves only just still clinging to the branches like brown fur, the lawn dry and beige, the air brisk with late Autumn, the light that high, cold New York mountain air that makes you look pale and drawn, no matter how healthy you are.
There was something urgent about the way she spoke. As though it was something she had been mulling over and had to divest herself of, no matter how impossible it was to make a conversational segue into it. She said, “I spoke to Mrs. Harrison, you know.”
“Recently?” I said.
“No, that summer.” Aunt Marie didn’t look at me. She was hunched over now. Like a small bison. Still plugging ahead. I walked beside her, much taller than she now. I didn’t ask what she had said. I replied, “That was a good idea. Thank you.”
“I was hoping you would thank me,” she said. It was another ten years before she died at ninety-four but “that summer” and Tim Harrison never came up again.
As I went to my room, the blue room, I imagined the conversation. Probably on the steps of that perfect little nondenominational church where everyone met on a Sunday morning. Exactly as they met at the golf club. But then again, it couldn't have been. The Harrisons were Catholic. But somehow I seem to remember them at the little white church with the clear windows from time to time. Perhaps it was a funeral.
