Family Secrets (62 page)

She could hear the maids coming back from the lake. Then she heard the fat sizzling and smelled the lovely smell of frying fish. She made another drink and went into the kitchen.

“What’d you get?”

“Just two little porgies. Ain’t nothin’ biting tonight.”

“Oh, that’s a shame,” Frankie said, and left.

“Miss Frankie?”

“What?”

“What did you intend for John to have for supper?”

Frankie turned back. “I don’t care. What’ve you got?”

“His grandmother got a nice broiler for him. For you too.”

“Then will you fry them, please?”

“Fried?” The cook was surprised and pleased. Nobody in that house would eat anything fried.

“Yes, fried,” Frankie said. “For both of us.”

By the time the fried chicken was ready Frankie was starving. The hell with her diet. She would have a good time. Naturally she and John couldn’t eat in the living room in front of the television set because they might get stains on the rug, so they had to eat in the dining room. She hated that. It made her depressed to sit all alone at that big table in that big dining room with the kid. It was like some movie about rich people, all bored and stuffy and alone, not saying a word at the table because they were so far away from each other they would have to scream, and rich stuffy people didn’t do that.

“Do you want the rest of my chicken, John?”

“Oh, yes, please, Ma’am.”

She had brought him up well, she decided, pleased. He always called her Ma’am, even when overcome with emotion at the prospect of stuffing himself with an unexpected bonus of fried chicken.

What she would do tonight, to cheer herself up, was drive to the roadhouse and have a couple of drinks and play the jukebox and maybe even find somebody to talk to. That would be fun. John would be safe; the maids were here. She would just go scoot off after dinner and have herself a pleasant evening for once, and she’d be back in the house before any of them came back so they’d never know she’d been gone. The maids always went into their room after dinner, and anyway, they wouldn’t tell. She’d make John go to bed and then he wouldn’t tell either, because he wouldn’t know. Ah, if she only had some friends here to invite, the way Richie and Gilda did. She would really know how to use this place. But since she couldn’t, then she would just have to go elsewhere to find her amusement. To each his own.

John went to bed without much more protest than usual, and Frankie brushed her teeth and put on lipstick and powder. She brushed her hair and put on some cologne. She put Everett’s old sweater over her shirt and slacks because the night had turned chilly, and added her charm bracelet to look nice, and then she got into her car, checked the gas to see if there was enough, and drove down the long driveway out of Windflower toward freedom.

She liked the roadhouse. It was small, and it wasn’t much, but she felt comfortable and relaxed there. They knew her; she fit in. She had a couple of scotches and bought a pack of cigarettes from the machine and settled in for a pleasant few hours. It wasn’t crowded, even though it was Saturday night, because not many of the people around here went anywhere, and when they did they went to the country club. Mostly people had parties in their own homes. Kids on dates just went to someone’s house, or to a dance at the club. Not many people went to the roadhouse, and it was a wonder it managed to stay open, but it was small and cozy and beloved of the few regulars, so it struggled along. It had been here ever since she had been coming to Windflower and it had never changed.

The nice thing about the roadhouse was that people came there to drink and not to pick each other up or get fresh. It was where you went to relax. Frankie felt perfectly safe. If she wanted to talk to the bartender or the waitress, both of whom she knew, she could, and if not, then she didn’t have to. A man drinking alone would have his snort and go home, not bothering her. He would have a wife and kids at home, and this was a way station, not a pickup joint. There were some young couples on dates, too. Frankie didn’t know why the family was so shocked at the idea of her going to the roadhouse, so that the only time she could come here was when she could sneak away. Also, they kept screaming about drinking and driving, because they didn’t drink and they didn’t know how to drive, so both those things seemed very mysterious and dangerous to them. She could hold it. She’d had more than she could count and she wasn’t too drunk. You had to be used to drinking in order to be a good drinker.

She looked at the clock over the bar. Damn, the evening had gone too fast! Now she’d better hurry home before all the vultures returned and really laid her out. Oh boy, if they found John all alone and her gone, would they yell! Frankie called for the check, paid it, and left.

The fog had risen during the evening and the road was ghostly … ghastly? no, ghostly … with this strange cottony mist all around the car and her headlights cutting a tiny tunnel through it. It was lucky, Frankie thought, that she knew the way so well. A stranger would get hopelessly lost. With all the lakes and streams and rivers around here sending up moisture, and then the valley holding it in, you were surrounded by heavy mist every night. Tonight was one of the worst ones. She wanted to hurry, but she knew that if she drove too fast she might miss the road and go off on the shoulder, or even miss her own turnoff entirely and then she would get lost. The big trees arched over her head and made a mysterious world of their own underneath them. She had her headlights on bright and still she couldn’t see more than about four feet. She wasn’t scared, just a little nervous because she’d stayed longer at the roadhouse than she’d meant to and she hoped she would get home before the family did. She crossed the bridge and then she knew she was nearly there. The stables were down the road, and then their own property started, and then there would be the Windflower entrance with the lanterns burning on top of the stone wall and she would be home safe. Home safe … that was funny, to think of Windflower as home. It had never been her home, never would be, yet it was all she had up north, so maybe it was her home. Home was where her bed was, how about that? Her kid was there, too. Frankie squinted into the fog and tried to see where she was. Boy, would she be glad to get there! She couldn’t see
anything
. She started whistling through her teeth, the way she had when she was a kid, so she wouldn’t be nervous any more. Maybe she’d passed it? Maybe the family was home and they’d turned off the lanterns. If they had, she would never be able to find the entrance to turn off.

Suddenly, rising up out of the mist right in front of her was an enormous stallion, terrified by her little car, rearing up on his hind feet, his front hooves flying toward her windshield, whinnying with terror. Frankie turned the wheel frantically to get away from him, this lost night monster, great black shrieking creature, and crashed head-on into the stone wall right outside Windflower.

The family decided Frankie should be buried in Vermont, with her own people. Everett made all the arrangements and accompanied the body. He wanted to take John with him, but his mother and the others talked him out of it: John was too young; it was too morbid. He had taken his mother’s death badly, as was expected, so whenever he had an outburst of wildness or brattiness, they understood. Poor little boy! What would become of him now? He couldn’t stay with Everett because who would take care of him after school while Everett was at work? A maid, a housekeeper, some ignorant hired stranger? He couldn’t stay with his grandparents either; Everett wouldn’t hear of it, and to tell the truth both Melissa and Lazarus were too old to have a wild child in their house at this stage of their lives. It was wonderful to have John for two months or so in the summer, but not all year in the city. They all thought the best thing to do would be to send John to some nice boys’ boarding school in Florida, near enough to home so that he could spend weekends with Everett. Boarding schools took boys as young as seven, children of divorce, of bereavement, of parents who just didn’t want them around.

Lavinia felt John’s grief as if it were her own. She still remembered, although only vaguely, how she had felt as a lonely child without a mother. Or perhaps she only imagined she remembered? She had been only a baby, and John was seven and bright for his age. He must be suffering terribly. She hadn’t cared for Frankie any more than any of them, but still, it was a shame. A mother, even a rotten one, was still a mother, and John loved Frankie. Poor little thing. He would be less lonely at boarding school than with Everett. At least he would have other boys his age to play with, and kind teachers to be father surrogates.

John thought they were sending him away to get rid of him. He didn’t tell any of them that, but he knew it. They didn’t want him. What was it about him that they didn’t like? He wasn’t so awful, was he? Maybe they just didn’t like kids, that was all. His father didn’t even put up a fight to keep him. It was obvious that his father didn’t care. Why didn’t he care? John had always been sure his father loved him.

The family thought that Frankie had crashed her car into the wall because she had been drunk, so they hushed the whole incident up and no one ever mentioned it. It was “the accident.” Lazarus said that small foreign cars were a menace, and if God had meant man to drive a car … and for once no one tried to make him finish the sentence to tease him. Jack said what could you expect from a car made by Nazis? Lavinia told Jonah not to drive any more, he was getting too old, they should let someone else drive. Jonah had always been a wild driver anyway. Eventually Frankie’s death became, in the eyes of the family, a sort of Revenge of the Machines. It was as if the only thing Frankie had had to do with it at all was that she happened to be there.

Everett didn’t miss Frankie. He was alone in his small house in Florida, going every day to work and then home again to heat up a TV dinner, and he was used to being alone. He drew into himself, relieved not to have her around. He made more trips to Windflower that summer to see John, and thought it was a good thing he was putting the kid in boarding school in the fall because his family would drive the poor kid crazy and ruin him. John didn’t mention his mother any more, and Everett wondered what he was thinking.

The last night John and Everett were there before Everett took John back down south to be enrolled in the school, the family asked John what he wanted to have for dinner.

“It’s your last night here, so you can have anything you want,” Melissa said. “You pick it. Roast beef? Steak? Lobster?”

“I want fried chicken,” John said.

“Fried chicken?” She was appalled. “Why in the world would you want fried chicken?”

“You said I could have what I want. I want fried chicken.”

Melissa shrugged and went to the kitchen to tell the cook to make fried chicken, except for Lazarus, of course, who would eat only broiled.

At dinner they all tried to be cheerful and told John how much he would enjoy his new school. The maid came out with a huge silver platter piled high with crisp pieces of fried chicken. When John had taken his share he couldn’t eat any of it. He poked it with his fork and then he put his fork down and tears filled his eyes.

“You wanted it, now you don’t want it,” Melissa said. “What’s the matter with you?”

John looked away, out the window, over the hills, withdrawing from them, and when he looked back his blue eyes were calm as sheets of glass. “My mother and I had fried chicken together the night she went away,” he said cheerfully, a comment, a matter of information.

No one had mentioned Frankie for a long time now, and her name came as an interruption, almost an imposition. When would he forget? When would she go away? John was eating now, with his customary good appetite. Maybe it was better for him to talk about her. He seemed all right.

TWELVE

Richie graduated from law school and passed his bar exams with no difficulty. Everyone expected him to settle down to the practice of law, but instead he entered divinity school to study to be an Orthodox rabbi. He had found a school in the mountains of Pennsylvania that was so religious no one had ever heard of it. Gilda had to wear a sheitel, and dresses with high necks, long sleeves, and hems down to the ground so no part of her body would show. Makeup was of course forbidden. Having to wear a sheitel didn’t bother her; she’d always thought wigs were jazzy anyway, so she bought a blonde one and a black one so that when she got tired of being Rita Hayworth she could be Marilyn Monroe or Elizabeth Taylor. She didn’t take Richie’s calling too seriously. She figured he was just going to school until he was too old to be drafted.

The religious community was isolated and like a very small town. Everyone knew everyone’s business, and from the start they were all shocked by the behavior of Richard Winsor’s wife. Everyone at the school took their religious laws very seriously. There was even a mikvah, although each house had modern central plumbing. Small private houses had been converted into apartments, but since Richie could afford it he rented an entire house for himself and Gilda. In the bedroom there were twin beds separated by a sink. It was one of the laws of the school that upon rising in the morning one must not walk more than a certain number of steps before washing oneself, and therefore the oddly placed sink. It was also necessary to wash before and after the marital act, which was most blessed when performed on Friday night. Gilda thought it was all hilarious. She would have shoved the beds together but everything was built in.

Their house was only partially furnished, since most couples liked to bring their own things from home to make it more comfortable. Gilda couldn’t be bothered, and Richie didn’t seem to mind that their living room, which was right on the street, had neither curtains nor shades. In the evenings, when no public appearance was required of her, Gilda would shuck her puritan dress and put on her jeans and hand-painted tee shirt, and she and Richie would sit in the living room and play their collection of records. Gilda had added some rock to Richie’s classical, and the strains of some depraved English group would sail out into the pious night and horrify the community. Looking into the living room windows they would see Richard Winsor’s wife dressed in that outrageous fashion, makeup on her face, her black sheitel (her favorite) still on her head.