Family Secrets (72 page)

“We always go to Windflower …” Melissa said.

“Do you want to go back there?”

Melissa thought about it. No, she didn’t want to go back. It would be her first summer there without Lazarus, and so lonely. But more than that, she hadn’t wanted to go there for years, not since Papa died. She’d never really admitted it to herself, but she hadn’t wanted to; she’d wanted to go other places, do other things, live. She had so many things to make up for. Life was so short. She wasn’t too old, only sixty-four. At Windflower she would be the fifth wheel. She didn’t want everybody to feel sorry for her, tolerate her. She wanted to run her own life, have adventures, see new things. Jessica was such a seasoned traveler, and with her son in charge of all their travel arrangements, everything would be first class and perfectly safe.

“I’ll go with you on the tour,” Melissa said.

“Hurray! You won’t regret it, believe me.”

Lazarus would have been glad, Melissa thought. He would have been proud of her, to see her seeking culture, standing on her own two feet. She missed him so much, but she mustn’t feel guilty for entering life again. That was what life was for. And maybe, if this trip worked out, she could take one every summer, just the way Jessica and other women did. It was perfectly respectable. It was expensive, but she could afford it. She had thought for a while that maybe she would go down south to see Everett, but that was silly. Let Everett come to see her. What would she do down south anyway? She didn’t even know anybody there. No, she had friends and she would travel, see things. She wouldn’t say anything about it to Lavinia or Rosemary, but Melissa knew that she would never go back to Windflower again. Never. Let them laugh at her if they wanted and say this was her second childhood, and she would laugh right with them and agree. She felt reborn. How interesting to find yourself reborn in such a different time, when a woman could do exactly what she wanted to do and no one could tell her no.

SEVEN

That summer Lavinia and Jonah and Paris were the last of the Mohicans. Buffy was away running in Europe, and now that she was gone Jack grumbled constantly about how expensive Windflower was, such a waste of money, and finally Rosemary began to agree with him because Windflower didn’t interest her any more now that her daughter was gone. It was as if Buffy had run away from her, right out of her life.

There were Andrew and Cassie, happily in their kibbutz, with their three children all married and all coming up every weekend, winter and summer, except when they went on a trip to ski or get some winter sun. And there were Rosemary and Jack, with a stranger for a child.

“Cassie must have done something right,” Rosemary kept saying. “I wish I knew what it was.”

It was beyond her comprehension. Chris, Cassie’s oldest boy, the athlete, had married an athletic girl, but they spent their weekends jogging around Andrew’s place; they didn’t run away to be professionals like crazy Buffy. And all week Chris worked in the family business, right with his father, a help and a credit. He was rich and lived well; he liked it. Buffy could have been rich; she could have married some boy who liked to run if she loved it so much. And there was Paul, Cassie’s second son, a stockbroker, with a wife who liked staying home and taking care of their three children and was no fool either. Cassie was a happy grandmother. As usual, Rosemary thought, Cassie gets it all and I miss out.

And last there was Blythe, Cassie’s shy little girl, who had married a boy who looked exactly like her, a shy little boy of twenty-nine who made a hundred thousand dollars a year, as if Blythe needed it! They rode horses together, Blythe and her husband, like two characters from an English novel. Blythe had a job too, and she couldn’t wait for Friday night when she could go to the country. She
wanted
to be there! Rosemary wracked her brains to discover what Cassie had done that she hadn’t, but she couldn’t think of anything and so she gave up.

Rosemary and Jack went to Chautauqua for two weeks that summer, to hear the concerts and the lectures, and they enjoyed it so much they made arrangements to rent an inexpensive cottage for the entire following summer. Okay, Rosemary thought, now I’ll think of myself, do for myself; it’s about time. She and Jack would wallow in the music, meet compatible friends, do what they liked for a change. When she thought of all the money she would save by not going to Windflower, and not hiring an expensive cook-maid, and not renting two cars, she felt warm all over. After all, she thought, we only went to all that trouble and expense of spending summers at Windflower because it was good for Buffy.

Melissa sent happy postcards from her European tour. Brief cards, always scribbled in haste because she was coming from one delightful event and hurrying to another. She bubbled like a schoolgirl. “You won’t believe it,” she scribbled to Lavinia, “a man actually flirted with me! Ooh la la, those French! But he was too
old
for me!!! Ha ha.”

“Meshuggah,” Lavinia said, shrugging. “But it’s good for her, poor thing.”

Lavinia had fixed up Paris’ house during the winter, had some of the rooms painted, because goodness knows it needed it. The flowers on the wallpaper had all faded. Maybe next year she’d get new wallpaper, if she could only get her hands on Paris long enough to go with her to pick it out. To Lavinia it was “Paris’ house” now, and she always called it that to make sure her claim on it was understood. No one could have that house, she would see to that. Paris had to have a place to stay. If Paris didn’t come up to Windflower, why Lavinia didn’t know what she would do. It was all for her, for Paris, that was what everything was for. What did she need to be in Windflower for without Paris? She bought a new stove for Paris when the old one broke; she even got a new refrigerator when Paris complained the food was spoiling. And what did Paris do? She accepted invitations all over the place and no one ever saw her. First it was East Hampton, for an entire week, and then two weeks in California at Malibu, and then she got an assignment to write an article in London and away she went. Why did she have to work in the hot summer? She didn’t need the money. Her agent was exploiting her. No matter how Lavinia tried to talk her out of it, Paris went anyway. And then when she had been in London for two weeks she wrote to Lavinia that she was going to spend a week or two visiting friends who had a house in the South of France.

“I hope they’re nice friends,” Lavinia wrote back. She didn’t even know who they were. Paris never told her anything any more. It was that analyst; it was his fault. He had made Paris secretive. When Paris finally graduated from the analyst, stopped throwing away her money on that quack and letting him influence her, Lavinia was very relieved. When Andrew had gone to an analyst so long ago he had gone every day and gotten it over with, but there was Paris hanging on year after year, and then taking all sorts of long trips in between. Her analyst never made her pay for the time she missed; in fact he encouraged it. He wanted her to go away. He wanted to make her a stranger from her mother. Why did analysts try to make enemies out of families? Lavinia knew the answer to that one. They wanted to hang on to someone who was perfectly well and convince him he was sick so they could get paid all that money every week forever and ever. Oh, it was a crime! But anyway, Paris had come to her senses and stopped going, so things would be all right now. Lavinia only hoped the doctor hadn’t done too much damage.

Paris and Rima were thirty-seven that year. They had decided that when they were forty they would start to lie about their ages, but they would always have to pretend to the same age because everyone knew they had gone to school together. “What age are we now?” Rima would ask, and they would laugh.

“I like getting older,” Paris said. “I really don’t mind it.”

“Well, I mind it,” Rima said. She had spent ten years with her married lover, ten years of waiting for him to visit her and donate a scrap of his time, ten years of eating dinner alone on a tray, ten years of feeling her heart turn over with frantic nervousness at the sound of his key in the lock, and then when he went away too soon, always too soon, feeling her throat close and the tears start coming out of her eyes. She cried every time he left, every time for ten years, and she didn’t know why because she ought to be used to it by now. He never stayed long enough for her to tell him all the things she wanted to say. She was nervous when he arrived because there was so much to say and so little time, and she always forgot something, remembering it only after he had left. What kind of a relationship was that? That was no life. She was tired of it and she resented it. She had chosen it, but she had been young then and foolish, an innocent, she had thought she would never grow old. She hadn’t dreamed what loneliness could be.

Rima was a senior editor now, at last. Her job was her life. Every night she took home manuscripts and read them, and was fond of saying: “A married woman could never have the job I have. It takes too much time. You have to be single, with no responsibilities.”

And then one evening at a business party she went to only because her married lover was out of town and so she was free, Rima met a man. He was a magazine editor, divorced, Southern, all soft-spoken Southern charm and an impish wit. He was only two years older than she was; a baby, she thought delighted. He asked her to dinner and she went, feeling as if she were sneaking out, cheating. She liked feeling that way. They liked each other, and she began sneaking out to be with him more and more, at first terrified her lover would find out and then not caring at all.

Within two weeks they were in love. He had his own apartment, which was convenient, since Rima’s lover had a key to hers and could walk in any time. She felt she should tell her politician and break it off, since deceit was never her strong suit, but she was afraid to hurt him, and so she went along recklessly, enjoying herself for the first time in years.

“He makes me laugh,” she told Paris rapturously. “He makes me feel so young. He makes me want to go to the country and throw snowballs.”

Her new lover saw no reason why he and Rima couldn’t live together. She told him about her politician. He still saw no reason why they couldn’t live together, since the other was over, wasn’t it? Rima thought maybe it had been over for years, maybe it had never existed. She waited for her old lover as usual, but this time when she heard his key in her lock her heart was pounding because she knew she would tell him what she had to say, and this time she would make him listen.

She told him it was over and she was moving out. He wouldn’t have to worry about scandal any more, he wouldn’t have to sneak away from his wife and children and the electorate. He took it staunchly, with tears in his eyes, but did not make a scene. He never made a scene about anything. He had trained himself never to do anything dangerous. He said he was sorry to lose her but happy she had found an unmarried man who could give her a more suitable life. He said he would always be her friend.

The next day while Rima was at the office her politician let himself into her apartment with his key and carefully removed every photograph and snapshot of himself, all his love notes, letters, and anything with his handwriting on it.

“Typical,” Rima said. She picked up the empty silver picture frame and looked at the blank glass. “That’s his real picture,” she said. Then she packed her clothes, gave her museum furniture to charity for a tax deduction, and moved in with her new love. “It was old lady furniture,” she said. “I decided I hated it.”

Weekends she spent in East Hampton, where her lover had a small house. Paris came up and spent a week while they were on vacation, and they promised to come to Windflower. “You should see it,” Rima told him. “It’s the most beautiful place in the world. It’s really something to see.”

They went to Windflower for one weekend. Paris was hardly ever there; she was always traveling or visiting someone. The leaves were very thick and green on the huge trees, and tiny white windflowers sprinkled the grass on the acres and acres of rolling hills. Molly Forbes, the caretaker, prematurely white-haired now but still as slim and lithe as she had been twenty years ago, ran down the hill surrounded by her dogs. Paris remembered when Richie had been a child, Molly running down the hill with Richie and her two little boys; all of them grown up now and gone away.

“What ever became of Basil?” Rima asked Paris. She knew all of the family and remembered their names, even the ones she had seen only once or twice when they came to visit. “He was so handsome,” she told her lover. “I used to joke and say I’d marry him if he ever got divorced. Are you jealous?”

“Nope.”

“He’s fine,” Paris said. “His son Hervé is in Budapest working for a movie director on location there. He’s a chairgetter.”

“What’s a chairgetter?”

“You know: the director says, ‘Hervé go get a chair,’ and Hervé does.”

“Didn’t he once want to be a movie star?”

“Yes, well, now he wants to be a director. And Geneviève, Basil’s daughter, is going to college and going steady with supposedly a very nice boy. They’re both at summer school now.”

“Wouldn’t it be great to be young now?” Rima said. “Boys and girls can be
friends
. We could go to summer school and live in a coed dorm. It was horrible being young when we were young.”

“I think it must always be horrible being young,” Paris said.

This summer there was a purpose to Paris’ traveling, more than the usual one of work or vacation. All her life she had planned, quietly, secretly, stubbornly, to get what she wanted, and now she wanted the next great step in her life plan. She didn’t think of it as “the last step” because it was more a beginning than an end. She was looking for a place to spend her future summers.

It seemed to her that all her life her parents had been telling her it was the wrong time to be happy, at least on other terms than theirs. First she was too young, it was improper, what would people think? If you were free when you were young you were throwing your life away out of ignorance, because you should be planning for your Real Happiness, whatever that was. Probably they meant a kind of security, safety, achieved through a sensible husband who would enter the family circle and close it behind him and Paris so they would be safe in the fortress evermore. But when she got older, and was not married, her parents began worrying about her old age, so now they spoke of saving money, putting money away for the future, for her old age, and although they never spoke the dreaded words they meant “your lonely old age.” She wasn’t even forty yet and her mother spoke of nice homes for the elderly where wealthy people could go when they were alone so they could be cared for. Her mother was already thinking of her as if she were ninety! Where was her life, the life she had planned for and waited for, her maturity? Where was the enjoyment of now? There was only fear of the future, while now disappeared in a succession of lonely days. Paris didn’t want to be an old lady with a young gigolo on the Riviera, she wasn’t a fool, but she didn’t want to end up in an old-age home either. She wanted to enjoy something now. This was to be her last summer at Windflower. She would find a house and buy it, and spend her summers there. She told no one but Rima, knowing her parents would get hysterical.