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

were acquainted with, whose wealth included vast land tracts on the west side of the Hudson River, just north of the Palisades, as my father explained to me. I was to stay overnight, and for that purpose the rich family provided a room for me across the corridor from Paul and Elsie.
    The idea of spending so much time with them filled me with alarm. But the visit began cheerfully, though a malaise gripped me as soon as I saw them together in the hotel room. I mistook the feeling for excitement.
    Humorously, my parents played with the idea that I should marry the son of the hotel owners, a boy only a year or so older than I was, I guessed. They would arrange the marriage first thing in the morning, they promised, both smiling broadly. I strained to match their mood. It would be like the marriages of children in India. I had seen such children in an issue of the National Geographic. They looked so little. They wore bands of jewels across their brows and large brilliantly colored flowers behind their ears.
    Evening approached. The dark, like ink, filled up the airshaft of their room on the fourteenth floor. My father asked me what I would like for supper; he would order it from room service. My experience was only with the minister’s cooking. “Lamb chop and peas,” I said, partially aware that this was a special occasion: hotel rooms, Paul and Elsie, so tall, so slender, both, a marriage planned for the future so I would be able to live in this room for years, the excitement of great things about to happen. We hardly ever had lamb chops at Uncle Elwood’s house, though we often had little canned peas. When the tray was delivered by a waiter, I looked at it and saw I had forgotten something.
    “There’s no milk,” I observed.
    At once, my father carried the tray to the window, opened it, and dropped the tray into the airshaft.
    Moments later, as I stood there stunned by what my father had done—nothing Elsie did ever surprised me—I heard the tray crash. Through tight lips, my father said mildly, “Okay, pal. Since it wasn’t to your pleasure.…” My mother, behind the half-closed door of the bathroom, where she had gone at the very moment he walked to the window, exclaimed “Paul!” in a muffled voice, as though she spoke through a towel.
    Again, as in the episode of the trunk in Provincetown, I was profoundly embarrassed, as though I were implicated in my father’s act. But nearly as painful was the gnawing hunger I suddenly felt for that lamb chop lying fourteen stories below.
    As the two of them were leaving for the evening, for whatever entertainment they anticipated, there was a loud knocking at the door. My father opened it to a laughing young man, possessed by what was to me an inexplicable merriment. “Foxes!” he cried, clapping his hands, fluttering and capering, calling out praises to my mother. “Your costume, darling!” My father murmured, “Dick is to keep an eye on you,” and at that the young man spotted me and held out his hand, which I took. “Come along, Paula,” he called, even though I was standing next to him.
    I followed him across the corridor to another room. He threw himself down on one of the twin beds, still smiling. “Well, dear little one. What shall we play?” he said, and promptly closed his eyes and fell asleep. Even if it had not been his purpose, he had rescued me from two incomprehensible people. I looked over at his pretty sleeping face in the other bed, and I was overcome with an emotion I had no word for—a kind of love for that stranger.
    I put myself to sleep with pictures of everything I could envisage in the Balmville house, the way I felt its walls around me, and Uncle Elwood, coming and going; the animated spirit of it all.
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    It seems unlikely that I would have been allowed to go unaccompanied on a train to New York City, yet in the winter of 1928, you could place a child safely in the care of a conductor or a porter. In any event, several