Family Secrets (40 page)

Jonah went into the city with Adam in the limousine. Although he also was an early riser, he waited for Adam, who never left before nine-thirty because he felt he had earned his few moments of ease by this time in his life. Jonah was usually up by six, and took a brisk walk around the estate before a spartan breakfast. He went to the office with Adam and had lunch with him and Andrew and Basil.

Basil came to Windflower for long weekends. During the week he stayed in the city, where he conducted his social life. Everyone hoped he would find a nice girl to marry and settle down.

Weekdays for Lavinia and Melissa meant running the house. They had to plan the menus, hopefully without too many arguments, and attend to the shopping, and Lavinia was busy working on her flower garden with Tim Forbes. Both Lavinia and the caretaker had green thumbs, and all three houses were always filled with fresh flowers.

Everett had been forbidden to come downstairs to breakfast in his underwear, but he persisted in horrifying everyone by wearing his dirty old trousers with no shirt. Luckily he got up so late that no one had to look at him, and he ate breakfast alone. Paris slept right through breakfast and got up for lunch. No matter how Lavinia nagged her, she insisted on wearing blue jeans and shirts instead of a pretty dress. At least she was always clean.

“Why can’t you wear a dress and set your hair?” Lavinia would say. “I got you all those nice dresses.”

“Who’s going to look at me?”

“We are. The family.”

“Won’t they like me if I’m not dressed up?”

“That has nothing to do with it. You should dress up for yourself. You should take pride in your appearance.”

“I do. I like looking this way.”

On weekdays lunch was served on the screen porch at the Mendes-Bergman house, Hazel ate with Richie, and Etta ate at her house. On weekends, when the men were home for lunch, everyone ate down at the lake. Ben would load the charcoal grill and the food into Jonah’s car, and drive it down to the lake. There were metal tables and chairs down there, and Ben would set up the grill and cook hamburgers while those who wished could swim and sun and those who disliked swimming and suntans could wait in the pavillion for their food. Although Lavinia was displeased at the tire tracks Ben left in Papa’s lovely, expensive new lawn, there was really no other way to get all that gear down there except by car. No one could carry it that far.

After dinner, whether on weekdays or weekends, the ritual was always the same: everyone went to Adam’s house and sat in the living room. Etta set out a big bowl of fruit and it was just like the old days back in Brooklyn, a little stilted, but cheerful and safe. It was hard to think of things to say when you saw each other every day, all day, and every night. They were all always running in and out of each other’s houses or on the phone to each other, and now here they were, dressed up, sitting there playing at being visitors. Paris was bored and gorged herself with fruit.

“Stop pulling the grapes off the stems,” Etta would snap. “Cut off a bunch with the scissors.”

“I only want one grape.”

“You know you’re going to end up eating them all.”

“Diet and starve yourself all day,” Lavinia would say. “Then come over here and stuff yourself. You’d think we don’t have fruit at home.”

At ten o’clock, when Lazarus was snoring in the corner in the easy chair and Adam looked as if he were about to doze off himself, everyone got up and said good night. There was a great to-do about who had the flashlights, and then they would all walk back to their own houses. Adam had had a street light installed between his house and the other two, but still everyone was a little afraid of the dark. Their houses were all lit up, and there were searchlights on the roofs. Paris liked to walk in the dark. She imagined there were prowlers and burglars lurking about. But if she couldn’t see them then they couldn’t see her either, and she was safe. Still, there was a delicious little thrill in imagining the danger.

The “next door” neighbors, who lived about a mile away, had come the previous summer to pay their respects. They were an elderly couple, German Jews, and very rich. It was because of them, and the Saffron family, and a Jewish banker across the way, that The Valley had become known to local people as The Polish Corridor. The Saffron family was a little intimidated by their neighbors, who had been there before them. After the courtesy call Etta, Lavinia, and Melissa had nagged Papa to go visit them back, but he never did. He put it off and put it off, and finally it was too late. Now the only time he saw the neighbors was when they were having an argument with him about the right of way.

People thought the new inhabitants of Windflower were strange. It was such a large family, and they kept to themselves, never tried to know anyone, no one saw them. A car would drive out of the gate and go away, then a car would return, but the only people you ever saw on the road were Molly Forbes and her two little boys, walking to the mailbox to gather up the clan’s mail. Everyone in The Valley had horses, even the children, and everyone rode, but not the people in Windflower. No one knew what they did to entertain themselves.

The family thought they had plenty of things to do. Everett tinkered with his inventions in his room, the same as he did anywhere he was. He had gotten another ham radio. Paris rode her bicycle on the driveway on the grounds (never on the road outside because there were cars sometimes and you could get killed) and walked by herself through the woods. At the lake there were two gargoyles set into the stone of the pavilion (The Crazy Russian must have loved gargoyles) and Paris took her water colors down there and colored them in bright colors. It made them look more like cheerful elves. She also persuaded Hazel to let her take care of Richie some of the time. Richie was a quiet, sweet little boy, and he and Paris spent many hours wandering around the property, not saying anything. She wondered if he was old enough to think yet, and if so, what he thought. She couldn’t remember what she thought when she was five. She made his supper and gave him his bath and secretly thought she was a much better baby sitter than Hazel was. Hazel gave him Rice Krispies all the time. Paris had had nutrition at school in her biology class, and she gave him meat and vegetables. Hazel certainly was dumb.

Paris wanted to invite some of her old friends from Brooklyn to visit her at Windflower, but her mother said no, they might be intimidated by all this splendor and feel badly. Actually it was Lavinia who was intimidated by the space and luxury of Windflower, they all were. It looked like a millionaire’s estate. It was one thing to have money, but another thing to show it. Of course they would dress nicely, they would never stint on food, but one had to be careful not to be showy. You didn’t invite people who were less fortunate than you were and rub their noses in it; it wasn’t fair. It would be all right if Paris invited a nice friend from Dalton to come visit. But her friends from high school were either at camp or else their families had their own places for the summer, so it was hard to get anyone to come. That was the trouble with knowing rich kids.

Feeling slightly guilty, the family economized in little ways. Mae didn’t change both sheets at the same time; she put the bottom one into the laundry, put the used top one on the bottom, and put a fresh one on the top. Lazarus brought piles of little wrapped cakes of guest soap from the Edwardian Hotel and he and Melissa used that. It didn’t matter to him that it was Papa’s hotel and therefore Papa paid for the soap; he, Lazarus was paying rent and therefore
he
was paying for the soap, so they might as well use it at Windflower.

Eating his lima beans carefully one at a time and masticating them the proscribed length of time, Lazarus launched into a story. “At the office today, this chink came in and … what are you kicking me for, Toots?”

Caught, Melissa would blush. “Don’t say chink.”

“This Chinaman came in, and … why are you kicking me now?”

“I didn’t kick you that time,” Melissa said.

“Then that rotten kid is kicking me.” Lazarus glared at Paris, sitting across from him at the wide, long table.

“I can’t kick you, my legs don’t reach,” Paris said.

“You kicked me.”

“I didn’t.”

“Please eat, Lazarus, we’re all waiting,” from Melissa, prompted by Lavinia’s impatient glance.

Dessert finally came. “Ooh, chocolate cake!” Everett said with malicious glee. “Paris can’t have any because of her pimples. I’ll have hers.”

“Pig,” Paris said.

“Let me count your pimples: one, two, three, four …”

“Shut up, Everett!”

“Don’t say ‘shut up,’” Lavinia said. “Be quiet, Everett.”

“I don’t think it’s nice to talk about Paris’ pimples,” said Melissa.

“Will you all shut up about my pimples?” Paris said.

“I’ll bet none of you knows what ‘hirsute’ means,” Lazarus said. He had been studying the dictionary as usual, expanding his vocabulary.

“Hairy,” Paris said.

Lazarus glared at her. Paris glared at Everett, who was wolfing down his second huge piece of chocolate cake.

“I got some nice fruit for you, Paris,” Lavinia said.

“I don’t want fruit.”

“Wait till tonight when she stuffs herself over at Papa’s,” Lazarus said.

“So what?” Lavinia snapped. “She has a right.”

Jonah sat there almost asleep, the dormouse at the tea party. He always tried to be invisible when they started squabbling. He didn’t know why they had to snap at each other when they all loved each other. Families should be kind to each other.

“Can we go to the movies tonight?” Paris asked, as usual, the pest.

“No,” Lavinia said. “We’re going to Papa’s.”

For all their squabbles, Paris and Everett were good friends anyway, mainly because they had no one else at Windflower to be friends with. At last in his cousin Everett found an audience for his sex fantasies. She believed everything he told her. No matter that there were a few details of the gang-bang that were inaccurate; she didn’t know the difference and she was impressed. She wasn’t shocked. She thought Everett was a man of the world. For her he wove tales of his sexual conquests in Florida, the girls who chased him and found him irresistible, and she believed those too. It didn’t seem strange to her that Everett never went out with a girl while he was here in the North. He didn’t have to. A life of adventure was waiting for him whenever he chose to indulge in it, and after all, everyone knew that you led a different life in front of your parents than you did when you were free. It was only respectful. Even sophisticated Uncle Basil, who goodness knows everyone knew about, put on the act of being a shy shnook when he was with the family.

Paris supposed that someday if neither she nor Everett found anyone they liked, they would probably have to marry each other. It wasn’t so unusual for cousins to marry. It had happened before in the family. It was nice to feel secure and know there would be a husband waiting for her when she would be old enough to have to marry. It meant she didn’t have to go out with those awful boys they dragged to school dances. She couldn’t imagine herself ever going out with one of them.

Sometimes when her mother and Aunt Melissa went into the town to buy groceries they let her come along so she could go to the library. She had gotten a library card first thing, and she took out piles of books: novels and short stories. Her favorite writers were still F. Scott Fitzgerald and John O’Hara, and she was in love with the Twenties. She had asked her mother about the Twenties, but her mother hadn’t been a flapper, she had missed it all. How could someone have missed it all when they were the right age? It was a shame she herself had been born too late.

She had started writing children’s books and illustrating them. It started because one day she said she was bored. There wasn’t anything interesting to read in that house and she had finished all her library books, no one wanted to go swimming with her, her father was in the city so she had no one to play tennis with, and she was sick of listening to the grownups talk.

“You’re bored?” her mother said. “Go write a book.”

So Paris did. She didn’t intend to send it to a publisher, but it was something to do. It was easy to write a children’s book because it was short, so she wrote another one. They were fantasies; one about a lonely little boy and another about an outcast fish. Neither of them had friends so they had to fend for themselves. The little boy had an invisible midget to play with and the fish went around looking for friends but all the other fish rejected him. Her favorite subject matter was loneliness.

She was allowed to lock the outside door from her room to the hall, because there were men in the house and they had a male butler who might walk in on you with the vacuum cleaner in his hand while you were undressed, but she was not allowed to close the door which led to her parents’ room. Her mother said it kept the air from ventilating and made it too hot. Paris knew better. There was no privacy in that house, not for children anyway. A child had the same status as a privileged pet. She was something to be watched with curiosity and amusement and exasperation, something to be talked about and over as if she couldn’t hear or understand, something to amuse the adults. That was why people had children and made a family, so they would have built-in entertainment. But the children were expected to be good pets; to be obedient, respectful, neat and clean, polite, and talented; do tricks; get good marks. She could hear her father snore at night and she hoped that her parents didn’t decide to have sex together because then she would hear them and it would be disgusting. So far they had behaved themselves and done nothing.

Sex was still something to be sorted out in her mind. She knew what people did, but she didn’t know what they thought, how they felt. Why, for example, would her parents want to keep their door open? Why did she have a strange suspicion whenever Everett twisted her arm to tease her that he really wanted to kiss her? Sometimes Everett did make her let him kiss her on the mouth, when she had to bribe him to take her into town to the post office, or let her come to the movies with him. She didn’t like it when he kissed her. It was a chaste kiss with closed lips, but there was nothing sexy or friendly about it, it was sort of desperate. Everett thought she was a pet too, just like the grownups did. Why didn’t he kiss a girl his own age? She would yell at him, “Incest!” and that made him furious. He would hit her and twist her arm until she shrieked, and then her mother and his mother would come running into the room and her mother would yell at him that Paris had thin bones and not to break her arm.