I Don't Kiss Read online

  In Aunt Marie's bland, blonde color-coordinated beige and pastel house there were two drawings that didn't fit. I accepted them as part of the decor then, but now realize how witty, sad and insightful they were. Which certainly was not my aunt and uncle's style. Were they by William Steig? One was in the downstairs powder room, a naked man squatting in a box turned on its side. Looking very mournful. The caption read, “People Are No Damned Good.“

  The other may have been in the powder room also. If not, where? It was a gawky girl with glasses and braids, spots on her and a stupid straw boater, knees together, feet turned in. Her caption read, "Mother Loved Me But She Died." Were these my aunt's only murmur about the endless guests and business dealings with which she was surrounded? And her Christian Science mother who undoubtedly disapproved of her mondain life. Not to mention that she had been my uncle's mistress for many years before he divorced his first wife and married her.

  One of her nieces told me much later when Aunt Marie was very old that her great trepidation upon facing death was the meeting of her mother on the other side. Her final words were “What will I tell Mama? What will I tell Mama?" Dreading the explanations she would have to give about taking a married man away from his wife. Since her mother was very much alive when the divorce and re-marriage took place these were explanations that were long overdue.

  Were those pictures placed in the bathroom by my uncle I wonder? So close to his mother whose funeral he did not at tend. He was too busy to go to Ohio. He was ambition incarnate and never had a bad word to say of anyone. For fear it would be repeated to them most likely. He never achieved the fame he dreamed of having, although he was a friend to many heavier hitters. He was an intelligent man of little spiritual quality who believed the ethos of his time. Making it was all. Returning from church one Sunday Uncle Anchor shouted, “Hello, Mr. President!” from the wheel of his car as Herbert Hoover oozed by in the other direction on a backwoods country road, deep in foliage. My uncle had pulled off to let the other car come by. Hoover was enclosed behind glass like an ancient white frog. Lowell Thomas, looking like a no longer young Douglas Fairbanks, was at the wheel. I was deeply embarrassed for my uncle, who flushed with excitement. At least he didn't say, "That's the famous ex-president Hoover." Or "Always remember this day, you saw President Hoover."

  I knew who President Hoover was. He was the pudgy blank who had let the country slip into the Depression that had ruined my father's life. It is hard being sixteen and having to say things like, "Oh, wow" when you want to say, "So what, fool?”

  Although Uncle Anchor's advertising agency was named for him, A.W. Hawthorne Agency, in fact Aunt Marie was a partner and the majority of the clients were there because of her. She was a beauty and fashion expert, a longtime friend of Edna Woolman Chase, the editor of Vogue, and she hung around with the likes of Madame Rubenstein and Elizabeth Arden. I think she had status with those ladies, not only for her obvious experience and abilities, but also because she had been a legitimate beauty in her youth with auburn hair, velvet brown eyes and a perfect complexion and perhaps even more so, had an attractive, well-known and successful husband. None of her friends and business acquaintances could have claimed to have been beautiful nor did they have real husbands. Madame Rubenstein rattled through a new husband from time to time, but her husbands were never real.

  And despite surface similarities to the other Colony wives Aunt Marie had another big difference. She had been Uncle Anchor's mistress before their marriage. Somehow I knew this and it gave Aunt Marie an aura of glamour and sexiness in my eyes that she in no way projected. I must have been told by my mother, who was Uncle Anchor's sister. My mother wasn't prissy. She was Victorian but in a solid country way. I know she believed Aunt Marie had broken up Uncle's Anchor marriage to his baffled and dotty first wife and that she considered this the ultimate female sin. But she also liked Aunt Marie. who was far from being a femme fatale and admired the fact that she had a career and could support herself. My mother frequently retold the story that when Uncle Stoddard, her other brother, was told that Anchor was getting divorced he was outraged and cried out: This is the first divorce in the Hawthorne family:" To which his wife, Aunt Laila the Polish Princess, retorted disdainfully, “That doesn't mean it's going to be the last." Aunt Laila had been the prototypical Gibson Girl in her day and she was never going to let Uncle Stoddard forget it.

  So in some sort of mythic way I knew that Aunt Marie had stolen Uncle Anchor away. And although this had only happened some fifteen years before I lived with them, it might as well have been in the reign of Henry the Eighth. It was LONG ago.

  I don't think it was so long ago for my cousin Regina. She was known as Reggie in the family, and it was Reggie who had taken her mother to Reno to get the divorce. It was Reggie who kept an eye on her mother, my Aunt Adriana, who had added constant depression to her previous state of bafflement. She and my father would have gotten along great. And I think Reggie was the reason I had come to Quaker Colony.

  Reggie was living at Uncle Anchor and Aunt Marie's while she was waiting for her second child. The baby was to be born in August and her husband was to be discharged in August from the Army. I was there so Reggie wouldn't be alone in the large house by herself with her two-year-old, Fred, Jr.

  Who thought of this plan? Uncle Anchor? Unlikely. Reggie? Now I wonder why Reggie wasn't living in her own home. She must have been living somewhere with little Fred. And where did she go when the baby and big Fred both finally arrived? And if Big Fred was in the army, how was it that she was pregnant? None of these questions occupied my mind while I was there.

  I accepted that Reggie was upstairs in one of the color-coded guestrooms. Probably the blue room. That was the best one. I was in the maid's room in the back wing that ended in the garage. Aunt Marie's maid Annie refused to sleep there. Too separate? Too much chance of getting raped? Was she afraid that loonies would escape in the night from the Wingdale Insane Asylum just over our end of the hill? If they had clambered up the wooded mountain behind the asylum they would have come upon this house as one of the first things to encounter on the downward slope. I tried to scare myself by thinking about this when I was alone in the house later but I never could.

  Fred, Jr.'s baby bed was placed in my room so that he would not disturb his mother during the night. If everyone was in residence Reggie would be in the blue room, Uncle Anchor and Aunt Marie in their huge pink bedroom with sun porch on which no one ever went. Annie would be in the rape-free green guest room (the least good one), and any stray guests were put in the yellow guest room.

  Out in the maid's room beside the garage Baby Fred was meticulous. He hated wool. He would not wear a sweater no matter how chilly the evening air. He couldn't go swimming because he would not don the little navy blue wool trunks with white belt that were his. Ridiculous as it sounds now, there were no such thing as little cotton surfing trunks or boxer shorts.

  Cotton was his thing. His sleeping toy was a meticulously ironed and folded handkerchief. Mr. Handkerchief occupied the right upper hand corner of his baby bed. And there was hell to pay if Mr. Handkerchief became unfolded in the night. There were cries and calls; though how he could see his handkerchief always beat me. I would get up, turn on the bedside lamp and sit on the side of the bed and try to get Mr. Handkerchief folded precisely as he had been before. Freddy would peer at me through the slats of his bed and “close" in the folding process was definitely not an option. Any attempt to put back a handkerchief that was not precisely folded as it had been when first ironed met with great hue and cry. Sometimes quite a few attempts would have to be made before perfection was achieved and sleep could be resumed. Fred never had any other problems. He did not have nightmares. He did not want to be cuddled. As far as he was concerned life was fine as long as his handkerchief was folded perfectly and he didn't have to wear wool.

  And as far as I was concerned my life was fine because I had met Tim Harrison. Rather, I had seen Tim Harrison.

  Chapter 3

  Tim Harrison

  He was blond and looked like Van Johnson, which I thought was as good looking as you could get. And he was very self-assured. Being self-assured was a very attractive quality to me at sixteen.

  My uncle and I went into Pawling that first Sunday morning to get the newspaper and Tim was standing in front of the Catholic Church with his family. Mass had just let out. The newspaper and magazine store was there, right next door to the church.

  With him was his handsome red-haired younger brother. And his parents. Both boys were taller than their parents, his father the gray-haired doctor in glasses and his even shorter mother, stocky in her print dress and white hat and shoes. They were all very correct and Anglo-Saxon looking. They didn't have what we would have considered a Catholic "look" back in Ohio, where Catholics were largely Italian.

  Tim, that was his name, Tim Harrison, was standing slightly aside from his sibling and parents, in a seersucker jacket and gray pants, button-down Brooks Brothers shirt and very likely a black knit tie. His brother was wearing a seer sucker jacket, too.

  Even in that college student uniform, in the cool of the green morning, light falling through the leaves to speckle the sidewalks and lawns and shoulders of the Catholics chatting in front of the red brick church, he looked different. A little out of place. A little too handsome, a little smart-alecky, a little smirky. Blond men don't often have that edgy, sexual quality that a man has when he's just standing around waiting to get a hard on. He did.

  Chapter 4

  My Cousin Reggie

  I wonder if I would ever have gotten involved with Tim Harri son if it hadn't been for my cousin Reggie, waiting for her new baby in Quaker Colony. Reggie was very hail-fellow-well-met. She seemed to never me
et a person she didn't like. Big and rangy, a little "horsie" as we called it in Ohio, she had my mother's features on a kind of more field-hockey scale. She and her brother Phil and I probably resembled each other the most in our generation. I didn't look much like my siblings or my parents. Which did not lead me to think I had been adopted. I was perfectly happy to be in the family I was in. They left me alone.

  I was introduced to Tim at a party at the country club the following weekend. They had a party every Saturday night with a small band and occasionally a guest speaker. Or Lowell Thomas himself would talk about something, standing in front of a very large, high stone fireplace, each stone from some different place or country he had visited. This was definitely his club and his colony. I don't think anyone minded. Or if they had they wouldn't have been there. I didn't know the word sycophant in those days. Nor would I have thought it was bad to be one, had I known it.

  It was my first party at the club. I wonder what I wore? It couldn't have been too awful, although we knew nothing about seersucker jackets and white buck shoes in Ohio. Some vague tweed jacket I suppose. And a shirt and tie. Summers were not unduly warm high on the hill of Quaker Colony. Men wore jackets in the evening and women always had a cardigan sweater to put over their sleeveless dresses, the dress usually with a cinched in waist and full skirt in a small pattern. Flowers or check or stripe or plaid. And usually white shoes. The spectator pump in brown and white was a popular look but usually signaled that you were interested in fashion. Those who were above fashion like Mrs. Thomas did not wear spectator pumps. Nor did Aunt Marie, who really was fashionable and didn't want to be classed with women who thought about fashion but weren't in it. Mrs. Dewey wore spectator pumps. That was exactly her speed.

  And Reggie wore spectator pumps. They sort of had the look of golf shoes without the cleats and with heels. Do you remember the man who sold strap-on heels you could fasten over your sneakers? He called it "Instant Fashion." It was sort of that look.

  She was undoubtedly wearing them and some kind of outsize maternity dress at the party. She may very well have had some kind of drink in her hand and a cigarette in the other. She might have been drinking a Dubonnet, that awful sweetish kind of drink. Was it really wine? Aunt Marie thought it was the only kind of faintly alcoholiish drink a lady could imbibe. The cigarette was probably a Parliament or a Marlboro, which was still a stylish Park Avenue kind of cigarette then.

  I asked Reggie to dance. I loved dancing and she was the only woman there I could ask. I would certainly not have asked Aunt Marie. I never saw her dance with anyone, even Uncle Anchor. It would have been like a pair of ocean liners setting off into the Hudson River. Uncle Anchor once told me you had to be proficient in bridge, tennis, golf, riding and dancing to be socially viable, so he must have known how to dance. But I never saw it.

  Reggie said, "Are you sure you want to dance with us?” looking down at her protruding stomach. I said of course I did, and we twirled away. The band was probably playing “Blue Moon” or “Stars Fell on Alabama.” I loved that song. I didn't even mind “My heart beat like a hammer,” the lyricist's desperate attempt to find something to rhyme with Alabama. While we were circling the room we encountered, didn't bump into, Tim Harrison who was dancing with Sally Kelly, who was pretty in a dark-haired, bright-eyed kind of way. Not the kind of look I would have wanted to have had I been a girl. Shortish and peppy. Tim I remembered seeing in front of the Catholic church the previous Sunday. So blond. So handsome. I of course fell madly in love with him on the spot. But in a very “secret love" kind of way. How old could Tim have been then? Probably about twenty-four. Maybe even a little older. He had been in the service. In the time I knew him we never discussed this. I would have imagined he was in the army. He would have looked his best in tan. He was working in New York during the week and was at Quaker Colony on the weekends.

  He was around a lot that summer. And now I wonder why. Why would a handsome ex-service man have wanted to spend his weekends and spare time with his family hanging out with such an extremely respectable bunch of people as in habited Quaker Colony? Was it really that glamorous? It seemed rich and secure to me, but it really didn't seem glamorous. Maybe even with his little edge of wickedness Tim wanted to be home with Mom and Dad and their crowd. They were people from the village, Palmerston, so perhaps the names and homes of Quaker Colony loomed large as a desirable goal.

  We didn't shake hands on the dance floor. Just marked time while Reggie introduced me. I already knew of Sally. Her father, a famous judge, and mother were best friends of Uncle Anchor and Aunt Marie. I was of no interest to Sally since I was not of college age and was never going to marry her. I assumed that I was of no interest to Tim Harrison either. He was just another amour impossible. I had only slept with boys from my hometown. For all I knew there wasn't anybody else out there who slept with other men but me and my friends. But that didn't keep me from falling in love with handsome strangers. Very regularly. I just assumed that I would be infatuated with Tim Harrison. Thrilled to see him in the distance at the little bathing beach or at the country club and within a few weeks have another handsome stranger to transfer my un known affections to.

  Reggie was friendlier with Sally because their families saw a lot of each other but Tim wasn't unknown to her. She said as we moved away, "Come up and see us. Please. We're just sitting up on the hill with a baby and another one on the way and nothing to do." And we all laughed and moved away from each other. The band was playing “Them There Eyes" and we stopped dancing. I was hesitant to dance to a fast rhythm with Reggie for fear of jostling the new baby too much.

  As we sat down Reggie said, "He's very nice. I wonder if he's thinking about Sally Kelly: I guess not. His brother is dancing with her now. He's more her age."

  And this was how the first part of my summer at Quaker Colony went. I spent the week with Reggie and baby Fred in an uneventful way, I mowed the lawn with the hand mower. I went shopping in Palmerston with Reggie. We laughed when the grocer insisted on calling her “Miss Hawthorne." She said, "Oh, Mr. Spinelli, I think I have to insist that you call me Mrs. Vogelsohn or people will get a terrible impression of me." And we laughed as we zoomed back up the hill and baby Fred said as the wind whirled past my elbow and up my short sleeve and billowed the front of my shirt, "Now you look just like Mommy." Fred kept everything to himself at that age. Still does. This was his first admission that he had noticed his mother changing shape. Although she told him that he was about to have a new brother or sister, he never mentioned that he understood this.

  There were no seat belts in cars then, and when children accompanied you they sat on your lap. I enjoyed our sorties with Reggie at the wheel and warm, sweet, serious Fred on my lap, twirling along the narrow blacktop roads of Quaker Col ony, trees almost close enough to be touched, modest stone walls running up and down to accompany the road as it dipped and rose.

  Every day we went to the beach beside the small and sinister black lake with its little pocket-handkerchief of imported sand. I swam well but never got Fred to do more than wade into the lake almost to his knees. He hated wearing his little navy blue wool trunks with the white belt so was usually wearing a sun suit and certainly had no intention of getting it wet and then sitting soggily on the sand. He was fastidious Fred. A fastidious baby and I assume he is still an equally fastidious adult.

  Sometimes we visited Reggie's friend Mimi who had rented a narrow house at the other end of the Colony, sunken in an equally narrow valley that led into town. Mimi was pudgy and prematurely gray-haired and had two children, a boy and a girl. Mimi had just been divorced. This did not make her happy. It mystified Mimi that her husband had left her. She must have been quite pretty and soft and huggable once. It had stood her in good stead in earlier years and now no one wanted to hug her anymore. We used to drive over and collect her and the children from their overgrown niche on the south end road and take them to the beach with us. And occasionally they came for lunch. I occupied myself with Fred most of the time but tried to include her children. The little boy had red hair and must have resembled his father. Although he seemed quite tranquil Mimi talked much about how difficult he was.