Family Secrets (53 page)

“And remember, if the price hasn’t gone down, don’t hondel. You’re Adam Saffron’s son. Adam Saffron’s son doesn’t have to hondel.”

“Yes, Papa.”

The house in East Hampton which Basil and Nicole had liked was, miraculously, still available. A large, modern house with big, airy windows, a large lawn, and only a block from the beach. You could see the ocean from the bedroom windows. It was very expensive. It was lucky Papa hadn’t asked exactly how expensive it was. When Basil finished his negotiations on the phone he ran all the way down the hill to the lake to tell Nicole the good news.

The following week Basil and Nicole drove to East Hampton to close the deal and make lists of what they would have to buy or bring from the city. The house was completely furnished, but there were always personal things you wanted that they forgot to supply. Of course sheets and towels were not included, and none of the special utensils that Nicole wanted for her French cooking were there. But there was even a cook included with the rental of the house.

That very next weekend Basil and Nicole, little Hervé and baby Geneviève, the French nurse, and the new East Hampton cook were all ensconced in their wonderful big beach house. It occurred to Basil that Papa had been singularly easy to convince. Perhaps it was true that, as he had suspected, Papa had never been able to warm up to Nicole, even now that she was a member of the family. No, that was silly. How could anyone not like Nicole? It was just that Papa was a practical man. The Big House at Windflower wasn’t meant for babies. Papa needed his peace and quiet, as he had said. East Hampton was for young people, young couples with little children, lively people who loved sports and social life. Their big, sprawling house would be casual and friendly. Children could spill ice cream on the deck chairs if they wanted to and no one would yell at them. Nicole believed in bringing up children permissively. Her friend the psychiatrist and his wife believed in letting their children do anything they wanted to so they would not become frustrated. Basil didn’t want his own children to become frustrated either. Better a few spots and stains on the living room furniture than a child who had social problems in his later life.

In East Hampton that Saturday afternoon Nicole and Basil bought green and white striped sheets and towels, large beach towels, and a set of Sabatier knives. At Windflower that same day Maurice, the chauffeur, huffing and puffing, brought the sofa back upstairs from the cellar where it had been stored under plastic wraps, and put it where it belonged in what had been Basil’s old study. The nurse’s bed was given to Maurice for his own chauffeur’s cottage, as it was time he had a new one. Hervé had broken the ship model that used to stand on the desk, but Etta put a large vase of freshly cut garden flowers in its stead. The cribs were gone to East Hampton with the children, and Etta had arranged for the cleaners to come on Monday to pick up the carpet to be cleaned.

“It’s funny how a house where there were babies always smells like vomit,” Etta said.

“Turn up the sound on the TV,” Adam said. Etta, Rosemary, Lavinia, and Melissa rushed to comply.

“What’s so good in East Hampton?” Paris asked.

“Nothing
you
want,” Lavinia said.

FOUR

It was the day of Richie’s bar mitzvah. Today he was a man. His prayers had all been learned, and the rabbi said he was a prize student. He was so fervent, so painstakingly proper in every detail, was it possible he might be considering going on to study to become a rabbi himself someday? No, Richie said politely, he was going to go to business school so he could become a businessman like his father. But of course, he added, he would always live the religious life and keep the faith and laws of his people. It was important to be a good Jew. He was only regretful that the rest of his family had forgotten so much of their beautiful heritage.

Thirteen years old and such a serious little boy, although a young man now. He walked around in a daze, lost in his own thoughts, and never answered when you said good morning. The happy smile was gone. It was a bashful smile, and he hung his head and wouldn’t look you in the eye unless he was giving a lecture on religion. He was unpredictable: one moment a child, the next an old man. He would walk into a room where a radio was playing and snap it off.

“What are you doing?” the outraged owner of the radio would cry.

“You’re interfering with my studies,” Richie would answer in a calm tone, sure that right and God were on his side.

“So go in your room.”

“I can still hear you.”

There was only only one television set in the Winsor-Nature house, and it was in the living room. It belonged to Jack Nature, who had bought it wholesale from a friend. Hazel didn’t care what program they watched, and Herman was never there, but Richie would walk over to the set in the middle of a program he didn’t like and change the channel. Jack and Rosemary would scream.

“You’re a
child
around here,” Rosemary would say, “and don’t you forget it.”

Sometimes Richie was kind to Buffy, patiently playing with her and telling her stories, and then suddenly his mood would change and he would beat her up, twist her arm, sit on her until she cried.

“Why did you do that?” she would ask him.

“I don’t know.”

Only two years old, she was bright and astonishingly verbal. Her physical coordination was precocious too. She loved to run. Whenever she could escape the watchful eyes of the family she would run all the way down the hill, across the wide expanses of lawn, down the road, around the turnabout, up the hill again, to the edge of the lake, the edge of the woods. She was like a little puppy, so fast and tireless. They had started to call her The Runner. She knew her boundaries; anything outside the stone walls and electrified barbed wire of Windflower was forbidden. There were cars on the road that could hit and kill a child. Strange maniac men lurked in the dark bushes down the road to kidnap little girls.

Richie loved Buffy. He thought of her as the little sister he had never had. He didn’t know why he sometimes turned on her. It was just that sometimes the tensions, the anger and bewilderment, and even the growing sexual frustrations inside him became too much to handle, and then he wanted to wrestle, and there was no one to wrestle with. He was not athletic, and he never invited friends to Windflower. He used to play with Timmy and Mike, the caretaker’s sons, but the past year he had become self-conscious with them, feeling that they were beneath him. They went to the local public school, had their own friends, and treated him with polite deference. They were planning their lives now, hoping to get scholarships to college or attend a free state college. Their mother had taught them to be very polite to the family, and now, although they never went so far as to call him Mister Richie, they treated him differently than they treated their own friends, partly because Richie treated them differently too. The three little boys who had run along the banks of the lagoon with Molly Forbes so long ago were three teenagers, separate people. He would not invite them to his bar mitzvah. They were not family.

For two days now, workmen had been putting up a huge green and white striped tent, laying a wooden dance floor, and putting a wood floor inside the tent as well, covering the floor with artificial grass. There would be a small orchestra to play for dancing, and for background music while everyone feasted. Two long buffet tables would line two walls of the tent, and the sides of the tent could be rolled down in case God forbid it rained. Maurice would direct all the cars to the parking lot near the garage and chauffeur’s cottage. Inside the tent would be dining tables with tablecloths and flower arrangements on them. It had been decided to have several very long tables instead of a lot of small round ones, so no one would feel he or she had been discriminated against because of whom they had to sit with. Some of the relatives, especially on Herman Winsor’s side, were nearly strangers.

Herman had come up from Florida for the whole week. Hazel was proud of her son and happy that her husband was with her. Whenever all three of them were together she felt that there was nothing more wonderful for life to offer her. She had never stopped feeling lucky from the very day Herman proposed. Now here was her wonderful son, so handsome, who had learned all that Hebrew, all those foreign words and prayers, and was so smart that the rabbi had complimented him specially. She had bought Richie a new suit for the occasion, and Herman had picked out a gold wristwatch from the two of them for their son, with an inscription on the back:
Richard Winsor
, 1952,
from his loving parents
. It was a very big watch, to get all those words on the back. She had bought a new dress for herself, and Herman said it was very pretty. She was the mother of the bar mitzvah boy! Everyone would look at her, so it was important to look specially nice today. Usually in the summer she left her diamonds and other expensive jewelry in the bank vault in Florida, because no one wore fancy things like that in the country, but this year Hazel had brought them with her. She wanted to wear all her diamonds to Richie’s bar mitzvah party. She was the bar mitzvah mother, wasn’t she! Besides, Herman had invited many of his relatives, and he wanted her to wear the diamonds: the necklace, the earrings, the pin, the bracelets, and the cocktail ring.

Presents for Richie were pouring in. Most of them, luckily, were savings bonds.

“How many fountain pens did you get, Richie?” Jack asked.

Richie smiled self-consciously. “Only eleven.”

“You know the joke—the bar mitzvah boy gets up to make his speech and he says: ‘Today I am a fountain pen.’”

In the morning there would be the ceremony at the temple in the next town (there was no temple in their town) and then everyone would attend the celebration luncheon, which would last all afternoon. It had been decided to hold the celebration at Windflower even though Richie’s main temple was the one in Florida, because it was easier for everyone to come here than to go down there. Many of the relatives were old, Papa’s surviving sisters, for example. Richie had never even seen them.

The bar mitzvah day had perfect summer weather, sunny, warm, but not uncomfortably hot. There was not the remotest possibility of rain. The caterers had put the finishing touches on the tent: leaves and ribbons wound around the tent poles. It looked very festive and pretty sitting there in the middle of the lawn between the two houses, under the great old trees.

“Can we keep it?” Buffy asked her father.

“No.”

“Why?”

“It costs money.”

When the first cars started driving up Buffy was suddenly shy and hid in the kitchen. Paris was all dressed up in a new dress and rather shy and self-conscious too. She didn’t like having to kiss all those people, most of whom she hardly knew, but it was part of her family personality, kiss kiss. Her mother had told her to be friendly, that no one loves a porcupine, that if she wasn’t nice to the family they wouldn’t understand, they wouldn’t like her. Basil and Nicole had come from East Hampton, with their kids, and Hervé was screaming to go swimming. He was just a little kid but he was big for his age and looked almost four years old. Nicole had bought him a lot of gold jewelry: a chain around his neck with some discs and charms on it, a bracelet, and two rings.

“She’d better watch out,” Lavinia muttered darkly. “Putting all that jewelry on a boy, she’ll make a fairy out of him.”

“Isn’t he handsome?” Nicole said over and over again. “Show everybody how handsome you are, Hervé mon fils.”

Little Geneviève, toddling about, was all white ruffles and dimples. Cassie and Andrew had arrived, with their three children, Chris, Paul, and Blythe. Although Paul and Richie were near enough in age to be friends they didn’t know each other at all. Richie couldn’t think of a thing to say to his cousin, but luckily everyone was making such a fuss over him that he wasn’t required to say much of anything.

“Don’t kiss people on the face,” Cassie whispered to Paris. “You’ll get lipstick on them and mess up their hair. Just pretend, like this.” She kissed the air. “Besides, what do you need to kiss some of those old horrors for anyway?” They both laughed and winked. “Hell-
o
, Nicole darling!” Cassie cried, and kissed the air next to Nicole’s cheek. She led her reluctant little daughter toward huge Nicole. “Blythe, here’s your Aunt Nicole.”

“Hello, Blythe,” Nicole boomed heartily. Blythe ventured to look up and gave a shy little smile. “Why don’t you give her a permanent?” Nicole asked Cassie.

“Don’t be silly,” Cassie said.

“It’s too bad she doesn’t have hair like my Geneviève,” Nicole said. “Ah, there’s Jonah! Hello, Jonah!”

“Oooh, that woman gives me a migraine,” Cassie whispered when Nicole was gone.

“Mommy, when can we go home?” Blythe asked.

“We just got here.”

Now the cars were arriving from Brooklyn and the Bronx, with Adam’s sisters and their grown children. Hepzibah and Zipporah, ancient and tiny, their husbands long dead, still speaking Yiddish, their wrinkled faces bearing the same lineage as the children who stood here now, so tall, so American. Zipporah, white-haired, delicate, still lovely, looking as Melissa might look someday. Hepzibah, her face more broad and peasant, smiling, sweet, looking much like her cousin Lucy, Adam’s second wife, had looked, and as in some distorted way Hazel looked now. And Becky, Adam’s youngest sister, old now too, her husband Isman as pale as paper, he walking with a cane, and she ill but smiling through her pain with the joy of seeing the whole family together again. Her face was the most like Adam’s, but delicate, with shrewd little eyes, a face much like Lavinia’s would be when she was old. Paris remembered Aunt Becky from when she was a child, and her mother often spoke of her, and spoke to her on the telephone, but the other nieces and nephews had never seen any of the great-aunts. When someone in the family died, some distant cousin or other, the older ones knew who it was, but they didn’t bother to tell their children. Why worry children with tales of death when there was so much to worry about already?