I Don't Kiss Read online

  I Don't Kiss

  A Novel

  David Leddick

  White Lake Press

  Miami Beach

  This is a work of fiction. The mention of any real person is completely fictionalized. Any similarity between the names and characters in this book and any other real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Corer design by Ethan Winslow

  SECOND EDITION

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction

  in whole or in part in any form.

  Copyright © 2020 by David Leddick

  Inquiries – [email protected]

  Dedication

  For Mary Brooks Picken Sumner, who did so much,

  cared so much, meant so much.

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Brooks_Picken

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Quaker Colony

  Chapter 2

  Quaker Colony II

  Chapter 3

  Tim Harrison

  Chapter 4

  My Cousin Reggie

  Chapter 5

  The Schmucks

  Chapter 6

  Lonny and Will

  Chapter 7

  Life before Tim

  Chapter 8

  The Clique

  Chapter 9

  The Conga Lesson

  Chapter 10

  Sunday Night

  Chapter 11

  Tyrone Power

  Chapter 12

  Screwing Around

  Chapter 13

  Tallulah Bankhead

  Chapter 14

  Peter Learns to Lie

  Chapter 15

  Tab Hunter

  Chapter 16

  Alone in New York

  Chapter 17

  Tony Larocca

  Chapter 18

  Uncle Anchor Gets Suspicious

  Chapter 19

  Uncle Anchor and Aunt Marie's Sex

  Chapter 20

  When They Get Older, Blondes Have to Go South

  Chapter 21

  The Weekend Away

  Chapter 22

  A Gas Station in Denver

  Chapter 23

  A Stolen Life

  Chapter 24

  Lonny Revisited

  Chapter 25

  Return to Quaker Colony

  Chapter 26

  Tears in the Rain

  Chapter 27

  Aunt Marie Speaks, Finally

  Chapter 28

  Everything Is Peaches Down in Georgia

  Chapter 29

  Late Charm

  Chapter 30

  The Review

  Chapter 31

  A Rash Decision

  Chapter 32

  The Last Word

  Chapter 1

  Quaker Colony

  I thought yesterday of the first time I saw Quaker Colony. It was a landscape entirely new to me and I found it dramatically romantic.

  We had left New York by car at the end of a Friday after noon, my uncle at the wheel, which I thought was uncharacteristic. I would have expected him to have had a chauffeur. Aunt Marie was beside him. She did not drive and this I thought as characteristic also of her. She was too elegant to drive. The maid Annie and I were in the back seat. The trunk was full of luggage. And food. My aunt always traveled with many open canvas bags with handles into which she stuffed books and magazines and food and sweaters in case it got cold on the trip, adding odds and ends lying around on the tables as she moved toward the door. She never really displaced herself. Her environment was always with her. Today, I travel with the same kind of canvas bags. This was only one of many things I learned from her.

  We swept up the Sawmill River Parkway, which was something like a never-ending approach road to someone's grand estate. There were no roadside billboards, no barns with Bull Durham chewing tobacco signs painted on them. No Burma Shave signs spelling out phrase after phrase "They're picking them up," "With a broom and a rake," "He put his hand on her knee," "Instead of the brake." Some drivers still put their hand on the brake in those days. It was 1946. And with the war so recently over. people were certainly driving twenty-year-old cars.

  My life since I had come to live with Uncle Anchor and Aunt Marie was much like the Sawmill River Parkway, Grand and sweeping without any of the detritus of lower middle-class life. No paper napkins and no one ever mentioned it if you left the refrigerator door open. Neither my uncle nor my aunt were ever in the kitchen. And Annie, who was the cook as well as the maid, would never have told me to do anything. I was of the family and therefore beyond reproach. Or even approach.

  Annie was Irish and placed Uncle Anchor and Aunt Marie just behind the Pope as objects of veneration. She always called Aunt Marie "Mrs. Perkins because Aunt Marie's professional name was Marie Banks Perkins. She was quite famous as a beauty and fashion and interior decoration expert. She was Mrs. Hawthorne in her private life, but far more people knew her as Mrs. Perkins. I think she thought of herself as Mrs. Perkins.

  When I first was swept into the grandness of their life in New York I took to it immediately. Their apartment was in what had been the private home of an early New York publishing baron. Just off Fifth Avenue, the building was a more-solid-than-Venice Venetian palace. Great stone pillars crossed the façade above the entrance and within it was dark and silent and smelled of the nineteenth century.

  The apartment was a large portion of the first floor up. There was a sweeping staircase but we always crammed into a minuscule elevator, made more minuscule by the doorman ac companying us to run the elevator. There were no buttons to push in 1946. Only a doorman in uniform.

  Once upstairs you were plunged into the darkness of heavy oak paneling and dim light bulbs. The door of their apartment stood gloomily at the end of the hall and the darkness continued inside. A short hall and a foyer led to the drawing room, which was immense. It was two stories high and reached for yards and yards toward the narrow balcony behind the Venetian pillars. No one ever went out there. Doors and windows were tightly shut and silence reigned everywhere. The publishing baron had suffered from a hearing ailment and noise troubled him. So his home had been made entirely soundproof. This room, which had originally been the library, was lined in cork and if you spoke from the door way to someone across the room they heard nothing. The decor of the drawing room was cream and French blue. Two very large satin couches in cream damask faced each other in front of the fireplace. Over the fireplace was a full-length portrait of Aunt Marie in white satin and sapphire bracelets. Her hair was auburn and her skin almost the same color as her dress. It had been painted by Neysa McMein, which meant nothing to me but everything to most people who saw it. The room had been decorated with its royal blue carpet and English furniture as a setting for the portrait. Aunt Marie's hair was now palest blue, which still went well with the room. Her sapphire bracelets had been gifts from Uncle Anchor long before their marriage. The painting, too, had been done before their marriage, but I was to find out about all this later. For the moment I was suitably overwhelmed by the richness, the silence, the smell of old wood and old fabric where the sun had never shone; and the feeling of security. I thought nothing bad would ever happen to me in that big, heavy, old apartment.

  At the other end of the apartment was the master bedroom, equally high, almost as large as the drawing room and done in rose brocade. The bed alone was as large as my bedroom in Ohio.

  Between these two rooms was the very small kitchen on the same level, and above were sandwiched the guest rooms. A sizable staircase in the same dark wood that was everywhere led up to these bedrooms. In a niche on the landing in a bowl was a large bunch of amethyst glass grapes. If there was one thing I would have liked to have taken from Aun
t Marie and Uncle Anchor it was the amethyst grapes.

  I slept in a large bed in one of the rooms. The window was a half-moon shape with a pleated curtain stretched over it. It hung raised open on a chain over the bed, which gave the impression of a coffin lid. In this window, which was always hanging ajar, came the sounds of the traffic on Fifth Avenue and that smell of automobile exhaust and foliage that has always been so uniquely the odor of New York to me. Something burning, something gray, with an edge of fresh sea air and green leaves mixed in.

  I did not spend many nights in that room. Most of that summer I spent at Quaker Colony, where my aunt and uncle had their country home. Quaker Colony was, and still is, about two hours north of New York by car in the foothills of the Berkshire Mountains. I would remain there all summer, to keep my cousin Reggie company and (I think primarily) to take care of the lawns. Although I was a member of the family and related by blood, I had been invited to stay with them to function as a servant. My father was dead and I needed the money. It made sense to them. It made sense to me. And in all honesty, they treated Annie the maid as one of the family. So why not treat one of the family as a servant? I was unprepared for the mountains. I didn't know that Quaker Colony was on a mountain, and one that rose with little preparation. From the Sawmill River Parkway we passed onto Highway 22. Among the towns we passed through was one with a statue of an elephant (small) in a park (small). Years ago as a circus was passing through the elephant had died there, was interred there and became the most outstanding event of this little burg's history. I always felt a pang for that elephant, taken so far away from the dry heat of Africa or the dank heat of India to be marched all over chilly North America and finally to die so far from home. I have passed through that town many times since and always feel sad for that elephant who trudged through so many joyless days and finally came to an end beside a New York road.

  Highway 22 passed through and by several more towns after the site of the elephant's demise, and then we suddenly turned right and started climbing a green hill on a narrow road, pressed in upon by many trees. The hill continued higher and though there were no glimpses of valleys or other mountains in the distance, I realized we were climbing to quite a height.

  From the road that climbed the mountain we turned off to the left, turned off onto yet another smaller road which clambered over a rise and then descended in front of a white frame house. A frame house with shutters that although built to resemble neighboring Revolutionary War period houses was obviously spanking new. This was Arcadia, the country house. Named for the small town in Iowa where Aunt Marie had been born.

  The clapboard exterior was only a façade. Once through the trim front door with its classic white-painted pediment you stepped onto a kind of polished wood dais. Two wide steps led down from this dais into a large living room furnished in a very modern way in beige and white. But you noticed none of this, for the opposite wall was entirely glass, one large pane. The kind store windows used. The next day I found that the other facade of the house was ultra-modern. A kind of hybrid, schizophrenic house.

  Through the enormous picture windows, the end of the day was falling over the Berkshire foothills. Black mountains folded over one another in the distance, fog creeping lightly in the crevices. In front of the house a long swale of green lawn led down to the fields that continued downhill beyond. (I was to get to know this lawn very well). The sky was paling to a lighter and lighter blue which would soon be gray, then black.

  Aunt Marie was directing everyone to their bedrooms. Uncle Anchor had already climbed the modern winding staircase to go to his room to change. But I didn't want to come away from the long distant view down the valley. This was drama we didn't have in Ohio. Drama, excitement, romance had always been high on my agenda in Ohio. And I was sure here was a setting of the life I wanted to live.

  Chapter 2

  Quaker Colony II

  Shall we start again? When I was sixteen I went to Quaker Colony to stay with my aunt and uncle. Aunt Marie and Uncle Anchor. My father was dead. The war was over. Everyone was okay. Both my brothers had been in the navy. Neither of them had seen action. I think my cousin Phil, Uncle Anchor's son, had been in some naval battles in the South Pacific but he was home. His sister, my cousin Regina, had a husband in the army who was due home soon. No one had died during the war except my father, who had been wasting away from cancer for several years before the war ever started, and died shortly after Pearl Harbor. I think he died because it was just all too much for him. The Depression, the kids, the successful brothers-in-law, the responsibilities an adult male was supposed to relish. I don't think he ever relished any of it. Even in his wed ding picture his handsome face looked depressed.

  So he was gone but things were looking up. Uncle Anchor and Aunt Marie had a very smart new house they'd had built at the Quaker Colony at the urging of their friend Lowell Thomas. The Quaker Colony had nothing at all to do with Quakers and everything to do with getting ahead in the world. The colony was draped across the crest of a highish hill north of New York on the Connecticut border. Only a gray, stark, unpainted Quaker meetinghouse still stood at the top of the hill as a reminder that once the Quakers had been there. The rest of the hill was festooned with large Revolutionary War period white frame houses with green shutters that actually closed, Italian villas from the slightly later Romantic period, a few upright and wing frame houses that originally had been where the local farmers lived, and a large stone country club called The Barn, with a golf course that spread out over the top of a promontory that jutted from one side of the hill and all was green, green, green.

  It was green where I came from in Ohio but this was a dark, almost threatening green. The trees met over the roads that clambered up the hill as well as the road along the crest. The little side roads leading to homes and nearby Connecticut were dank and dark even at midday. Everything smelled of old walls. Low stone walls that ran here and there through the dark woods that had once been unsuccessful fields. This was Robert Frost country. "The woods are dim and dark and deep." I had already read that. In Ohio you felt that the trees stood politely back and let the fields take over with their grain and cows. Here in Quaker Colony you felt the trees were pushing forward at the edges of the lawns, lurking over the roadways, pressing forward everywhere. There was a swimming lake, created by a dam, halfway down Colony hill. The trees pressed forward here, too, as though looking for their sisters and brothers who had been submerged in the glassy, black water. There was no shore, just hanging branches.

  In some of the small houses in that little side valley that contained the lake there was virtually no sun. They were dark and moist and when you visited someone who lived there they emerged from the shadows within the house as though they were emerging from the depths of the black lake nearby. I thought the atmosphere of Quaker Colony was romantic and dramatic and threatening. I don't think Uncle Anchor and Aunt Marie thought it was any of those things.

  The only brick house in Quaker Colony was occupied by Mr. and Mrs. Thomas. As a newscaster and sort of poor man's T.E. Lawrence, Lowell Thomas was the most splendid of the local celebrities. Even Governor Dewey was less important in the Colony. The governor was rather self-effacing in person. Lowell Thomas radiated presence with his brilliant blue eyes and jet-black dyed hair and mustache. His brick home was a true mansion built for a Mr. French, who followed the Quakers in residence on the hill. It was he, I think, who created the lake below his house. I wonder where his money came from? Why do I think New York real estate? Mr. French had owned great stretches of land, lost his fortune, and in time Lowell Thomas came there and started assembling his friends into a true colony. More than new money, these were people who had created important new names in the center of the century. The Reverend Norman Vincent Peale had a home on the crest of the hill and was a jolly golfer along with the rest of the energetic judges and antique dealers and advertising men who had followed Lowell Thomas onto the hill where the Colony stood.

&nb
sp; There were very few people in the Colony who had to be apologized for. This was not the Eastern Establishment of old money, where the children of wealth wasted their time and their health drinking too much and swapping wives. This was not even the new big money that longed for Newport and racehorses and couture dresses. These were hard-working men from the Middle West who may not have been particularly good at handling money but were very good at handling themselves and whatever talent they had. More than anything they wanted to be known. The wives were there to support and entertain and to be charming, but never seductive. The Duchess of Windsor was not a role model for them and they would not have particularly wanted to meet her. She had been a high-class courtesan and to them she was forever tainted. These were large, full-bodied ladies in hats and gloves who entered rooms like ships entering harbor. Only Mrs. Dewey had kept her figure, but her lovely face was always remote and a little embittered. She never seemed happy in her role as the spouse of the famous governor and potential president. But dutiful, yes. Uncle Anchor and Aunt Marie played their parts very well in the Colony. He was hawk-nosed, deep-voiced, a not handsome but dark-eyed and distinguished raconteur and noted after-dinner speaker. She was a ship under sail with a lit tle edge. She wore bigger hats and better shoes than the other ladies wore and solid colors. Navy blue and black in the win ter. Pastels in the summer. Never little flower prints like the other women at the colony. And among these women, she was the only one who worked.