Family Secrets (41 page)

“I don’t know why those kids always have to fight,” Melissa would say.

Paris knew. But she wasn’t telling. Your first loyalty in matters of sex came to the person nearest your own age, whether you liked him or not. The older people wouldn’t understand.

FOUR

The war was over. Jack Nature, still a sergeant and still untouched, got his honorable discharge, and he and Rosemary came back to New York and moved into the apartment Papa had gotten for them in the Edwardian. It was hard to get a place to live, and Rosemary considered herself lucky, even though the apartment wasn’t as big as she would have liked. It was hers, and it was a home. She had never been much of a housekeeper or a cook, and she liked the built-in maid service the hotel gave its tenants, plus the nearness of all sorts of restaurants where she and Jack could eat dinner. He went right back to his father’s dry cleaning company. Old Natelson was ailing and semiretired; he had just been waiting for his only son to come home from the war. A month after Jack was settled into his old job at the company, feeling comfortable and managing well, his father had a stroke, lingered a few days, and died. Jack complained about the responsibilities and the hard work, but Rosemary knew he was pleased to be the boss.

Jack didn’t believe in spending any more money than you had to. Rosemary didn’t mind, since it bothered her a little that she had more money than he did. Not that anyone outside the family knew it, but still, the man was supposed to support the wife, not the other way around. They were frugal. It wasn’t good to be showy. And besides, now they would start a family, and that took a lot of money.

While the war was on and they had been holed up in that hotel room near the Army base it hadn’t bothered Rosemary too much that she hadn’t become pregnant. They had sometimes forgotten to use anything but nothing happened. Other Army wives were having babies and then their husbands were sent overseas and killed or maimed. It seemed ironic that she was here in the States, so safe, and she hadn’t become pregnant. But where could a baby sleep in their room, in the dresser drawer? But now the war was over, they had a nice apartment, and she was well into her thirties. She’d better hurry before it was too late.

She and Jack had already decided that they would go against convention and have only two. Both of them had known what it was like to be the youngest in a large family and they wanted their children to have what they had missed. They hoped they would have a boy and a girl. But if they had two boys or two girls they would stop anyway. Who wanted to keep trying and have six of one kind? Two kids was convenient. You could take them with you on vacations. You could send them to private schools and college without going barefoot to pay for it. You could live in a reasonable-size apartment, not a big barn. Two was perfect. But where was the first?

In May Rosemary and Jack moved into their new house in Windflower. It was such a beautiful place, so big, so beautifully landscaped. They played tennis every day when Jack came home from work, and on weekends they played both morning and afternoon. They swam in the lake. Rosemary had never looked or felt healthier. She still wasn’t pregnant.

Jack drove to work every day so he rented a car for her. She was much in demand among the family because she could drive. She decided she would drive to the grocery store every day to do the food shopping and Hazel made a fuss. Hazel felt that the reins of authority had been snatched from her. It was darned annoying, Rosemary thought, to have to consult with Hazel every day about what they would have for dinner, just as if Hazel was a functioning grownup, but if she didn’t then Hazel would sulk. It was unfair that she had to live with Hazel anyway. Nobody had consulted her. At least Herman hadn’t shown his face yet, and with any luck his visits would be brief. Imagine, after running away from Herman all that time, here she was living in the same house with him. Their kid, Richie, looked like a very cute version of Herman. It was almost impossible to imagine Herman Winsor as a child, but here he was in front of her own eyes, a baby Herman, but cuddly. Still, there was already something about Richie that reminded her of an old man. He was a strange, serious little boy. He said he had a wife in the attic who no one could see but him. Imagine a seven-year-old dreaming up a wife! Richie was an old man all right.

“How’s your wife, Richie?” Rosemary would ask.

“She’s fine.”

“Why don’t you let her come down?”

“Oh no, she has to stay in the attic.”

“Don’t you think that’s mean? Maybe she’d like to come down.”

“No,” Richie would say solemnly, “she likes it there.”

When Rosemary had a baby then Richie would have a real child to play with. She hoped he wouldn’t be too old by then.

Dinner with Hazel every night was no pleasure. Rosemary would be talking to Jack and Hazel would butt in. Hazel still hated to be left out, just as she’d been when she was young. Richie ate with them at the dinner table now. He never talked unless you asked him something.

Jack seemed to have become friends with Everett. The two of them would sit outside at night, telling dirty jokes, until the mosquitoes drove them in. Jack had a whole collection of unsavory jokes he’d learned in the Army. Everett seemed to love them. Rosemary couldn’t take much of it and then she’d find something to do in the house.

Even after all these years and coming back here as a happily married woman, it still made Rosemary cringe inside when they had to go over and see Etta. She still remembered how she’d felt when Papa had brought Etta home and she was still living at home and had to go right on living there with Etta in Mama’s place. It was funny how you never outgrew the things you felt when you were young. They didn’t hurt so much, they went further away, but they were still there inside you.

Papa looked older. He looked young for his age but Rosemary couldn’t help noticing that he was a middle-aged man. He loved his work and would never retire. He went into the city every day. This place was his dream, and even though there were things about living there that none of then liked—this community living was difficult—they had to do it for his sake. He had worked hard for it. All their money had come from him, and they should be darned grateful. Rosemary had never made a cent in her life, yet she was rich.

Papa was always doing things for people. He’d built the loveliest little house for the caretaker and his family. It looked like the drawings of dream houses Rosemary had seen in magazines during the war, when everyone was dreaming of coming home to a little white house with rambler roses and a white picket fence, and a lawn and a vegetable garden and two kids and a family dog. There it all was, and the caretaker and his family were living in it, complete with the family dog, a mutt. Tim Forbes worked hard, though. No matter how early she woke up, Rosemary would see him working out on the grounds, sitting on his tractor with the cigarette drooping between his lips, bent over his prize roses, up on a ladder pruning a huge tree, spraying trees, clipping hedges, building a stone wall to make sure Steiglitz didn’t intrude on their right of way, painting the metal furniture down at the pavilion, cleaning dead leaves out of the drainpipe, repairing screens, moving the sprinkler system that watered the huge lawns as the sun moved in the sky. There was no end to the work. A man had to love nature to spend so much time worrying about keeping things alive.

The man was so busy that he hadn’t bothered to go to the doctor even though he’d been complaining all summer about his bad back. Papa had told him to take the day off, your health came first, but Tim would keep putting it off. Maybe he was afraid to go to the doctor. Lots of men were. They’d just keep hoping it would go away by itself. He’d go in the fall, he said, when the family moved back to the city and there wasn’t so much work to do on the gardens.

It was the middle of September and they were planning to move back because Paris and Everett had to go to school. Tim Forbes had already rolled up the awnings and taken the terrace furniture in. Rosemary thought he looked very tired and thin, quite awful in fact. He and his wife were Irish Catholics and they had only the two kids. She wondered if they kept a calendar. Here she was thinking about their kids, wondering about their private life, wondering about everybody’s private life who had kids. Catholics didn’t use birth control. It must be easier not to have kids than everyone thought. All her life she’d thought if she ever did it once she’d get pregnant, and it wasn’t until she got married and lost her virginity that she discovered it wasn’t so. Maybe she should have tried to have a baby right from the start of her marriage, when she was younger, and then perhaps she’d have had a chance. Sometimes she saw Molly Forbes shepherding her two little boys and Richie down to the lake to play, or for a run across the hills, or across the road to see the horses, and she wished it were she with her own little kids. What did it take to have a kid? Lavinia used to say, “Any cow can have a calf,” whenever any of her friends acted as if the very act of birth made them a kind of madonna, but sometimes Rosemary was sure that what was true for cows and all the rest of nature had nothing whatsoever to do with human beings.

It was Indian summer, hot. Rosemary went over to Lavinia’s house to sit on the screened porch. Every afternoon Lavinia and Melissa sat on their cool porch and talked and ate fruit, and Rosemary and Hazel often joined them, Hazel knitting or doing her puzzles. The grass was dry and brown from the heat spell and there were clumps of algae on the lake. You couldn’t swim, it was awful-looking.

“Tim Forbes is in the hospital,” Lavinia said.

“The hospital?” Melissa said. “When did you hear that?”

“He finally went to the doctor and they gave him a chest x-ray, and it’s …” She lowered her voice and looked around. “Cancer.”

“Ooh!” Melissa bit her knuckle.

“He got worse fast, just like that. The doctors think he’s done for.”

“At his age?” Melissa said.

“Gee, she’s got those two young kids,” Rosemary said.

“Oh, let’s not talk about it, it’s too gruesome,” Lavinia said. She had been very fond of Tim because they both loved flowers the same way and talked about them the same way, as if flowers were human.

The next month, when the family was back in the city, Tim Forbes died. Rosemary heard about it later. Papa went up to Windflower where the young widow was bewildered and in tears. This place was the only home she and her children had known in America. It had all happened so fast, and now she was alone.

Papa told her she could stay in her house forever, rent free. Her sons would continue to go to the local school. She would be the caretaker. Papa would hire a gardener-handyman from outside to come in and do day work. At first Molly Forbes couldn’t believe it, but Papa insisted he meant it. When he went away and drove back to New York she seemed in a kind of shock that her life, which had been so suddenly torn apart, should be so quickly arranged again.

“Isn’t that just like Papa?” Lavinia said proudly.

“He’s a wonderful person,” Jonah said. “One in a million.”

I’ll never envy her having kids again, Rosemary thought. Still, there was the rest of the world to envy. What was a woman without children? A man and wife weren’t a family, they were just a couple. What would she do if God forbid something happened to Jack? She would be all alone. If she had kids … Kids made a house warm. Kids gave a life purpose. No matter that she and Jack had everything in common and got along so well together, there was something missing. What had she ever done that she had to be so punished?

FIVE

In a school that gives no marks it is impossible to tell if you will get into college until your senior year, when the principal tells you what the teachers have known all along and have kept a secret. The girls in Paris’ class were very nervous, trying to make a joke about getting into some junior college that would take anyone, and worrying themselves sick that they would be the one who had to go there. Paris sent for some college brochures. She knew her parents would decide which was the best college for her to go to after the principal gave her the alternatives. She was sure she wouldn’t have to go to the joke junior college, but beyond that it didn’t really matter. It just had to be a college. College had the mystique, names didn’t matter.

When she and her parents went to see the principal for the news Paris was very surprised when the principal said she could go to any college she wanted to. It had never occurred to her that the field would be wide open for her. In her trimonthly reports the teachers had always complained she was not working to her “full capacity.” She had assumed that meant she wasn’t getting As. It hadn’t.

“Where do you think you would like to go?” the principal asked.

Paris looked at her mother.

“We want her to go to Radcliffe,” her mother said.

“What’s Radcliffe?” Paris asked her.

“It’s the girls’ part of Harvard,” her mother said. Her father nodded his approval.

“I want to go to Radcliffe,” Paris said.

“Good,” the principal said. “Very good. I’m sure you can get in. There is one thing you might consider though. You’re only going to be sixteen next year. Maybe you would want to stay out for a year, take some sort of courses here at home, and become more mature, older. Then you could start college nearer to the age of the other girls.”

“I agree with that,” her mother said.

“What courses?” Paris said. “If I can get into college now, why do I need courses?”

“But you would be so far away from home, all alone,” her mother said. “We just want you to stay home for a year so you can grow more mature.”

“Do people get more mature automatically? I thought you got more mature from living.”

“You’d be living,” her mother said.

Paris thought of the tall shelves of books in the living room, the classics she hadn’t read yet, her mother’s college textbooks. She could stay home and read all of them and get an education no one else had. She knew when it came down to it they would never let her take courses. Her mother would keep her home in the apartment to be a friend and companion. They would have lunch at Schrafft’s with Aunt Melissa and Aunt Cassie. All her friends from high school would be in college, living in other cities, and there would be no one left to be her friend. No one left her age. Her friends were her age, even though they were older chronologically. Her mother and aunts weren’t her age. They wanted to make an oddity of her, half old woman like them, half permanent child kept at home to rot. It was tempting to think of reading all those books, tempting to put off a strange new experience until she was older and stronger, but she also sensed that if she stayed home she would never go to college. Oh, they thought she would get to college all right. But her mother clutched her with bonds stronger than claws. If she stayed at home with her mother and no friends for an entire year she would become so shy, so beaten down, so dependent, so strange, so unable to function, that she would be a better candidate for a mental institution than for Radcliffe.