Cheat and Charmer (90 page)

“Oh no you’re not,” she said. “We’re not citizens here. We’re v-v-v-visitors. If you get arrested you could jeopardize our residence permits, and for Christ’s sake,” she added, “don’t sign anything. Not now or ever.”

“I won’t get arrested,” Peter said, looking out the window with a put-upon expression. “But I’ll sign anything I damn well want. Mom, why don’t you just let me out here. We’re in St. John’s Wood. I’ll walk the rest of the way.”

“No, I’m driving you there, and that’s that. Now tell me again about this kid. Did you say he was born in California?”

“Yeah. It’s the weirdest thing. I was talking to him at school, and he had
this YCND button on his jacket. I asked him about it, and when I said I was American and from L.A., he said he was born there, too, and that his dad had been some kind of screenwriter. But he doesn’t remember it. He was only four or something when they moved here.”

“What’s his name again—your friend, I mean?”

“Gideon Metzger.”

“Oh,” she said. She was sure now.

“And,” Peter said, “he has this really pretty sister.…”

“Oh?” said Dinah. She smiled at him knowingly, but all the same abruptly edged the car over to the side of the road and brought it to a complete stop.

“What’s the big idea, Mom! What’re you doing?”

Since the Laskers had left Los Angeles, Peter’s voice had changed. It cracked often, and was deepening unmistakably. He was shooting up, too, getting taller and thinner by the minute, and had started wearing glasses. When he wasn’t in his school uniform, he usually wore a big navy-blue pullover from Marks & Spencer and his school muffler wrapped around his neck. It was as if every day, except for his accent, he was losing the traces of his California childhood and becoming instead a thin, delicate-featured, serious-looking young man, completely at home in this new city he loved, consumed by a secret, independent life that he pursued ecstatically on the London tube, free of the humiliation of having to be driven everywhere, as he had been in Los Angeles.

“Listen to me, Peter,” she began. “There is something I have to tell you.”

“What?” He looked bewildered, annoyed, and impatient. “Do you have to tell me now? I don’t want to miss the meeting.”

“You won’t miss the meeting. But there’s something you have to know.” She lit a cigarette with the car lighter, and then turned and looked directly at her son. “I used to know Gideon Metzger’s parents. Their names are Norman and Helen. You’re right: he was a screenwriter, and a pretty good one, too. But he was blacklisted; that’s why they’re living over here. Do you know what the blacklist is?”

“No.”

“Well, I’m going to tell you.”

And she did. “If your friend’s parents have figured out that you’re my son,” she said, when she had finished, “the same way I’ve figured out that Gideon is theirs, you might walk in there today only to be thrown out. Because
I named Norman Metzger when I t-t-t-testified.” She had placed her arms on the steering wheel and was looking right at him, searching his face. “They probably won’t want him to associate with you. A lot of people hate me and consider me a traitor, a fink, and a stool pigeon. And among those who do, the Metzgers probably have me right at the top of their shit list.” She pulled the lighter from the dashboard and lit another cigarette. “And that’s why you aren’t walking into that house alone.”

His eyes opened very wide. “You were a
Communist?
A
real
one?” There was surprise and something close to delight, or pleased amazement, in his expression. But then, as if the rest of what she said had just sunk in, he added, “You named people? You
ratted
? You
told
on people? How could you
do
that? That’s
terrible
.”

She started the car and pulled out into traffic. “I did it to protect D-D-D-Dad.”

“To protect
Dad
? God, Mom,” he said, his voice cracking. “I can’t believe it! My mom a
fink
! And for whom? For Jake Lasker. All-time asshole. Don’t think I don’t know about Veevi and that girl. I know all about it. We listened to you fighting with Dad—Lorna and me. We heard you yelling at him. We heard you crying and stuff. But Jesus, Mom, you named people’s names. For him! Shit, Mom, why’d you have to do it?”

She opened her mouth to say something, then thought better of it and simply sighed. “I remember Norman and Helen out at Veevi and Stefan’s,” she said quietly. “I didn’t like him, and someday I’ll tell you why. But she was nice—very nice. I remember one night we all went grunion hunting. Everybody was running into the waves, trying to catch these millions of slithery little f-f-f-fish. We were very young, and they’d just come back from Russia and were telling everybody that night how great it was over there. The grunion were flopping up onto the beach, and we all had baskets to catch them. God, I remember it like it was y-y-y-yesterday.”

“Mom, let’s go. I’m going to be late.”

As she drove, and found her way with the help of his
London A–Z
, which he laughingly pronounced “zed,” she saw his fists repeatedly clenching and unclenching. “It’s down there,” he said. “There. There’s the number. Stop, Mom,” he said. “Let me out.”

She pulled over and began to open the door, then felt his hand clamp down on her left shoulder. “You are
not
going in with me.”

“Hush up,” she said sharply. “I’m taking you to meet them whether you like it or not.”

“No, Mom.” His hand was firm and dug into her flesh, pushing her away. “I can take care of myself. I don’t want to be protected.”

“I’m not letting you go in there without facing those people myself. I have to protect you. I’m your mother. That’s my job.”

“Oh, Mom, cut it out. I’m fifteen, for Christ’s sake.” He let go of her shoulder but took her chin in his hand and then stroked her cheek. “You don’t have to protect anyone anymore,” he said. “You protected Dad and you tried to protect Veevi, and look what happened.”

“What if they say something to you? What if they throw you out of the house?”

“Then they’ll throw me out of the house. Big deal. Look, Mom. I wish you hadn’t, you know, done this thing with the names. I really, really wish you hadn’t done it. But I don’t care what his parents think. That’s their tough luck. This time, I’m protecting
you
. And I’m going in there alone.”

He got out of the car and came around to her side, where she looked up at him through the open window. “I’m not coming home for dinner,” he said.

Then he pushed down the lock on her side.

“When will you be home? You have school tomorrow.”

“So what? Don’t wait up. I might see if I can find a concert tonight, after the meeting, over at the Albert Hall.”

He grinned at her and shook his head at the same time. “Jesus, Mom. You were a real dope. What was the matter with you, anyway?”

She shrugged. Love, she said to him silently. Love. Love. Love.

“Am-scray,” he said. “Go to the Heath, Mom. Take a walk. Feed the ducks. Okay? See ya later, alligator.”

She watched him, hands in his peacoat, casually wait for a car to pass, and then cross the street and walk up a stone path to the front door of a brick house. He knocked and the door opened, but she couldn’t see who had opened it. Then he disappeared inside.

She drove to the Heath, got out, and began walking.

The afternoon was cloudy, with a tumultuous vaulted sky whose pale blue and gray haze softened and misted the yellowing leaves, what few were left, on the oaks and planes and beeches that trembled in the cold. Oddly enough, the weather now often seemed familiar. London made her
think of Pittsburgh—the grayness and the grime, the smoke and the smell of coal dust in the air, the children on the streets with their pink cheeks and grimy raincoats, who could have been herself and Veevi so long ago. Every day she was no sooner out in the streets, doing her errands with her string bag on her wrist, than the bleak weather knocked her backward into the past—the streets of Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, where she was always, always, guarding her little sister.

She came to a spot high on Parliament Hill, tightened the belt of her trenchcoat, and sat down on the grass to smoke a cigarette. As far as she could see, all London lay before her—sprawling, teeming, a place where she still knew practically no one. The city stretched out as far as she could see. How many, she wondered, of those millions I do not know, and who don’t know me, are deluded and deceived, as I was, are fools, as I have been?

I haven’t left Jake, she reminded herself. I still haven’t made my move. It seemed impossible that she wouldn’t, someday, but she hadn’t the least idea how. She had lived with him for so long, and she had never stopped loving him. She couldn’t imagine not loving him. But continue to live with him? She couldn’t, and yet she was, still.

What she did was walk—all day, every day, when she was doing her daily chores and when she wasn’t. She walked and looked around her and thought and didn’t think. She walked down to Blackfriars Bridge and sat in the garden of Gray’s Inn and thought about Stefan and Veevi, Mike and Veevi, her parents and Veevi, Jake and Veevi, herself and Veevi. She walked in Regent’s Park and asked herself, How did things end up the way they did? What am I going to do? It wasn’t that she lacked answers. There were dozens of them, hundreds of them—answers, reasons, explanations, plans—and she was a target for every single one of them, for none arrived without its accusing voice. What do you have to show for your life? asked one persistent voice. If she could bedeck herself with all she had done, and all she had failed to do—to see, to know—she would look, she thought, like someone in a
National Geographic
photo, covered head to toe with beads, shells, and feathers, each one an error, a folly, a sin, and a crime.

Yet, no matter how hard she looked at her life, it seemed to her that everything would have turned out the same. Veevi and Mike would have broken up, Veevi would have come home, Veevi would have tried to take Jake, and Jake would have taken whatever he could get. “I’m sorry,” Veevi had said in the hospital. Now Dinah knew why. But there was nothing to
forgive. Veevi couldn’t help being who she was. “You ended up me, and I ended up you,” she had said. Meaning: you weren’t supposed to be the one who made it. You weren’t supposed to have lived.

There had been one choice she could have made. But she hadn’t. It was useless wondering if things would have been different if she had walked out of that room and gone to jail. And now, here she was, on Hampstead Heath. To her amazement she wasn’t dead. Her heart was beating, and the cold air smelled bitter with autumn smoke and she liked it. She felt again the tenderness of Peter’s hand on her face, and for the first time in months she wondered what his life was going to be like, his and Lorna’s. They were thriving here in London. They didn’t miss California. They were getting an education, and they felt they were in the world, finally. Lorna looked out her window at night and watched the people walking up and down the street and listened to the sounds of a great city. The Irish maid, Olive, came in at six every morning and woke her for school with a cup of hot tea and two pieces of toast. To dress for school, she wore an orange-and-white-striped necktie and a pair of crimson knickers under her tunic, and a black hat that looked to Dinah like some kind of homburg. And she loved it. She loved playing hockey and learning Latin. And Peter? He was making great strides on the clarinet, but he had also started to compose. At dinner one night, he had announced to her and Jake, “I’m going to be a composer.”

If she left now, if she took the kids back to Los Angeles, it would be a disaster for them. But if she stayed with Jake, she would die.

Again she felt Peter’s hand on her cheek. The firm way he had pushed her shoulder and locked the door on her side of the car.

One recent Saturday, she had picked out a small silver flask from an antiques dealer on Portobello Road, taken it home, and filled it with Scotch. Now she reached into her pocket, took it out, opened it, poured out the whisky on the ground, and got up to find someplace to throw the flask away.

She was trying. She went to the market and shopped for groceries; she went to the theater with Jake and dinner at R. Parks with friends from Hollywood when they came to town. For laughs, she took them to the Tower and to Westminster Abbey, but told them that if they really wanted to see England they had to go with her to the lamp department at Harrods. People took the stories of her London adventures home with them to Hollywood, New York, and Paris, and in four months she had become a legend—someone you had to see when you went to London—and so at
five o’clock there were usually people at the Laskers’ flat on Green Street, with its view of a formal garden, where she sometimes sat on an iron bench and read
The New Statesman
and smoked her Camels and wondered why she was alive. She went out to parties with Jake and took excursions with him on Sundays to new English friends of his who had grand houses in Marlow, High Wycombe, and Gerrards Cross. He wanted to get a dog and buy a house. She told him she didn’t care what he did, and slept by herself in the maid’s room downstairs, in a small single bed. In the early-morning hours, she could hear the horse-drawn milk carts clop-clopping in the street.