Family Secrets (33 page)

As for the two houses for his four married daughters, they would both be built from exactly the same architect’s plan, exactly alike so no one would feel short-changed. The only thing that would be different would be the exteriors. Then the houses would be built backwards to each other, so that everything was reversed except for the front porch, which afforded the wonderful view, and no one would ever be able to guess that they had both been built from exactly the same plan.

There were four bedrooms and four bathrooms on the second floor of each house. In each house two of these bedroom-bath combinations had been planned as an adjoining suite. In Hazel and Rosemary’s house Hazel and Herman could have the suite so that Hazel could be near baby Richie, and Rosemary and Jack could have the separate bedroom because they had no children. Later, when they did have children, the children would have the bedroom across the hall.

In the matching house, Lavinia and Jonah would have the suite because Paris was younger, and Melissa and Lazarus would take the bedroom across the hall from Everett. None of them was planning to have any more children, so the downstairs den would be a family room doubling as a guest room.

There would be eight bathrooms in each house. Eight! Four on the second floor, three on the first floor counting the one for the maids’ room, and one in the basement for the handyman to use. That made more than one bathroom per person.

“I remember when we had only one bathroom for the whole family,” Jonah said happily, “and the bathtub was in the kitchen and the toilet was in the hall.”

“Well, you,” Lavinia said, dismissing his whole family with a wave of her hand. “Bathrooms are very important, and thank God we can afford them.”

Lavinia and Melissa had decided that they would hire a couple, so one maid’s room was sufficient. Cassie had a couple and liked the idea very much because the man could double as a butler whereas a maid could only wait on table as a maid, which didn’t have the same panache.

Windflower already came with a caretaker, who had stayed on when The Crazy Russian left. He was a young Irish immigrant, Tim Forbes, who lived with his wife, Molly (also an immigrant), and their two baby sons, Timmy and Mike, in a shack. Adam had been horrified by the shack The Crazy Russian had provided them with, no better than a chicken coop in his opinion, and had already made plans to build them a nice little house. He was also building a cottage for Maurice, a garage for all the family cars, and a tool house for Tim’s equipment. Now that there would be such an enormous expanse of lawn there would have to be a tractor with an attachment to cut the grass, and it would stay in the garage with the cars. And there might as well be a vegetable garden—why not save money somewhere?—as long as Tim Forbes loved growing things and swore he had a green thumb. They could even try raising chickens, for the eggs. And your own chicken in the pot, made with your own fat hen and your own home-grown vegetables, wouldn’t be bad either, would it?

They would start to dynamite the stumps and rocks that spring as soon as the frost melted. They could then level off the hill a bit and start to build the houses. With luck, if Adam’s pull with building supplies held out, the houses would be finished before the first snow. The girls could spend the winter decorating, the spring worrying, and maybe by summer the things they had ordered for the houses would arrive. If all went well, Windflower would be ready to move into a year from this coming summer.

Lavinia and Jonah decided to send Paris to camp alone that summer for the first time. She was nearly twelve, big, and far superior mentally to anyone her age. If anything went wrong, she had a mouth, she could complain. With her safely out of the way Lavinia would be free to supervise the building and decorating of her house and all the other details she could never entrust to anyone else. Jonah thought it was a good idea for Paris to be on her own at last. He knew the owners and head counselor personally. As for Adam, he thought it was high time the child went to camp alone. No one asked Paris her opinion of this arrangement, but she was thrilled. She would be free the whole summer, just like everybody else. Nobody would ask her why her parents were hanging around.

Etta had the use of the department store decorator first because her house was already built. The decorator was a chic, skinny little woman who was obviously a Gentile, Miss Anderson. Between them she and Etta made The Big House, as it had come to be called, a riot of flowers. Sunny flowers bloomed on the drapes, the sofas, the chairs, the bedspreads, the wallpaper. The Big House had been transformed from a kennel into a giant flower garden. The only person who wouldn’t live in a flower garden was Basil; his suite was painted white and filled with dark, heavy furniture, as befitted a bachelor of his age and taste. His suite consisted of a bedroom, a bathroom, and a library. In the library there were bookcases filled with the classics (supplied by Miss Anderson) and a desk with a ship model on top of it. There were comfortable chairs for reading and good lamps to read by. He even had a double bed. After all, Miss Anderson said, he might get married. You never knew.

The weather became nice, workmen began dynamiting the rocks and tree stumps, and Adam drove up in his limousine nearly every day to watch, taking whoever wanted to come with him. The waterfall was full and frothy white, flowing freely now that the sun had melted the ice, and the state of Connecticut sent a man to stock the lake with fish. Imagine, the state gave you fish! Jonah immediately bought his first fishing rod, having always fished at camp with borrowed ones, and bought a child-size one for Paris. They could catch and eat their own fish.

The land around The Big House still had its grass and trees, and Tim Forbes had put in a rose garden. Now the huge trees were budding, and then overnight they burst into leaf—large, young, pale green leaves, exuding a fresh odor and a promise of the great, heavy, dark green leaves that would shelter the house in summer. And suddenly, in the grass around The Big House and all along the edge of the woods, there occurred a miracle: thousands of tiny white flowers sprang up like dots of snow. They were something The Crazy Russian hadn’t killed or taken away or sold, a miracle of courage and tenacity and nature. What were they?

“Those are windflowers,” Tim said. “There used to be millions of them. They’re why the place was named Windflower.”

“Windflowers …” Adam said, liking the sound of the word on his tongue. He had never really wondered before why the place had been called Windflower, he had just supposed someone had made up the name, and as he hadn’t minded it he had decided to keep it. But now it had meaning. Not the meaning of the flowers for which this place had been named, but the meaning of the miracle these little white flowers represented. They were his. All his life he had overcome odds, fought difficulty and doubt, and he had survived and flourished, just like these tiny flowers. They had come out of nowhere, like himself, and they were survivors too.

“When we put in the lawn,” he asked Tim, “will they grow there too?”

“I don’t see why not,” Tim said. “We have plenty of bees.”

“You’d better make us a sign for the front drive,” Adam told him. “And get a lot of ‘No Trespassing’ signs and tack them up on the trees.”

For the first time he was filled with an enormous, personal sense of possession, stronger than anything he had felt before.

TEN

That summer Paris loved camp. There was a polio scare so the two Parents’ Weekends were canceled and the camp was quarantined. That meant that she didn’t see her parents for the entire summer, but instead of missing them she was delighted. She felt grown up and independent. She had started getting her periods, and all of a sudden, even though she was eating the same as she always did, she shot up and got skinny. None of her clothes fit any more; her shorts were baggy at the waist and her shirts were too tight across the chest. When she had to run during sports she was self-conscious in her undershirt because those things kept bobbing up and down. To compensate for that was the wonderful transformation of her legs, from two roly-poly little pig legs with no knees to two knobby-kneed long legs rather like a boy’s. She wasn’t ashamed to wear shorts any more, even though she had to hold hers up with safety pins.

When she got off the train at the end of the summer her mother screamed, but her father was pleased. Actually, her mother seemed rather pleased too, even though she was afraid Paris was suffering from malnutrition, and she even let her have a chocolate soda. This was the last time though, her mother said, because if she ate chocolate she would get acne. From now on no milk, just that awful blue skim milk. She had to stay looking pretty because this winter she would be going for interviews at New York high schools. They were going to move, just for her. She wouldn’t have to go to Midwood with all her friends, where it was so crowded they had to have classes in three shifts, and some of the kids had to be there at seven-thirty in the morning. Seven-thirty, ugh. Paris hated even having to be at school by nine.

Her mother had chosen two private schools she liked the best. One was where Everett went, but he had to commute every day on the subway. Paris certainly wasn’t going to commute, her mother said. No wonder Everett didn’t have any friends, shy as he was and then living so far away from school that none of the boys wanted to come home with him. Paris would live in New York and have lots of friends. It had been difficult to get the schools to agree to see her because she was so young—not even twelve yet—but she was so tall and looked so grown up. Her mother would let her wear lipstick. And now that she was thin she could have some real grown-up clothes, no more Chubbettes.

They took her to see Windflower. Paris sat on a chair at the top of a hill under a tree with her grandfather and watched the last of the dynamiting. It looked like a war movie she had seen. They told her the hill across the way had been twice as high, and the valley below had been much deeper, before they fixed them all up. Soon men were going to bring in truckloads of topsoil, and then lay lawn in big squares, just like you put down linoleum. Etta was screaming because she’d had her whole kitchen ripped out last spring and was still waiting for her first sight of the new equipment they’d ordered. Big foundations had been laid on top of the hill across the way, and the skeletons of two houses were just starting to rise. One of them would be for Paris.

Paris sat there missing the counselor she had had a crush on this summer. She wondered if this would be the last year she was in love with a counselor. If she didn’t have someone to have a crush on then camp wouldn’t be half as much fun. One of the two schools she would be interviewed at was coed, and the other was all girls. She didn’t really care which one she went to until she saw the school. She couldn’t stand boys her own age, and older boys never looked at her, not that she would know what to say or do if they did.

Her parents were going to look for an apartment near the school when she made her choice, or when the school made its choice. Maybe the schools wouldn’t take her. It wasn’t so easy to get into a good private school. But she had good marks, she wasn’t afraid. She had always thought New York was very glamorous. The few times her parents had taken her to see Aunt Cassie and Uncle Andrew she was very impressed. Paris didn’t have any idea how to be sophisticated or glamorous, but she wanted to be both. If you lived in New York you were already on your way to learning how. People in New York were different from other people, just the way Aunt Cassie was different from her other aunts.

Next summer she was going to go back to that same camp because she loved it, and her parents would move into their new apartment in New York, and fix up their new house in Windflower, and then when Paris came back everything would have been done for her. She would say goodbye to the subway and start taking the bus—that was one sophisticated thing already! And she would be a freshman in high school. That was another sophisticated thing. She could hardly imagine it. But right now she had her eighth-grade year to finish, and they were the highest class in the school, the leaders, the big kids. She might as well enjoy it, because after that she would have to start being a little kid all over again. But somehow she couldn’t believe that. Paris knew now that she was finished with being a little kid. She hadn’t missed her parents all summer, and she knew she was on her way to being a grownup. The question was, did anyone else know it, could they tell? The family still talked around her like she wasn’t there, or talked about her right in front of her as if she was a baby, or talked Yiddish when they didn’t want her to understand something they thought she was too young to know.

No, the family didn’t know she wasn’t a kid any more. But she knew. And right now, that was all that mattered. The rest would take care of itself.

ELEVEN

Melissa didn’t like that Lavinia was going to move to New York without her, she didn’t like it at all. They had always been so close, just down the block in winter and then in the same house in summer until Lavinia and Jonah went trailing off to camp those years, and now Lavinia was going to leave her. It just didn’t seem right. Melissa began looking at her apartment, the place where she and Lazarus had been so happy all these years, and now she found things wrong with it. That bathroom looked out on a court, so dark and gloomy. The tiles were chipped, too. The fish decals she’d put on the tiles so lovingly when they were all the rage looked tacky now and Melissa was darned if she knew how to scrape them off. As for those bookcases she’d been so proud of, now they were overflowing with Lazarus’ books and he was always complaining.

The neighborhood wasn’t what it used to be either. Not that it was bad, but it no longer thrilled her. She was tired of it. This fall she had to paint again, which was a messy boring job, and the living room furniture needed to be reupholstered. It would be easier to move, after all, than go through all that boring work here. The more she thought of it, the better the idea sounded.