The Whiteness of Bones (9 page)

“And last.”

“Are you hoping for a boy or a girl?”

“It doesn’t matter, I just want a healthy baby.”

Despite Dodo’s optimistic remark about her new breasts, Mamie was not really prepared when Dodo casually said, “I’m having a Caesarean delivery so as not to stretch my vagina.”

“How sensible,” Mamie said, sipping her coffee.

“
I
thought so,” said Dodo, and asked the butler for a tequila.

In her aunt’s mirrored bathroom, mirrored toilet and walls and floor and ceiling, Alysse asked Mamie about her dinner partner, perhaps in the hope of catching Sid Zimmerman in an indiscretion, and Mamie was able to say, with a clear conscience, that it had been very interesting.

“You say that a lot,” Alysse called out from on top of the mirrored bidet.

“Well, it
is
interesting,” Mamie said. “It’s not like having Sunday dinner with the headmaster.”

“What?”

“That used to be my standard of worldliness. Sunday with Dr. Fox.”

“Dodo finally got smart,” Alysse said, drying herself in the mirror. “If she didn’t have this kid, all the dough would go to the younger brother. She’s so smart she’s even naming it after the grandfather. Walter. Such a bad name. And for a child, too.”

“But she doesn’t know if it’s a boy, does she?” asked Mamie in surprise.

“She’s known it was a boy for months. She had that test. Dodo did not get where she is just on her looks, you know.”

Mamie wanted to ask Alysse just where it was that Dodo had got to, but she stopped herself when she realized that
Alysse might think she was being sarcastic. She was right to stop herself. Mamie, an apt student, was beginning her course of New York lessons, and while it cannot be said that Alysse was the teacher one might have wished for her, she was the only one available. At her best, Alysse, in her impatient and practical way, might have been a tonic for Mamie. Alysse could keep Mamie afloat, as long as she held Alysse’s interest, and she could make Mamie, at least in her terms, a success.

Mr. Zimmerman found Mamie perfectly charming, or so he told Alysse, with whom he was sleeping later that night. Alysse was relieved. Mamie had passed her first test.

When Mamie told Alysse that she wanted to stay in New York and that she was going to look for a job, Alysse was, in her own words, “
très, très
delighté.”

“And find an apartment,” Mamie said. “I can’t live with you forever.”

“At least until you’re organized,” Alysse said, reassuring her. She opened a bottle of champagne to celebrate Mamie’s decision to stay and the two of them settled girlishly into the green velvet sofa in the library to discuss Mamie’s prospects. Her prospects were limited, for despite the genuine charm of her dinner conversation and her intelligence, she had no particular accomplishments.

“You have to graduate from Harvard to get a job sharpening pencils at one of the magazines,” Alysse said. She regretted now that she could not telephone Carter Schmidt, who owned one of the networks, but she had, she admitted, accused him of giving her a local infection and he probably would not take her call.

Mamie was unaccustomed to the sweet, cold champagne. She liked the taste of it very much. “I can handle a machete,”
she said. “I can roll a cigarette.” She laughed. “I can graft an orchid. I can do a back dive. I can talk a little bit about books. But that’s it. Not much to go on.” In the course of reciting her talents, she had managed to discourage herself.

“You don’t understand, Mamie,” Alysse said, pushing the loose brown hair back behind Mamie’s flushed ears. “What good would typing do you? You’d only have to type. What we want to do is make a list of everyone we know, and who owes favors, and who will be willing to help and who won’t. You leave it to me.”

Mamie leaned back against a needlepoint pillow and drank her champagne. Perhaps this is what I need, she thought happily. It had been a long time since she had taken for granted, as do most children, that everything would be all right, that there were grown-ups out there acting busily in her interest. Alysse’s seductive confidence was misleading to Mamie. She did not know that conviction, on its own, did not necessarily mean wisdom.

“You just leave it to me,” Alysse said again, terribly excited at having the young woman in her care.

Alysse did not bother to tell Mamie that as one of Deardorf’s best customers she felt it only right that the most expensive women’s store in New York take on her niece as an assistant lingerie buyer. Nor did she tell her that she had given Mr. Deardorf a very thorough, as thorough as Alysse could be, account of Mamie’s family connections in the islands. These social attributes of Mamie’s were not seen as handicaps to selecting satin bedroom slippers and terry-cloth bathrobes. Generations of barely educated, well-born young women had skipped across Deardorf’s elegant floors for that awkward two- or three-year period between college and first marriage, and
their sponsors—wealthy grandmothers, fathers’ mistresses, trust fund executors—had been relieved and lucky to place them there.

Mamie believed that she was fortunate to have been given the job. She resignedly gave up any individuality and passively placed herself in the plump red hands of the head saleslady, Miss Magda. She never complained or imagined that there was anything else she would be able to do. She understood that there were things she
could
do, such as work at a publishing house as a reader, but she had no idea how to even find a job like that. She walked during her lunch hour, unable to afford lunch in a restaurant and too self-conscious to eat alone in the noisy store cafeteria with the other solitary women. She willingly fetched vanilla yoghurt from the corner delicatessen for the middle-aged, middle-European salesladies who ordered her about; tirelessly replaced on satin-padded hangers the silk crepe nightgowns dropped carelessly to the floor of the dressing rooms (she was not yet trusted with the keys on the pink grosgrain ribbon used to lock the customers into the dressing rooms); and conscientiously sorted out, at the end of the long day, the size-five panties from the size-six panties and returned them to their “proper drawers,” as Miss Magda called them, seemingly unaware of the bad joke she had made. Mamie decided that it must be Miss Magda’s unfamiliarity with the idiom, even though Miss Magda had lived right on West Fifty-seventh Street for the last thirty years, a fact she pointed out to Mamie nearly every day.

She made friends with a very pretty blond girl named Selena. Selena’s mother, a baroness, had moved to Calcutta to work with an order of silent nuns for the poor and dying. Selena had none of her saintliness, if, in fact, it was sanctity that had led the baroness to impulsively leave everything behind in Munich.

“She hasn’t given it up forever, you know,” Selena said irritably whenever Mamie asked about Calcutta and the nuns. “It’s just what she’s doing now. She used to live with a cargo cult in New Guinea.”

Selena wanted to marry. She lived with her rich grandmother in a big apartment on Fifth Avenue. Her father, an extremely handsome businessman who was divorced from her mother, often came to New York and took Selena to lunch. For those occasions, as well as for her many dates, Selena stole her clothes from Deardorf’s. Selena told Mamie that it was not really stealing, because she sometimes returned the clothes the next day, although Mamie once refused to take back a red satin corset that Selena sneaked back badly stained and slashed. Mamie would never have reported Selena, but she did not want to steal clothes from Deardorf’s. Selena was irritated by this, especially as she disapproved of the way that Mamie dressed. Mamie, by choice as well as by economy, found her clothes in second-hand stores. She wore one of the printed
muumuus
from her collection of silk aloha shirts and sundresses, cinched around the waist with an alligator belt. If it were a chilly evening, she added one of her elaborately beaded cashmere sweaters from the 1950s, her favorite being an ivory-colored cardigan embroidered with pastel insects. Selena could not understand why Mamie refused to take advantage of the extraordinary opportunity offered by Deardorf’s open racks. When Mamie tried to explain that she liked the way she looked, Selena accused her of being “deeply out of it.”

“You’re in New York now,” she said. “Not some hokey little farm town.”

Mamie was not happy at work. She was not unhappy, either. She recognized that it was something she must do in order to
earn money, so that she could take care of herself. She received a small allowance of two hundred dollars a month from her mother and she knew that she could not stay at Alysse’s too much longer, but she was worried when she read the advertisements for rental apartments in the newspaper. She did not know how she would make her way.

Although her mother had never written much to Mamie when she was away at boarding school and college, she now began to write to her every week.

Mamie was reminded again of her mother’s curious literalness—settling in New York City, Gertrude religious. It made her smile.

Alysse wondered indignantly how her sister could have turned down the Japanese offer to buy the palm grove.

“How she can live on that lonely island, I’ll never know. Their idea of a good time is weird Mexican-sounding music and dinner at five o’clock. I remember going down the road with your parents to someone’s house for dinner and they actually served coffee with the main course, the only course, as it turned out. Can you imagine? Always a bad sign, coffee with pork chops. Besides,” she went on, “you’d be rich.”

“Rich?”

“Loaded.”

Mamie did not mind the idea of being loaded, as Alysse put it, but like Mary, she did not like the thought of Chiefess Deborah’s grove being bulldozed for a swimming park. She wrote back to her mother that she thought she had made the right decision in declining to sell the land.

She wondered where it was that Alysse had been so disturbingly
served coffee with pork chops, but she didn’t think she should ask. She refrained from asking Alysse many things and let her talk on in her irresponsible, absolutely certain way. It was not that Mamie accepted everything that she heard (she was still amazed at the inaccuracy of the belief that childbirth left your vagina a vast marshland), but she kept quiet and listened. Part of it was what she considered the polite behavior of someone who was a guest, but part of it was also an astonished interest in her aunt. Although Mamie did not yet understand that Alysse’s seeming sophistication was really a kind of crude expediency, she did see that Alysse was a woman who would get her way.

Perhaps she believed that she might take on some of Alysse’s audacity during those cozy winter nights when Alysse was not engaged and she invited Mamie into the library and opened bottle after bottle of champagne and instructed Mamie in the fundamentals: “never, ever let your maid work for a friend and do not be overly familiar with the help, for example, you should not have introduced yourself the other night to Mrs. de Coppet’s chauffeur; never sit on
any
toilet seat,
anyone’s
, I don’t care whose, besides, it’s great for the thighs to pee three inches above the seat; try to use the old form of a word, looking-glass, for example, or frock; do not ever get caught changing the place cards at someone else’s dinner;
do
under-dress, it makes the other women look older and vulgar;
do, do
flirt, with everyone, children, husbands, wives, especially wives as they’re the ones who invite you back; try to remember that having a child is nothing better than giving birth to a living insurance policy, you never can tell, it might come in
très, très
handy; never, never underestimate anyone—you can never be sure just who they are. You paid not the slightest attention to Louise Hathaway at lunch, but you must remember it was
Louise who was singlehandedly responsible for bringing the sport of water-skiing to France.”

She was really the first mature woman ever to pay any attention to Mamie. Her own mother had never really had a conversation with her. How could she help but sit mesmerized at Alysse’s knee, drinking the champagne, taking it all in? After the drudgery of her day at Deardorf’s, Alysse was funny and titillating. Mamie was flattered by Alysse’s interest in her. She didn’t realize, of course, especially when Alysse began every conversation with the warning, “Don’t dare tell anyone this,” that Alysse had just had the same conversation with her masseuse or one of her best girl friends, and one might say, looking back, that it was unfortunate that Mamie was so naïve as to think that Alysse really favored her, but how could she have thought otherwise?