Family Secrets (14 page)

“They are. They are.”

“Then how can I tell who they are?”

“You can’t always tell. That’s why you need someone older and wiser to protect you.”

“But I have to go out, don’t I?” she said.

“Of course. But what I am trying to imply or infer is that you should choose such an older and wiser person as your companion or escort. In other words, I am suggesting myself. I would like to see a great deal of you in the near future, Melissa. May I?”

“Oh. Well, yes, of course,” she said, stunned. Her life was certainly going to be full for a while, keeping company with two men at the same time.

“I would like to take you to the theater,” he said. “And to the opera, and to concerts. There are many fine restaurants in this city which I am sure you haven’t yet had the pleasure of encountering, and I would like to show them to you.”

“Oh, I’d love that!” Melissa said.

“And I as well.”

When Lazarus escorted her to the front door of her family’s house, telling the taxi to wait, he saw her safely inside and did not try to kiss her or even shake her hand. He simply touched his fingers to the brim of his hat in a polite and jaunty way, bobbed his head to her, and left. Melissa thought it was just perfect. If he had tried to kiss her she would have been disappointed in him, and if he had shaken hands it would have been too formal. Men shook hands with each other. She didn’t like it much. Lazarus made her feel like a precious little thing to be protected. A china figurine. A goddess. The muse of terpsichore. She danced around the vestibule, in front of the long mirror, watching her chiffon streamers trailing gracefully out behind her, light-headed from the champagne but not drunk. It was delicious to have two suitors, both mad about her; one a handsome young actor who was going to be famous someday, and the other a distinguished, brilliant, rich doctor who was famous already. Dr. Lazarus Bergman was definitely a good catch, and he was after her.

The next day, red roses arrived, with Dr. Lazarus Bergman’s printed calling card. Melissa put the red roses into a big vase on top of the shawl on the piano in the living room, and tucked the card into her memory book along with the ticket stub and the signed program from her first date with Scott Brown and a whole lot of other things that were really just junk. She liked beginnings. If life could always consist of just beginnings it would be wonderful. Nothing would ever be boring, and nothing would be sad because it would never end.

FIFTEEN

In that summer of 1923 Andrew was in his senior year at Boy’s High and a junior counselor at Camp Kinnewanah. He had liked the camp when he had gone there as a camper, and he liked being a junior counselor even more. He taught arts and crafts. Arts and crafts was a joke: it consisted mainly of teaching the boys to braid lanyards and paint colors on plaster plaques with Indian heads on them in bas relief, all premade, something a five-year-old could do easily. Or, if they were particularly adventurous, they could hammer a circle of copper into a copper ashtray, something any seven-year-old could do. The fact that they kept on doing these dumb things until they were fourteen, then brought them home to show their parents what they had spent so much money on, made Andrew indignant. But what he did like about arts and crafts was that every summer there were a few boys who were actually interested in painting and drawing, and so he could teach them the thing he loved best.

Andrew loved nature as much as he loved anything, but the trouble was he always wanted to improve on it. The bridle path through the deep woods was lovely, but he would have made it wider in a few places, and narrower in another, and he would have liked to take it up on the high ridge overlooking the lake so that a rider could pause a moment to rest his horse and gaze down on the view.

When he painted pictures of scenic places around the camp he improved upon nature as he would have wished to see it, so his paintings although representational, were also fantasy. The colors came from Andrew’s head, and the landscape from his dreams. The boys to whom he taught painting enjoyed working with him because his pictures didn’t look right any more than theirs did. Painting was fun and no one felt inferior. Painting made Andrew happy. Although he had learned charm, basically he was quiet, and he liked not having to talk to people.

There were many feelings Andrew kept inside. To the world (the world being his family and friends) he was the clever, charming golden boy who got everything he wanted. He was also a sometimes cranky perfectionist, who criticized and changed things. He knew all this. But what that same world did not see was the other side of Andrew, the secret side, the always frightened Andrew who knew the world was going to come to an end and could not figure out how to stop it. He worried that he was not handsome enough, that his father would lose all his money, that he himself would not be accepted into Columbia with all his friends, that he might disgrace himself, that people didn’t really like him, that his father would find him wanting in some way. The motor car, the horse, the things he asked Papa for and got, were only props to keep the fragile roof of his world from caving in. In nightmares he was alone, weak, afraid, trying to run through water and finding that his legs pained and failed him. In the daytime he sometimes had headaches so painful he would strike his head against the wall.

His plan for life was to go to Columbia and law school and enter his father’s business, do well, be respected, make a lot of money. Nothing would ever be enough for him, he wanted to be rich beyond measure so that he would never have to be poor. He wanted to marry the prettiest girl in the world, with the sweetest disposition, and protect her. He wanted bright, happy children. He wanted his father to be proud of him and what he made of his life. He wanted people to look up to him and say: “Andrew Saffron is an honor to his father and his family.”

His secret plan (his silly plan he thought of it, because he would never do it) was to run away to Paris and study painting, live on the Left Bank in a studio with north light and paint in oils, know other young artists and even the more established ones—well, this was a dream, so he might as well include Picasso as his close friend—and he would have lovely girls to admire him, and in the evenings, tired and satisfied from a good, long day’s work, he would go to a cafe or a cheap restaurant with those other artists and those lovely girls, and they would all talk of art and their feelings, without shame or pretention.

Now at Camp Kinnewanah he was enjoying his last summer before he would have to put away boyish things and become a man. By next summer he would probably work in Papa’s office, learning the business from the bottom up so that when the time came for him to take his place there he would be able to fit in. Although it would be only a summer job, to learn the ropes, he would have a better position than Lavinia, who was there biding her time until she got married. Lavinia did the little things Papa’s secretary was too busy to do, and she liked to feel she was a help, but no one there took her seriously. One was sorry for Papa’s secretary, who was an older woman with no husband and no parents, who had to support herself, and certainly no one would ever imagine a girl like Lavinia would want to end up like that. She was twenty-three, and soon she would find the right fellow. She was very picky, and no one was good enough for her, but Andrew thought she was right. He would hate having an ordinary brother-in-law.

He cheered himself up this last summer by swimming in the cold lake, walking in the cool, dark woods, or watching the kids playing sports. Lucky kids, nothing to worry about yet. There was Jonah Mendes, the head counselor, an interesting guy, pitching a spitball to one of the older boys. Jonah Mendes was the kind of person Andrew would ordinarily never have known because he lived in a slum and was very poor. He was a math teacher and an athlete, an Orthodox Sephardic Jew who kept kosher and wouldn’t eat half the things they served at the camp. But he didn’t sit around reading the Bible or anything; he was really a great guy who loved baseball and diving and hikes. He had taken the job as head counselor because he needed the money. Teachers didn’t make anything and had no future. The funny thing was that even though they came from opposite ends of the earth, in a way, Jonah Mendes had always been in Andrew’s life, first because Andrew had been in his math class in high school, and later because of the camp. At school he had been Mr. Mendes, who really felt sorry when he had to give Andrew a bad mark, not because a bad mark made it harder to get into college but because Mr. Mendes thought math was art. At camp he was Jonah, the boss but still a nice guy, reticent but pleasant, with a big happy smile. You couldn’t swear in front of him—he would practically faint because of his religious upbringing—but Andrew made it a practice never to swear anyway because he felt it was bad taste. The worst thing you could do was use certain Yiddish words in front of Jonah; then he would hit the roof. For instance, to Andrew “shmuck” meant a dunce, but to Jonah it meant a dirty street word for penis, and if you called someone a shmuck in front of Jonah he would nearly choke. It was funny in a way.

Andrew sometimes felt sorry for Jonah. He was tall, he had looks, he had a great build, he was an intellectual, but he would never make it in life. He would always be poor, always have to struggle. What a dumb job to pick, a math teacher. A shmucky job! Jonah Mendes just didn’t have any future at all. And he was a wizard at math, too. Jonah with his math was sort of like what Andrew would have been with his painting, but Andrew was practical enough to know that his painting and the whole poor-in-Paris fantasy was just a dream, a diversion, but Jonah had gone and committed himself to being a poor math teacher, not because he was brave but because he didn’t ever know or dream of anything better. Or maybe he
was
brave. How could you tell? You couldn’t sit down with him and tell him you thought he was strange and ask him why he had done it. He was either very brave or very limited. He was either someone to envy or someone to pity.

That was another thing Andrew would miss when he left camp: being able to meet and know people who were so different from the all-the-same people he would meet when he went into his own world for keeps.

But as it turned out, no one, even Andrew, could ever really plan life.

Afterward, he liked to tell the way it happened, and so did Lavinia, until in the telling it became something entirely different although essentially the same, something out of a storybook. It was visitors’ day at Camp Kinnewanah, and Lavinia and Basil and Papa had driven up to see Andrew, in Papa’s chauffeur-driven car. Basil did not go to camp. Basil hated camp.

It was a yellow car with a black top, and the sun was shining. Lavinia was wearing a white dress and white stockings and white shoes, and she and the car looked all gold and white, the car hard and shiny, Lavinia small and soft and gauzy. Her dark hair was bobbed, and because it was naturally wavy it looked marcelled and very stylish. And Jonah Mendes was standing there to greet all the parents as the cars drove up, because that was what a head counselor did. And of course, Andrew was standing there too, because he wanted to see his family. And so it happened that Andrew was standing next to Jonah when Papa’s car drove up and stopped, and Lavinia climbed out. And Jonah, seeing Lavinia for the first time in his life, sucked in his breath as if he had seen a vision.

“That girl!” he whispered to Andrew. “See that girl? Someday I’m going to marry her.”

“You mean,” said Andrew, “my stupid sister?”

SIXTEEN

When Jonah Mendes asked Lavinia for a date that summer after camp was over for the season, she accepted because she liked his looks and Andrew said he had a good character. She had never seen a young man who looked like Jonah. Black hair in fat curls like black grapes, and skin so dark from the sun that he looked like a Spaniard. He tried to comb his thick hair down with pomade so he could look like everyone else, but it sprang right up again. He had good, strong features, and large, kind black eyes, a happy smile with dimples, and good, strong, white teeth. He looked clean. Cleanliness was very important to her. He was twenty-nine years old, but in many ways he was an innocent. She was not afraid of him, not afraid to admit to herself that she found him handsome.

However, he was crazy. The first thing he did on their first date was propose to her.

“You don’t even know me!” she said.

“Yes I do. I know enough to know that I love you and I want to marry you.”

“How can you love me when you don’t know me?”

“I loved you the minute I saw you.”

“Well, you’re crazy, that’s all,” she said.

They went for a walk because he had no money. A walk! Lavinia had never been out with a poor boy, and her high heels hurt her feet. She should have known better than to wear her brand-new shoes on a date without breaking them in first. While they walked he told her a little of his life, that he had grown up in a good Jewish neighborhood in Harlem, but not a rich neighborhood, on the fringes of it, where the poor people lived. All the men in his family had been scholars, teachers, rabbis, and professors. His father was deeply religious, and because he would not work on Saturday he had ended up in a menial job in a factory, he a scholar! And his sons were all school teachers because it was a five-day week, enabling them to go to temple not only on Friday night but on Saturday, as good, Orthodox Jews did. And of course, they kept kosher.

I certainly would never marry a religious fanatic
, Lavinia thought to herself.
But then, of course, I suppose men can be made to change
.

“When I was a kid, I used to swim in the East River,” Jonah said. “I always liked the outdoor life, but I had to go to school, and Hebrew school, and also I had to work to help my family, so I never had as much time for sports as I wanted. Although we used to play ball in the street when we had a chance.”

“I always enjoyed bicycle riding at college,” Lavinia said.

“You see how much we have in common!” he said, delighted.