Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

     Kitty was a small woman whose voluptuousness was something of a problem, being incomplete. Begin at her head: thick chestnut hair (at that time) that seemed to leap from her skull, properly above a wide forehead; big un-innocent eyes, one green, one blue, a slight cast giving her every expression a louche connotation; nice small nose happily not pointing toward a much too large mouth, the size, she said, giving men ideas she was glad to corroborate. She had a certain resemblance as a brunette to Dorothy Maguire including what she called ‘the cleave in my chin.’ Moving on down this feisty personage (as most men were wont, and many women wanted, to do) we come to a strong columnar neck, that of a goddess; that photograph of Garbo with her head thrown back so far it is painful exposes the neck and throat of Kitty, whose shoulders too were Garbo-wide; skip now for good reason to the hips undulative from an eighteen inch waist which after her cunt (Kitty’s word) gave her greatest pleasure as became a Southern belle; her thighs were alabaster solid with the inner muscle, the sartoris muscle, strongly delineated, which she said was because her legs were so often and prolongedly stretched open; the legs were just barely long enough but sufficed and were shapely and her feet were like most women’s gnarled. Her back was a great beauty - later in the nightclub act it was always completely bare to the tailbone of her callipygous arse; her elbows and knees were the focus of a ritual in which lemons were rubbed on, as her hair was treated with olive oil (by me, foreshadowing Vermont and a Maharani and a twice-weekly ritual in the sun watched for all I know by coupling natives in the surrounding shade); Kitty also used honey for arcane purposes, and salt: oil, lemons, salt, honey - the result a woman of biblical allure, a Tamar, a Miriam…Now what of Kitty have we in our verbal reconstruction elided? Ah, her as she would say tits. She did not have any, or scarcely any; the buttons upon her admirably broad chest were those of some adolescences, the tragic ones. She told of frantic kneadings, of consultations (in Savannah, her home) with Gullah-speaking Black women and herbal ‘cures’ one of which caused skin eruptions considerably larger than her nipples…She even used, she said with painful solemnity, the vacuum cleaner to suck from her the submerged breasts and swore that the Hoover and not normal development was responsible for what she had had to settle for. Accustomed to flat brown chests I found little to wonder at in her boyishness but did agree that the heavy padding she used best complemented her lovely hips. The result of her natural abundance and the little bit of artifice was a real traffic stopper. To walk with her was to experience pride and humility, a daily experience for we walked from Perry Street to the Dumont Network in the mid-Fifties and as she was ‘my girl’ I was proud, and as she was ‘my girl’ I was also insulted, by the remarks of truck drivers and those men whose automobiles sidled near us at the curb so that they could name their preference as though she were a waitress dispensing trays at curbside. These men she called ‘chowhounds’ for they always spoke of eating. I felt that I thus learned some of the burden of being a woman. I asked her if she was ever tempted to smash a face with anything at hand instead of smiling, smiling, and returning as she often did sexual remarks (at those times I felt most insulted, probably a sexist reaction in today’s parlance). She asked me to reverse it and see how I felt - if it were women hooting and smacking their lips, or if the men directed their lust at me. I was able with real anger to say I would smash their goddam faces, for Louisville was not yet that far away. I remember her curious regard which said that she did not understand, and it was true that any advance, if she was in a position to return it, was returned. She was one of those women who truly needed men, even their sexual insults, and if one had spoken of objectification she would have hooted: who objectified whom? She was entirely in love with the male form and essence, with balls, cocks, tongues, the swagger that we have come to call ‘macho’, the brutal itness of male focus that made a woman into an it: a cunt.

     Our first Christmas together I went from the studio to the offices to pick her up, about 5.30 in the evening. I was late, she would not mind, both of us thinking of the gala evening ahead and the sweetly decorated room on Perry Street, of gifts, surprises. The dark was streaked with snow that was sticking alternating with sluices of sleet, the heavens with hush and whisper duplicating the sound of tires on Madison Avenue. I was late because I had with my new increase in salary (from $75. to $300 a week) bought Kitty a jewel, an unset ruby. Buying it I had imagined it in her navel, dangling from one ear, worn as a pendant, a diadem, but never in a ring. I had had her smiling a broad ruby smile, had seen the ruby and a sister gracing her nipples, but never a ring. The Village was filled with lovers and we were among them, happily unmarried, living without strings or rubber bands but with plenty of rubbers and Kitty had a diaphragm. She did not like the feel of a sheathed cock but if the urgency precluded that primary insertion she would watch impatient and lascivious the unrolling of the condom. I had discovered that to be without protection was dangerous for she did not trust me to withdraw and with triphammer blows forced me off her when she had miscalculated my timing, blows to the face which left marks and bloodied my nose. Her franticness was morbid, her distrust seemed pathological, and it was the only unattractive thing I ever saw about her in a year of love. As I never gave simply a simple gift, these thoughts were all implicit in the ruby - the bloodied nose, her relief at the onset of each menstruation. Once she asked bitterly, ‘What would I feed a kid from, one of these?’ and I had a glimpse of how far-reaching that adolescent tragedy was.

     In the office I found Kitty alone with all the workers gone except for two Black janitors, young men who swept and re-swept around her feet, who knelt before her to polish desk legs, burnish the wastebasket, and re-do the whole job as unworthy. Kitty seemed amused and spoke endlessly in her broadest Southern as though that too amused her. But when we were ready to go and one of the young men asked in a pleading voice if she would not kiss him Merry Christmas she acquiesced with no hesitation and after a visible exchange of tongues performed the same Holiday pleasantries with the second young man.

     I don’t know if what I felt was perturbation or thrill, at this sight I had never seen before: certainly there was electricity in my response, that neural coursing of heated filaments that seems to be the result of watching someone feel what you yourself have felt and thought it exclusive. I had discovered the tactile shock of Black skins and tongues and muscles a few years before in the Army; a man twice my age had, I guess the word is, seduced me in the middle of a moonlit Phillipine field and since then I have been trying to understand what the crop of lowgrowing fragrant plants could have been, trying to find the knowledge tucked away in my mind along with the revelation of his satin-marble body and sweet mouth. We continued our affairs for months, and when we were sent home together, we made love in a gun turret each night and formulated plans: I would get off the train with him in Indianapolis and live with him; to make this possible he would leave his wife and children. I was serious about him, that remarkable combination of lover and father, and believe that only the image of left children could have caused me, to his surprise and grief, to refuse to leave the train with him in Indianapolis. All the way from California, as we lay in our adjacent top bunks holding hands and kissing, afraid to do more - arrest at the last minute, scandal, dishonorable discharges (much low joking about that one) - I tried to fight off the faces of small Black friends peering at me from the past, whose father my lover had become - this and not the uncomprehending sorrow of the kindly woman who was his wife changed the direction of my life. In the growing empathy I became one of the fatherless ones and nestled with my brothers four abed like fieldmice in their funky nest, as I had done in childhood when a storm kept me from making it home. I recalled how the presence in the next room of the Black father was an absolute comfort, unlike the disturbing proximity of my father whose different darkness could seem more formidable than any storm, and concluded - because I needed to, because it was inevitable - that a Black father is more important than a white father because Black children need more protection.

     On impulse, seeing the men hiding their kiss-induced erections as they went to the restroom, I followed them and heard, as I opened the door, a remark about the hot cracker bitch. I believe I had had it in mind to ask them home with us, or the one who had been so sincere, he of the pleading voice. The other young man had taken Kitty’s largesse slyly. As I say, I believe it had been in my excited mind to hurry integration along in the gaily decorated room on Perry Street but in instances of lust recalled it is difficult to attach dates to certain refinements, and I had recalled and embellished that near-miss many times since. But Kitty and I, as we were destined to do, did finally make the breakthrough as two Southerners with a Black man, and it is one of my best and most painful memories.

Kitty exuded the pungent odor of martinis, when naked and in the attitudes of love. She drank, but bourbon, and it was a mystery to me until I recalled the lemons which coupled with the briny odor of her excitement to produce a martini, which I lapped from her skin. Her perfume was astringent, critusy, and may for all I know have had a gin base. As martinis were then my passion, to drink Kitty was a continuous pleasure. I don’t know if she was insatiable; I never had the chance to find out; we leapt from beds of love to tear out into New York, devouring the Village, and, as my fortunes increased along with my modest fame (such a thing? - stories about me in DOWNBEAT, LOOK MAGAZINE, CORONET - Elizabeth Taylor and I in the same LOOK - Talullah Bankhead and I in some other magazine together - the company I kept!) Kitty and I ventured onward and upward to such as The Rainbow Room, to expensive seats on Broadway; we frequented Sardi’s as became two theatrical aspirants and probably because we were decorative we were given better and better tables. We were often asked upon leaving that place for our autographs and would consult each other silently: whose name to sign tonight? She had signed Dorothy Maguire after a woman assured her ‘I didn’t know you were so pretty offscreen!, and I signed, after a similar hint, John Agar; but we were both chameleons and could get away with a whole spectrum - I with Louis Jourdan and she with (after her hair change) Olga San Juan, Betty Hutton, and once, incredibly, for the hound was French, with Michele Morgan. But Kitty experimented upon herself with all the dedication of a girl expecting someday to do her own makeup (‘No, not Perc Westmore; I am a mistress of maquillage!’) for the cameras. Hours before one of our uptown hunting trips she would begin, big lighted mirror on a trunk, she on the floor, a palette of colors any painter might covet beside her. Came the night of the Gleaming Bronze, a new color for hair which we understood would wash out if you were not satisfied. Gloved, aproned, masked (I think) against fumes, I performed the magic of transforming my girl into a pretty good facsimile of Rita Hayworth. What was left of the muck we smeared onto my hair - mine only for an evening on the town. Glittering red-bronze we drew more than the usual attention, some of it decidedly not approving - those looks reserved for me. Secure in heterosexuality, a defense whose importance can never be overstressed, a revelation to a nominally homosexual man (as was being daily and nightly proved), I pressed on against the hostility and had a good time and Kitty and I took home a nice catch for her - I was not interested - and I slept unperturbedly on my half of the bed while they, stacked on her half, moaned in my dreams; for I was secure in knowing that I would return to my own hair color and persona come morning. Alas. Was it Clairol I should sue, or my gullibility? Washing and re-washing only produced a more realistic bronze, bronze after weathering, a decided green. I was due at a Saturday rehearsal, unusual, but our Star had only returned to town and we all needed to meet her and I needed especially to learn about her range and so forth before I wrote songs for her on the weekend, which we would rehearse starting Monday. We rehearsed four days and played live on the fifth, one and one-half hours of terror on camera. Should I cap myself for the meeting? I owned no cap. Should I wear Kitty’s shower hat? Seeing the entwined sleeping bodies sweaty and sticky in June and jism I had a flash of hatred for my lover whose gleaming bronze hair flowed upon her pickup’s shoulder - flawless hair, the thatch of a goddess, my handiwork. But look what she had put upon my head (and nowhere in the thought did horns obtrude; we were free, we were unjealous, we were very fortunate in fact).

     The cloudy June day extruded one ray of brilliant light which fell exclusively upon me as I walked into the rehearsal hall and faced Elaine Stritch where she sat tailor-style upon the grand piano. Those weekly companions of mine, for we were a television rep company, broke into applause at the green hair and the effect upon it of the sun. Stritch gave me her Tom Sawyer grin and added one more scalp to her belt.

     She was in fact playing a frontier dancehall girl who in the penultimate scene (before the clinch) had to shoot a lot of Indians. Longlegged as a colt in her micro/mini hoopskirt, she sang my song ‘Everytime Another Redskin Bites The Dust’ while firing blanks at everybody including the cameraman. One line of the song should suffice: ‘As for Fleetfoot and Big Storm/How I wonder who’ll keep their wigwarm’ - This was was sung in a marvelous hillbilly whine. This show ‘introduced’ Beatrice Arthur as a schoolteacher who takes off her glasses, lets down her hair, and becomes beautiful, desirable, and brave. Meeting her, we did not doubt that she was brave for she was somewhat large. But the other two requirements? She made it on camera with flags waving; that magic of certain skins which take the lights and scrutiny of the camera and transform them was hers, and those of us huddling at the monitor all expressed astoundment in the same way, pause followed by applause as though she could hear us away off there on the stage. She and Stritch, who does often deserve the misused ‘incomparable’, made that one of our most successful satires, for in the end it became believable, and charming, and it was funny (my lyric example notwithstanding). We were beautifully reviewed and Stritch and I were a new combination, platonic, I hasten to say, though not because I failed to try. An impregnable fortress was our Stritch and because I know her temper I will not go further into revelations of a sexual nature, though I would like to. That summer I went home to Kentucky for a little visit and while I was there she was arrested in Central Park for taking off her bra to sunbathe, and when I called her about it there was already a change in her tone - national publicity will do that to you; and though she performed many selfless acts for me in the still-near future, such as recording a tape of a show of mine for audition purposes, she did go on and disappear eventually into that limbo that waits just the other side of Stardom’s gate. The end for us came when I went backstage to see her in a show that starred her and she said, unpleasantly, ‘Oh, it’s you’ as though I were a tax collector. I mean the end as far as I was concerned in the privacy of my vanished affection. I did go on and see her, and see her new apartment on East Fifty-fourth Street with its hastily painted portrait of her, and it’s little bar foreshadowing her alcoholism, and I did listen to her say the sort of thing we had hooted at together on bicycle rides, lying in grass doing satires of Most Hated Types, drinking huge amounts of martinis in her apartment (her old apartment, shabby and comfortable). Attempting a satirical interpretation of her haughtiness, blase affectations, and such remarks, made petulantly, as ‘I’m the happiest successful girl in New York’, I intercepted, as one would intercept arrows, killing looks and saw that I had lost her as she had lost me. I have been through this so many times with people to whom fame arrives as an affliction that I see it, perhaps in their defense, as a concomitant of fame, as something unavoidable, as part of the bargain. The latest of my friends, a man already deservedly wellknown, to whom this has happened following a great success in Germany and subsequent exposure to ‘the Faubourg’ for a few months, was here, as a stranger, only a week ago. When I had last seen him he was an artist quite austere in his dedication as well as a fine critic. Last week I saw through great distance the petulance, heard the lies that allowed him to leave very early, felt the sorrow but faint now - not much blood left in the ancient wound. I have decided that for some people fame exposes an inner creature that was there all along making compromises, calculating one’s worth in money or negotiable loyalty, making one a promise: just you wait. When fame comes these ones turn inside out like gloves, the markers are called in, and the time of settlement is at hand. It is not that they have not always known ‘who’ they were; it is that they did not dare risk showing it without the aegis of fame. Their discipline, dedication, hard work, grim self-denials: all, so that they might some day be written about in PEOPLE magazine. Once there, see what happens: alcoholism, free-basing, Elaine’s. And no work.

And in the meantime, Kitty and me, me and Kitty. She is at work while I cavort with Stritch, and intensely occupied when I am not there in the evenings, either exploring the reaches of her sexuality or plotting career moves with the help of whomever. As we often said, our room on Perry Street witnessed more auditions than the offices of Cheryl Crawford.

     When I got home if the door was doublelocked I went around the corner and had a drink or several, eventually making the telephone call that would be answered, and home I would go to compare notes. Immediately after sex Kitty was voluble and still excited; often I profited from this excitement and did not mind tasting the other man in her mouth. This courtesy of the right to doublelock and prolong privacy was mine too but I had no inclination to be unfaithful to her, beyond my essayance of Stritch; I certainly was not tempted to betray her - as I thought of it but did not think of it when it was reversed - with another man. It was just that I had had so much experimentation and she had not, and her wings, frightfully experienced-looking, were in fact fledgling.

     A nice paradox was that she felt safe experimenting because I was there, and her lover. Thus men who might be tempted beyond the permissible had been informed beforehand that a lover was due home eventually and a picture of me, looking somewhat like Elvis Presley in the Bad Old Boy sullen demeanor of the satiric pose, was prominent in the room. Only once, some intuition led me to question the doublelocked door and I rattled the knob and hit the frame, then waited in the stairwell to see what would happen. A very angry-looking man hurtled out and a scared Kitty crept down to find me and thank me. So scared was she that she was what it pleased us to call a good girl for over a week. But she never told me what it was the man had done or threatened, to reach out so powerfully and urgently prod my intuition on our behalf. All I was told was that he was from Hell’s Kitchen and hung like a horse.

     We had many such weeks in our year together, weeks that belonged exclusively to us. Some of the things we did: that year saw the revival of the thé dansant at New York’s best hotels and we attended them all, foxtrotting, tangoing, rhumbaing; being Southerners (as we said, safe in New York) we called everything that was not Latin or a Lindy a Round Dance; round and around we went, singing in each other’s ear, discreetly drunk, amorous, under the approving eyes of New Yorkers no more beautifully dressed than we, no more glamorous, not as young, with no more to hide. We took the Staten Island Ferry on hot late nights, back and forth, forth and back, quoting Miss Millay; we dipped into queer bars on Eighth Street, heard Mabel Mercer at the Bon Soir, Kaye Ballard at Le Reuben Bleu, were at La Commedia for Alberta Hunter’s return to New York. Miss Hunter had been in Europe for perhaps twenty years.and the grubby little Commedia was hardly an auspicious place for a comeback; before the name change it had been Tony’s and was famous, but cramped and grubby withal, and an unfriendly air pervaded it. That night a comedian-impressionist named Sheila Barrett was head of the bill and we were there at her invitation. Once we were there she made it clear that we were not there as her guests, the sort of gratuitous remark in which she brazenly specialized, as in her act she had perfected bitchery and high camp. One of the musicians on my television show was there - a man who was also Ethel Waters’ accompanist - and he, Reggie Beane, introduced us to Alberta Hunter. As is the case in many small clubs in New York, there is no proper dressing room and unless the artist is willing to sit on a john all the hours between sets she is generally to be found at a table with someone to keep her company. I performed this office for Lee Wiley when she was briefly at a handsome fly-by-night club called The Jickey, and for Mildred Bailey at the Bon Soir, though I think that place had adequate dressing rooms. Reggie was sitting with Miss Hunter but had to leave after the first show and asked if we would mind taking his place until we were ready to go. Both Kitty and I sensed something bad, something regrettable, in the atmosphere and when Miss Hunter did her first show there were loud interruptions from Sheila Barrett’s table, laughter and remarks, so that they had repeatedly to be told to shut up - to only momentary effect. When Miss Hunter came back to the table she was sweating heavily and gave off an odor that Kitty and I agreed later on was the smell of fear. I had smelled it once before, just prior to a shooting in the bar in Louisville where I moonlighted as a pianist, researching the Haymarket for my musical; the smell came from the person who moments later was shot dead where he leaned over my green-painted piano, his eyes glassy as though the opaqueness of mortality preceded death by a moment; the bullet went through him and out and shattered the glass on the piano into which people put money, called the kitty. My Kitty had smelled the fear on her mother as they - father, mother, child - watched from their stopped car some terrible act by whites against a Black man, in the deep night-breathing country around Savannah. We sat with Alberta Hunter through the night and after her last show we left with her. We wanted to see her home but she forbade it, saying, ‘Saint Nicholas Avenue at this hour of the morning? You children go on home and remember’ - A wink at me, a quote from one of her songs, ‘- one long steady roll!’ A handsome woman, just in her forties I imagine. She was around it seemed briefly then gone and not until her reappearance in the 1970s did one discover what had happened to her.

     Does one continue the montage of Me and Kitty things? They are many, and varied, but not infinite: jazz clubs, the Beekman Tower for drinks, The Cloisters, the one-time-only-I-swear-it trip around Manhattan with its melancholy-inducing sights of ashheaps and squashed cars piled upon the shores of its rivers; Manhattan is best seen from the ground, or a plane; recovery from the boat-trip is slow; one feels its clogged arteries as one’s own; the vigorous names - Spyten Dyvil - and legends, squared-off against the reality of man’s detritus, which always wins. To have seen this Island when all its streams were rushing! Streams now running beneath apartment houses and streets, occasionally breaking through the asphalt only to be subdued: this in a city perpetually in need of water.

     I always knew when Kitty had met someone challenging and mentally would move aside leaving room, for it was in my mind that I was most monopolous of her and only there that the words I love you were said. I had been an abused child and an abused young-adult (as we say nowadays) and being reborn at twenty-four, I had vowed never to put another human being before me or to allow one to seize precedence. But with Kitty, to break my vow was easy, as in a Cole Porter song; the kick she gave was champagne, cocaine, gin and vermouth, for all of which one generally had to pay handsomely, but the word is ‘gave’, and generosity, like water priming a little meadow pump, brings forth the same. To please her was my aim, I wore her colors to each daily joust and was the stronger for it; in the smallish room on Perry Street - to move never occurred to us though we were very solvent - I never felt claustrophobic for in today’s jargon she did not crowd my space; her sexual adventures with other men did not daunt me but may have enhanced our own highly satisfactory dalliance. The new man, the one who broke into the latest segment of our idyll, was a specialist: he specialized in menstruating women. Did he…I asked, tactfully allusive and she said, No, not that, but he loved to slip and slide around in it. She imagined it had something to do with being born (to him) she said, and of course he was perfectly safe. Kitty was quite vulgar in her speech but I am reluctant to quote her, for the mitigating charm and huge humor will be missing as will the radiance of the countenance - eyes raying health and gladness, little nose twitching like a rabbit’s in glee over a fresh lettuce - which both supported and disarmed the filthy mouth. Recently a film of outtakes has been released and on it one of Carol Lombard talking dirty and in her I find restated the sweetness of Kitty at her Anglo-Saxon business, like a cross between the Abbess and the Wife of Bath. Let it go at that.

     After what we called The Blood Bather (put on reserve for Those Special Days) we took a little summer jaunt to The Hamptons and cavorted there in what today would be considered remarkable privacy. The handsome beaches were sparsely populated, the few restaurants uncrowded, Montauk was a cluster of rough buildings with barely a motel among them and was my favorite of all the villages at the end of Long Island: all but forgotten since the flurry of the twenties, the great hotel empty, the skyscraper vacant; sandy, sunny, fish-smelling, briny Montauk, I wish I had bought all of you and kept you as you were, for you were my idea of Paradise, isolate from the languidly chic Hamptons as an eremite alone on his desert rock. When as a child I envisaged the ocean, it was the ocean at Montauk; and the fog there around the lighthouse: the fog and lighthouse as seen at Montauk become definitive. A small house with a blue door opening onto the wide beach and the sea; a diner; a store or two; a restaurant with two rickety tables teetering on the uneven sidewalk very like a snook cocked at East Hampton; and the scrubby growth and the gulls and the surf and the cool to cold night winds. Once having seen it we settled for Montauk. I remember beach plums. Increasing rockiness toward the Point. Declivitous cliffs eroded into nooky coves, an acre of lily pond lying surprisingly just atop a cliff within a few feet of the edge and the drop to the ocean. Bleeding feet. Real exhaustion. Exhilaration of the spirit, of the soul.

     Riding horses from the oldest ranch in America we essayed the Sound side. We left at 4 a.m. for deep sea fishing. Then all at once we both wanted Manhattan and returned on the Long Island Railway. In a changing world…good to know that some terrible things never change. Etc.

But we, not being terrible, had changed. Our longish intimacy at Montauk had I think frightened us. Kitty missed a period, nothing to worry about (but we both remembered a certain night of many wonders).

     One early morning at the Christopher Street stop I tumbled out the subway door drunk and half-asleep. The motorman leaned from his caboose. Black and Beautiful was not yet in the language but he was both. I went with him under the river to Brooklyn on my knees in the caboose, then the notion, the conviction, took me that this paragon just might unstop Kitty’s plumbing with such a plunger, the way you would unstop a sink. I told him I did not want to drain him and told him why. I described Kitty. Yes, he was the proper gent for her. We rode home from Brooklyn, or wherever it was we left the train, in a taxi. I asked Kitty to see what I had managed to bring her, never mind the smallness of the hour. My crudeness did not affect them. A civilized drink was had by all, a bit of chatter. I fell carefully onto my side of the bed and fell asleep. Their love, being a first for both of them - his first white woman, her first Black man - went on for a long time, eventually and authoritatively invading my sleep, so that I had the choice of voyeurism, no favorite of mine, or participation. I chose the latter.

     By November we know that Kitty is pregnant. The question is, Black or white? The question is - only for her - to abort or not to abort; I say over my mutilated body. Then as now, only the most extreme circumstances would lead me to acquiesce in what I can’t help seeing as murder. Genius lights randomly; suppose it was meant to be a Beethoven, an Einstein (and on and on). I believe that everyone I know favors hacking the kid out nowadays, so much so that it seems to have become the point of pregnancy: abortion rather than birth, a new biological wrinkle, the way womanhood (and manhood) is proved. But it was still a serious matter in 1951.

     Kitty and I became domestic. Our room had no kitchen, only a halfsize refrigerator by the bathroom door; I bought an oven to fit over a two-burner stove and began to learn to cook. I don’t know why. She was healthy and capable of running from one end of Manhattan to the other. But I imagine that it was our way of saying goodbye to each other, of giving the kid a little taste of Mom and Dad at home before it was born. For we knew what we were going to do. Kitty’s long-sought chance came coincident with the pregnancy - a Revue in England planned conveniently for the following fall. If the baby was on time she would have recovered by the onset of rehearsals and according to our plan Kitty would be in England ready to go. Her parents were very young, her mother only sixteen years older than Kitty, her father only seventeen. They would be the parents. The birth would be in England. Up until the departure from Savannah Kitty’s mother would mime pregnancy, the nursery there would be refurbished, everything - Savannah, friends’ mind, the very air would be padded like a bassinet. How beautiful! Kitty’s mother exclaimed; I always dreaded being a Grandmother!

     Cable from England: White. Spit and image of Father. Love.

We named him Christopher Townsend. Except of course we did not, anymore than the name I have given to her, Kitty, is her real name. Here the purpose is really to protect the innocent for we all agreed he must remain so and never suspect that the man he met when he was twelve was his father. Kitty went on to become a movie star - his sister the movie star, you understand, and I doubt if he has ever given a thought to the possibility of duplicity. I imagine if she writes her memoirs she will be as selective as I have been and I doubt that even in senility her parents will suddenly decide to reveal to him the truth about his real parents - whatever that means; something other than furnishing sperm and egg, I imagine. And so we are all safe. If that’s the object. I know we thought so at the time.

     After England, pre-Hollywood, Kitty turned to women as her love objects. I had been frightened in Louisville by a pride of lesbians and had never recovered, so the news was unpleasant to me. In Louisville the girls had all resembled Fran Leibowitz; they swaggered squatly, fought with icepicks, and stuffed rolls of socks in the front of their pants. They linked arms around pianos and bawled songs about assholes. Some of them drove trucks. A highly admired, in New York and elsewhere, Louisville belle was said to be of their number. But I was not reassured by her femininity and imagined Kitty with one of the Leibowitz look-alikes, thinking with foul heterosexual despair that the mother of my child was doing that.

     When I at last saw Kitty and my successor - across the street, Kitty now wearing her great blonde bell of hair that was to be her trademark - it was evident that they were very much, as Kitty used to say, ‘in like’ with each other and the older woman’s femaleness afforded me shameful relief, for surely it’s the love that matters? But try to tell that to the homophobes of the world - and I was one, just then.

     Still, gossip has it that it was Kitty’s honest but blatant lesbianism that brought to an end her movie career. She was a real actress, a surprise I have never quite got over, and I hear that she is playing the Russian parts on stages from the Coast to Louisville. I would have liked very much to have seen her Arkadina.