Family Secrets (39 page)

It was really late when Everett signed off, and he stumbled back to the house and fell into bed. Well, there was always Sunday to clean up the garage and make his equipment look presentable.

As usual, Everett slept late. It was past noon when he came downstairs to the dining room, too late for breakfast, too early for lunch. Henny gave him a cup of coffee in the kitchen and didn’t look too happy about it. He lit a cigarette and walked out to the back porch with the cup of coffee in his hand. It was another perfect, hot, sunny day. He certainly wasn’t looking forward to cleaning up the damn garage, it would be hot as hell in there. He smoked his cigarette and drank his coffee, left the empty cup on a table and walked slowly out to the garage to survey his unwelcome task.

The garage was completely empty except for Papa’s car.

It was as if he had entered someone else’s garage by mistake. Everett couldn’t believe it. The coils of wire were gone, his tools were gone, his partly completed inventions were gone, the new things he’d bought on sale yesterday were gone, and even his ham radio set was gone. His ham radio set! He felt his stomach turn over, the sour taste of the coffee and cigarette in his mouth. His heart was pounding and he started to tremble. Where was all his stuff? He ran outside to the driveway and there was his red jalopy, right where he had left it last night, but it was empty. Behind the garage? No, nothing.

He ran around the outside of the garage like an idiot, flapping his arms, trying to croak something, and then he raced back to the house and ran in, slamming the screen door behind him.

“Papa! Etta!”

Papa came into the living room with the Sunday paper in his hand. He looked at Everett calmly. “Nu, so what’s the screaming?”

“My stuff is gone!” Everett said. “My stuff, from the garage.”

“I threw it out.”

Everett looked at his grandfather to see if he was kidding. But there was no trace of a smile on the old man’s face, nor anger either. Just that calm; a job needed to be done and he had done it.

“You threw it
out
?” Everett was aware that his voice had cracked, the way it hadn’t done since he was an adolescent. “Where is it?”

“I left it for the junkman and he took it.”

“You threw it out for
garbage
?”

Papa sat down in his favorite comfortable chair and opened the Sunday paper. Etta came cheerfully into the room as if she hadn’t heard a word of Everett’s anguished screaming.

“Lunch is ready,” Etta said pleasantly.

“Oh, good,” Papa said, and refolded the paper neatly.

Everett looked at both of them and ran out of the house before they could see him cry. He got into his car and gunned it away, sobbing, tears blinding him. He wanted to hit, to kill. His life, his love, it was gone. Where could the garbage collector have taken it? If he could just find out, maybe he could get back his ham radio set at least. But he knew it was hopeless. They collected trash early in the morning. That diabolical old man must have been up at the crack of dawn, as usual, and when he saw all the “junk” as he thought of it, he must have lost his temper. Everett remembered the story of his grandfather chopping the stone gargoyles off the fireplace with an ax. The old man had probably picked up each and every one of his beloved things and tossed them all out into the street, a tangled mess of junk for real. They would be resting now in the back of some smelly filthy garbage truck along with the remains of last night’s dinner, smashed beyond repair. Maybe they had been put into the town garbage dump already, lost, destroyed. Everett was crying openly in the safety of his car, sobbing like a child and wishing he was dead. He could never go back to that house, never again.

He rode up and down side roads he had never seen and finally made his way to the beach. Up the road past where the hotels were, to the open places where no one lived. The air was cool even though the sun was hot, and he squinted his faded eyes against the sun, looking for a place to park. He drove up on to the shoulder of the road and stopped the car. The beach was broad and clean and empty. The sea rocked peacefully, the waves slapping symmetrically against the sand and spreading the surf out like a tablecloth. Everett went to the edge of the ocean and urinated into it, and then he walked over to a soft mound of sand and lay down. He wondered if he could live on the beach like a bum. No, he wouldn’t like to sleep here, and he didn’t like the sun either. He would go back downtown, to a rooming house.

He counted the money left in his pants pocket. He had seven dollars. He could take a five-dollar room and that would leave enough for food, and then he could call his mother collect and tell her to send him some money.

He drove back downtown, and through the side streets where the old, retired couples lived in little run-down rooming houses. He stopped in front of a three-story greenish house that had a sign in front that there were reasonable rooms to let, and went inside. It was only five dollars a night, and would be cheaper if he took the room by the month. No meals. An old woman ran the house, and when he told her he was a college student she seemed impressed. Education always impressed the members of the varicose vein set. There was a phone in the hall for the entire floor, but that didn’t bother Everett because he didn’t plan to get any calls. He paid for the room in advance and told her he would pick up his luggage later.

As soon as the landlady left he telephoned his mother, but there was no one home. Where would they go on Sunday? Maybe visiting. He wasn’t going to call anyone else looking for her, she’d come home. He felt hungry so he got back into his car and drove around until he found a cheap place to eat and had bacon and eggs and toast. Everything tasted greasy, but food was food. He wondered if Papa and Etta were worried about him yet. It was nearly supper time. Would they wait, or would they just go on and eat without him? Etta wouldn’t care, but Papa would care; after all, it was he who’d driven his own grandson out of the house. Well good, let them suffer.

When his watch said six o’clock Everett telephoned his mother again. She was still out. Damn her, probably eating out because it was Sunday night. Well, they always came home early.

The walls of his little room seemed to suffocate him. He didn’t even have a radio. He got into his car again and realized he was almost out of gas. It was either gas or supper, and naturally Everett chose gas. Freedom was more important than food any day. He drank a coke from the machine in the gas station and then drove around in the balmy evening until the air got too chilly. He hadn’t even brought a sweater. When his mother sent him the money he could buy some new clothes. He would never go back to that house. Papa could throw out his clothes the way he’d thrown out his equipment, if that was all Everett meant to him.

He wondered if he should tell his mother the great wrong that had been done to him. Would she take her father’s side the way she always did, or would she side with her son? Maybe she wouldn’t want to send him the money when she heard he’d run away. Maybe it would be a smart thing just to tell her to wire the money to him at the bank and then after it was safely in his hand he could call her and explain why he had left. That way at least she wouldn’t be able to do anything about it. He needed money either way, wherever he lived.

He finally caught her at home at ten o’clock at night. He was annoyed at her, and his voice was petulant.

“Everett, you don’t have to whine. When did I ever refuse you money?”

“Will you send it first thing in the morning?”

“Did you spend all the money I gave you
already
?”

“I had to. I have expenses.”

“I hope you didn’t buy any more junk, Everett. I want you to go out and enjoy yourself with your friends.”

“I do.”

“Well, that’s good. How is Papa?”

“Fine.”

“And Etta?”

“She’s fine too.”

“I want you to try to be neat around the house and not make a pest of yourself.”

“Yes.” Oh boy, he was glad he hadn’t told her about the scene today with Papa and his “junk.”

“You be nice to Etta. Maybe you should buy her a little present, some handkerchiefs or something, or some nice candy. She has to go to extra trouble for you.”

“Okay,” Everett said, bored. He sighed. He would buy Etta nothing. “I better go now, this is costing you money.”

She laughed. “Since when did you ever worry about that?”

“Goodbye, Mom. Say hello to Dad.”

Well, at least he’d attended to his financial affairs. Now for a good night’s sleep. Everett went into the little room and turned back the covers on the bed. He lay down in his underpants, his customary sleeping garment, and stared at the ceiling. How could anybody live in this little box? He heard a senile cough from the next room and winced. Fossils. It was as bad as a dormitory. A sink in his room and the public toilet down the hall, one for men, one for women. A bathtub on claw feet in the bathroom. It was a good thing he seldom bathed. He didn’t have a toothbrush but he hardly ever bothered to brush his teeth anyway. Tomorrow when he got the money he’d buy a razor, or maybe he’d just grow a beard. Ha! That’d shake them up. Maybe he’d never go back to college at all, just hang around and pretend he was going to college. He could loaf until Christmas vacation that way, and then he’d go back to New York to visit his parents, and then he’d come back here and … He was so bored and lonely he wanted to cry again. The future seemed endless. Just until Christmas vacation seemed endless. Even tonight seemed endless. If an hour was so long, how long would a year be, a lifetime? It was bad enough to live anywhere, but to live here was hopeless. His grandfather always said a man shouldn’t have to live alone, and he was right. Loneliness was the worst thing in the whole world.

The next morning Everett got into his car and drove back to Papa’s house. Nobody acted surprised to see him, nobody made any cracks. He put on a fresh shirt and opened a fresh pack of cigarettes, and when he went into the kitchen Henny gave him a freshly made cup of coffee. Papa went off to the office in his limousine, driven by Maurice, and the garage was completely empty. Everett could see that someone had hosed down the cement and swept up the place very neatly. If he wanted to he could even park his own car in there.

He felt as if he had died.

THREE

Everyone moved to Windflower for the summer on the same day in May. Lavinia closed up her city apartment very carefully, putting covers on the chairs and sofa, on the drapes, on the lampshades, after having prudently unplugged the lamps and removed the bulbs so there would be no chance of fire. She wrapped each bulb in tissue paper and put them all into a big cardboard box on the closet shelf. Melissa did the same.

Adam had sold his house in Brooklyn, smelling change in the air. The neighborhood was going down, and he wanted to get out while the property still had value. The good things, the heirloom furniture (as he thought of the things he had bought during the past twenty years), were moved up to his house in Windflower and arranged there lovingly by Etta, who now thought of all of them as hers. The not-so-good things, the worn-out and cheap things, were distributed among his poor and deserving relatives. And a few things went with him and Etta to their new apartment in the Edwardian Hotel. Adam was now a resident of New York City.

Hazel came to Windflower with the housekeeper and Richie. Richie was five years old now, and finally Hazel had managed to fire the nurse. She was really a baby nurse anyway, and she didn’t care for older children if she could help it. Older children were too wild. The firing of the nurse had actually been by mutual consent, but Hazel liked to think it was her doing because it made her feel like the boss in the house.

In Virginia, Rosemary envied all of them their nice country summer, and she and Jack wrote joint letters still trying to find some humor in their long dreary Army stint.

It was Paris’ first whole summer at Windflower. Carefully she put out her bottle of hand lotion, her new tube of toothpaste, her new toothbrush, her little jar of deodorant, her baby powder, her comb and brush, and arranged them in the medicine cabinet. Her mother had bought her some summer country dresses, and they were hung neatly in the huge closet. Picture postcards and stationery to write to friends went in the night table drawer, her portable typewriter and paper went into the closet, and her drawing materials as well.

Melissa took Mae the cook-maid on a tour of Paris’ room and bathroom when Paris wasn’t there. “Look how neat she is!” Melissa said, opening Paris’ medicine cabinet and displaying the things neatly lined up on the shelves. “She’s always that way. You’ll never find any clothes on the floor from that child, no.” It was Melissa’s way of apologizing for Everett, her bribe to the help.

Everett was ensconced in his gray room amid his mess. His red jalopy stood in the driveway next to Jonah’s sedan. Nobody but Adam bothered to use the garage because it was far away from the houses and a nuisance, but of course Adam had a chauffeur. Paris kept her new English racing bike in the garage too. Rosemary had won it in a raffle, the only thing she’d ever won, and since she couldn’t ride it around the streets she gave it to Paris.

The girls—Lavinia and Melissa and Hazel—and Etta were very conscious of their new role as the ladies of a country estate, and had bought suitable new clothes. No longer the casual dresses of their beach house days, now they wore pastel linen dresses with cashmere sweaters to match, girdles and stockings, clean white high-heeled sandals, and summer jewelry made of mother of pearl and the new plastic. Their good winter jewelry went into the vault at the bank. Adam had found a small vault in the back of one of the closets in his bedroom, where perhaps Mrs. Crazy Russian had kept her jewels, but of course no one used it. A private safe was the best way to encourage burglars in the country. Everyone knew that help talked. Better not to show too much wealth, it gave people ideas.

Adam and Lazarus and Jonah wore what they pleased, because they were men. Old sloppy sweaters, baggy pants, comfortable shoes, were suitable for hard-working men who had to get dressed up every day to go to their offices. Lazarus arose at the crack of dawn to attend to his ablutions, ate a hearty breakfast consisting of half a grapefruit, hot oatmeal, two soft-boiled eggs, toast with jam, coffee, a banana, and a tall glass of buttermilk, and then Ben the butler drove him to the station to catch the seven-fifty-eight. From Grand Central Station, where his train arrived half an hour later (it was the crack express), Lazarus took the subway to his office in Brooklyn. He was always there before nine, in time to greet his first patient. Because he had eaten such a good breakfast he was never hungry for lunch, and thus saved at least a dollar and a half. He could get by with just a container of coffee, and see an extra patient besides.