Family Secrets (60 page)

Rima believed in compromise; Paris did not. Yet, wasn’t her own life a compromise? Still tied to the family, hurt by whatever they said to criticize her, waiting for the approval that never came without some parenthesis or clause to take away the joy, giving clever interviews that made her out to be a brave and self-sufficient person because it was what she wanted the world to think, while in her private life she was lonely and vulnerable and frightened and even sometimes shocked by things. Whenever something affected her she wrote about it. It was her only escape. There was no one to talk to so she talked to strangers she would never meet who would read what she was saying. They couldn’t interrupt, criticize, argue with her. They could complain afterward, but while she was saying what she felt they were silent, a silence she never found in the family. How could a place where there was all that talk be so lonely? There were so many people there, and yet the loneliness was like a physical pain.

That summer they were all there. Richie had brought Gilda Finkel, his girlfriend, to meet the family. He was trying to decide if he should marry her. Herman had come up from Florida to see what he thought of this Gilda Finkel, and he was horrified. At heart Herman was a great prude. Gilda was supposed to sleep in the downstairs library, which had grudgingly been made into a guest room for her, but she would go upstairs to Richie’s room while everyone was sitting on the porch after lunch and shriek demandingly: “Richie! You come up here this minute.”

Then they would shut the door and not come out for two hours. Everyone was afraid to think about what they were doing, but they all knew. That girl was using the wiles of her body to entrap poor Richie. He trotted after her with a hypnotized look on his face. She was too fat, she was falling out of the top of her bathing suit, she was loud, she had no class, but worst of all, she was going to bed with Richie right under the noses of his horrified parents. It was a wonder she didn’t give Herman a stroke. Herman was in a state; he didn’t know what to do. He told Richie he refused to let him marry that girl. He went back to Florida. Richie told his mother he wanted to marry Gilda.

“I love her,” he told his mother. “I want her to be my wife and the mother of my children.”

“He loves her,” Hazel told the family.

Hazel, who had never before been taken into Richie’s confidence or treated as a person of any intelligence at all, was touched. Still, this Gilda, no one liked her, did they? And Gilda yelled at Richie, and they had fights, and sometimes she slapped him. How could he be happy with a girl like that? A man was supposed to be the boss in a marriage.

What did Papa think? This time they had protected Papa from the outsider. He had taken Frankie’s side, or perhaps it was Everett’s side, but Gilda was really too much. Frankie had been cold, but Gilda was too hot. You couldn’t tell Papa about the things that were going on upstairs in the Winsor-Nature house. They didn’t let Gilda go to The Big House. The only time Papa walked to the pool was during the cool of the afternoon, to take a look at his family having a good time, and that was when Gilda had Richie trapped upstairs in the bedroom. Papa had a golf cart to travel the long distance to the lake, and to inspect the estate, and Etta sat beside him and took turns driving it.

“Who’s that girl?” he asked her.

“Oh, some friend of Richie’s,” Etta said.

“Good. He should have company. He’s too shy.”

The end of Gilda’s visit was not the end of Gilda. Richie had his apartment in the city, and there he could do what he pleased. She was living with him. Sometimes they had fights and Gilda went back to her parents in the Bronx; then Richie, contrite, would go after her, parking his blue Alfa Romeo in front of her run-down apartment building while the neighbors leaned out of their windows and the kids stole his hubcaps. Richie had already lost eight hubcaps to his reconciliations with Gilda, but his relationship with her was the most exciting thing that had ever happened to him in his life. He didn’t know if he loved her or not. All he knew was that when she wasn’t there he missed her. She was the only person who had ever made him feel comfortable. There was nothing frightening or phony about Gilda. She said what she wanted, asked for what she wanted, got what she wanted. He didn’t have to worry about impressing her. She was so unimpressed with him and what he had to offer her that he had to come to the conclusion that it was he himself she wanted. He knew she wasn’t in love with him either. Yet, she stayed with him. Maybe they were both lonely. He had everything money could buy, and it only gave him pleasure to give her things. He couldn’t imagine the bleakness of his life without Gilda. This could grow into love. He could imagine being married to her and having her for a best friend. The truth was, although Richie thought he was lucky to have such a convenient bed partner after years of having no one at all, what he really liked best about Gilda was that she was his friend. She talked to him, and eventually he found that he could talk to her. Everyone thought it was the sex that bound him to her, that sexy, zoftig girl with the long flowing red hair and the dumb look in her eyes, but the truth was the sex wasn’t so special. What was so special was that Gilda Finkel was Richie Winsor’s first, best, and only really close friend.

Frankie and Everett came up that summer with John, and with their killer dog, Daisy. Everett kept the dog on a leash most of the time, but the family cowered and his mother wouldn’t let him keep Daisy in the same room she was in. They were all relieved that he wasn’t going to stay long, because when he left he would take the dog with him.

As far as Everett was concerned, his marriage was dead. He and Frankie didn’t sleep together any more, and they couldn’t even have a conversation without fighting. Whatever it was he had been so attracted to a few years ago was gone. He felt older and wiser. She wasn’t even pretty. She drank all the time and her eyes were bloodshot, the wit was dulled into a nasty disposition, and she was vicious to John. But what could he do? He told his mother, he asked her for advice, and his mother went to his grandfather, who had started the whole thing by giving Everett his permission to marry Frankie, and Papa said why didn’t they get a divorce?

“What do I need a divorce for?” Frankie asked Everett. “You haven’t any money to give me, and I’m perfectly happy as I am. If you want a divorce, I keep John.”

He couldn’t let her keep John. Yet, how could he keep him, alone, working all day? He had to stick with Frankie, if only because John needed someone. He looked at that kid, so smart, so loving, so inquisitive, and he understood why people had children even though it meant spending the rest of their lives trapped in a loveless hell of a marriage. He wouldn’t have wanted to miss having John. What was it he had seen and liked about Frankie anyway, and where had it gone? Whose fault was it? Maybe marriage itself was a lost cause. People weren’t like his parents, staying together forever no matter what, devoted and loving. His contemporaries were all getting divorced. You had to be blind not to see that. Frankie had all sorts of divorced girlfriends. The only thing Everett couldn’t figure out was why anyone had married them in the first place.

John was five years old and he could mix a perfect martini for his mother’s guests. When they were at home in Florida he got up every morning and took his milk from the lower shelf of the refrigerator where he could reach it and the cold cereal from its box in the food cabinet, and made his own breakfast. He got dressed and waited outside the house until the school bus came to take him to first grade. He was too young to go to public school so Grandma had given his father money so he could go to private school. John didn’t like school much. He could do everything for himself, and when they went to Windflower in the summer he packed his own suitcase.

“Anything you forget, it’s your own tough luck,” his mother would tell him.

He would pack everything he could remember, but it didn’t matter if he forgot anything because whenever they got to Windflower his grandmother would say how dreadful and shabby his clothes were and take him to the store and buy him all new ones. When he had his new clothes, everything from underwear to shoes and pants and shirts and even a bow tie, everyone made a big fuss over him and said how handsome he looked. John liked people to tell him he was handsome and make a big fuss over him. No one ever did that at home in Florida. His mother just yelled at him a lot and made him water the lawn, and then if he didn’t come in to supper the minute she called him she would lock him out of the house and make him stay out until his father came home from work and rescued him. By then it would be cold because the sun would have gone down, and John was always glad to see his father. He liked to be with his father because his father let him watch him work and fix things, and showed him how to fix things too. When he grew up, John wanted to fix television sets like his father did. They could have a store together.

His father was nice to him and never hit him the way his mother did. But John loved his mother too. The more she got mad at him the more he tried to make her like him. He saved his allowance and bought her things from the drugstore, like soap and bubble gum, so she would like him. He wanted her to smile and kiss him and tell him he was her big handsome boy, which sometimes she did. She told him that when he grew up he was going to have to make a lot of money and take care of her, because she would be old then. He intended to make a lot of money and take care of both his parents, because they would both be old, and he loved them both. He knew his parents didn’t like each other much. They had a lot of fights. He hoped it wasn’t his fault. Sometimes when they fought they mentioned his name, and then he would hide his head under the pillow so he couldn’t hear what they were saying.

He knew his father didn’t like that his mother drank so much. Sometimes John would take the empty bottles and hide them in the trash before his father got home so he wouldn’t see them. His mother didn’t care if his father knew she was drunk or not, but John did. When she was drunk she was mad at everybody and she made everybody mad at her. She had a lot of friends over and she always let John taste all their drinks. John liked the way they tasted. But he was careful never to drink enough to get drunk, because after all, he was only five years old.

Buffy, The Runner, Rosemary’s only child, was eight. They were all used to her daily routine and hardly even noticed her as she ran. She was so fast now that one minute you would see her starting out from the front porch in her shorts and sneakers and the next minute you would see her as a tiny figure far away. She didn’t really know why she felt compelled to run. It was something she did with herself, competing with herself, trying to do better and better each day, get stronger, run faster. She didn’t need a car, she didn’t need grownups. Her legs could take her anywhere she wanted to go. They were her escape. But she stayed within the confines of Windflower, running around and around as if on a track that had no end. She had a little gadget her father had bought her that you hung from your belt and it told how many miles you had gone. She also had a wristwatch that told seconds as well as minutes. It was what she had wanted for her birthday and her parents had given it to her. She did lengths and times and made herself go faster and faster, made her lungs fill with air and keep her going, feeling her heart pounding as if it would burst. She knew she was fast.

She watched the track meets on television in the afternoons. She had decided that when she got older she would be a track star. She didn’t tell anybody what she was going to be when she grew up because she knew they would hate it. Her father laughed at the girl track stars on TV and said they were “a bunch of dikes,” whatever that was. He said they were men dressed up in women’s clothes. How could he tell, when the men and the women wore the same thing, shorts and shirts? Buffy knew it just meant he thought they were ugly. She didn’t care; people thought she was funny-looking anyway.

She had always known she wasn’t pretty because all her life everyone said how beautiful her cousin Geneviève was and how
she
needed to have a lot done to improve herself. Geneviève and Buffy were nearly the same age, so their mothers made them play together. Buffy was very jealous of Geneviève, especially when Aunt Nicole was around, because Aunt Nicole was always saying what a beauty Geneviève was. When Buffy and Geneviève were left alone to play they got along all right, although Buffy wasn’t too crazy about her. She liked her school friends better. At school Buffy was a champion athlete. She was good at everything in gym. Geneviève didn’t like gym much; she liked boys. At eight years old all the boys hated all the girls, except for Geneviève. The boys actually liked her, and she actually liked them. Some of them even invited her to their birthday parties, and everyone knew that was expressly forbidden. You didn’t invite—ugh!—boys to your birthday party, and they wouldn’t dream of inviting you. Geneviève was so sweet and such a little lady. Buffy, on the other hand, was a tomboy, and they hated her.

She looked a little like her mother and a little like her father. From her father she had inherited her forgettable beigeness, a drab and colorless texture that made her fade away in a crowd. She had her mother’s frizzy hair, but it was beige, not reddish, and she had a sprinkling of her mother’s freckles. She was little and stocky and strong, with long legs for her height. When she was old enough she would go to a real track and practice, just like those girls did. She wanted to win medals and trophies and bring them home, and then people would make a fuss over her like they did over Geneviève, only she would be unique. Lots of girls were born pretty, but how many made something of themselves by working hard for it? When she grew up and was a runner she could go all over the world like those girl track stars did, and see places and meet people from other countries. It would be exciting and fun.

The only sport Buffy didn’t like was horseback riding. No one at Windflower ever rode a horse, and they were all scared of horses. Uncle Andrew’s kids all rode. Her cousin Blythe had her own horse and rode it all summer and every weekend in the winter. Buffy couldn’t think of one thing to say to Uncle Andrew’s kids. She was stricken dumb with shyness when she saw them. They seemed to come from another world, where everybody knew what to say and what to do. One time Buffy’s mother put her up on a rented horse and Buffy was scared to death and screamed until they took her off. The horse seemed so high. Buffy liked things where you depended on yourself, like running or swimming. It wasn’t natural to sit on a horse’s back. The horse couldn’t like it much. She would watch the neighbors’ horses running around and playing in the lower field and hope they wouldn’t escape and come over to Windflower. That summer one of them had, the mean stallion. He was some kind of prize horse but a little crazy, and his name was America. He belonged to the boy down the road. Aunt Melissa, who was a sweet little old lady with pink and white skin and always wore clean, pretty pastel dresses, was sitting in a chair on her front lawn under a tree when America came running by. Aunt Melissa was too startled to even scream, and then America ran on past the house and disappeared into the woods, where there was a bridle path. Then the boy who owned him came running by and asked Aunt Melissa if she’d seen his horse. She said she had. And the boy said: “Well, if he comes back will you hold him and call me?”