The Kindness of Strangers

A third winter day with Paula Fox…and this time on Frightsday.

The famous Irish writer James Joyce renamed the days of the week. The one he gave to Friday is timely, given our chaotic times under a deranged monarch.  Paula Fox’s mother was deranged too, not related to politics but to motherhood.  Fox tells the reader that she never learns why ‘her birth and existence were so calamitous for her mother.”  After Paula was born, Elsie left her in an orphanage in Manhattan. Yet fate intervened for infant Paula in the personage of the Reverend Elwood Amos Corning, a Congregational Minister from Balmville.

On Paula’s 5th birthday, she received a card from her father Paul with two five dollar bills, enough for a white dotted-Swiss Easter dress, which Paula and Uncle Elwood (as she calls the Reverend) buy. Clothing becomes a strand woven into this memoir from beginning to the last chapter (California) before the six concluding pages about Fox’s mother and her daughter, also abandoned at birth. If you read the memoir, you’ll understand Paula’s action and her eventual reunion with Linda.

Borrowed Finery begins with two pages in the same time frame as California.  Paula works in a cheap clothing store in Los Angeles and has one thick blue tweed suit, “a couple of sizes too big and sewn of such grimly durable wool that the jacket and skirt could have stood upright on the floor.” I laughed when I read this, remembering a suit I inherited at age 10, which I hated for its scratchy wool and same stiffness.

To see the significance of the first two pages and what occurs in a bungalow at the end, required my second read of the memoir. How Paula ends up in Stella Adler’s Hollywood bungalow is too long to explain. Who was Adler?  I knew the name but only in the second read did I search the internet and read about Stella’s fame as an acting teacher. Adler believed that an actor not use a method but take the place of the character. Adler herself is described as “full of magic and mystery, a child of innocence and vulnerability.” And that evening, Adler, like an actress, moves inside Paula Fox. The following pages end the California chapter.

“I (Paula) was nearly fainting with self-consciousness in such company, and excited by it, sweating in my tweed suit and not only because of the weather.  Stella got up and went into another room. When she returned, she was holding a large photograph of a painting of a dark-haired child.

“My daughter, Ellen,” she said wistfully.  I loved Stella at that moment, and I thought to myself that Ellen was the most fortunate of children, the inheritor of every marvelous thing, especially the velvet dress she was wearing in her portrait.

Then she rose again. When she came back this time, she was carrying a blue covert-cloth suit in her arms as though it were an infant.

“May I give you this,” she asked me.

Everyone in the room had fallen silent. Odets (Clifford) hit a piano key softly, middle C.

“I think it’s the right size,” she said.

Harold Clurman (Adler’s husband) nodded his head and smiled at me. Allen said hurrah, for no apparent reason.  I took the suit.”

                                                        *

“I depend on the kindness of strangers.” This famous line is fitting. Do you know who said it? I love hearing from readers, so please let me know the character and the play!

Next time: Turns out Fox’s sixth novel A Servant’s Tale is in my library.  I’ll read it this week.