My mother was born not too very long ago of my grandma, who named lots of others, girls and boys, all starting fresh. It wasn’t love so much, my grandma said, but she never could call a spade a spade. She was imagination-minded, read stories all day, and sighed all night, till my grandpa, to get near her at all, had to use that particular medium.
That was the basic trouble. My mother was sad to be so surrounded by brothers and sisters, none of them more good-natured than she. It’s all part of the violence in the atmosphere is a theory—wars, deception, broken homes, all the irremediableness of modern life. To meet her problem my mother screams.
She swears she wouldn’t scream if she had a man of her own, but all the aunts and uncles, solitary or wed, are noisy. My grandpa is not only noisy, he beats people up, that is to say—members of the family. He whacked my mother every day of her life. If anyone ever touched me, I’d reduce them to fall-out.
Grandma saves all her change for us. My uncle Johnson is in the nuthouse. The others are here and now, but Aunty Liz is seventeen and my mother talks to her as though she were totally grown up. Only the other day she told her she was just dying for a man, a real one, and was sick of raising two girls in a world just bristling with goddamn phallic symbols. Lizzy said yes, she knew how it was, time frittered by, and what you needed was a strong kind hand at the hem of your skirt. That’s what the acoustics of this barn have to take.
My father, I have been told several hundred times, was a really stunning Latin. Full of savoir-faire, joie de vivre, and so forth. They were deeply and irrevocably in love till Joanna and I revoked everything for them. Mother doesn’t want me to feel rejected, but she doesn’t want to feel rejected herself, so she says I was too noisy and cried every single night. And then Joanna was the final blight and wanted titty all day and all night. “… a wife,” he said, “is a beloved mistress until the children come and then…” He would just leave it hanging in French, but whenever I’d hear les enfants, I’d throw toys at him, guessing his intended slight. He said les filles instead, but I caught that petty evasion in no time. We pummeled him with noise and toys, but our affection was his serious burden is Mother’s idea, and one day he did not come home for supper.
Mother waited up reading Le Monde, but he did not come home at midnight to make love. He missed breakfast and lunch the next day. In fact, where is he now? Killed in the Resistance, says Mother. A postcard two weeks later told her and still tells us all, for that matter, whenever it’s passed around: “I have been lonely for France for five years. Now for the rest of my life I must be lonely for you.”
“You’ve been conned, Mother,” I said one day while we were preparing dinner.
“Conned?” she muttered. “You speak a different language than me. You don’t know a thing yet, you weren’t even born. You know perfectly well, misfortune aside, I’d take another Frenchman—Oh, Josephine,” she continued, her voice reaching strictly for the edge of the sound barrier, “oh, Josephine, to these loathsomes in this miserable country I’m a joke, a real ha-ha. But over there they’d know me. They would just feel me boiling out to meet them. Lousy grammar and all, in French, I swear I could write Shakespeare.”
I turned away in despair. I felt like crying.
“Don’t laugh,” she said, “someday I’ll disappear Air France and surprise you all with a nice curly Frenchman just like your daddy. Oh, how you would have loved your father. A growing-up girl with a man like that in the vicinity constantly. You’d thank me.”
“I thank you anyway, Mother dear,” I replied, “but keep your taste in your own hatch. When I’m as old as Aunt Lizzy I might like American soldiers. Or a Marine, I think. I already like some soldiers, especially Corporal Brownstar.”
“Is that your idea of a man?” asked Mother, rowdy with contempt.
Then she reconsidered Corporal Brownstar. “Well, maybe you’re right. Those powerful-looking boots … Very masculine.”
“Oh?”
“I know, I know. I’m artistic and I sometimes hold two views at once. I realize that Lizzy’s going around with him and it does something. Look at Lizzy and you see the girl your father saw. Just like me. Wonderful carriage. Marvelous muscle tone. She could have any man she wanted.”
“She’s already had some she wanted.”
At that moment my grandma, the nick-of-time banker, came in, proud to have saved $4.65 for us. “Whew, I’m so warm,” she sighed. “Well, here it is. Now a nice dinner, Marvine, I beg of you, a little effort. Josie, run and get an avocado, and Marvine, please don’t be small about the butter. And Josie dear, it’s awful warm out and your mama won’t mind. You’re nearly a young lady. Would you like a sip of icy beer?”
Wasn’t that respectful? To return the compliment I drank half a glass, though I hate that fizz. We broiled and steamed and sliced and chopped, and it was a wonderful dinner. I did the cooking and Mother did the sauces. We sicked her on with mouth-watering memories of another more gourmet time and, purely flattered, she made one sauce too many and we had it for dessert on saltines, with iced café au lait. While I cleared the dishes, Joanna, everybody’s piece of fluff, sat on Grandma’s lap telling her each single credible detail of her eight hours at summer day camp.
“Women,” said Grandma in appreciation, “have been the pleasure and consolation of my entire life. From the beginning I cherished all the little girls with their clean faces and their listening ears…”
“Men are different than women,” said Joanna, and it’s the only thing she says in this entire story.
“That’s true,” said Grandma, “it’s the men that’ve always troubled me. Men and boys … I suppose I don’t understand them. But think of it consecutively, all in a row, Johnson, Revere, and Drummond … after all, where did they start from but me? But all of them, all all all, each single one of them is gone, far away in heart and body.”
“Ah, Grandma,” I said, hoping to console, “they were all so grouchy, anyway. I don’t miss them a bit.”
Grandma gave me a miserable look. “Everyone’s sons are like that,” she explained. “First grouchy, then gone.”
After that she sat in grieving sorrow. Joanna curled herself round the hassock at her feet, hugged it, and slept. Mother got her last week’s copy of Le Monde out of the piano bench and calmed herself with a story about a farmer in Provence who had raped his niece and killed his mother and lived happily for thirty-eight years into respected old age before the nosy prefect caught up with him. She translated it into our derivative mother tongue while I did the dishes.
Nighttime came and communication was revived at last by our doorbell, which is full of initiative. It was Lizzy and she did bring Corporal Brownstar. We sent Joanna out for beer and soft drinks and the dancing started right away. He cooperatively danced with everyone. I slipped away to my room for a moment and painted a lot of lipstick neatly on my big mouth and hooked a walleyed brassière around my ribs to make him understand that I was older than Joanna.
He said to me, “You’re peaches and cream, you’re gonna be quite a girl someday, Alice in Wonderland.”
“I am a girl already, Corporal.”
“Uh huh,” he said, squeezing my left bottom.
Lizzy passed the punch and handed out Ritz crackers and danced with Mother and Joanna whenever the corporal danced with me. She was delighted to see him so popular, and it just passed her happy head that he was the only man there. At the peak of the evening he said: “You may all call me Browny.”
We sang Air Force songs then until 2 a.m., and Grandma said the songs hadn’t changed much since her war. “The soldiers are younger though,” she said. “Son, you look like your mother is still worried about you.”
“No reason to worry about me, I got a lot of irons in the fire. I get advanced all the time, as a matter of fact. Stem to stern,” he said, winking at Lizzy, “I’m O.K.… By the way,” he continued, “could you folks put me up? I wouldn’t mind sleeping on the floor.”
“The floor?” expostulated Mother. “Are you out of your mind? A soldier of the Republic. My God! We have a cot. You know … an Army cot. Set it up and sleep the sleep of the just, Corporal.”
“Oh, goodness”—Grandma yawned—“talking about bed—Marvine, your dad must be home by now. I’d better be getting back.”
Browny decided in a courteous way to take Lizzy and Grandma home. By the time he returned, Mother and Joanna had wrapped their lonesome arms around each other and gone to sleep.
I sneakily watched him from behind the drapes scrubbing himself down without consideration for his skin. Then, shining and naked, he crawled between the sheets in totality.
I unshod myself and tiptoed into the kitchen. I poured him a cold beer. I came straight to him and sat down by his side. “Here’s a nice beer, Browny. I thought you might be hot after such a long walk.”
“Why, thanks, Alice Palace Pudding and Pie, I happen to be pretty damn hot. You’re a real pal.”
He heaved himself up and got that beer into his gut in one gulp. I looked at him down to his belly button. He put the empty glass on the floor and grinned at me. He burped into my face for a joke and then I had to speak the truth. “Oh, Browny,” I said, “I just love you so.” I threw my arms around his middle and leaned my face into the golden hairs of his chest.
“Hey, pudding, take it easy. I like you too. You’re a doll.”
Then I kissed him right on the mouth.
“Josephine, who the hell taught you that?”
“I taught myself. I practiced on my wrist. See?”
“Josephine!” he said again. “Josephine, you’re a liar. You’re one hell of a liar!”
After that his affection increased, and he hugged me too and kissed me right on the mouth.
“Well,” I kidded, “who taught you that? Lizzy?”
“Shut up,” he said, and the more he loved me the less he allowed of conversation.
I lay down beside him, and I was really surprised the way a man is transformed by his feelings. He loved me all over myself, and to show I understood his meaning I whispered: “Browny, what do you want? Browny, do you want to do it?”
Well! He jumped out of bed then and flapped the sheet around his shoulders and groaned, “Oh, Christ … Oh,” he said, “I could be arrested. I could be picked up by M.P.’s and spend the rest of my life in jail.” He looked at me. “For godsakes button your shirt. Your mother’ll wake up in a minute.”
“Browny, what’s the matter?”
“You’re a child and you’re too damn smart for your own good. Don’t you understand? This could ruin my whole life.”
“But, Browny…”
“The trouble I could get into! I could be busted. You’re a baby. It’s a joke. A person could marry a baby like you, but it’s criminal to lay a hand on your shoulder. That’s funny, ha-ha-ha.”
“Oh, Browny, I would love to be married to you.”
He sat down at the edge of the cot and drew me to his lap.
“Gee, what a funny kid you are. You really like me so much?”
“I love you. I’d be a first-class wife, Browny—do you realize I take care of this whole house? When Mother isn’t working, she spends her whole time mulling over Daddy. I’m the one who does Joanna’s hair every day. I iron her dresses. I could even have a baby for you, Browny, I know just how to—”
“No! Oh no. Don’t let anyone ever talk you into that. Not till you’re eighteen. You ought to stay tidy as a doll and not strain your skin at least till you’re eighteen.”
“Browny, don’t you get lonesome in that camp? I mean if Lizzy isn’t around and I’m not around … Don’t you think I have a nice figure?”
“Oh, I guess…” He laughed, and put his hand warmly under my shirt. “It’s pretty damn nice, considering it ain’t even quite done.”
I couldn’t hold my desire down, and I kissed him again right into his talking mouth and smack against his teeth. “Oh, Browny, I would take care of you.”
“O.K., O.K.,” he said, pushing me kindly away. “O.K., now listen, go to sleep before we really cook up a stew. Go to sleep. You’re a sweet kid. Sleep it off. You ain’t even begun to see how wide the world is. It’s a surprise even to a man like me.”
“But my mind is settled.”
“Go to sleep, go sleep,” he said, still holding my hand and patting it. “You look almost like Lizzy now.”
“Oh, but I’m different. I know exactly what I want.”
“Go to sleep, little girl,” he said for the last time. I took his hand and kissed each brown fingertip and then ran into my room and took all my clothes off and, as bare as my lonesome soul, I slept.
* * *
The next day was Saturday and I was glad. Mother is a waitress all weekend at the Paris Coffee House, where she has been learning French from the waiters ever since Daddy disappeared. She’s lucky because she really loves her work; she’s crazy about the customers, the coffee, the décor, and is only miserable when she gets home.
I gave her breakfast on the front porch at about 10 a.m. and Joanna walked her to the bus. “Cook the corporal some of those frozen sausages,” she called out in her middle range.
I hoped he’d wake up so we could start some more love, but instead Lizzy stepped over our sagging threshold. “Came over to fix Browny some breakfast,” she said efficiently.
“Oh?” I looked at her childlike in the eye. “I think I ought to do it, Aunty Liz, because he and I are probably getting married. Don’t you think I ought to in that case?”
“What? Say that slowly, Josephine.”
“You heard me, Aunty Liz.”
She flopped in a dirndl heap on the stairs. “I don’t even feel old enough to get married and I’ve been seventeen since Christmas time. Did he really ask you?”
“We’ve been talking about it,” I said, and that was true. “I’m in love with him, Lizzy.” Tears prevented my vision.
“Oh, love … I’ve been in love twelve times since I was your age.”
“Not me, I’ve settled on Browny. I’m going to get a job and send him to college after his draft is over … He’s very smart.”
“Oh, smart … everybody’s smart.”
“No, they are not.”
When she left I kissed Browny on both eyes, like the Sleeping Beauty, and he stretched and woke up in a conflagration of hunger.
“Breakfast, breakfast, breakfast,” he bellowed.
I fed him and he said, “Wow, the guys would really laugh, me thiefin’ the cradle this way.”
“Don’t feel like that. I make a good impression on people, Browny. There’ve been lots of men more grown than you who’ve made a fuss over me.”
“Ha-ha,” he remarked.
I made him quit that kind of laughing and started him on some kisses, and we had a cheerful morning.
“Browny,” I said at lunch, “I’m going to tell Mother we’re getting married.”
“Don’t she have enough troubles of her own?”
“No, no,” I said. “She’s all for love. She’s crazy about it.”
“Well, think about it a minute, baby face. After all, I might get shipped out to some troubled area and be knocked over by a crazy native. You read about something like that every day. Anyway, wouldn’t it be fun to have a real secret engagement for a while? How about it?”
“Not me,” I said, remembering everything I’d ever heard from Liz about the opportunism of men, how they will sometimes dedicate with seeming goodwill thirty days and nights, sleeping and waking, of truth and deceit to the achievement of a moment’s pleasure. “Secret engagement! Some might agree to a plan like that, but not me.”
Then I knew he liked me, because he walked around the table and played with the curls of my home permanent a minute and whispered, “The guys would really laugh, but I get a big bang out of you.”
Then I wasn’t sure he liked me, because he looked at his watch and asked it: “Where the hell is Lizzy?”
I had to do the shopping and put off some local merchants in a muddle of innocence, which is my main Saturday chore. I ran all the way. It didn’t take very long, but as I rattled up the stairs and into the hall, I heard the thumping tail of a conversation. Browny was saying, “It’s your fault, Liz.”
“I couldn’t care less,” she said. “I suppose you get something out of playing around with a child.”
“Oh no, you don’t get it at all…”
“I can’t say I want it.”
“Goddamnit,” said Browny, “you don’t listen to a person. I think you stink.”
“Really?” Turning to go, she smashed the screen door in my face and jammed my instep with the heel of her lavender pump.
“Tell your mother we will,” Browny yelled when he saw me. “She stinks, that Liz, goddamnit. Tell your mother tonight.”
I did my best during that passing afternoon to make Browny more friendly. I sat on his lap and he drank beer and tickled me. I laughed, and pretty soon I understood the game and how it had to have variety and ran shrieking from him till he could catch me in a comfortable place, the living-room sofa or my own bedroom.
“You’re O.K.,” he said. “You are. I’m crazy about you, Josephine. You’re a lot of fun.”
So that night at 9:15 when Mother came home I made her some iced tea and cornered her in the kitchen and locked the door. “I want to tell you something about me and Corporal Brownstar. Don’t say a word, Mother. We’re going to be married.”
“What?” she said. “Married?” she screeched. “Are you crazy? You can’t even get a job without working papers yet. You can’t even get working papers. You’re a baby. Are you kidding me? You’re my little fish. You’re not fourteen yet.”
“Well, I decided we could wait until next month when I will be fourteen. Then, I decided, we can get married.”
“You can’t, my God! Nobody gets married at fourteen, nobody, nobody. I don’t know a soul.”
“Oh, Mother, people do, you always see them in the paper. The worst that could happen is it would get in the paper.”
“But I didn’t realize you had much to do with him. Isn’t he Lizzy’s? That’s not nice—to take him away from her. That’s a rotten sneaky trick. You’re a sneak. Women should stick together. Didn’t you learn anything yet?”
“Well, she doesn’t want to get married and I do. And it’s essential to Browny to get married. He’s a very clean-living boy, and when his furlough’s over he doesn’t want to go back to those camp followers and other people’s wives. You have to appreciate that in him, Mother—it’s a quality.”
“You’re a baby,” she droned. “You’re my slippery little fish.”
Browny rattled the kitchen doorknob ten minutes too early.
“Oh, come in,” I said, disgusted.
“How’s stuff? Everything settled? What do you say, Marvine?”
“I say shove it, Corporal! What’s wrong with Lizzy? You and she were really beautiful together. You looked like twin stars in the summer sky. Now I realize I don’t like your looks much. Who’s your mother and father? I never even heard much about them. For all I know, you got an uncle in Alcatraz. And your teeth are in terrible shape. I thought the Army takes care of things like that. You just don’t look so hot to me.”
“No reason to be personal, Marvine.”
“But she’s a baby. What if she becomes pregnant and bubbles up her entire constitution? This isn’t India. Did you ever read what happened to the insides of those Indian child brides?”
“Oh, he’s very gentle, Mother.”
“What?” she said, construing the worst.
That conference persisted for about two hours. We drank a couple of pitcherfuls of raspberry Kool-Aid we’d been saving for Joanna’s twelfth birthday party the next day. No one had a dime, and we couldn’t find Grandma.
Later on, decently before midnight, Lizzy showed up. She had a lieutenant (j.g.) with her and she introduced him around as Sid. She didn’t introduce him to Browny, because she has stated time and time again that officers and enlisted men ought not to mix socially. As soon as the lieutenant took Mother’s hand in greeting, I could see he was astonished. He began to perspire visibly in long welts down his back and in the gabardine armpits of his summer uniform. Mother was in one of those sullen, indolent moods which really put a fire under some men. She was just beady to think of my stubborn decision and how my life contained the roots of excitement.
“France is where I belong,” she murmured to him. “Paris, Marseilles, places like that, where men like women and don’t chase little girls.”
“I have a lot of sympathy with the Gallic temperament and I do like a real woman,” he said hopefully.
“Sympathy is not enough.” Her voice rose to the requirements of her natural disposition. “Empathy is what I need. The empathy of a true friend is what I have lived without for years.”
“Oh yes, I feel all that, empathy too.” He fell deeply into his heart, from which he could scarcely be heard … “I like a woman who’s had some contact with life, cradled little ones, felt the pangs of birth, known the death of loved ones…”
“… and of love,” she added sadly. “That’s unusual in a young good-looking man.”
“Yet that’s my particular preference.”
Lizzy, Browny, and I borrowed a dollar from him while he sat in idyllic stupor and we wandered out for some ice cream. We took Joanna because we were sorry to have drunk up her whole party. When we returned with a bottle of black-raspberry soda, no one was in sight. “I’m beginning to feel like a procurer,” said Lizzy.
That’s how come Mother finally said yes. Her moral turpitude took such a lively turn that she gave us money for a Wassermann. She called Dr. Gilmar and told him to be gentle with the needles. “It’s my own little girl, Doctor. Little Josie that you pulled right out of me yourself. She’s so headstrong. Oh, Doctor, remember me and Charles? She’s a rough little customer, just like me.”
Due to the results of this test, which is a law, and despite Browny’s disbelief, we could not get married. Grandma, always philosophical with the advantage of years, said that young men sowing wild oats were often nipped in the bud, so to speak, and that modern science would soon unite us. Ha-ha-ha, I laugh in recollection.
Mother never even noticed. It passed her by completely, because of large events in her own life. When Browny left for camp drowned in penicillin and damp with chagrin, she gave him a giant jar of Loft’s Sour Balls and a can of walnut rum tobacco.
Then she went ahead with her own life. Without any of the disenchantment Browny and I had suffered, the lieutenant and Mother got married. We were content, all of us, though it’s common knowledge that she has never been divorced from Daddy. The name next to hers on the marriage license is Sidney LaValle, Jr., Lieut. (j.g.), U.S.N. An earlier, curlier generation of LaValles came to Michigan from Quebec, and Sid has a couple of usable idioms in Mother’s favorite tongue.
I have received one card from Browny. It shows an aerial view of Joplin, Mo. It says: “Hi, kid, chin up, love, Browny. P.S. Health improved.”
Living as I do on a turnpike of discouragement, I am glad to hear the incessant happy noises in the next room. I enjoyed hugging with Browny’s body, though I don’t believe I was more to him than a hope for civilian success. Joanna has moved in with me. Though she grinds her teeth well into daylight, I am grateful for her company. Since I have been engaged, she looks up to me. She is a real cuddly girl.