Family Secrets (18 page)

“He’s your child,” Lavinia said. “So you have to do what you think is right, but I would give him that steak.”

“If he eats the carrots, too,” Melissa sobbed.

Lavinia put some carrots on the plate beside the beautiful rare steak, and put the plate in front of Everett. He didn’t like her for making his mother cry. He folded his skinny arms and stared at the steak, pretending to himself that it was poison.

“See?” Melissa said. “See? See?”

“Let’s all leave the room,” Lavinia said. She took Melissa’s arm and led her out of the kitchen.

“At least drink your milk!” Melissa shrieked after Everett as she was being dragged away.

When they were gone, Everett pulled his chair over to the kitchen cabinet and grabbed the box of oatmeal cookies the grownups kept there for themselves. He took two and stuffed them methodically into his mouth until his cheeks were bulging. Then he washed them down with a swallow of his glass of milk. The rest of the milk he poured out the kitchen window.

It was not his fault that the front porch curved around the house just enough so that the grownups sitting on the porch could hear the milk strike the hard ground below the window.

“What’s that?” his father yelled. He jumped out of his chair, waving his evening newspaper. “Toots, it’s that rotten kid again! He just threw something out the window.”

Melissa came rushing back into the kitchen. “What did you do?”

Everett stared at her silently with round, innocent eyes. His left eyelid was twitching again. He would name his big dog Toughie.

“Why can’t you be good?”

Toughie would grab his father’s newspaper and run away so fast that no one would ever catch him.

“I’m going to have to spank you now.”

She swatted him a few times. She hated hitting him. Toughie would bite her anyway, but not really hard. Just enough to make her scared. He, Everett, would be the only one to have the power to tell Toughie what to do. Bite, Toughie! Stop, Toughie! Come here, Toughie! Get ’em, Toughie!

TWENTY-ONE

Adam had always wanted at least one of his two sons, either Andrew or Basil, to go to law school after graduating from college, because they were both going to go into the family business and he felt that it never hurt to have a lawyer in the family, albeit a nonpracticing one. Andrew, as the elder, graduated from college first, and went right to Columbia Law School, going into the summer session to get through faster. With Andrew, everything had to be faster, faster, more, more, better, better. He had grown up to be even more of the perfectionist he had seemed as a child: picky, critical, aesthetic. He liked elegance. He was offended by a job poorly done. Yet, he retained his shy, boyish charm, which made these qualities—which might have been annoying in someone else—seem admirable in him. Adam sometimes even asked Andrew’s opinion on things.

With Basil it was always tomorrow. Although he was now a grown man in the eyes of the law, he was still the little brother in his own family, and the more he saw his Papa leaning toward Andrew the more Basil drew into himself. Basil’s closest friend in the family was still his younger sister Rosemary, not his brother. He didn’t have to compete with Rosemary. She could just be his pal. Basil had fulfilled all his youthful indications of growing up to be a very handsome young man. Some of the girls he knew even told him he looked like a more masculine version of Rudolph Valentino. He combed his hair back with a lot of pomade to further the resemblance. No, Basil would not go to law school and compete with Andrew. He would have a good time. Not that Basil really was a Good-Time Charlie, it was just that he needed an identity that was different from anyone else’s in the family. At heart he was morose—that was the true Basil—but he created another Basil for the world, the amiable, high-living ladies’ man.

The summer of 1929 Basil was traveling through Europe with a friend, Maurice Weinstein, as a college graduation present to both of them from both their families. Rosemary missed him. Her sister Hazel, still at home and just as dumb as ever, was certainly no company. Rosemary had finished studying piano at Juilliard, but she did not want to give recitals although her teachers urged her to. There was something in Rosemary that cringed from competition. She could not even bear to play the piano in front of anyone but the immediate family, and her teachers, of course. If a visitor entered the house while she was playing, and she heard the strange voice in the hall, she would stop playing immediately, her face would compose itself into the grim semblance of a smile, and her fingers would clench into fists.

At home during the winters, she practiced the piano four hours a day. Practice makes perfect, she had been told, but she knew she would never be perfect, not even near it. Nothing she did would ever be spectacular. She was ordinary. This made her bitter. Why couldn’t she be beautiful so that people noticed her? Why couldn’t she be charming so that she could enchant a roomful of people? Why couldn’t she have confidence so that she could do the one thing she did well—play the piano—for people to admire? Why did she feel this hatred choking her when she was really trying to be nice? She could hear her own voice: a high, nasal sneer, offering derision, when she had meant to offer a compliment. There were two people inside her, the Rosemary she really was and the other one. Which one was the real one? The argumentative, sharp-tongued Rosemary who could not agree even when someone said it was going to be a fine day out, or the good soul, the Rosemary who only wanted to please and be liked? The more the good soul took over—staying with Everett, for instance, so that Melissa and Lazarus could go to the opera on the maid’s night out—the more the other Rosemary demanded payment. When an ordinary, tactful white lie was called for, her tongue failed her. The truth came out, bitter, cruel. Why had she told her best friend, Ruth, that her yellow dress was unbecoming? Now Ruth was angry at her. But wasn’t truth beautiful? Wasn’t it worse to pretend the dress looked well? But perhaps the yellow dress wasn’t so bad, maybe she had only said it was unattractive because Ruth had a date that night and she didn’t. Who
was
the real Rosemary?

Hazel was twenty-four now and had never had a date. It didn’t seem to bother her. She had discovered a new passion: crossword puzzles. Puzzle books had to be fetched for her from the drugstore, more and more. She sat engrossed in them by the hour. She would never let anyone see what she had done, not that anyone really cared. She kept her crossword puzzle books with her, and put them into the bureau drawer in her bedroom when she was not working on them. They were her pride.

“You see?” Lavinia told everyone, “Hazel is a lot smarter than you give her credit for. She’s doing puzzles. Look how fast she does them! If she didn’t have a fat tongue, she would be able to express herself and you’d see …”

“There’s no such thing as a fat tongue, Lavinia,” Rosemary said.

“Hazel has a fat tongue.”

“Then how do you account for what comes out of her mouth?”

“Oh, I can’t talk to you!”

Lavinia had stopped working in Papa’s office, realizing she had no future there, and with Jonah’s help had been able to get a job as a substitute teacher during the school year. She liked being in his world. She taught first grade, which was easy. Anyone could do it. She read to them and taught them the alphabet, and how to count. She tried to make it fun. School was much different from when she had been a pupil. You didn’t hit the children for being children. She remembered her own school days with horror, and remembered how even Andrew, a boy and tough, had quaked with fear every day at the thought of going back to that horrible place. As a child she had approached school with a certain stolid fatalism, but Andrew had really dreaded it. When he was very young he had sometimes even cried in the mornings. And now he was such an eager scholar! It was terrible the way the school system had destroyed sensitive children, bright children, gentle children. It was a system of brutish mediocrity.

There were certain teachers like Jonah (and herself, she hoped) who made learning an exciting experience for the children. His students loved Jonah. Papa had given her some money, and she had given it to Jonah to invest in the stock market for her. He was a student himself, learning more about the market every day, and she trusted him. The stocks he had bought had done very well.

But now Jonah wanted to sell them. He wanted everybody to sell their stocks. “It’s not a real economy,” he told Papa and Lazarus. “I don’t like it. I don’t trust it. It’s fake, it’s inflated.”

“Oh, what do you know?” Lazarus said. “A poor school teacher thinks he knows more than my own broker.”

“There are three kinds of investors,” Jonah said calmly. “Bulls, bears, and pigs. A bull can make money, a bear can make money, but a pig will never make money.”

“Who are you calling a pig?”

“I would never call anybody a pig. I’m just telling you a saying they have in the market.”

“This little pig went to market,” Melissa said, and giggled.

Papa studied the market and sold his stocks at a huge profit. Jonah sold the ones he had bought for himself and Lavinia, and put the money into the savings bank. The only stock he kept was a few shares of a utility. “You can always trust a utility,” he said. “No matter what, people need lights, they need phones.”

Lazarus refused to sell any of his stock. He had more than any of them. In fact, the dividends he received from his investments were most of his income. They enabled him the luxury of being a neighborhood doctor, for the poor, the immigrants, whoever came to his door. He didn’t have to scuffle for the society trade. No one woke him up in the middle of the night. He had an office, and office hours, like a businessman. He had a low overhead. One nurse doubled as a bookkeeper-secretary. Most of his cases were very simple: a cut, a bruise, a broken arm, an attack of appendicitis which he sent to the hospital. Anything requiring complicated care or surgery he referred to another doctor, receiving his share of the fee. Lazarus hated blood. He loved book medicine, and had gotten high marks in medical school because he was a fanatic for memorizing. He had been a perfect little boy, with As in all subjects including deportment, and Ds in sports, and then he had been the perfect scholar all through college and medical school, but he lacked a love or compassion for humanity. Medicine interested him, his patients did not.

Melissa took Lazarus’ side about holding on to their skyrocketing stocks. They were rich. She dressed Everett in little white suits with sailor collars, and white sandals. He had two suits for each day so he would always be clean. He had a roomful of toys. He had books and records. She had learned to drive and Lazarus had bought her a motor car. Lazarus did not drive. “If God had meant man to drive a car …” but he never finished the sentence, for what could he say? “He would have given him wheels?” However, he gave Melissa whatever she wanted.

Basil wrote many glowing letters home from Europe. He was having a wonderful time, meeting old friends and new ones, seeing all the famous cultural sights, eating strange new foods, drinking wine for the first time. There was no Prohibition in Europe. The one thing that disturbed him, he wrote home, was the obvious and growing anti-Semitism in Germany. It was this that had made him and Maurice decide to leave Berlin a week earlier than planned to go straight to Paris. He had trouble with the language, but people seemed kinder. Of course, he was used to anti-Semitism at home, but the kind he had seen in Germany was frightening, different. There was anger in it. At home, people simply didn’t like Jews, and Jews knew it and avoided people who were not their own kind. But people didn’t go out deliberately to make life difficult for you at home, the way they were starting to do in Germany.

He planned to stay on until the holidays, Basil wrote, although Maurice had relatives in London, and they had invited him and Basil to spend Yom Kippur with them. It might be broadening to see how Jews celebrated Yom Kippur in London. Perhaps he would stay on until Thanksgiving, or until the weather got cold, if nobody minded …

After Labor Day everybody packed up and left the beach houses for another year. They took up their autumn lives again in Brooklyn. Melissa was thinking of enrolling Everett in prekindergarten, but he was such a cranky child she wondered if he would do well. Lavinia said it would be good for him to have friends. He had no friends. “Four-year-olds don’t have friends,” Melissa said. She knew this was true because even though some of her own friends had children of Everett’s age, when they brought them over to play Everett never wanted to. Obviously if four-year-olds were supposed to have friends he would have wanted to. He was too young.

The problem of whether or not to send the child to school was solved when the stock market crashed in October. Lazarus lost everything. There was no question of private school, or anything else for that matter. People were jumping out of windows. Melissa sold her beautiful car, for a fraction of what it was worth, but they had to pay the rent.

Papa’s business toppled along with everything else, but he was not worried. He had money saved, and he had been poor before and had survived and become rich. He had a perspective none of the others had except Jonah, for none of the others had ever had to do without.

Jonah still had his job. Schoolteachers were still needed in this time of crisis. But now the poor teachers were the rich, for they had work. Any man who had a job was an aristocrat.

“That bastard!” Lazarus muttered.

The crash had been a terrible blow to Lazarus. It shook his world. He had been the bon vivant, the big spender, Mr. Generous, and now he was dependent on the poor people he treated who always whined and pleaded and promised to pay him “next week.” He put a lock on one of the closets in his apartment and filled the closet with the only thing of value he had left: bottles of Prohibition whiskey. Those were still worth money. Someday he might need them.

Frightened, adrift, he became stingy. He stole slivers of soap from public toilets and brought them home. He never bought a newspaper any more, but furtively snatched one whenever it was left behind, read and discarded, on the subway seat. He would refold it neatly, as if it were new, and bring it home proudly. Then he would sit in his chair and read it, snapping at Everett if the boy tried to touch it. A newspaper cost money. Everything cost money. Food cost money.