Her middle name was Marshell, after her mother’s people, but they called her Shell.
Her ancestors crossed the ocean early enough to insure her mother membership in the DAR. The family produced two undistinguished senators and a number of very good traders. For the past seventy-five years all the males (excepting the utterly stupid) have attended Williams. Shell was the second youngest in a family of four. Her older brother was one of the unfortunates who did not make Williams. To compound his shame he ran off with a Baptist and made his father bitterly happy when he quarrelled with his wife over their children’s education.
Shell grew up in a large white house on the outskirts of Hartford, where her maternal great-grandfather had founded a successful bank. There were a stone fountain in the garden, many acres of land, and a stream which her father stocked with trout. After the younger son made a reasonable marriage and moved to Pittsburgh, Shell and her sister were bought two horses. A stable was built, a miniature reproduction of the house itself. Her father was fond of building miniatures of his house. Scattered through the trees there were a chicken coop, a rabbit hutch, a doll’s house, and a bird roost, all copies of the original one, which (they reminded their weekend guests) was for humans.
The affairs of the house were conducted with much ritual and decorum. Both the mother and father, deep readers of American history and collectors of colonial furniture, took some pride in never having been tempted to visit Europe.
Every spring Shell was in charge of floating cut flowers in the stone fountain. She took the business of being a girl very seriously. She thought her sister was too rough, wondered why her mother raised her voice, was hurt when she contradicted her husband. Not only did she believe in fairy tales, she experimented with peas under her mattress.
She hated her hair, which was black, thick, and long. After a washing it could not be managed and she was called “Zulu.” But she would not cut it, thinking perhaps of ladders let down from tower windows. She didn’t like her body. It was not a princess’s body, she was sure. It wasn’t growing in the right places. She envied her younger sister’s breasts, her straight auburn hair. She attacked hers with a brush and did not begin to count until she had done at least two hundred strokes. She was appalled when one of her sister’s boyfriends tried to kiss her.
“Why?” she demanded.
The boy didn’t know why. He had expected to be accepted or refused, not examined.
“Because you’re pretty.…”
He said it like a question. Shell turned and ran. The grass seemed suddenly white, the trees white. She dropped the flowers meant for the fountain because they were white and dirty as bones. She was a spider on a field of ash.
“Primavera,” said Breavman when he heard the story. “Not Botticelli — Giacometti.”
“You won’t let me keep anything ugly, will you?”
“No.”
Besides, Breavman could not resist adding to his memory the picture of a delicate American girl running through the woods, scattering wild flowers.
Shell loved the early morning. She asked for the room with the big east window which had been the nursery. She was allowed to choose her own wallpaper. The sun crept over the calico bedspread. It was her miracle.
Apparently life was not all Robert Frost and Little Women.
One Sunday morning she was in her mother’s bed. They were listening to a children’s programme. Gobs of snow, the size of seeded dandelions, were drifting diagonally across the many-paned windows. Shell’s hair, gathered by a black ribbon, lay tame and smooth over her chest. Her mother was fingering it.
On the air a child was singing a simplified aria.
“Daddy’s so silly. He says you’re all growing up so fast that the house will be too big.”
“He’ll never leave his fish and chickens.”
Her mother’s fingers had been leisurely twining and intertwining but now only the thumb and forefinger were at work, a few strands of hair between them. The movement was that with which the bargain hunter tests the fabric of a lapel, but more rhythmical and prolonged.
She was smiling faintly and looking straight into Shell’s face but Shell could not make contact with her eyes. The movement made the hair impersonal. It didn’t belong to Shell. The blanket was moving. With the other hand her mother was doing something beneath it. The same rhythm.
There is a kind of silence with which we respond to the vices, addictions, self-indulgence of people close to us. It has nothing to do with disapproval. Shell lay very still, watched the snow. She was between the snow and her mother, unconnected to either.
The announcer invited all the boys and girls out there to join the Caravan next week, when they would take a trip to the far-off land of Greece.
“Well, aren’t we the lazy things? Up you get, Miss Dainty.…”
Shell took a long time getting dressed. The house felt very ancient, haunted by the ghosts of old sanitary napkins, exhausted garters, used razor blades. She had encountered adult weakness with none of the ruthlessness of a child.
When her father, coming in red and jolly from walking in the woods, kissed her mother, Shell watched very closely. She was sorry for her father’s failure, which she understood was as much a part of him as his passion for miniature houses, his gentle interest in animals.
It was not too many years before her mother began to exercise the inalienable rights of menopause. She took to wearing a fur coat and sun-glasses in the house at all times. She hinted, then claimed that she had sacrificed a career as a concert pianist. When asked on whose behalf, she refused to reply and turned the thermostat lower.
Her husband kept her eccentricities on the level of a joke, even though her attacks on her young daughters were occasionally vicious. He allowed her to become the baby of the house, kissing her as usual before and after every meal.
Shell loved him for the way he treated her mother, believed herself lucky to grow up in this atmosphere of married affection. His patience, his kisses were tiny instalments on a debt she knew he could never cover.
A damaging consequence of this neurotic interlude was a rivalry between Shell and her sister. Their mother developed and encouraged it with that faultless instinct which people who live under one roof have for one another’s pain.
“I can’t remember which of you hurt most,” she reflected. “Good thing you weren’t twins.”
Shell’s father drove her to school every morning. It was his idea that the girls go to different schools. This was a wonderful part of the day for both of them.
She watched the forest go by. She knew how happy he was that she had inherited his love of trees. This was more important than her own delight, and it ushered her into a woman’s life.
He drove very carefully. He must have been unwilling to turn his head to look at her, he had such a precious cargo. He mustn’t have quite believed he had anything to do with her, she was so lovely, and he must have wondered why she believed the things he told her. When she was sixteen he gave her a car of her own, a second-hand Austin.
The school was a continuation of the house. There were many trees and trimmed bushes, many weathered buildings or buildings constructed to appear weathered. The enrolment represented an impressive concentration of old money, so no one could accuse the authorities of pretensions when they disguised the new junior residence with an Early American façade.
Its curriculum was not designed to produce artists, revolutionaries, or ceramicists. A Wall Street version of the little red schoolhouse, it trained girls to ornament society rather than question or subvert it.
Shell was formal. She sat on the grass with a book in front of the library and arranged her dress over her knees.
Let us say the dress was white and the book one of the interminable dialogues of Ivy Compton-Burnett, and let us say that this time her hair was bound in braids.
If she wished to think about something she laid the book down carefully and leaned on one arm; perhaps with one finger she absently turned a page.
She knew she represented something immortal, she was sure. She was the girl in front of the building. Her age in the foreground, her fifteen-year-old body, her hair in the intermittent wind, were instruments to praise the weather and the old stones. She knew this, so she composed her face.
She must be still so that the unknown elderly man crossing the other side of the quadrangle, if he happened to glance towards where she was sitting, would see the perfect thing, the quiet thing, the girl before the preserved doorway, the scene the heart demanded. It was her responsibility. Therefore she was serious, and the world was crumbling into plastic.
She loved the horizontal afternoon light. It seemed to come right out of the shrubbery, and, for precious minutes, right out of the ground itself.
She must find a way to sit in that light.