hand.
“Don’t let the wicked city get
you down.”
I sat quietly in my swivel chair
for a few minutes and thought about Jay Cee. I tried to imagine what it would
be like if I were Be Gee, the famous editor, in an office full of potted rubber
plants and African violets my secretary had to water each morning. I wished I
had a mother like Jay Cee. Then I’d know what to do.
My own mother wasn’t much help.
My mother had taught shorthand and typing to support us ever since my father
died, and secretly she hated it and hated him for dying and leaving no money
because he didn’t trust life insurance salesmen. She was always on to me to
learn shorthand after college, so I’d have a practical skill as well as a
college degree. “Even the apostles were tentmakers,” she’d say. “They had to
live, just the way we do.”
I
dabbled my fingers in the bowl of warm water a Ladies) Day waitress set
down in place of my two empty ice cream dishes. Then I wiped each finger
carefully with my linen napkin which was still quite clean. Then I folded the
linen napkin and laid it between my lips and brought my lips down on it
precisely. When I put the napkin back on the table a fuzzy pink lip shape
bloomed right in the middle of it like a tiny heart.
I thought what a long way I had
come.
The first time I saw a
fingerbowl was at the home of my benefactress. It was the custom at my college,
the little freckled lady in the Scholarships Office told me, to write to the
person whose scholarship you had, if they were still alive, and thank them for
it.
I had the scholarship of
Philomena Guinea, a wealthy novelist who went to my college in the early
nineteen hundreds and had her first novel made into a silent film with Bette
Davis as well as a radio serial that was still running, and it turned out she
was alive and lived in a large mansion not far from my grandfather’s country
club.
So I wrote Philomena Guinea a
long letter in coal-black ink on gray paper with the name of the college
embossed on it in red. I wrote what the leaves looked like in autumn when I
bicycled out into the hills, and how wonderful it was to live on a campus
instead of commuting by bus to a city college and having to live at home, and
how all knowledge was opening up before me and perhaps one day I would be able
to write great books the way she did.
I had read one of Mrs. Guinea’s
books in the town library--the college library didn’t stock them for some
reason--and it was crammed from beginning to end with long, suspenseful
questions: “Would Evelyn discern that Gladys knew Roger in her past? wondered
Hector feverishly” and “How could Donald marry her when he learned of the child
Elsie, hidden away with Mrs. Rollmop on the secluded country farm? Griselda
demanded of her bleak, moonlit pillow.” These books earned Philomena Guinea,
who later told me she had been very stupid at college, millions and millions of
dollars.
Mrs. Guinea answered my letter
and invited me to lunch at her home. That was where I saw my first fingerbowl.
The water had a few cherry
blossoms floating in it, and I thought it must be some clear sort of Japanese
after-dinner soup and ate every bit of it, including the crisp little blossoms.
Mrs. Guinea never said anything, and it was only much later, when I told a
debutante I knew at college about the dinner, that I learned what I had done.
When
we came out of the sunnily lit interior of the Ladies} Day offices, the
streets were gray and fuming with rain. It wasn’t the nice kind of rain that
rinses. you clean, but the sort of rain I imagine they must have in Brazil. It
“Don’t let the wicked city get
you down.”
I sat quietly in my swivel chair
for a few minutes and thought about Jay Cee. I tried to imagine what it would
be like if I were Be Gee, the famous editor, in an office full of potted rubber
plants and African violets my secretary had to water each morning. I wished I
had a mother like Jay Cee. Then I’d know what to do.
My own mother wasn’t much help.
My mother had taught shorthand and typing to support us ever since my father
died, and secretly she hated it and hated him for dying and leaving no money
because he didn’t trust life insurance salesmen. She was always on to me to
learn shorthand after college, so I’d have a practical skill as well as a
college degree. “Even the apostles were tentmakers,” she’d say. “They had to
live, just the way we do.”
I
dabbled my fingers in the bowl of warm water a Ladies) Day waitress set
down in place of my two empty ice cream dishes. Then I wiped each finger
carefully with my linen napkin which was still quite clean. Then I folded the
linen napkin and laid it between my lips and brought my lips down on it
precisely. When I put the napkin back on the table a fuzzy pink lip shape
bloomed right in the middle of it like a tiny heart.
I thought what a long way I had
come.
The first time I saw a
fingerbowl was at the home of my benefactress. It was the custom at my college,
the little freckled lady in the Scholarships Office told me, to write to the
person whose scholarship you had, if they were still alive, and thank them for
it.
I had the scholarship of
Philomena Guinea, a wealthy novelist who went to my college in the early
nineteen hundreds and had her first novel made into a silent film with Bette
Davis as well as a radio serial that was still running, and it turned out she
was alive and lived in a large mansion not far from my grandfather’s country
club.
So I wrote Philomena Guinea a
long letter in coal-black ink on gray paper with the name of the college
embossed on it in red. I wrote what the leaves looked like in autumn when I
bicycled out into the hills, and how wonderful it was to live on a campus
instead of commuting by bus to a city college and having to live at home, and
how all knowledge was opening up before me and perhaps one day I would be able
to write great books the way she did.
I had read one of Mrs. Guinea’s
books in the town library--the college library didn’t stock them for some
reason--and it was crammed from beginning to end with long, suspenseful
questions: “Would Evelyn discern that Gladys knew Roger in her past? wondered
Hector feverishly” and “How could Donald marry her when he learned of the child
Elsie, hidden away with Mrs. Rollmop on the secluded country farm? Griselda
demanded of her bleak, moonlit pillow.” These books earned Philomena Guinea,
who later told me she had been very stupid at college, millions and millions of
dollars.
Mrs. Guinea answered my letter
and invited me to lunch at her home. That was where I saw my first fingerbowl.
The water had a few cherry
blossoms floating in it, and I thought it must be some clear sort of Japanese
after-dinner soup and ate every bit of it, including the crisp little blossoms.
Mrs. Guinea never said anything, and it was only much later, when I told a
debutante I knew at college about the dinner, that I learned what I had done.
When
we came out of the sunnily lit interior of the Ladies} Day offices, the
streets were gray and fuming with rain. It wasn’t the nice kind of rain that
rinses. you clean, but the sort of rain I imagine they must have in Brazil. It
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