Mistral's Daughter (36 page)

Like some Melanesian native
confronted with a dish of sacred
       
food
that is
consecrated to the use of priests, Teddy stepped instantly,
self-protectively away from the forbidden subject.
 
It was an interdiction so strong, so total,
that she dared not ask Maggy more about it.
 
This taboo set squarely in the living center of her life kept Teddy
apart from her friends.
 
None of them had
any real secrets, Ubdeed the prime objective of their friendship was to share
secrets, to confide, to reassure each other, to be companions and comrades in
the difficult business of puberty.

Maggy had offered Teddy few
details about her father.
 
When she
thought Teddy was old enough to understand, she told her that he had been an
Irish Catholic who, before he died of a heart attack, had been prevented from
marrying her by the laws of his church.
 
Her manner as she said these few, halting words was strained, tense and
so forbiddingly sad that it would have warded off any demands to know more,
even if Teddy had dared to make them.

Teddy worshipped her mother
but she was a little afraid of her.
 
Many
people were.

The habit of command, of
being in total charge of a growing, prosperous business had added a formidable
dimension to Maggy's character that was lacking in almost every other woman of
the 1940s.
 
It was a dimension that if it
made it hard to think of her as maternal,
made it easy to think of her
as "The Boss" as all her girls called her, except when she was
angry.
 
Then they whispered to each her
that "Marie Antoinette" was at large.
 
On those days any girl who had gained more than a single pound invented
excuses to avoid coming
into the agency, every model who had stayed out
too late at the Stork Club or El Morocco the night before took special care
with her makeup and no one, absolutely no one, was a minute late for any
booking.

At thirty-four Maggy had the
authentically proud, bravura air of the acknowledged great beauty.
 
When she was seventeen she had looked
years
older than her age; now she looked younger than her peers.
 
Time had only accentuated the daring line of
the bones under her taut, still luminous skin.
 
She had grown into her self-confidence of movement, the spangles of her
Pernod-colored eyes were brightened by wit and experience.

At the office Maggy dressed
in black and gray suits and, in the summer, white suits, tailored to an almost
inhuman perfection by Hattie Carnegie.
 
The Burmese pearls she had received for her twentieth birthday were always
around her neck, a fresh red carnation always pinned to her lapel.
 
Titania of Saks Fifth Avenue designed the
enchanting hats which she wore even when she was at her desk, as did most of
the top fashion editors of the day.
 
Maggy was friendly with all of them; she often had lunch with one or
another at the Pavillon where Henri Soulé reserved one of his best tables for
her every day.
 
If by chance she were not
planning to there, she would have her secretary telephone to free the table.
 

And at night, there was
always Jason Darcy, her best friend, her lover of many years, her
co-conspirator, the man whom she would never marry.
 
It was something Maggy hadn't even been able
to make her dearest woman friend, Lally Longworth, understand.
 
She tried, God knows, when Lally took her to
task years ago. "Are you totally mad, Maggy Lunel?" she had
demanded.
 
"Darcy's dying to marry
you.
 
What on earth is stopping you from
saying yes?"

"Oh, Lally, Lally, I
must never depend on a man.
 
If we got
married I know just what would happen. Slowly, inevitably I’d have to spend
less and less time at work until one day I'd just give up the business and be
Darcy's hostess and travel with him and worry about our houses and our servants
and our dinner parties
—
 
maybe
even our children.
 
I'd be
in his
power,
Lally, and I don't want that ever to happen.
 
I can
not
depend on any man to support
me.
 
Maggy put down her drink and almost
shook Lally to make her understand.

"What if we found out
that we couldn't be happy together and we got a divorce?
 
Then, just tell me, where would I be?
 
You
 
build a business like mine and then drop it and expect it to be waiting
for you when you get back...
 
it isn't
possible.
 
It's much better to go on as
we have
—
Darcy knows that he has me, there’s no other man I care
about.
 
If that's not enough for him I'm
sorry, but that's the only way it can be."

"And I was going to give
you the wedding," Lally said in
 
a tone of exaggerated disappointment, but she was privately
appalled at Maggy's grim view of marriage.
 
Lord have mercy, if every woman thought so clear-mindedly about divorce
before she got married the human race would die out in a generation.

Maggy knew that Teddy must
speculate on her relationship with Darcy, but if she couldn't explain it
successfully to a woman as sophisticated as Lally Longworth, she wasn't going
to try to make it comprehensible to a teenager. Oh, there was so much that
couldn't quite explain to Teddy, she thought with a familiar fear.
 
She had never told Teddy that she, Maggy, was
illegitimate herself.
 
Instead she had
invented a story of being orphaned early.
 
Teddy, who was lost in
Wuthering Heights
, whose bible became
Gone
With the Wind
and who saw
The Philadelphia Story
a dozen times was
too befuddled by high romance to question her mother closely.

And then there was the
problem of Teddy's lack of a definite religion.
 
Maggy's own Jewish identity had never depended on religious observance,
although she had lived in a closely knit Jewish community during her early
years, and Rabbi Taradash had been her example of the dignity and wisdom of
Judaism.
 
From the time she ran away from
home she felt no personal need to carry on specific traditions that, to her,
were somehow unnecessary.
 
She felt that
she
was
a Jew
—
but she had no obligation to be an observant
one.
 
The menorah she had left behind in
Paris had never been sent for and she hadn't had the heart to replace it.

Years too late for it to have
been worthwhile, she sent Teddy to Sunday
school at the Spanish and
Portuguese Synagogue on Central Park West.
 
Teddy spent one bewildered morning discovering that everyone
else
seemed to belong there, to know and care about what they were learning.
 
She decided that nothing could make her
return to a place that made even the pecking order at the Elm School seem
comfortable in comparison.
 
As soon as
she was old enough to take a bus by herself she ventured into St. Patrick's
Cathedral, sat down in an inconspicuous pew and looked about in frightened
curiosity.

This immensity of stone, this
softly buzzing cave of blue and red and golden lights, these ranks of candles,
the many sober, self-contained
people going about their business so
confidently
—
what had they to do with her?
 
No more than the Synagogue school, she
decided.
 
She was no more Catholic than
Jewish
—
no more and no less.
 
To
Maggy she announced that she thought she was a pantheist, or perhaps a pagan,
whichever it was that felt more strongly about apple trees in bloom, the Brontë
sisters, weeping willows, Siamese cats, the hot dogs at Jones Beach, and the
Staten Island ferry.

"Patsy Berg touched a
boy's
thing!"
Sally said with an air of fascinated incredulity.

"l don't believe
you!" Mary-Anne said, stunned.

"If she did, he must
have
forced
her," Harriet said with the look of someone with
superior knowledge.

Teddy said nothing.
 
She would give almost anything just to
see
a boy's thing.
 
Touching it was even
too much to dream about.
 
She roamed the
corridors of the Metropolitan Museum looking in vain for a statue that would
possess a penis that was more than a marble curlicue, as insignificant as if it
were a decoration on a birthday cake.
 
Mostly they were broken off like the noses on the Greek statues.
 
She
knew
that there had to be more to
the whole mystery than the museum revealed.

But she was almost sixteen
and only one boy had ever asked her it on a date, Harriet's second cousin,
Melvin Allenberg.
 
Melvin was short,
almost elfin, and he wore thick glasses, but he was a senior
at
Collegiate, and when he smiled she told herself there was something about his
grin that reminded her, for a split second, of Van Johnson, except that he
wasn't blond or tall or handsome.
 
But,
on the other hand, he didn't have pimples.
 
The next time that
 
Melvin
Allenberg asked Teddy to go to the movies with him she accepted.

From the moment Melvin had
first seen Teddy, his rampaging imagination had grasped her in a hold in which
reverence mingled with longing.
 
Her
height only seemed one more uniquely wonderful thing about her.
 
His fantasy was to live on an island peopled
only
by tall, beautiful women, who would, at his command, do
anything he asked.

Before her date Teddy shaved
the fine golden hair on her legs, the first of her friends to do so.
 
The others watched in depression.
 
"The hairs will grow back in like the stubble
of a man’s beard
—
real tough and scratchy," Mary-Anne warned.
 
"Now you’ll have to do it every
week," Sally said with malice, "for the rest of your whole
life."
 
"I can't believe you're
going through this
for my icky, second cousin, Melvin, even if he is
eighteen
—
you're crazy, Teddy Lunel," said Harriet, the most
disapproving of the lot.
 
"Do you
know what his mother told my mother about him?
 
He's
weird
, that's what.
 
He's supposed to have this terrific I.Q. but he
says doesn't want
to go to college, he's not interested in any sports, he doesn't care about
anything except his stupid camera and that darkroom he's fixed up in his closet
—
Aunt Ethel can't keep a decent maid because Melvin is always bothering
them to pose for him
—
the maid, for goodness sake
—
that's
bizarre
,
Teddy.
 
My aunt found hundreds of dirty
magazines in his room once.
 
You'd better
watch with him.
 
He may only come up to
your shoulder but who knows what goes on in his mind?"

Teddy smiled at Harriet and
started on her left leg.
 
They're
envious, she thought.
 
None of them
has ever had a date.

She sat through
See Here,
Private Hargrove
without daring meet Melvin's eyes, but she was conscious
from time to time he would stare at her profile with something considering and
earnest in the attitude of his round, curly head.

As they had waffles after the
movie Melvin said solemnly,
You
are
the most beautiful girl in
the world, Teddy Lunel."

"I
am
?" she
gasped.

"Without any
doubt."
 
His glasses glittered at
her.
 
"I'm an acknowledged
connoisseur of feminine loveliness, ask anyone at Collegiate."

"1 don't believe
you!"

"It doesn't matter what
you believe.
 
That has nothing to do with
it."

Teddy blushed, her ears
buzzed and she was afraid that tears were
about to come into her
eyes.
 
None of the compliments she had
received in her life from grown-ups had ever meant anything, but this!
 
It was impossible not to know that Melvin
meant what he said.
 
He spoke as if he
were making a documented academic pronouncement, there was an evaluating
quality in his voice and she saw that behind his glasses he had bright, clever
and very big, very clear blue eyes. His whole funny little face was set in an
expression of total conviction.
 
He
looked like some kind of fluffy bird concentrating on an exceptionally fat
worm.

"I've decided to call
you Red," he continued.
 
"Every
beautiful woman needs a nickname that keeps her from being too intimidating
and Teddy makes me think of Theodore Roosevelt. When a guy looks at you, Red,
he sees something he never really believed existed except maybe on the movie
screen, so he gets terrified that he won't have anything interesting enough to
say to you.
 
That's going be one of your
problems, getting people to treat you normally...
 
make ordinary human contact...
 
in fact it's going to be damn near
impossible.
 
All the most beautiful women
suffer from the same thing.
 
It takes a
special kind of man to understand them."