Family Secrets (59 page)

“Who?”

“Rita Hayworth, that’s who. From now on we’re calling her Gilda. Golda’s a name for an old lady anyhow.”

Gilda was an only child, and lived with her parents in an old apartment building in the Bronx, which year by year grew more dilapidated. Her father was a salesman, but he didn’t do very well. It was her mother’s ambition that Gilda become a star of some kind. She had tap dancing lessons, but as she was fat—zoftig, they called it—she despised them and eventually her mother decided to give her singing lessons instead. Gilda had a fine set of pipes, everyone said. She had a loud voice, anyway, a real belter, and she had the build to be an opera singer.

Gilda’s father wanted her to go to college. At NYU she could meet a nice boy, better than the type that was starting to move into this neighborhood. More than half the kids in her high school were colored and Puerto Rican. If Gilda went downtown to NYU she could meet a nice Jewish boy with brains who was studying for a profession.

All Gilda wanted was to have fun. But she was a bright girl, bright enough for college, and she figured if she got away from home she could do what she wanted and maybe meet a couple of people who would help her with her career. It was her mother who was stage struck, but Gilda wasn’t adverse to having a singing career if it wasn’t too much work. At eighteen she was a nice-looking girl with a lot of red hair cascading down to her shoulders in waves and ringlets, too fat (but some men liked that), and had a cute little baby face. She had a problem focusing her eyes, so you never knew if she was looking at you or not, and it gave her a myopic, innocent, even sometimes idiotic look.

She liked NYU and loved the Village, where she spent most of her time. She made a lot of friends immediately, and most nights she stayed downtown in somebody’s apartment because shlepping back up to the Bronx on the subway was a big drag. Her parents didn’t mind. They didn’t ask if who she was staying with was a boy or a girl; they assumed it was a girl. Sometimes it was.

Now that she was in college she had a lot of work to do, so she didn’t take singing lessons any more. She did take a music course, and was trying to decide whether she should major in English or drama. Mostly, though, she just enjoyed herself. There were lots of things to do in the city, lots of parties, lots of just hanging out and having laughs. She took things as they came, no real plans. It was great to be away from home, even though she supposedly still lived there.

If the place where you lived was the place where you kept your clothes, then Gilda wasn’t sure where she lived. She had clothes all over the place, at different friends’ apartments, just in case. She carried a big shoulder bag with her hairbrush and her toothbrush in it, along with her wallet and makeup and stuff, so she’d always be ready for anything.

One day she was walking along the street downtown with her girlfriend Angelita Lopez, whose cousin Gilda had gone with for about two months at the beginning of the term, and Angie said, “Hey, I know a boy who lives in that house right there. He’s very boring but he’s very rich, and we could go up to see him and maybe get a fancy dinner.”

“Okay,” Gilda said. “What’s his name?”

“Richie Winsor.”

Gilda had heard of him. In a school as big as this there were still small cliques, and you knew of certain people by reputation. “Richie Winsor is very boring but very rich.” “Gilda Finkel sleeps with Puerto Ricans.” Etc., etc. Apparently, the word went, Richie Winsor had a fancy apartment and an expensive sports car, and he would take a girl to any restaurant she wanted, plus a supper club, and spend all kinds of money, but he never said a word. You would have to do all the talking, all night. The only time he opened his mouth was to tell you how rich he was, what his family owned, something like that. Nobody ever went out with him more than once or twice; it was just too tiring.

“Let’s go ring the housephone,” Angie said. The house was a big, new high rise, very expensive. They were just going in the door when a little blue Alfa Romeo sports coupe came zipping around the corner and parked, and out came a young guy.

“That’s him!” Angie said. Gilda nearly fell down on the sidewalk laughing because they’d just been dishing him and there he was.

“Hi, Richie!” Angie said. “I want you to meet my friend Gilda Finkel.”

“Hello,” Richie said. He didn’t look like much, not very tall, with a self-conscious look on his face and dandruff on the collar of his expensive sports jacket. Gilda wanted to brush it off; she could hardly keep her hands off it.

“Hi, Richie,” Gilda said. “We were just coming up to visit you.”

“Oh,” he said, and stood there.

“Why don’t you invite us up for a drink and show Gilda your paintings?” Angie said.

Richie nodded and led the way into his apartment house.

“Mr. Personality,” Gilda whispered to Angie, and nearly choked trying not to laugh again.

Richie Winsor’s apartment was very expensively decorated and very dull. It was all done in shades of brown and had about as much personality as he did. He showed them various paintings and graphics on his walls and said who had made them and how much they cost, and Gilda acted interested. It was a big apartment for a college boy, even for anyone. She and her parents didn’t live in one any bigger, and their building was a slum compared to this. Finally he offered them a drink. He had a bar that lit up when you opened the door and had mirrors inside. Gilda couldn’t stand it. It was like something out of a movie about a swinging bachelor, which this guy certainly was not.

“I don’t drink anything but wine,” Gilda said.

“Oh, I have wine,” he said. He went to a closet and opened it and there were two cases of wine, one white, one red, lying on wine racks. Angie gave Gilda a look, as if to say: See? “Red or white?” Richie asked.

“Red,” Angie said.

“White,” Gilda said, just to be difficult.

Richie selected a bottle of red wine from the closet, then he closed the door and went into the kitchen where he opened the refrigerator and chose a bottle of chilled white wine. He opened them both with a horrible corkscrew with a man’s head on top of it; the man was carved out of wood and had his tongue stuck out.

“Where did you get that corkscrew?” Gilda asked.

“My mother gave it to me.”

They sat on the couch and drank their wine. Angie chattered away about the English class she and Richie both went to, and then Gilda took over when Angie ran out of things to say. She talked about her singing, and about music, and asked Richie questions which he answered with either a yes or a no. She thought maybe they were interrupting something; he certainly didn’t seem to be trying to entertain them.

“I guess we’d better go,” Gilda said. “You’re probably busy.”

“Oh, no,” he said, sounding as if he meant it. “Stay.”

“We’re not keeping you from anything?”

“No.”

“You really mean it?”

“Yes.”

“Okay,” she said cheerily. She held out her glass. “Why don’t you just refill this and put on some records?”

He had only classical records and some opera. He put on the classical. That meant they had to keep on making conversation. As far as Gilda was concerned that wasn’t too difficult because she liked to talk anyway. She had plenty of opinions on everything. It was weird talking to Richie because he hardly responded at all, but he kept looking at her so she knew he was listening. He must be shy; nobody could be that boring. It was too bad that a boy with all his money had such a case of social ineptitude. He was a sophomore, a year older than she was, but he acted like some eleven-year-old on his first date. When she ran out of things to say to him Gilda got up and looked at his books in the bookcase, and then she made comments on them and asked him questions, which again he answered with a yes or a no.

“It’s seven o’clock,” Angie said, looking at her wristwatch. “I better call my mother and tell her if I’m coming home to dinner or not.” Since Mrs. Lopez lived uptown and worked nights, and Angie hardly ever bothered to come home at all, much less for the nonexistent dinner, that was her way of finding out if Richie intended to take them out or if they were going to have to scrounge somewhere else.

“I’m hungry,” Gilda said.

“I’ll take you girls out to dinner,” Richie said. It was the first complete sentence he had uttered in several hours.

“Oh,” Gilda said, “that would be lovely.”

“I’ll just go in the bedroom and call my mother, if that’s all right with you,” Angie said.

“And I’ll go brush my hair,” Gilda said, tossing her mane so he’d be sure to notice it if he hadn’t already.

In the bedroom the two girls fell on each other’s necks, giggling. “Shh! Ooh, isn’t he just what I said?” Angie whispered.

“Where should we make him take us?”

“Let him pick,” Angie whispered. “He’s got a list
this
long.”

“I look like a shlump.”

“So what?”

Gilda brushed her hair and put on some lip pomade. His bedroom was as impersonal as the living room, not even a photo of his parents or a girl or anybody. He had a big bed. She wondered how often he ever got anybody into it. According to rumor, never. Poor Richie. She would be nice to him. A kid like that deserved a break. She could just see all those yentehs in the neighborhood if she came zipping up to her house in that blue Alfa Romeo of his. Her parents would be thrilled. Gilda met a nice, rich Jewish boy for a change. A college boy, a catch. No more Josés and Raouls with black leather jackets hanging around her doorstep. Richard Winsor. Some fancy.

TEN

When Paris’ novel was published in the fall of 1958 it was an immediate best seller, climbed up the best-seller list, and was sold to paperback and the movies. She was interviewed on all the television talk shows, interviewed and photographed by the newspapers, and taken on a cross-country tour to promote the book. Seeing her picture in bookstore windows, seeing girls her age carrying her book in the street, none of it seemed real to her. It had all happened so fast it was like a dream. She was still the solitary person she had always been, but this time the solitary person was invited to parties filled with the rich and famous, the collectors and the hangers-on, and she was terrified. She felt as if she were on display, expected to say something important or interesting to justify her presence there, and since she couldn’t think of anything she got drunk instead. The phone didn’t ring any more than it had before she had become famous. She was waiting for the magic prince to appear, the perfect man to become her perfect husband, the reward for all this work, but he never did. She met more married men, more homosexuals, and more sons or nephews or cousins of women who had known her mother or her aunts and who now wanted to meet the celebrity. These new young men were as incompatible to her as the former ones had been, if not worse, because she was older and wanted someone who shared her interests. Was that too much to ask? Apparently it was. Her mother’s friends said that because she was now famous and independently wealthy she would never be able to find a husband. A nice boy would be afraid of her. But she had always been rich, hadn’t she? At least the family was. But that wasn’t money she had earned, and therefore was not threatening.

Paris had never expected her novel to be a best seller. She had written about being young and single in the Fifties, her friends, herself, Rima, the girls she knew in her office and the boys they all dated, the men they fell in love with: their double life. She had thought she and her friends were freaks, but she had written about their struggles, and to her amazement all the other young people in the world seemed to be saying that they were just like her. It had been time to get the truth out in the open and display the hypocrisy they all lived by. But her family was shocked. Trash! How could she write those things? Her parents, faced with a fait accompli, defended her. The only ones who were really proud of her were Hazel, who hadn’t read the book but liked the publicity, especially the idea of all those movie stars in the film, Melissa, and her grandfather, who was eighty years old now with failing eyesight. His daughter Lavinia protected him, reading to him a passage from Paris’ book which happened to deal with love, marriage, and religion in a way which would make any grandfather proud. She told him not to bother to try to read the book; it was too long and the print was too small. He wanted someone to read it to him, but on the other hand it
was
a long book, and he had never been much for fiction. He was satisfied that his granddaughter was such a success. He was proud of her.

So Paris was now embarked on what would be her life. She was already trying to think of a subject for her second novel, while the controversy and praise for the first was at its height. Her stories and articles were not only accepted by magazines, they were asked for. Editors took her and her agent to lunch. She got fan mail, some of it friendly, some of it hostile, some from lunatics, some from strange men proposing marriage. It frightened her. She had her telephone number unlisted after several phone calls from an unknown man in a phone booth who told her what he would like to do to her. She still went to her analyst. She was still a solitary person and wondered if that was just the way she was, if her family life had shaped her that way and that was the way she would have to stay, terrified of parties and strangers, comfortable only with her own few friends, not demanding more, not even wanting it. She still went to Windflower in the summer, and slept in her old room next to that of her parents, this time with the connecting door closed and locked, the key removed and put into her own night table drawer. Except for Rima, she had no guests.

Rima, too, had embarked on what would be her life. She had met a married politician, twenty years older than she, and they had vowed to spend the rest of their lives together although he would live with his wife and children and she would live alone. He put her in an apartment a block away from the one where he lived with his family, and he visited her every night for a few minutes. He could not take her out to dinner, he could not be seen with her, because people would recognize him. He filled Rima’s tiny apartment with antiques and engraved bibelots so that it looked like a museum. She bought many at-home clothes and only a few daytime things to wear to the office. She never went out. She only waited for him. Everyone told her she was crazy and she replied that she wanted it this way. The only time she had him to herself was during the summer, when he put his wife and children into their large home on Long Island and moved Rima into his New York apartment. He was quite fearless about that, almost hoping his wife would discover them. When his wife finally did, it made no difference. There would be no divorce. A divorce would ruin his career. His wife and children continued to spend summers on Long Island, where he visited them every weekend, and Rima spent weekends at Windflower with Paris. Even Paris told her she was crazy, but it was her life. Everyone settled for what they really wanted, didn’t they?