Mistral's Daughter (37 page)

"You're nuts, Melvin
Allenberg."
 
Teddy was overcome with
the intimate, flattering things he was saying to her so calmly, with such
authority.

"Think about it, Red,
just think about it," he said quietly.
 
"One day, when we're both rich and famous, you'll tell me I was
right."
 
Teddy couldn't answer.
 
His words, that casual "one day"
had acted on her as if they had been a beam of light that shot all the way into
the future, illuminating undreamed-of vistas, as though Teddy Lunel was someone
else who moved lightly in a world where the impossible became possible.
 
Teddy looked down and slowly drew lines in
her maple syrup with her fork.
 
With the
first absolutely calculated provocativeness of her life she asked, "What's
a dirty magazine, Melvin?"

"Oh, so Harriet told
you.
 
I can't even make a collection of
art photos without my family thinking I'm a dirty old man.
 
Red, do I look like a dirty old man to
you?"

"Harriet never said you
were a dirty old man," Teddy said hastily, to defend her friend.
 
"She never talked about you at all until
you asked me to the movies."

"Well, she certainly
never mentioned you either so that’s fair.
 
Anyway I never see her
—
our mothers have a mutual avoidance
pact."

"Did Harriet never tell
you about my family...
 
my father?"

"No
—
should she
have?"

"Well...
 
he was a member of the Abraham Lincoln
Brigade...
 
he died fighting the Fascists
in Spain...
 
he was a great
hero."
 

Melvin blinked with
emotion.
 
"God, you must be proud of
him!"

"I am.
 
My mother...
 
she hasn't really gotten over it.
 
She buries herself in her work... carrying on.
 
She's French, you know.
 
Her family was noble
—
there was a marquis
who lost his head in the French Revolution...
 
then all their land and money was confiscated...
 
but not their pride.
 
Mom's the last of her line...
 
rather I am..." Teddy said in a dreamy
voice.

Melvin swallowed three times
in awe.
 
No wonder Red was unlike any
girl he'd ever met before.
 
"Do you
go out much?" he ventured, after a silence that seemed a fitting tribute
to the unfortunate marquis.

"Mom's terribly
strict.
 
She only lets me have two dates
a week on Friday and Saturday.
 
She makes
me go to bed early on Sunday because of school."

Reminded of the time, Melvin
looked at his watch.
 
"
 
Come on, Red.
 
She said home by eleven-thirty.
 
I
don't want to get you in any trouble."
 

At the door to Teddy's
apartment Melvin Allenberg looked
at Teddy, who had been strangely quiet
during the walk home...
 

"Have you seen
Jane
Eyre
yet?" he asked.
 
He
might be short and funny-looking but he believed in always asking for what he
wanted, no matter what the odds.

"No," said Teddy,
who had seen it three times.

"Would you like to go
next Saturday?
 
If you're not busy
already?"

"Umm...
 
could we make it Friday?
 
Saturday's taken I’m afraid."

"It's a date," he
beamed.
 
Once again his simple approach,
unknown to most boys of eighteen, had let him achieve his goal.
 

"Thank you for a lovely
evening," said Teddy, who had been grudgingly coached in this ritualistic
phrase by her three friends.
 
Melvin
grinned his not-quite-Van Johnson grin, reassured by this conventionality.

"I hope you had as good
a time as I did.
 
Listen, I can tell
that you're not the kind of girl who lets a guy kiss her goodnight before the
third date, but don't you think it would be good for your soul to make one
exception?"

Teddy didn't hesitate.
 
She took off his glasses, and wrapped her
long arms around him tightly, crushing his face into her collarbone with
passionate gratitude.
 
He struggled
free.
 
"Not like that, Red!
 
Come
on, bend down, and hold
still."
 
He planted a chaste kiss on
her lips. "There!
 
Now don't let
anybody else get away with that.
 
Promise?"

"l promise," Teddy
whispered.
 
Male lips felt different from
female
lips, they were prickly at their edges.
 
Who would have guessed it?
 
With her first conscious smile as a flirt she
swayed forward and kissed
him fleetingly before she gave him his glasses
back.
 
"Just don't tell
anybody," she murmured. "It'd ruin my reputation."

16

You told him what?"
Bunny Abbott, Teddy's roommate at Wellesley was astonished.
 
Just as she thought she had gotten used to
the glorious excesses that had made Teddy an instant legend among the four
hundred freshmen who had entered college with her in the fall of 1945, another
caprice surfaced.

"I simply lied by an
inch and a half and said I was six feet tall," Teddy repeated calmly, as
she came back from the phone booth in the corridor.
 
"When they hear that they suddenly lose
interest unless they're six two or three
—
it eliminates the
shrimps."

"Why do you still bother
with blind dates?" Bunny asked.
 
You
can't even fit them into your datebook anymore."

"Oh, they just amuse
me...
 
it's like opening a Christmas
present."
 
Teddy sounded casual
because she knew she could never possibly explain the feelings of
embarrassingly violent love she felt for everything about her new life, for
every detail of college, from blind dates to each and every girl in her
dormitory.
 
From the very first day she
had arrived at Wellesley she had been reborn into an intoxication so unexpected
that at night she lay awake to try to pin down and fully explore the dimensions
of the unbounded joy that possessed her.

Teddy's life had become a
high drama of popularity; every afternoon the dormitory phone rang at least a
dozen times for her and the girl on "Bells" who answered it would
come to the head of the corridor and shout "Lunel" in ironic
resignation, yet without any growing trace of resentment.
 
At Wellesley, Teddy had found at last the
miraculous arena where it was acceptable to be different.

Her class had its share of
brilliant girls who studied half the night; other girls were dedicated to
winning a place on the crew that rowed against Radcliffe; there were those
girls who clearly arrived at college already running for president of the
class, girls who cared for little except art or music or philosophy, and still
others who played fierce bridge all afternoon while simultaneously knitting
argyle socks.
 
If Teddy Lunel was almost
exclusively interested in boys, who cared, as long as she didn't flunk
out?
 
She was smart enough to have been
admitted to Wellesley so she was automatically one of them,
her identity
was, before all else, a member of the class of 1949.

The Wellesley campus was the
noble proscenium for the epidemic of
dating that had unfolded ever
since the distribution of the little red Freshman Handbook, which contained photographs
of each member of the class above their names and hometowns.
 
The book was printed to help the freshman get
to know each other but before it had been out for twenty-four hours, copies
found their way to every man's campus in New England, now swollen by the ranks
of newly returning veterans of World War II as well as the usual freshmen.

At the second week of
freshman year, Teddy had been invited to every major Ivy League football
weekend until Christmas vacation; she had her choice of nine dates for the
Dartmouth Winter Carnival and, if her studies had permitted it, she could have
gone out to dinner with a different man from nearby Harvard every night the
week.

When she went home for
Christmas vacation that year, Maggy realized that her tall child had become a
young woman who beckoned and tempted even when she stood still. The
refrigerator held a heap of orchid corsages, love letters arrived in the mail
every morning, Teddy went out every night and slept till noon.
 
Still, better to be a prom queen, Maggy
decided, and from what she observed, an utterly heartless and merciless flirt,
than to be a girl who could
be taken advantage of by a man because
she imagined that he loved her.

Teddy waltzed through the
first years of college, amorous, fanciful, vainglorious, as memorable as a
first kiss and as impossible to recapture.
 
She whirled from romance to romance as changeably as the tides,
developing an authentic affectation of personality as she felt her power grow.
 
She began to acquire a kind of learned
self-confidence that was translated into a bewitching air of happiness as if
nothing on earth had ever caused her to feel ruffled, or flustered or
perturbed.
 
She started to enter every
room with a buoyant certainty of welcome, she accepted any change as if it had
been planned
for her enjoyment, there seemed to be no disappointment in
her world, no potential for diminished expectations.

I don't believe this is
happening to me, she whispered to herself,
over and over, but she never
said it out loud, for under all her triumphs always lurked the fear that she
might suddenly find herself again the outsider just as suddenly as she had
attained her fantasies of popularity.

Reality was never enough for
Teddy
.
 
Somehow reality didn't manage
to penetrate her unconscious in a way that allowed it to become a rock of
experience on which she could base her emotions.
 
She had been just a child, only six, when she
learned the habit of changing
reality into something brighter in
recounting her days at school to Maggy.
 
Now reality was as highly colored as she could ever have imagined, and
it still didn't satisfy her.
 
Outer
success did not, could never, translate fully into an inner self-image that
allowed her peace.
 
Little by little the
fantasy that dwelled within Teddy, that had inspired her to invent a father who
died in Spain and a noble French background for Melvin Allenberg, was allowed
to grow, to blossom.
 

At a Harvard-Yale game Teddy
told her date, "My father went to Harvard, you know. Before he died he
used to take me to all the Harvard games that were played near New York.
 
He was mount climbing in Tibet when he was
killed
—
but he managed to save all the others."
 
At Princeton, in a group that was discussing
summer plans she grew nostalgic.
 
"While I was growing up I spent every summer at my family's château
in the Dordogne
—
the Lunels have lived in the Dordogne for as long as
anyone can remember
—
 
the château
has a hundred rooms, half of them in ruins
—
I haven't been back since
my grandfather died."
 
At the Dartmouth
Winter Carnival she confided in her date.
 
"Would you mind if I didn't go to the ski jumping? You see my
father was killed right before my mother's eyes
—
he was ski jumping in
the Alps, training for the Olympics...
 
she's never been the same."
 
When
the talk turned to Christmas vacation Teddy remembered her own.
 
"We used to go to my
great-great-grandmother's in Quebec.
 
She
always had the tallest tree I've ever seen
—
a living pine, at least
thirty feet tall
—
and I'd dance around it with all my little cousins
—
there must have been two dozen of them
—
no, I don't see them anymore
—
my mother quarreled with my father's family after he died.
 
They blamed her for letting him join the Free
French when France was invaded.
 
He was
killed
when his plane was shot down
—
he was on a special secret
mission for General de Gaulle...
 
no
one's ever known what it was about, to this day."

Her tales were never
questioned; a girl so extraordinary to look at must surely have tragedy and
romance in her life, and she talked this way only to men she didn't intend to
see in New York where they might meet Maggy when they came to call for her.

Maggy made it a point to
inspect Teddy's dates as often as she could.
 
She was reassured by the ever-changing parade of polo-coated youths who
looked so fresh-faced, so respectful and essentially innocent.
 
They were only children, she thought, and
harmless.

"There's no question
that there's safety in numbers," she told Lally
Longworth.
 
"I'm happier that Teddy's going out with
dozens of boys than just one or two.
 
And
she treats them all so badly...
 
I don't
understand her anymore...
 
if I ever did.
 
I know it's too late now that she's gone away
to school but I feel uneasy, as if I've lost touch with her...
 
as if there's a beat missing...
 
I keep thinking that there must have been
something that I should have done to be closer to Teddy, to know her
better.
 
She mystifies me, Lally, and yet
I gave her everything I could...
 
love
her so, she has a comfortable home, she's always been beautifully looked after,
I bought her the best clothes...
 
oh, I
just don't know..."

"Half the mothers I know
say the same thing about their girls," Lally said comfortably, speaking
from within the untroubled fortress of her little-regretted childlessness which
entitled her to tell her friends how to bring up their offspring.
 
"Once they go to college they become
strangers.
 
Are you sure there isn't
anybody serious in Teddy's life?
 
She'll
be twenty soon.
 
What were you doing at
that age, I wonder?"

"Having fittings all day
—
and living like a woman," Maggy said thoughtfully.
 
"We grew up so much faster in
France.
 
Or maybe it was just the
twenties
—
I don't know, but her boyfriends all seem barely hatched to
me.
 
They're still groping their way out
of the shell.
 
Teddy assures me that
these boys don't even expect
—
much less try
—
to make love to
her... do you suppose that's really true?"

"Of course it is!
 
What are you talking about, Maggy Lunel?
 
Nice boys never expect to make love to nice
girls."

It all depends on your
definition of nice, Maggy thought, remembering how the blue frenzy of the
Hawaiian guitars used to sound in her blood, remembering the wildness of the
red sky of Montparnasse, remembering the melody of a Java that had power to
make a girl of seventeen be embarrassed by her virginity, remembering a spring
night on which five hundred people howled their delight at the sight of her
naked body.

But Lally Longworth was
right, at least for the second half the 1940s, that profoundly conservative period.
 
An overwhelming majority of the class of 1949
at Wellesley remained virgins until their marriages, and in that era of the
tease, Teddy Lunel was responsible for more aching groins than any other girl
in greater Boston.
 
She had been
influenced more than she realized by Maggy’s deep suspicion of men.

A few of her favorite dates
were allowed to kiss her for hours, rubbing themselves frantically against her
in the back seats of convertibles or on the sofas of darkened rooms in eating
clubs or fraternities, striving to gain their orgasms through the thickness of
the clothes that separated their two bodies, for Teddy would not permit any of
them to unzip his fly, to insinuate his hand under her skirt.
 
She triumphed over their desire by refusing
it any release except whatever they could gain without her seeming to
notice.
 
None of them was calm enough to
guess that Teddy always had an orgasm too, easily, without a sound or a
movement that could be detected, produced magically just by the pressure of a
rigid penis straining inside a pair of trousers, a secret orgasm that could
happen even on a dance floor.
 
She never
granted any of them the closeness
to her that knowledge of this would
have produced and, for her cruelty to them, she received the tribute of their
proposals marriage.
 
Teddy was not
indifferent to the men who loved her, but somewhere deep within her there was a
profound lack of concern with their pain.
 
She was so in love with the idea of her popularity that she never fell
in love with any one individual man.
 
This inaccessible, heedless, faraway sensuality was like a few drops of
water to men longing to drink their fill; it drove them mad, far more than if
she had refused them the kisses she spent so lavishly.
 
To have felt the points of her breasts
through her dress, to have held her tumbled fragrance so closely, to have made
her lips swell with too many kisses, but to be stopped there as if by an iron
will...
 
"I just hope, Teddy
Lunel," one of them had said in a rage, "that someday somebody makes
you suffer the way you make me."

She looked suitably regretful
but she knew it could never happen.

If premarital Ivy League sex
was rare in the late 1940s, drinking was the rule.
 
At the very first football game Teddy ever
attended in the Harvard stadium, she had been initiated with a paper cup of the
powerful rum punch that was smuggled up into the stands in one of the red fire
buckets that usually stood along the corridors of Eliot House.
 
The buckets were intended to be filled with
sand to throw flaming wastepaper baskets but they were most often used as
cocktail shakers or punch bowls.