Rich Friends (60 page)

The family—or most of them—were no problem. Vliet, in their minds, was too tall, too elegant for Cricket. That was all. Being first cousins seemed a rather witty quirk. Hadn't they absorbed a Japanese artist, a handsome and rather sadistically inclined Jewish surgeon, a Communist (Gene)? They were worldly people. And thought so well of themselves that they didn't consider themselves at all. They took for granted their large, overtaxed houses, their Revillon furs, their handmade sterling, their inherited
bijouterie
and gems, their Van Vliet noses and stock certificates. If two of them decided to get married, why not? As a matter of fact, there was a delicious fairy-tale aspect here. Look who had snagged their handsome, bewitchingly droll Vliet. Their very own little Cricket-the-hippie-one.

Caroline—Van Vliet to the marrow of her handsome bones—was in seventh heaven. Her child married, and no in-laws to bother anyone!

Em never had been secure like Caroline. She did not take well to the idea.

Early in March, before one of their routine Sunday dinners, Vliet said casually, “Cricket's coming for dessert. Did I mention we're getting married?”

The parents laughed, imagining this one of their son's inexplicable Family-type jokes. Vliet met their eyes candidly. And silence fell in the small, overly neat living room. Em paled. Sheridan reddened, his mouth dropping open. The refrigerator kicked on, noisily.

Em spoke first. “But she's your cousin!”

“Give us good wishes, Ma, not facts.” Vliet sounded amused at her outcry. And this added to Em's confusion.

“Cousins don't marry.” Sheridan had gained weight. Ponderous anger shook his double chin.

“From what I hear, Dad, cousins marry all the time. It's legal in California. Royalty, I hear, don't marry anyone else. Or du Ponts.”

“If,” Em hesitated. “If there are children.”

“Ma, what's this ‘if'?”

“Vliet, we're serious.” Sheridan straightened. His wife's Family always had terrified and filled him with baleful envy. Vliet's offhand explanation, royalty and du Ponts, seemed to Sheridan the ultimate decadence. Now They're marrying only Themselves, he thought. And coming from the Midwest, he was bitterly disturbed. “The word is incest.”

“Among Catholics,” Vliet agreed. “Maybe we better get a papal dispensation.”

Sheridan's emotions churned. A staunch anti-Catholic, he was led (as Vliet well knew) into certain interestingly progressive ideologies.

“I have it on the best authority there won't be a single grandchild with more than one head.”

“Vliet,” Sheridan warned.

“Come on, Ma, Dad. You know you're crazy about her.”

“Of c-course we are, Vliet.” Em, embarrassed, was positive that Vliet understood the fine points she and Sheridan were trying to get across. Yet she continued in her sober way. “We want what's best for Cricket as well as you. What if something does h-happen? Could you ever f-forgive yourself if anything went wrong with one of the children?”

Vliet's expression changed. He looked older, harder. He rose, pouring himself a drink. Sheridan and Em glanced at one another, the sad, knowing look that can only pass between two people bound together more by defeat than anything else. Their lives had been measured out by her bottles and his petty adulteries, their other son's desertion and death. We better lay off, the look said. After tragedy, parents tend to become lenient. (And, too, Em for a while had suspected Vliet was seeing “her.”) She went into the kitchen and held tight to the sink. When Sheridan came in and put his fleshy arm around her, she did not shake him off.

Gene's objections were on a profound level. The matter of consanguinity bothered him very little. His wife's family was in good health, mental and physical as well as financial. He, however, had been the fool bestrewing Van Vliet ledgers with large black figures. He had, in his own mind, betrayed his life. He didn't care to see Cricket embark on a similar venture. A vacant alliance. He loved Vliet, but that did not prevent him from seeing the younger man for what he was, a charming egotist, a driving and unscrupulous businessman who was lacking in a way that Gene never could quite put a finger on. Gene would, he told himself, far rather have any of Cricket's quiet, stumbling young men of various races, colors, and religions for a son-in-law.

The wet March Monday after the engagement had been thrown casually at him, Gene waited for the rain to stop. He crossed the puddled loading area to the warehouses. He went directly to Vliet's office. Vliet, on the phone, said, “I'll get back to you, Dave,” and hung up. “Gene?” he said.

“Why Cricket?” Gene asked.

Vliet sat down, looking at the man in front of his desk. Gene could have called him, could have forced him into the large, awe-invoking presidential office, but that would have been against Gene's principles. Gene, the boss with ulcers and a liberal's Achilles heel.

“You must've noticed, Gene. We've always been fond of one another,” Vliet said.

“Not to marry,” Gene replied, and sat on the cheap Naugahyde. “She's nothing you look for in a girl. She's not pretty, my Cricket.”

“That's not paternal, Gene.”

“I'm her father, I love her. I'm not blind. And you haven't answered my question.”

“After all these years, you're not about to play the heavy father, are you, Gene?”

Gene pressed his thumbnail to his lower lip. He was severe with himself. And in his book, interfering with a child's marriage was despicable. Yet he kept his probing gray eyes on Vliet.

Vliet turned away. “For Christ's sake, Gene, let it be, let it be.” He spoke harshly. No part of any plan. The words had spilled out.

Gene had known Vliet since he was born, and had seen him in every kind of situation. This was a voice he'd never heard. Whose? A stranger's, lost, despairing.

Then Vliet was turning, extending his hand with a smile. “Come on, think. You're getting Dad for a relation.”

Gene gripped his nephew's extended hand.

Rain had started, harder now. Gene ran around trucks. He was back at his desk, his feet wet, thinking how little he knew of the human heart. That implausible misery in Vliet had been brief. And unforgettable. Gene wished he'd been more tolerant, kinder. Some writer I'd've been, he thought, forever reworking material to make myself sound noble and just. He kept a pair of socks here, and he was pulling them on when he realized he was praying. An agnostic's prayer to his dubious God: If You exist, let her help him, let her be able to help him.

Epilogue

On April 20, a warm, slightly hazed Sunday, the Eugene Mathenys held Open House for their daughter, Amelie Deane, and Mr. Van Vliet Reed, who, six weeks earlier, had driven to Las Vegas to get married.

The bridal couple sat on a patio wall. Em and Sheridan stood nearby. Em would have preferred a receiving line, but Caroline had nixed the idea. A receiving line, Caroline had pronounced, was too
stiff
for words. Still, this being a wedding of sorts, the guests did stop to kiss and congratulate before spreading around the patio and down the terraced hill.

There were sharply delineated groups.

On the narrow grass of the first terrace sat Cricket's friends. (“Is it law, luv, that the fingernails be dirty?” said Caroline sotto voce to Gene.) They drank their champagne, earnestly discussing lenses and how to get inside the frame. Vliet's crowd lounged on the pool deck: they seemed to glitter, such was the indecent number of lovely girls. Van Vliets mingled with the Mathenys' friends, greeting one another with champagne-scented kisses and cries of “Isn't it a delicious day?” and “I adore that dress!” and “They just don't get married anymore. This is my first wedding in ages!” and “Worth missing the old tennis game for, huhh, boy?” Under a yellow-striped awning that had been put up for the occasion, the Reeds' Glendale contingent clung together for safety. Everywhere bloomed tubs of yellow and white daisies.

The musicians, young people in jeans, were wandering back to their station, retrieving viola d'amore, lute, flute, and recorder, drifting into a pleasantly archaic “Bridge over Troubled Water.” Vliet, with graceful conducting gestures, left his bride, descending to the pool deck to introduce an old Harvard buddy around.

Cricket swung one sandaled foot, oblivious to the social magnets drawing people together. She saw the simple truth. They were enjoying themselves. They were happy. She was happy. Sun had raised a faint shine on her forehead. She wore a yellow lace she'd discovered in a garage sale. Naturally her mother had tried to coax her into a new dress, indeed, into a trousseau (or, as the enthusiastic Caroline had purposefully mispronounced, a “torso”), but in the multiple reflections of the fitting-room mirrors, Cricket had seen the incorruptible in her small body denying these elegantly tagged clothes. “No,” she had said.

Most people think of a wedding as a mountain that, once crossed, presents one with a pleasant or exciting new vista. Cricket had no such concept. Her ability was to give. She lacked the sense of ownership. She did not think of possessing Vliet. Or being herself possessed by matrimony. She was just happy they were together, and this happiness had the evocative power of the classical music Vliet played whenever he was home—she'd moved into his West Hollywood apartment. Those taped chords left in her a sense of surprise, wonder, and inevitability.

Vliet, returning to her, paused to clown a small dance in front of their grandmother's chair. As the smile gathered wrinkles on the bovine face, Cricket felt her own lips echo the smile. Vliet thought he didn't love her, and Cricket knew it. He did. And she knew this. Since his love was uncolored by romanticism, he missed seeing it.

“You forgot your wedding ring,” Vliet said.

She looked down. She had. He hadn't.

Suddenly they both laughed.

The party, Caroline decided, had the fine, casual ambiance she had striven after.

“It's coming off,” she said to Gene.

He put his arm around her waist. “You worked hard enough.”

“We
should
celebrate a son-in-law who'll support our
dee
-clining years.”

She had thrown herself into the planning, conferring interminably with Em, overriding her sister's cautious opinion on each issue. Formal invitations versus informal, receiving line or none, refreshments, cut flowers, guest lists. The decision that had thrown Em was that Gene and Vliet would not wear suits at the garden afternoon. “Well, Sheridan will!” she had cried.

Yet in the midst of the fiercest sibling argument, they would catch themselves. “It's for the children,” Em would cry. And the tall sister and the short would embrace. Em almost had gotten over her reservations. (And besides, Vliet's beautiful girls always had made her uncomfortable.) Caroline was, as she repeatedly told her friends, delirious. She
ad
ored Vliet. (Besides, she had feared Cricket would keep flopping from one bed to the next and never marry.) Neither sister mentioned the close relationship to one another. In Caroline's mind it was just too bourgeois. Em was anxious about angering her urbane sister. Anyway, the children had eloped, and the matter was out of their hands. Em, hating herself for it, couldn't help wondering if they'd had to.

She turned, peering through her glasses at Cricket. Was that lace a trifle snug? The way the child dressed, fit was impossible to gauge. It actually made Em's head ache when she considered that Cricket might have, before. Yet she couldn't help saying to Sheridan, “Cricket looks pretty, don't you think?”

Sheridan wiggled his neck, trying to escape his shirt collar. Since Roger's death he'd put on thirty pounds, and his new navy suit was hot, uncomfortable. “If she'd fix herself up a bit,” he muttered. He never would surmount that thought,
incest
, yet at the same time, he liked his new daughter-in-law far more than anyone else in his wife's Family.

“Hasn't she gained a little weight?”

“Married life agrees with her.”

Just then, Beverly, with Dan, stepped through open sliding glass. Em hadn't seen Beverly for ages. It came as a shock that Beverly's brown hair, which flowed around shoulders slender and straight as a girl's, was threaded with white. She doesn't keep it colored, Em thought, and pity welled. As an archaeologist cautiously unearths stones of a dead civilization, so Em delved her emotions, discovering to her pleasure that she still felt affection for Beverly Linde. Beverly is a family friend, Em thought. Then she thought, Alix!

Em held up her empty glass. “I'll be back in a moment,” she said to Sheridan.

“Why not lay off today?”

“I've only had champagne,” she lied, heading for the long portable bar, hoping fervently that Alix, most disputed on the guest list, wouldn't show.

Beverly kissed Cricket. “I'm so happy for you,” she murmured in her gentle, low voice, and then, when Cricket hugged her, “Vliet's so very lucky.”

“
Mazeltov,
” Dan said to Vliet.

“Thank you, sir,” Vliet replied.

“How long've you been married?” Beverly asked.

“Four weeks,” Cricket said.

“Six,” Vliet corrected. “My wife's not much on detail.”

“Mine either,” Dan said. “There're advantages and disadvantages.” He spoke pleasantly. He did not like Vliet: he had seen in that charnel house the way Vliet had stared at Alix, he suspected Vliet had had more than a hand in her relapse. But Dan was Gene Matheny's friend. So he was pleasant.

Caroline draped an arm over her tall nephew's shoulder. “This is a son-in-law. The prime of the species.” She laughed, and they all had to laugh with her. “Ahh, Beverly, we're aged crones.”

And Gene was there, kissing Beverly, shaking Dan's hand. “Weren't you bringing Sam?”

“Listen,” Dan chuckled, “would you give up pitching for this?”