Read Borrowed Finery: A Memoir for Free Online Page B

the room, arrested in their flight by small hangers attached to a metal bar, to which they clung, half on, half off.
    I had never seen so many women’s clothes before. I touched them, felt them, pressed against them, breathing in their close bodily smell until I grew dizzy. I pulled open a drawer and discovered a pile of cosmetics.
    I hardly knew what they were for, but memories stirred of Uncle Elwood’s mother, asking that her face be powdered when she was about to be taken for an outing in the car and a large powder puff in his hand as he bent toward her face, or the lips of some of his parishioners, too red to be true.
    My mother was suddenly in the room, as though deposited there by a violent wind. I gasped with embarrassment and fear. She began to speak; I saw her lips move. I bent toward her, feeling the fiery skin of my face.
    “What are you doing?” She was asking me over and over again. I heard her repeat “doing … doing” in the same measured voice, as she stared at my forehead covered with her powder, at my mouth, enlarged and thickened with lip rouge I had discovered in a tiny circular box.
    I began to cry silently. Her face loomed in front of mine like a dark moon. She began to whisper with a kind of ferocity, “Don’t cry! Don’t you dare! Don’t! Don’t cry!”
    I covered my face with my hands. She pushed in the trunk drawers and straightened the clothes. I sensed that if she could have hidden the act, she would have killed me.
    I stood there, waiting for permission to stay or to leave. She left the room as though I weren’t there.
    There was a party that evening. The noise of it came up the narrow stairs to the alcove where I lay on a cot, listening. It was like the sound of the ocean roaring in a seashell.
    *   *   *
    Grandfather Fox appeared at the Balmville house one afternoon. I sat on his bony lap and asked him why he sometimes whistled as he spoke. “False teeth,” he replied.
    I couldn’t recall seeing him before. He seemed pleasant if close-mouthed. I wondered if it was because he didn’t know me despite the fact that there I was, sitting on his lap. Perhaps I was being premature, as I had been with the bishop.
    Then he said to Uncle Elwood, with no reproach in his voice, “You are ruining my son,” and I understood that until that moment he had been holding back those words as if they were hard little pebbles, rolling around in his mouth. I didn’t understand what they meant.
    When I was a few years older, my father told me his father had attended a German university, where he had taken a degree in philosophy. Most of the other students had saber scars on their faces from the duels they had fought.
    My grandmother Fox, Mary Letitia Finch, had been one of five sisters, my father said. When admirers came to court them, their father would stomp into the living room, lift out a sword hanging in its scabbard over the fireplace mantel, and brandish it at them.
    One daughter, Sara Finch, had packed a footlocker at the age of fifty and moved to the Bowery in New York City, where she made the acquaintance of a sailor at a tavern. She lived with him a year until he found a desirable berth on a ship bound for South America. She then returned to her father’s house and proceeded to write love letters, signing the sailor’s name to them and mailing them to herself. She greeted their arrival with cries of joy if her father was nearby.
    My father recalled that another Finch sister had eloped with a Hungarian Jew. They had a child and named him Douglas, a family name. He grew up and became an actor, Douglas Fairbanks. He was my father’s first cousin.
    When Grandfather Fox returned from Germany to the United States, he had been able to find work only as a traveling salesman, a drummer, selling medical supplies, going from town to town lugging a huge black sample case.
    My grandmother’s tyrannical father had felt that his daughter had married beneath her when her husband became a