Borrowed Finery: A Memoir by Paula Fox Read Free Book Online

traveling salesman, although when he was a philosopher he didn’t consider that she had.
    One morning when my grandfather left the family home for a week of peddling in Pennsylvania, my father, then a small boy, hid behind a tree and threw an apple core at him, shouting, “Red! Red!” at his redheaded father. He desperately didn’t want him to go away on still another trip for what must have seemed to him a year.
    *   *   *
    Shortly after my grandfather’s visit, the minister drove me to Yonkers, to Warburton Avenue, where my Aunt Jessie Fox and my grandparents lived in a tall, narrow wooden house. I looked forward to the visit with curiosity and apprehension.
    My aunt had thin freckled hands and a slight hump below her right shoulder, which gave her an air of impending wickedness. It was a result, Daddy said, of an early bout with tuberculosis. She smoked continually. Often, as she spoke, she twisted and twirled her hands about. She was ten years older than her brother, my father, and, like him, had a beautiful voice, but she talked constantly, and it became beautifully monotonous.
    She led me through the many rooms of the house. They were either empty or crowded with furniture. In the long living room, on the wall behind a small sofa, hung a gold-framed mirror. It diminished the size of all that it reflected, and showed a scene as tiny and perfect and lifeless as a village inside a spun-sugar Easter egg I had once seen somewhere. When I looked away from it to the real room I was in, I realized how shabby and forlorn the furnishings were.
    Someone very old was sitting in a large chair in front of a table at the end of the room. She was wrapped in many scarves and a blanket but had worked one of her arms loose so she could do the crossword puzzle in a newspaper that lay on her lap. From time to time, she raised her head and stared into the distance through thick-glassed spectacles.
    “Here’s little Paula, Mother,” Aunt Jessie said.
    The old woman made a comment. I’ve forgotten the words, but I recall her voice, soft and cold and small, a sound that might have issued from something that lived on the bottom of the sea.
    Later that day, I sat at my aunt’s dressing table letting a necklace of bright glass beads flow from hand to hand. She told me the necklace had come from Venice, a city in Italy that floated upon water.
    She spoke about my father’s restlessness when he’d been a boy. She had waked many mornings just before dawn to discover her little brother, unable to sleep through the night, curled up on the floor beneath her bed. On other nights, he slept under his parents’ bed. “Even in winter when it’s so cold?” I asked her, startled by the image of him in a nest of dust and cobwebs. “Even in winter,” she replied.
    I noted that day how she spoke of men as “the little fellows,” but when she mentioned my father it was always by his name, Paul. “The little fellows came to repair our plumbing but they didn’t do so well,” she remarked when I told her that the faucet in the bathroom was leaking.
    At one point, she recalled an incident that involved her brother and began to smile. When my father was ten or so, he was standing beside her at a window that looked out on the skimpy lawn at the front of the house. It was a summer evening, and she was waiting for a suitor to call. As the young man came into view, walking up the cement path to the porch, Paul, who had not seen him before, made a derisive remark about him.
    My aunt had laughed. She was laughing as she told me about it, and had laughed as she had gone to the front door, opened it, and given the young man his “walking papers.” She could no longer remember his name.
    My grandmother lived to be 101, kept alive, my father told me some years later, by his sister’s desperate measures. Jessie was like a living bellows, breathing air, day after day, into the ancient woman’s exhausted lungs. When her mother died, Jessie began to