Gilbert - City of Girls
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For Margaret Cordi
my eyes, my ears, my beloved friend
Pilgrims
Stern Men
The Last American Man
Eat Pray Love
Committed: A Love Story
At Home on the Range, by Margaret Yardley Potter
The Signature of All Things
Big Magic
You will do foolish things,
but do them with enthusiasm.
COLETTE
NEW YORK CITY, APRIL 2010
I received a letter from his daughter the other day.
Angela.
Id thought about Angela many times over the years, but this was only our third interaction.
The first was when Id made her wedding dress, back in 1971.
The second was when shed written to tell me that her father had died. That was in 1977.
Now she was writing to let me know that her mother had just passed away. Im not sure how Angela expected me to receive this news. She might have guessed it would throw me for a loop. That said, I dont suspect malice on her part. Angela is not constructed that way. Shes a good person. More important, an interesting one.
I was awfully surprised, though, to hear that Angelas mother had lasted this long. Id assumed the woman had died ages ago. God knows everyone else has. (But why should anyones longevity surprise me, when I myself have clung to existence like a barnacle to a boat bottom? I cant be the only ancient woman still tottering around New York City, absolutely refusing to abandon either her life or her real estate.)
It was the last line of Angelas letter, though, that impacted me the most.
Vivian, Angela wrote, given that my mother has passed away, I wonder if you might now feel comfortable telling me what you were to my father?
Well, then.
What was I to her father?
Only he could have answered that question. And since he never chose to discuss me with his daughter, its not my place to tell Angela what I was to him.
I can, however, tell her what he was to me.
In the summer of 1940, when I was nineteen years old and an idiot, my parents sent me to live with my Aunt Peg, who owned a theater company in New York City.
I had recently been excused from Vassar College, on account of never having attended classes and thereby failing every single one of my freshman exams. I was not quite as dumb as my grades made me look, but apparently it really doesnt help if you dont study. Looking back on it now, I cannot fully recall what Id been doing with my time during those many hours that I ought to have spent in class, butknowing meI suppose I was terribly preoccupied with my appearance. (I do remember that I was trying to master a reverse roll that yeara hairstyling technique that, while infinitely important to me and also quite challenging, was not very Vassar.)
Id never found my place at Vassar, although there were places to be found there. All different types of girls and cliques existed at the school, but none of them stirred my curiosity, nor did I see myself reflected in any of them. There were political revolutionaries at Vassar that year wearing their serious black trousers and discussing their opinions on international foment, but I wasnt interested in international foment. (Im still not. Although I did take notice of the black trousers, which I found intriguingly chicbut only if the pockets didnt bulge.) And there were girls at Vassar who were bold academic explorers, destined to become doctors and lawyers long before many women did that sort of thing. I should have been interested in them, but I wasnt. (I couldnt tell any of them apart, for one thing. They all wore the same shapeless wool skirts that looked as though theyd been constructed out of old sweaters, and that just made my spirits low.)
Its not like Vassar was completely devoid of glamour. There were some sentimental, doe-eyed medievalists who were quite pretty, and some artistic girls with long and self-important hair, and some highbred socialite types with profiles like Italian greyhoundsbut I didnt befriend any of them. Maybe its because I sensed that everybody at this school was smarter than me. (This was not entirely youthful paranoia; I uphold to this day that everybody there was smarter than me.)
To be honest, I didnt understand what I was doing at college, aside from fulfilling a destiny whose purpose nobody had bothered explaining to me. From earliest childhood, Id been told that I would attend Vassar, but nobody had told me why. What was it all for? What was I meant to get out of it, exactly? And why was I living in this cabbagey little dormitory room with an earnest future social reformer?
I was so fed up with learning by that time, anyhow. Id already studied for years at the Emma Willard School for Girls in Troy, New York, with its brilliant, all-female faculty of Seven Sisters graduatesand wasnt that enough? Id been at boarding school since I was twelve years old, and maybe I felt that I had done my time. How many more books does a person need to read in order to prove that she can read a book? I already knew who Charlemagne was, so leave me alone, is how I saw it.
Also, not long into my doomed freshman year at Vassar, I had discovered a bar in Poughkeepsie that offered cheap beer and live jazz deep into the night. Id figured out a way to sneak off campus to patronize this bar (my cunning escape plan involving an unlocked lavatory window and a hidden bicyclebelieve me, I was the bane of the house warden), thereby making it difficult for me to absorb Latin conjugations first thing in the morning because I was usually hungover.
There were other obstacles, as well.
I had all those cigarettes to smoke, for instance.
In short: I was busy.
Therefore, out of a class of 362 bright young Vassar women, I ended up ranked at 361a fact that caused my father to remark in horror, Dear God, what was that other girl doing? (Contracting polio as it turned out, the poor thing.) So Vassar sent me homefair enoughand kindly requested that I not return.
My mother had no idea what to do with me. We didnt have the closest relationship even under the best of circumstances. She was a keen horsewoman, and given that I was neither a horse nor fascinated by horses, wed never had much to talk about. Now Id embarrassed her so severely with my failure that she could scarcely stand the sight of me. In contrast to me, my mother had performed quite well at Vassar College, thank you very much. (Class of 1915. History and French.) Her legacyas well as her generous yearly donationshad secured my admission to that hallowed institution, and now look at me. Whenever she passed me in the hallways of our house, she would nod at me like a career diplomat. Polite, but chilly.
My father didnt know what to do with me, either, though he was busy running his hematite mine and didnt overly concern himself with the problem of his daughter. I had disappointed him, true, but he had bigger worries. He was an industrialist and an isolationist, and the escalating war in Europe was spooking him about the future of his business. So I suppose he was distracted with all that.
As for my older brother, Walter, he was off doing great things at Princeton, and giving no thought to me, other than to disapprove of my irresponsible behavior. Walter had never done an irresponsible thing in his life. Hed been so respected by his peers back in boarding school that his nickname had beenand I am not making this upthe Ambassador. He was now studying engineering because he wanted to build infrastructure that would help people around the world. (Add it to my catalogue of sins that I, by contrast, was not quite sure I even knew what the word infrastructure meant.) Although Walter and I were close in ageseparated by a mere two yearswe had not been playmates since we were quite little. My brother had put away his childish things when he was about nine years old, and among those childish things was me. I wasnt part of his life, and I knew it.
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