Stages (23 page)

“If it’s what everyone wants to do,” Lauren replied. She didn’t know how anyone could be sure what Jack Case wanted to do. He seemed to be fixed on something that was outside the conversation and perhaps even outside the room.

“Oh, it’ll be just so much fun,” Andrea said. “Your parents can come down and be our houseguests, and your brothers and sisters too.”

“That’d be quite a crowd,” Lauren said.

“Oh, we’ll manage,” Andrea assured her. “We certainly have the room.”

“I guess you have at that,” said Lauren. She looked up at the ceiling. “I think my parents’ whole house could fit in this one room,” she added. “Including the TV antenna.”

The following morning Lauren and her new mother-in-law were driven into Manhattan in a Cadillac limousine that had a television set with better reception than the RCA Lauren’s mother and father had bought on the installment plan. At Tiffany’s Andrea picked out engraved invitations for the party. Andrea never once asked “How much?”

“We’ll have to come into town again this week,” Andrea said while they were looking at table settings in Bendel’s. “With you two setting up housekeeping. You have to start thinking about things like sheets.”

Lauren wanted to say,
Have you ever heard of a thing called a white sale?
but instead she just listened while her mother-in-law explained to her that next to a Pratesi sheet anything else was a paper napkin. When finally they were heading back to Connecticut, with Merv Griffin on the television set, Lauren began to wonder what Jason and his father had talked about all day, or rather what Jason had found to say to his father, who could reply only with faint gestures. Andrea had talked about her husband for a minute, perhaps, saying that he’d had a stroke and a heart attack, and it was a wonder that he’d survived. Then a cowled sleeveless Oleg Cassini dress with an apron of Madeira lace had quickly changed the subject.

When she wasn’t in the city shopping with Andrea, Lauren was driving around Greenwich and Wilton and New Canaan with Jason and a real estate agent, looking for a house. In one month she saw so much money that she watched
The Grapes of Wrath
on the late movie one night, just to vacation for a couple of hours in poverty.

A week later poverty—or, to be generous, severe modesty—arrived on the Cases’ doorstep in the person of Lauren’s family. The weekend of the big party had come around quickly. Joe and Ethel Holland and their children and their children’s wives and
their
children arrived on a Thursday evening in two Chevrolets and one Ford van with DUFOUR ELECTIC painted on its sides.

Lauren rushed up to hug and kiss her parents.

“Is this a house or a hotel?” her mother asked.

That night Andrea gave a dinner party for “just the two families.”

“This is some place,” Ethel said. “I promised myself once that I’d never ooh and ah over anybody else’s house, but here I just can’t help it.”

“Well, Jack worked hard for it,” Andrea replied. “And we do enjoy it. Why not enjoy what you’ve earned? I’m sure you folks do. You’re a lot like us. I sensed it the minute we met. You came up the hard way.”

“We’ve had to do it the hard way all right,” Ethel said. “The only thing is we never came up.”

“She’s kidding you,” Joe said, pulling the tail of a shrimp through his teeth. “We’ve made a lot of money over the years. Of course we blew most of it on food and clothing.” He was wearing a baby-blue leisure suit and navy-blue patent leather shoes. Listening to him, Andrea lightly touched the Harry Winston pearls around her neck.

“That much is true,” Ethel said. “We’ve had the kids to feed and clothe—and the ponies.”

“Do you ride?” Andrea asked.

Lauren winced.

“No,” said Ethel. “But Joe has fed and clothed racehorses for years.”

“Haw, that’s a good one, Ma,” one of Lauren’s brothers said. He was sitting next to Jason’s sister Marla. Marla, who had arrived the week before, was a sophomore at Mt. Holyoke. She did ride horses, and much of her life seemed to be a private joke between herself and them. She was smiling secretively now.

“I take it you’re a gambling man,” Andrea said to Joe. “Do you ever get out to Las Vegas?”

“Twice last year,” Joe replied.

“We went once,” Andrea said.

“Mother won seventeen hundred dollars playing roulette,” Jason said.

“I was ahead a little more than that, for half an hour,” said Joe. “But I wound up losing a couple hundred. The second trip I almost paid for, though.”

“You can’t win for losing,” Ethel declared. “I’ve always liked that saying. It’s one of those sayings where you’re not sure exactly what it means, but you just feel inside you the truth of it.” A maid refilled her wineglass and Ethel said, “Thank you, dear.”

Lauren was embarrassed to see that one of her little nieces was staring at Jack as if he were some kind of exotic pet. He didn’t seem to notice at any rate, or if he did notice, to mind.

Dinner wasn’t over until after ten. By eleven Ethel and Joe were ready to go to bed, and Lauren walked with them to the guest house while Jason took her brothers upstairs to the billiards room. Andrea was leading the women on a tour of the house—Lauren imagined them stepping into one of her clothes closets. There were two of them, each the length of a bus, each as jammed as a bus at the height of the rush hour. Lauren could hear her sister-in-law Miriam, who was always sending dollars to Methodist charities, muttering that it was a sin that so many people had so little when people like this had so much.

As Ethel pulled things out of suitcases, Lauren hung them in the closet. Joe put on the news and said, “Do you get any Boston stations here?”

“Who cares about Boston when we’re staying at a place like this?” Ethel said. Handing Lauren one of her father’s sports jackets, she shook her head and said, “He never really gets away. There’s no romance in traveling for him anymore.”

“I like my own bed,” Joe said.

“Mm,” said Ethel, nodding. “No place like home, especially when home’s so close to the dog track. Well,
I
like this place. I’ve never seen anything like it and I don’t suppose I ever will again. But your poor father-in-law…”

Lauren smoothed her father’s jacket—the material felt like a vinyl-coated place mat—and put it on a hanger.

“What do you think of them, Andrea and Jack?” she asked her mother.

“I can’t help wondering what good all this money does him,” Ethel replied. “But then it can’t do him any harm, either.”

“Miriam’s probably telling Peter right now that it’s easier for a camel to get through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to get into heaven,” Lauren pointed out.

“Miriam!” Ethel huffed. “You don’t have to be that stingy with life.”

“You don’t need all this, either,” Joe said, pushing pillows out of his way so he could lie on the bed.

“Jason says what you have is what you have. If you had more or if you had less, you’d still have to live with it and try to make the best of it.” Turning to her mother again, Lauren said, “So what do you think of Andrea?”

“She’s very gracious, and generous,” Ethel said. “It must be a terrible burden for her, though, having her husband in that condition.”

“She looks to me like she’s got round heels,” Joe said.

“What kind of thing is that to say, when you’re a guest in somebody’s house?” Ethel said.

“I know women,” Joe said. “She’s the type, you hit her on the head and her legs fly apart.”

“Don’t listen to him,” Ethel said. “He always has to have something to say about people, just like Miriam.”

“Miriam was frightened by a dog’s dick when she was a little girl,” Joe said, lighting the cigar Jason had given him.

“For God’s sake, don’t say anything like that about Andrea to anybody in the family, even if you think it,” Lauren pleaded.

“He won’t, I’ll see to that,” Ethel promised. “Such ingratitude! With all these people are doing for us. It’d be easier for me to get through a donut hole,” Ethel scolded her husband, “than it’d be for you to get into heaven.”

“How
are
things at the donut shop?” Lauren asked.

“Effie’s working for me. Her husband died a couple of months ago. He was having bourbon for breakfast, what’d he expect?”

Ethel reflected for a moment on Effie’s fate, and then went back to bickering with Joe. She was grateful, Lauren could tell, that she still had a husband around to annoy her.

A few minutes later Lauren left her parents to argue themselves to sleep. Tomorrow was going to be even more of a marathon than today.

*

Early Friday morning the tents were already being set up for Saturday night’s big party. There were three of them, and they were all pink. The largest one was a billowy ballroom with a real wooden dance floor. The tent poles were garlanded like trees in a fairy-tale forest. There would be thirty tables, each seating eight, and each set with crystal and Spode china and sterling silver. There were going to be three bars and two bands, one of them Lester Lanin’s and the other a rock group from Los Angeles. The food was coming in a fleet of vans. For Lauren it was almost too much.

“If you’ve got it, flaunt it,” her father said.

“The centerpieces are going to be
orchids,
” her mother said. “And I have one African violet in the kitchen that never blossoms.” Ethel swore she was going to take pictures of everything to show the girls.

When Saturday was upon them, and the guests began to arrive, Ethel would have taken pictures of them too, if she could have worked up the courage. The Cases’ friends and relatives all looked like people straight out of the TV movies Ethel most enjoyed (the ones with big houses and beautiful clothes). Joe watched with a smirk on his face as Andrea kissed everyone. One of Lauren’s brothers asked her if it was going to be a cash bar.

Lauren looked wonderful, her mother thought, and she took three pictures of her in her silk organza dress with wild roses on it and ruffles. Lauren told her it was a Valentino, and her mother said it didn’t look like anything that had come from Filene’s basement.

The food wasn’t anything like ham and potato salad, either. There were big silver tureens full of lobster newburg and there was rare roast beef carved by men in chefs hats. There was cold salmon decorated with cheese florets. There was shrimp salad and crabmeat salad and lobster salad of whole individual tails served right in the shell. What potatoes there were had been pureed together with turnip and were just satin on the tongue.

Even after a couple of hours none of the men had taken off their jackets, Ethel noticed. And nobody was drinking beer. And when the music started, even the older women danced with a foot off the ground. When the women Ethel knew danced at weddings, they always looked as though they had a couple of heavy grocery bags in their arms. Was it possible, she wondered, for people to spend their whole lives just having a good time?

Ethel was watching Lauren dancing with her father when she heard, “Gramma, I’m full.” Her nine-year-old granddaughter Peggy was standing next to her with a dessert plate in her hand on which were two chocolate-covered strawberries and half a meringue. Peggy was Peter and Miriam’s child. She wore glasses, and when she took them off you saw brownish circles under her eyes. In the summertime Peggy would read all day under a tree in a little park that was mostly asphalt and full of bottle caps and straws and cigarette butts. Whenever she saw Peggy, Ethel’s heart went out to the poor thing. She was afraid that Peggy was never going to find a husband when she was grown, and would wind up living with her mother all her life.

“Why don’t you just sit here with me if you don’t want to eat anymore,” Ethel said to her, “and we can watch everything that’s going on.”

Then Jason appeared and asked Ethel to dance. She put down her camera and told Peggy she’d be right back.

“I should be wearing my waitress shoes,” Ethel said as Jason led her out onto the floor.

“You can wear them at the Christmas party,” Jason said.

“What Christmas party?”

“At the Dunkin’ Donuts you work in. I’m going to take it over for an evening during Christmas week. Champagne is great in a coffee mug. And wait’ll you see what we stuff the donuts with—chocolate truffles, mocha buttercream—”

“Jason, you can’t be serious!”

“Don’t tell Lauren, I want it to be a surprise.”

Ethel thought her ears were beginning to glow, and as Jason swirled her around, the glow spread all through her. She was truly charmed, and truly loved it. Maybe it wasn’t quite fair for Jason and his parents to be so rich. It wasn’t quite fair, either, for him to be so good-looking when there were so many
women
who could use looks—but when someone was so generous, who would begrudge him what he himself had been given? Who wanted to be like Miriam, turning up her nose at “the idle rich” and sending dollars to places like the Piney Woods School just to make sure that the people worse off than you would keep going?

Ethel’s heart was just about singing.
Oh, Lauren, Lauren, what a lovely life you’re going to have,
she thought.