Expensive People (11 page)

“It's nice you … you're caring for her,” I said. I wanted to tell him that I too took care of my mother; but everything I did was a failure. I admired Gustave's strength. You got the impression that when the time came he would get up and go get his mother and lead her home, safely.

After about thirty minutes of our leafing through old
Business Weeks,
Gustave craned his head around. “Uh-uh,” he said grimly. He did indeed get up and stride into the living room. He was a small, skinny kid, nothing much, but he knew what he was doing. “Mrs. Everett, thank you so much for an enjoyable hour,” he said to Nada, bowing his head slightly, “but Mother has to leave now. I think she's forgotten her hair appointment.”

“My hair appointment is Thursday,” Bebe said.

“Mother, it's today at five-thirty You always do forget,” Gustave said.

“It isn't. It's tomorrow,” said his mother. “I can't have a moment to myself. He's always … he—”

“Mother won't have time for that drink,” Gustave said. “I'd better be getting our coats.”

And he went to get the coats and, still chatting away while his mother whimpered, he helped her into her mink coat and stooped to pick up one of the gloves that had fallen from a pocket to the floor, doing everything smoothly and confidently, simply raising his voice to drown out his mother's complaints.

“Very nice to have met you, Gustave,” Mother said.

“Enchante,”
Gustave murmured at the door.

We could hear his mother whimpering as they walked down our bone-dry walk. “Isn't that strange,” Nada said, closing the door slowly.

That was one of her “friends,” Bebe Hofstadter. In a novel you would get to know such a woman better, but in real life you never do— women like her are perennially about to age but never quite do, they're always at a distance no matter how close, etc. Though Mrs. Hofstadter will return again in this memoir she will never develop, never get any clearer. And we saw a little of her husband, Gregory, but not much; he was always traveling. And there were many other interesting people. Let me see—Charles Spoon, who designed automobiles and was always six years ahead of the current season, consequently irritated and distracted by the present, a balding, intense loud-laughing man with a considerable fortune, most of it made in the last decade, and a lank, quiet wife from the Upper Class, one of the season's choicest debutantes many seasons ago. And Mavis Grisell, one of the area's few active divorcees, a dark-blond woman with exotic eyes and an interesting Aztec profile, given to Egyptian and Indian jewelry and the exclaiming of monosyllabic words from unintelligible foreign tongues. She had traveled a great deal since her divorce from a rather odd man who, for some reason, had cleared their large home of all its furnishings and objects of art one day when Mavis was visiting her sister in Cedar Grove (you'll become acquainted with Cedar Grove in good time), leaving her nothing but her clothes and a mattress in what had been their bedroom. It was a sensational Fernwood scandal, and the divorce settlement, for Mavis, had been generous. Nada didn't like her but Father thought she was a “good sport.”

“In our society it's impossible for a woman without a man,” Father said gallantly. Or maybe he was warning Nada. “We should do all we can for poor Mavis, who's been through so much.”

And there were the Nashes (Dean Nash and his good wife Hattie), and the Griggses from down the block, and Harrison Vemeer, whom Nada admired extravagantly without knowing, as I did, that he was considered
no me
by our other guests. Mr. Vemeer was a successful contractor whose rise to fortune was legendary in Fernwood. He operated out of gulleys, swamps, small woods, hopeless eroded land, erecting identical colonial houses—you've seen his trademark, a red-brick colonial with navy blue shutters and navy blue windowboxes and a white wrought-iron kitty-kat crawling up the chimney, all for only $39,900?—which often tilted, or sank, or cracked in twos and threes after the new owner moved in. Mr. Vemeer sometimes was prudent
enough to change the name of his company, and continued to build “Distinctive Modern Colonials,” sometimes across the street from the outraged homeowners. I say “street” but I mean rutted muddy lane. His most amazing coup was the draining of a swamp so that he could erect fifteen more “distinctive Colonials,” resulting in a nearby lake (“Picture Lake,” in the center of another housing subdivision) filling slowly and mysteriously with black mud. It oozed out through a twenty-four-inch pipe. The outraged homeowners took Mr. Vemeer to court but somehow he escaped. There were suits and countersuits. But perhaps his really masterful venture was the flood-plain episode. Mr. Vemeer owned land everywhere, being by now enormously wealthy and having a zest for adventure, and so he moved truckload after truckload of dirt from a flood plain which he “owned” to another lower, sunken area near a road which he also owned, in order to build houses on this site. When the spring rains came a creek overflowed and houses near the original flood plain were flooded, exactly as anyone could have foreseen, and Mr. Vemeer was again taken to court but declared innocent by dint of an obscure, helpful article of the law which says that one may improve his own property.

In our home Mr. Vemeer was fond of exclaiming, as if he were a parody of a provincial French miser out of literature, “Buy a good lawyer and buy him first. That's it. I've been sued now twenty-seven times and no one has collected once, not once, and the secret is to buy the best lawyer and buy him first.”

Everyone knew this (Fernwood despised lawyers) but no one said it so bluntly; hence Mr. Vemeer was considered crude, ungracious
nou-veau riche,
and his Catholicism did not help. I overheard many a guest of ours complaining about him, a rapid, whispered “Isn't he awful!” from the throaty depths of Mrs. Hofstadter, a muttered exotic syllable from Mavis Grisell. Tia Bell, her headdress of stacked, banked red-tinted hair quivering, her giantess's frame barely restrained, must have liked Harrison Vemeer in spite of everything because she often giggled, behind a large suntanned hand, “Goodness!” when he launched into one of his anecdotes. He scandalized her. But the gloomy frowns of Dean Nash and his good wife were obvious, and I wanted to tell Nada not to invite Mr. Vemeer back again. Did she want to endanger her standing? Nada was enchanted with Mr. Vemeer because she had the idea he was an ideal businessman and that her guests must certainly
admire him and be grateful to her for bringing them all together. Mr. Vemeer's wife never went out; she remained at home with their eight children.

Anxious to help Nada out, I wrote her a note in big block letters and mailed it from the corner. It said:

YOU WOULD BE WISE TO DROP VEMEER. HE IS A CROOK.

When Nada opened this letter she stared at it, puzzled. Then a haughty flush brightened her cheeks and she crumpled the note in her fist.

I said, “What's that, Nada?”

“The work of a depraved mind,” she said.

So I wrote her another note. This said:

HARRISON VEMEER IS ABOUT TO BE FOUND GUILTY OF FRAUD. YOU WOULD BE WISE TO DROP HIM.

Nada received this on the morning of the day she and Father were invited to the Vemeers' for a cocktail party, and she did indeed read the note with concern. She said nothing to me. The cocktail party was a failure because no one came except Father and Nada and poor Bebe Hofstadter, desperate for an audience to whom she could tell about the deceit of her maid Hortense, who had invited in a colored gentleman friend of hers and slept in Bebe's bed and then cleared out, not even leaving a note. “Oh, my dears! My dears! I don't think I can face reality again,” Bebe kept moaning. “You should have seen what they did …”

But what finally decided Nada against Mr. Vemeer was a simple touch of genius on my part. With beautiful innocence I said one day that Farley Weatherun, the grandson of the internationally known Weatheruns, had told me in French class,
“Ce Monsieur Vemeer, ilestlaid”
and why had he said that? “I always thought Mr. Vemeer was kind of nice,” I told Nada. “Why would Farley Weatherun say anything so mean?”

“He must have had his reasons,” Nada said slowly.

After a moment she put her hands to her eyes and sat there in silence. What was she thinking? She might have been overcome with the chaos of trivia and garbage that had overturned upon her. I could almost
read her mind. I stared up at her pale, nervous hands and thought: If she would just look at me and talk to me I could save her. But she sat like that for a while, alone and shivering. Then her hands dropped away suddenly and she lit a cigarette. She was smoking too much these days, and I hunted up news articles in the paper to show her, about the dangers of smoking.

“Nada, you okay?”

“Of course, Honey.”

“You look kind of pale.”

“I'm really quite all right,” she said, smiling to show me she was all right. “Tell me, are you very good friends with that Weatherun boy?”

But her facial muscles tightened as she spoke, as if something inside her hated the very sound of those words. It made me feel sick to see how she looked at me as if I were no better than anything else in this world. A chill ran up my body and I wondered if I was really going to be sick, again, and maybe that would be good because she couldn't leave home if I was sick. She couldn't leave me if I was sick.

Yes, I loved her, and do you know how I remember her most? Not dazzling and lovely, greeting her guests, and not pale with despair as she was sometimes, turned away from Father, from a few fast-spat words that had passed between them, but off, off on her own: strolling down the front walk to the street with a letter to mail, her hair loose, girlish and quite alone, with the look of a person absolutely free and meaning no harm, no harm.

One morning at breakfast Nada said to me, “Can I interrupt you?”

I was jotting down cheat-notes for a history quiz to be given in an hour, but I looked up politely.

“Richard, I was talking to Mr. Nash about something that means a great deal to me. I don't want to upset you or worry you, but, frankly, Mr. Nash was kind enough to tell me the results of your entrance examination. That's something he usually refuses to do, because some mothers take these things too seriously. Anyway, he did tell me, and I'm afraid I was a little disappointed with your IQ^score.”

“What was it?”

“I can't tell you. But I was a little disappointed.”

My heart hung large and heavy in my chest. I watched Nada's fine white teeth bite off a piece of toast and chew on it, the way she was chewing on me, and I tried to make my haggard face look pleasant. “Yeah, well, I'm real sorry. What was the score?”

“I said I can't tell you,” Nada said patiently. “But it was lower than my own. That's ridiculous, I don't accept it. You know, Richard, I don't want you to be less than I am. I want you to be better than I am. I can't bear the thought of some kind of degenerative process setting in. I see myself as less than my father was, and now you … Do you understand?”

“I guess it isn't anything we can help much,” I said feebly.

“I'm not so sure about that. I've made arrangements with Mr. Nash for you to take the test again.”

“What?”

“I've made arrangements for you to take the test again.”

“The test again?”

“Just part of it. Half of it, I think.”

“But, Mother,” I said, my stomach beginning to tremble where no one could see, and even laughing to show her how calm I was, “Mother, if my IQjs a certain
IQ^,
it won't matter how many tests I take, will it?”

“Please don't call me that,” she said.

“But it won't matter, will it? I mean, will it? The test is just a measure. It… isn't—”

“I want you to take it again, Richard.”

“Take it again? That test?”

“Yes, Richard.”

We stared sadly at each other. I did not know and I do not know today how much she hated herself for all these things. Every word of hers, every gesture, was phony as hell, and as time passed in Fernwood this phoniness grew upon her steadily, like the layers of fat I have encircling my body. But who was going to rescue her? Once or twice I caught her, sitting alone, staring out into our unused backyard and screwing her face around in a mannerism not her own: drawing her lips down, tightly pursed, and seeming to lift her nose slightly as if straining for purer air. But no, Dean Nash wouldn't help. I never found out how close they were, Nash and Nada. But though they would have
been a fine couple—he was no more than Father's age though he looked younger—I don't think she got much strength from him. He was just a son-of-a-bitch anyway, as you'll see.

And was I good friends with that Weatherun boy?

I got to know him through Gustave Hofstadter, who had become my best, indeed, my only, friend. Gustave and I were fond of playing chess, which we played seriously and silently, like two little old men in a terminal ward of a hospital. If we played at his house (a baronial estate with a house that was gabled, ornamented, towered, as cute as a gingerbread house in a Mother Goose story), Bebe ran in and out of the room, looking for things she could never find, and shot at us muttered remarks: “Still playing that game! Still at it! I don't understand children … Such a sunny day…” If we played at my house we had the sweet, serene quiet of the library, bathed with winter sunlight, the feel of a house empty and silent everywhere except for Ginger's vacuum cleaner roaring away upstairs, while Ginger probably rifled through Nada's bureau drawers (I had caught her at it once). We loved and respected the game of chess, both of us. Gustave was going into math and I had no idea where I was going—indeed I couldn't have predicted exactly where I would end up!—but I joined him in his admiration for this precise and beautiful game, which leaves nothing to chance, unlike that hideous game, Bridge, which Nada pretended to like, or that still more hideous game of life. (You can trust a degenerate to turn philosophical.)

Another chess-lover was Farley Weatherun, who was a freshman at Johns Behemoth. Farley was a slow, gentle, distracted boy who had the best room in the dormitory with the exception of a couple of rooms in the seniors' wing. His family was famous and indeed is still famous. You will find one Weatherun or another mentioned constantly in gossip columns or in
Time
magazine (“Aqualung Enthusiast Si Weatherun Announces His …”; “Socialite-Flutist Virginia Weatherun Announces Her …”; “Admiral-Playboy ‘Taffy’ Weatherun Announces His …”). But fame counted for little at Johns Behemoth, where it was vulgar to
speak of anyone's family, especially your own, since you were supposed to be an individual and nothing more. Nothing less. The president of the school, a waspy wispy man named Sikes, told us repeatedly that we were on our own, each of us was a young man, an individual working his way through life. And, indeed, we did work.