CHAPTER 19

Coming Out

It was 1946. The war was at last over. I’d graduated from school. I was coming out in the summer, and yet I was still in many ways a child.

The male members of our families—various cousins, my Uncle Sonny and Doc’s three sons—had joined the Army, Navy, or Air Force. Pam’s summer love, Jack Bergamini, joined the Marines and was killed in the Pacific. Whit was home from the Air Force, on his way back to Harvard, and in love with one girl after another. He introduced me to many of his friends—undoubtedly at our mother’s bidding—and that was, at last, the beginning of a life that included boys. The mostly older people I began to meet seemed to like me. Astounding! Deep down, I wasn’t really part of the group of sophisticated party goers who drank, smoked, and already looked a little weary despite their seeming gaiety. The war they shared had marked them forever.

I had slimmed down, and I had a good haircut. My mother had bought me a number of beautiful dresses, made for me by Hattie Carnegie or Monsieur Tappe of Bendel’s. At Mainbocher, I was measured for a headless wire and muslin dressmaker’s form upon which a lowcut white lace dress with a bustle waited until I appeared for the final fitting. A column of black lace with a pale pink, heavy silk underslip was molded first to my surrogate body, then to my own. I was changing from tomboy to woman of the world, however superficially. The sensuous fabrics, the form-fitting bodices, and bouffant skirts made me feel like a butterfly. Paillettes sparkled on a multicolored, striped sheath, and a band of tiny flowers circled my chest above a sky blue, sprigged, full-skirted organdy gown. My favorite dress was a joyous billow of watermelon-red silk taffeta, the wide rustling skirt trimmed with black lace. Swirling to Eddy Duchin’s waltzes, hopping to Lester Lanin’s sambas, I never lacked a partner. I felt like the belle of the ball. Two brothers, Bobby and Johnny White, still in their sailor uniforms, did the hornpipe with me one evening under the full moon by the sea. Dancing without a break at all the debutante parties that June and July, boys I’d never laid eyes on cut in on me. Surprised and flattered, I was thrilled to be teased by Whit’s attractive, urbane friends. Movement was all, talk was superfluous. After midnight when the band had departed and there was a breakfast of scrambled eggs and bacon, I dreaded conversation with the dancing boys: what could I possibly have to say to such creatures? I had no idea what interested them, or what we might have in common. I remember going through the alphabet for subjects, trying to avoid the silences that seemed to afflict only me. I watched the prattling, laughing girls with envy. How I longed to be like them, even as I retreated into my shell. Budding friendships never progressed beyond the dancing I so enjoyed. Oddly, I felt out of place; out of touch with them and with myself. “Why are you so serious?” one of Whit’s friends asked, without much interest in the answer. “That’s how I am,” I’d have liked to say. “You’re so much more experienced than I am—you must have some ideas.” But how could I even think of confronting him, when, like many of these men, he, too, perhaps had friends or brothers who had lost their lives in the war. Their wildness, their hilarity, even their excessive drinking were understandable to me.

Despite modest flutters of desire, like the shivers that warn of an impending illness, nothing further developed that summer. I remained pure. From running along piney trails, fly-fishing in Adirondack streams, galloping over Aiken fences, and studying for SATs, I emerged into the world of my grandparents and parents.

For twenty years, those elegant dresses hung in a series of small crowded closets, reminders of my dancing days, and of the miserable terror of being a wallflower—having power, losing power, and, in the end, humiliation. Seldom did I have occasion to wear them after that first coming-out summer. (The words coming out have a very different meaning now.) Those ballgowns were historical remnants of the days when American heiresses were traded to the highest bidder: a European princeling whose wealth needed replenishing, a British aristocrat whose ancestral castle was tumbling down. Fortunately for me, my fortune was no longer large enough, nor would my parents have been prone to that kind of gambling, as much as they enjoyed every other conceivable game.

David, 1971