Family Secrets (51 page)

But she had her own strength around her soft inner core. Little Porcupine, her mother had called her as a child. She was still the little porcupine, protecting what was hers. Lavinia Saffron Mendes knew that soft core was there, partly an inheritance from Jonah: goodness, softness, and a dogged stubbornness, all of which Lavinia had seen and conquered in Jonah. But Jonah had chosen to be conquered. Paris had not.

PART IV

The Beginning

ONE

Richie was twelve, and his mother was driving him crazy. He knew that the other kids at school didn’t get along so well with their mothers either, but his really got on his nerves. He couldn’t communicate with her at all. He couldn’t talk to her, reason with her. He was always fighting with her. She was so dumb, dumb, dumb. She followed him around the house when he was home and dragged him with her when she went out, and treated him like a pet. His father was working in his office all day, and in the evenings his parents went out to one of their charity affairs, or a business dinner, or else his father went out alone to a business meeting, so Richie never had a chance to broach the subject to him. Anyway, how could you tell your father that your mother was a pest and that she embarrassed you? His father said he was to respect his mother, sons should revere their parents. When his father did have time to talk to him it was always about business. Richie knew he would inherit his father’s business someday, and could even go into it when he graduated from college and business school if he wanted to. He also knew that he would someday own a part of his mother’s family’s business, and so it was important that his father have these little man-to-man talks with him to prepare him for the future. Treated thus like a man, how could he turn around with a childish whine and complain about his mother? No, he couldn’t. So he tried to avoid her as much as he could. That was very hard to do; she sought him out with her own radar.

“Richie? Whatcha doin’?”

He had read that certain kinds of whales and dolphins had a sort of radar, sonar actually, where they could bounce sounds off objects in the depths of the ocean and thus “see” them. It was as if his mother were some great whale, calling out, finding him. She was big on top and little on the bottom, and in her fishtail blue sequinned evening gown that trailed off into a little ruffle at the floor she even looked just like a whale.

Richie was a lonely child. He had few friends at school, and none of them was a close friend except for one extrovert boy, Iggie, who was friends with everybody. Except for Iggie, who was a slob, Richie never invited his friends home after school because he was embarrassed and guilty about the way he felt ashamed of his mother. It was wrong to be ashamed of your mother. You should respect her. But she said such dumb things sometimes, and she pestered his friends. He wanted a mother like he saw on TV and in the movies, helpful, wise, graceful, but if he couldn’t have that because they only existed in the movies then he would like to have one like Iggie’s mother. She was a yenteh, but she let him alone.

Once a week, in the afternoon, Richie’s mother went to the beauty parlor, and she didn’t make him go. That was wonderful. He played records in his room, or did his homework, or wandered around the house if he felt restless, feeling free for once. She went on Thursdays. This particular Thursday he decided to explore his parents’ room. Your parents’ room was forbidden territory, but since his mother felt free to explore his, Richie felt it was about time he availed himself of a comparable privilege. They had a wonderful big bedroom with twin beds in it, and a television set, and a dressing room and a huge bathroom. There were a million closets. His mother had a lot of clothes. His father had a lot of clothes, too. The maid kept the room really neat.

On the big triple dresser there were several silver framed photos of Richie, from the time he was a baby until now, so he assumed that was his mother’s dresser. There was a matching chifferobe, and on top of that was a humidor containing his father’s cigars, so he knew whose that was. You could see the back garden and the palm trees from the bedroom window. They really lived in a nice house. Richie listened carefully to hear if the maid was coming. Other people’s maids had every Thursday off, but not their maid, because his mother had to go to the beauty parlor on Thursday and wouldn’t dream of leaving him alone, so their maid had Wednesdays off. When his mother was having her hair done the maid was very contented in her room or in the kitchen preparing dinner, and she never went upstairs to see if he was getting into trouble. The maid, at least, respected him as a grown-up twelve-year-old, nearly a teenager, not a baby any more.

He opened the top drawer of his mother’s dresser. Holy cow, what a mess! Everything was just thrown in; scarves, stockings, magazines. It looked like some kid’s dresser drawer, worse than his. The maid knew better than to arrange her employer’s dresser drawers, those things were private.

The magazines, Richie noticed, were his mother’s beloved crossword puzzle magazines. If she wasn’t knitting she was working on her puzzles. He picked up one of them and idly leafed through it. She had apparently been working on it as all the pages had filled-in puzzles on them. Then he saw something that scared him half to death. None of the puzzles was really done, not the way you were supposed to with the letters written in the boxes to make words. She had made a big D that covered four boxes, then a C, then some other letters, and none of it made any sense at all. She hadn’t even filled in the three-letter words, dog and cat. It was as if a three-year-old had been pretending to be a grownup, a three-year-old who couldn’t read yet but could imitate.

But his mother could read! He knew she could read. Sometimes she read things aloud to him from the movie gossip column in the daily newspaper. It was just that she couldn’t … couldn’t reason. She couldn’t actually do a crossword puzzle, but she liked pretending that she could because then people thought that she was just like everybody else, capable, with a hobby.

Richie grabbed the other puzzle magazines from his mother’s drawer and looked through them. They were all the same, a mess. He stood there with the crossword puzzle magazines in his hand and began to cry.

His mother wasn’t like other people’s mothers. He had been right about that. She was retarded. He had always thought retarded was those scary Mongoloid children you saw on the charity telethon on TV, the ones who grinned and drooled and looked at you out of little piggy uncomprehending eyes, but his mother was retarded too. She didn’t look queer, and she didn’t drool or let her tongue flop around, but she could hardly talk straight and she played tricks on people and games like a child. She bought all those dumb silly things at the store and thought they were funny, those tricks and gags, and now Richie knew why.

Why didn’t his father know?

His father always just went along acting as if his mother was perfectly normal. If his mother did something particularly weird or stupid his father just laughed it off, saying that was what women did. His father believed women were inferior to men, particularly wives, and it amused him that his wife was so helpless and passive, that she could never park the car right, that she forgot where she had put it, that she brought home jokes and tricks and gags she thought were funny. His father didn’t like his wife to talk when he was holding forth in a group, and he felt a wife should be an ornament and credit to her husband, expensively dressed, neat, hair done, glittering with jewelry. So his mother sat there and didn’t say anything, and looked like all the other wives, and his father was happy. His father didn’t know his mother was retarded because
he didn’t care
.

But I care, Richie thought, tears streaming down his cheeks. I care.

He knew it wasn’t inherited. He was smart and got good marks in school, and his father was smart and did well in business. His aunts and uncles were smart. He particularly liked Uncle Basil, who was always very nice to him and seemed so gentle. Did the rest of them know about his mother? They always acted as if she was just like the rest of them, just like everybody else. Sometimes Aunt Rosemary yelled at her when she wanted her own way, because his mother could be very stubborn and Aunt Rosemary liked to argue about things. But that seemed normal in a house. With everybody living together the way they did at Windflower, no wonder they had fights. His parents, alone, never had fights. Whatever his father said in his own house was law.

Richie blew his nose in one of his mother’s handkerchiefs and wiped his eyes. Then he threw the dirty handkerchief into her hamper in the bathroom for the maid to take away. He put the crossword puzzle magazines back into the drawer where he had found them. In a way he was sorry he had ever looked, and in another way he was glad. Now he was truly a man. The rabbi who gave him his Hebrew instruction said he would be a man next year when he was thirteen and had his bar mitzvah, but Richie knew differently. A man was a person who had to be alone and could survive. He was alone now. He didn’t have a mother any more, he just had another kid in the house, one who was allowed to be boss over him because everybody had played a trick on her. They had pretended she was fine, just like anyone else, and she believed it. But even as he grieved for the lost, warm mother who had ceased to exist when he was about four years old, Richie was also glad, because now he didn’t have to respect her and he could respect himself, depend on himself.

When his mother came back from the beauty parlor he acted just the same as ever. He told her she looked nice with her hair done and she was pleased. He even let her kiss him. There was some time before his father came home for dinner so he went into his room and started reading the Torah. When his mother came to the door he held it up and said, “Hebrew lesson tomorrow,” and she withdrew. The Torah said a lot of things about man, how he should behave, and about women. It was better to be a man than a woman. Men were smarter, stronger. And if you obeyed the laws of God He would help you more.

That night at dinner Richie said to his father, “Tomorrow night I want us to light the candles.”

“You do?” his father said. He seemed pleased. “How come?”

“I think we should. We’re a Jewish household and we should behave like good Jews.”

“I think that’s a good idea,” his father said. “Don’t you, Hazel?”

“Do we have candles?” his mother said, bewildered.

“We’ll buy some!” his father said. Why not? He had bought cars, houses, diamonds, furs, so what were a few candles? “Richie will buy them, since it’s his idea.”

“And I want to say the prayers too,” Richie said. He knew his mother was supposed to light the candles and say the prayers, but she obviously couldn’t, so he would.

“My little Hebrew student,” his father said. “My scholar.”

“I want to light the candles every Friday night from now on,” Richie said. “And on Saturday, I don’t want you to go to work.”

“What do you mean? You’re telling me not to go to work?” His father laughed. “A lunch meeting isn’t work.”

“It’s Saturday,” Richie said. “I want to go to temple.”

“You go to Sunday school.”

“I want to go to temple with the men.”

“You can go to temple with the men when you’re a man. Meanwhile you go to Sunday school and take your Hebrew lessons and get ready for your bar mitzvah, and I’ll go to my lunch meeting.”

“You’re going to Hialeah,” Richie said accusingly.

“So what?”

“That’s a race track. It’s a sin.”

His father laughed. “Now we have a religious fanatic in the house.”

“I’ll take him, Herman,” his mother said.

“I don’t want to go with you. I want to sit with the men.”

“Now the temple isn’t orthodox enough for you either?” his father said. He was taking it all as a big joke. After all, he was not an irreligious man, and it was good that his son should have an idea of his heritage, but enough was enough. Teenagers!

“I’m shocked that there is so little religion in this house,” Richie said.

“What does he want?” his mother asked his father.

“It’s all right, Hazel, it’s a phase they all go through before they’re bar mitzvahed. I went through it myself. He’ll outgrow it.”

Richie was poking at his dinner with his fork. “What’s this?”

“What’s what?” his mother asked.

“This.”

“That’s liver and bacon. You like it.”

“That’s
tref!
” Richie screamed.

“Don’t scream,” his father said, amused.

“It’s pork, pig, tref!” Richie said. “I want another plate.”

“What’s the matter?” his mother asked.

Richie went into the kitchen and got another plate. The maid looked at him with surprise. He took the plate back to the dinner table and helped himself to some vegetables and potatoes. He would not eat the liver after it had been contaminated by touching the bacon. He would not eat unclean pig. He chewed his broccoli and felt strangely relieved and calm. It was better to know your path. He was so abysmally ignorant of the proper ways of observing the laws, but he would study and then he would obey. It would be good to find God and be able to speak to Him. He would be a true and faithful friend to God, and then God would be a true and faithful friend to him. Whatever tribulations had been put here on this earth for him to endure had only been put here to test him.

TWO

On summer evenings at Windflower Frankie would wander along the lawn, taking in the view, a glass of scotch and ice in her hand.

“Don’t wander away,” Melissa would warn. “Dinner is promptly at six.”

How scared they were of the maids! If it was my house, Frankie thought, I’d either have no maid or else one I could boss around. Who ever heard of eating when the maid says you have to eat? Rich people should have a cocktail hour and then eat at seven-thirty like anybody else. Dinner on the table smack at six o’clock was for poor people, blue-collar workers, the man of the house home from the factory starving and screaming for his meat. Six o’clock dinner was for oilcloth on the table; seven-thirty was for linen tablecloths they kept telling you were heirlooms, and real silverware with the family’s initials on it, and a crystal chandelier over the table. She wasn’t even hungry yet at six o’clock. They ate lunch all afternoon, it seemed like.