Family Secrets (25 page)

“But share and share alike won’t be expensive!” Melissa said gaily.

“Humph.”

“I like the country much better than the beach,” Lavinia said. “It’s so much cleaner. You aren’t always tracking in sand.”

“And the sheets won’t always be damp,” Melissa said. “Oh, and I worry so about Everett running into the ocean and drowning! When are you going to do this, Papa?”

“When the time is right,” Adam said.

“Soon?”

“Not soon. But I want you all to have something to look forward to. Meanwhile, I bide my time, and we see.”

There would be no more mistakes. But Adam would not cry about it, for it was as foolish to cry about something which was done as it was to make mistakes. Andrew was a good son, a devoted son. But he was the son of a builder, and the son of a builder built.

TWO

Paris was six years old and had been at school for two years. It was a private, progressive school, and she was there on scholarship, as were many of the other children during the Depression. She knew that some of the children were poor and some were richer than she was by their houses. The poor ones lived in row houses in Mudville, and the rich ones lived on Eastern Parkway and had doormen in front of their large buildings. She lived in a nice building sort of in-between, a block away from Aunt Melissa and Uncle Lazarus and Everett. Everett was twelve, and she had known him all her life. They told her he had been waiting at her house when her parents brought her home from the hospital the day she was born. Since both she and Everett were only children, and saw so much of each other, she thought of him more like a brother than a cousin. If anyone asked her if she had any brothers or sisters she sometimes said yes, she did, a brother named Everett. She liked pretending that he was her brother, although she also liked that it was just pretend and she was really an only child. She would have loved to have a dog or a cat. But her parents didn’t seem to like animals.

Her father brought her as many frogs and toads as she wanted, and a big bottle of tadpoles that turned into frogs, and she liked them, but after all, you couldn’t hug and kiss a frog, could you? She had to content herself with hugging and kissing her toys.

She thought everybody in the world was Jewish, like her. When she found out that her favorite teacher wasn’t Jewish she felt very sorry for her. Poor Miss Martin! She was so pretty and so nice, and so young, and not only wasn’t she Jewish but also she wasn’t married, so she must be very lonely. Paris knew that Jews had lots of relatives like she did and always had people around to care about them. She didn’t know her father’s family and she assumed they lived far away. Her mother had a great big family and some of them lived far away, so you only saw them on holidays or at parties. But on Sundays most of them went to Grandpa’s house for dinner at noon, and that was really boring. Paris drove everybody crazy by talking so much, and Daddy would give her a penny for every minute she could keep still, but she never made more than a nickel. Then they would let her go outside to play in the yard, which was what she liked, and she was perfectly content climbing trees and digging up worms and chasing the white dog that lived down the street.

She had a lot of friends at school, girls and boys both. She loved school. The two things she hated about school were Playground and being fat. Being fat was what made her hate Playground. She wasn’t any good at games, and whenever they had to choose up teams she was always the last one picked, which was humiliating. At meals she tried to eat the meat and vegetables and leave over the rice or potatoes and the buttered bread, but the teachers always made her eat everything. Couldn’t they see how fat she was? Everybody teased her. If you wanted seconds on meat you had to have seconds on everything. That was a dumb rule the school dietitian had made. You either had to eat everything or nothing, and it was hard to eat nothing when you got so hungry.

She was the third fattest girl in the class. The other two were much fatter than she was, which was a relief. Her best friend was very skinny and the other kids teased
her
. You obviously had to be just in-between, just like everybody else, what her mother angrily called Average, not to be picked on.

Her mother often talked about Average, with scorn, especially when it meant Average Mentality. She told Paris that she was very smart, and that most people were Average and didn’t appreciate people who were superior. It sounded as if Average really meant stupid, the way her mother talked about it. Paris could write stories and poems and draw and paint, she usually had the lead in school plays, and she always painted the scenery and even made up the music. She couldn’t play the piano but she would hum her tune and the teacher would write it down. She was terrible at dancing class, naturally, being clumsy and self-conscious, just like a horse. She was tall as well as fat, so that even though she was the youngest one in the class she was always one of the tallest. That was lucky, because she sometimes got into fights with the boys and she had to beat them up. In a fight she was completely fearless as long as it was only one person. If it was a gang she would run for her life. Since they went to a progressive school they were allowed to have fights, although the teachers lectured them on being kind to others. She tried to be kind; she really didn’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings and sometimes she worried for days that she had. Why didn’t words come out the way you wanted them to? She knew that words could really hurt. If you had a fight, if you hit someone or knocked them down and sat on them until they cried, it was just a fight, and maybe the next time they would win. But if you said something that hurt somebody they might never forgive you, never forget it, and it was hard for you to forget it too because you felt so guilty.

She knew there were a lot of things people had said to her mother that her mother had never forgotten, mean things that had hurt. It was important to be kind to people, her mother said. But you were not to confuse it with being Average. It was a little hard to understand.

Brooklyn was a paradise for kids. You could go to the park and there were so many places to play and pretty things to look at, like the Japanese garden, and the flower garden, and of course there was ice skating in the winter if the lake was frozen hard enough. Most of the time though they went to the Ice Palace, which was indoors. In good weather you could roller skate on the sidewalk, and Paris could even roller skate all the way to Everett’s house, which was at the bottom of a big hill and a very thrilling ride with the bumpy sidewalk coming right up through the metal wheels of your skates until it made your teeth rattle. Halfway down the hill was the candy store, with penny candy, which she knew she shouldn’t eat but which sometimes she couldn’t resist. Her favorite was the chocolate-covered sponges, which cost two cents but were worth it.

You could also play ball in the street and against the walls of buildings, and you could skip rope and play hopscotch. Even though she was the worst one at sports in school Paris was very active and full of energy, so her afternoons were always spent in some sport or other with her friends, which wasn’t at all like the horrible things they made you do in Playground like hang from a sideways ladder and climb across it holding on like a monkey. If you were with your friends in the street and didn’t go far from home or talk to any strangers, especially men, it was safe for kids to play outside alone. Paris knew her mother was always somewhere very near, watching her and pretending not to. It was fun to try to run away and hide from your mother, but she was also glad her mother was there.

There was also the museum, where Paris went with her mother and a friend and the friend’s mother at least once a week. Her favorite thing was the dinosaur bones, and her second favorite was the armor. Her third favorite was the museum restaurant, where they went for lunch on Saturdays. Her least favorite was the woman who read stories to the kids on Saturday afternoons after lunch. Paris hated to be read to. She was a good and fast reader and loved books. They were her favorite present. No one had read to her since she was four years old; she wouldn’t let them.

She had just started being taken to the movies. Her parents had told her she would be allowed to go to the movies when she could sit through the whole picture without asking to go to the bathroom. Movie bathrooms were dirty.

They were going to build a big new library across the street from her house. In the meantime there was the school library, which let you take books home. Everett didn’t like to read, or play any sports, or even ice skate. He only had one friend, and he hardly ever saw him after school. Everett was the smartest person Paris knew. (She didn’t include grownups in her list of who was smart, because they were so different from kids.) Everett could build anything mechanical in the whole world. He could build a telegraph and even a radio. Sometimes he took apart the telephone and showed her how it worked, and then he put it together again. He said he didn’t like books because he knew everything in them, but Paris knew you could never know everything that was in books because there were too many of them. He was probably a bad reader.

At least once a week Paris went to Aunt Melissa’s house with her parents for dinner. She and her mother usually went over in the afternoon and then she could watch Everett in his room where he was always making something new and wonderful. He could sit over his things for hours, soldering, tinkering, putting things together, and she could sit there and watch him, fascinated. She just wanted to watch. She felt flattered that he let her. He was usually nice to her.

Her father would come there later, in time for dinner, because he had been at Grandpa’s office, and Uncle Lazarus would come from his office at around the same time. The food at Aunt Melissa’s was very boring. It was always what Uncle Lazarus liked, and he liked what was good for you. Everett never ate anything, and Paris ate to be polite.

The nicest thing about Everett, besides that he was so brilliant and always doing interesting things, is that he wasn’t scary at all. Older boys and grown men were scary. They had something in their pants that you weren’t allowed to see, and when Paris rode on the subway with her mother that thing was just on her eye level and it scared her to think of it. She tried not to look at where it was, but she couldn’t keep her eyes away. She didn’t remember where she had heard about that thing, or who had told her, but she knew it was there. When they left her alone with any older boy cousin who she didn’t know she kept looking at where it was and wishing she didn’t have to be in the room alone with him. She knew that strange men in the street who tried to kidnap little girls had that thing. That was why if she was ever alone in front of her house without her friends and she saw a strange man coming, even if he was all the way down the street, she would duck inside the lobby, where she felt safe. The doorman was there, but she never thought about him having one. Men who had them were strangers and enemies, but the nice men like her father and her uncles and the few men teachers at school and the doorman and the man who owned the candy store and people like that, they had one but you didn’t have to be afraid or even think about it. The boys in her class had them, but you didn’t have to think about that either because those boys were her friends, the same as girls, and most of them she could beat up if she felt like it.

She was never going to get married. She wouldn’t marry a grown man or a stranger. Maybe when they grew up, if he still didn’t have any friends, she would marry Everett. It would be nice, because then nothing would change.

THREE

In 1938 Adam had bought a nice big house in Miami Beach, a few blocks from the beach itself, and Etta had furnished it in the most modern style. The house nestled among all sorts of tropical foliage, with tall emperor palms outside, and behind the house were orange trees, with both regular and mandarin oranges, and lemon trees with lemons on them as big as a fist. There was a goldfish pond and a shuffleboard court, flowering bushes in profusion, and many palms. Right at their back porch there was a banana tree with dwarf bananas on it. It was a garden of Eden to a Northerner; you could reach right out and pick your own snack.

Inside, the house was done in pastel colors, with a white piano in the living room and navy blue glass walls in the bar like a real cocktail lounge. The bathrooms all had tiles of gray or navy or maroon, for white was commonplace. The master bathroom even had a navy blue bathtub. Adam took showers.

Fat Maurice was still with them to drive the Cadillac limousine, and Etta had hired a gem of a cook named Henny, a scrawny colored chain-smoker with an enormous family who seemed to appear out of nowhere whenever an extra maid or gardener or serving girl was needed. Was it possible for someone to have so many relatives? No matter, they were there and they were good. Besides Henny there were two of her daughters to clean and serve, not always the same two, but she always managed to produce two of the right age and appearance. Henny’s family had a strange, earthy, literal sense of humor which shocked Adam’s family. One day one of her daughters began to appear listless, and her stomach was protruding rather significantly.

“Oh,” Etta said, “maybe she’s pregnant.”

“Naw,” Henny said, her Camel wobbling under her upper lip, “she had a hysterectomy.”

Everyone was shocked that Henny hadn’t said that her daughter couldn’t be pregnant because she wasn’t married yet.

There were bedrooms for Rosemary and Hazel and Basil and enough left over for all the others if they decided to visit at the same time. Rosemary and Hazel stayed with Papa and Etta all winter, while he managed his growing Miami Beach real estate interests, while the boys, as Andrew and Basil were still called in their thirties, managed the New York office and took turns visiting down South. Cassie had had another son, Paul, who was an infant. He had blond hair.

“His mouth looks like a tunnel,” Cassie said. “I can’t wait till he gets some teeth. He’s so ugly.”

Chris and Paul were exactly four years apart, as had been recommended as the best way of spacing your family according to a child psychology book Cassie followed. Everyone used to have children every year, whenever they appeared, and that, the book said, led to jealousy and sibling rivalry. At four a child was nearly on his own; he would not be so insecure. She still kept the German girl, who was more of a governess than a maid or a nurse.