The Inn at Lake Devine (3 page)

“And Eddie?” they’d prompt.

“He said, ‘Need a hand?’ My father said, ‘You mean it?’ He opened the trunk, found what he needed, and thirty seconds later was on his knees.”

And while my father was changing the tire, my grandfather was busy asking questions: What kind of business was his father in? What street in Chelsea? How many brothers and sisters did he have? What plans did Eddie have after graduation? Boston State? Not Boston University? Cost any less? Were his brothers big men too? Ever heard of Interlon? Well, know what interfacing is? Did his mother sew? Ever see her sew an extra layer of stiff cloth between the body of the garment and the facing?

It was inevitable that a conversation between my grandfather and a mechanically competent, friendly Jewish boy in which Interlon was mentioned would lead to a summer job offer.

Eddie said, “No, thanks. I help my dad in the summer. It’s his big season.”

“Fruit, did you say?”

“That’s right,” said Eddie.

“We go through a lot of fruit in our house,” said Mr. Cohen.

Audrey, approaching with a huge Raggedy Ann doll, a tennis racquet, and a gooseneck lamp, heard “truck,” and pictured exactly what Eddie’s father’s livelihood was: fruit sold from an open truck, a scale hanging from the back, and Eddie’s father making change from a bus driver’s coin holder. “This is everything,” she said. “Let’s go.”

“I’d help,” Eddie said to Audrey, showing his palms, “but I don’t want to get your things dirty.”

“You’ve helped enough already,” said my grandfather, “and I just wish you’d let me buy you lunch as a thank-you.”

Eddie looked down from his great height at Audrey. She smiled politely—the man had changed their goddamn tire, after all—but in sourpuss fashion. My grandfather asked her, “Where can you get a nice lunch around here? Where do the professors eat?”

“All my stuff is in the back,” she said, hoping her father would understand that she couldn’t have lunch near B.U. with this man—he looked old for a college student—especially with her sixty-year-old father along to pepper him with questions about the fruit business.

Eddie said, “Thanks, but I’ll take a rain check.”

My grandfather said, “You sure?”

“I had a late breakfast—”

“So did I,” said Audrey, settling the question. Satisfied that he had made the proper overtures and had acted like a
mensch
, my grandfather performed one more ingratiating act. “You take my card, and if you’re ever in Fitchburg-Leominster, anyplace close by, you come by the plant and I’ll buy you lunch. Interlon—right on the main drag. Red brick with a big yellow brick smokestack.”

“Thanks,” Eddie said. He put the card in his wallet, which Audrey noted was embossed like a cowboy’s and overstitched with gimp.

“Or need a summer job,” Mr. Cohen added from the driver’s seat.

From the safety of the passenger seat, Audrey waved to Eddie and granted him a brief, chilly smile. When her father steered the car into Kenmore Square, she spat out, “Big shot. He’s going to show up one day and you’ll be on the phone yelling at some supplier. Why offer something if you don’t mean it?”

“I meant it,” he said. And again, thinking it over: “I did mean it.”

“And he’ll be driving a fruit truck, with rotting fruit and flies,” Audrey added, then laughed.

My grandfather smiled and checked the outside mirror. She wasn’t the worst of the daughters, and she was the prettiest. This general absence of disappointment and these mild twinges of pride might mean that Audrey, the baby and only redhead, was his favorite.

I
t was almost precisely what my father did one day in late June—he showed up at Interlon and asked the receptionist for Mr. Cohen.

“And you’re with …?”

“Tell him Eddie Marx. From B.U. The flat-tire guy.” The receptionist, who was wearing slacks of a print that looked to Eddie like Chinese wallpaper, said, “He’s with an account right now.”

My father sat down on a metal folding chair and waited until the human barking in the inner office stopped. The secretary didn’t change expression or look up from the letterhead and two carbons she was typing. Mr. Cohen, dressed in gray trousers and a short-sleeved, white button-down shirt, came forward.

“You here for lunch?” he boomed in greeting.

Eddie said he had the truck, which meant he had the produce, which meant he couldn’t leave it on a city street.

“How about my driveway?”

Eddie smiled, a grin that asked what “my driveway” meant exactly.

“My house! I’ll call Florence.”

Eddie raised his hands in protest. “Nobody likes an unexpected guest for lunch.”

Isadore Cohen put his hand on Eddie’s shoulder. “How old are you?”

“Twenty-five in September.”

“I ask that because you don’t act like a kid,” said Isadore. “You act like you have half a brain.”

Eddie laughed and said, “Tell that to my father.”

“He gives you a hard time?” asked Isadore, pleased to be topping a guy’s father as easily as this.

“He’s got a short fuse, but he’s harmless. I learned a long time ago to take it and not shout back.”

“How many boys?” Isadore asked, a question he had asked before, and would ask again before lunch was over.

“Three,” Eddie said. “Would have been four, but they lost one as a baby.”

“I’m sorry,” said my grandfather, and he was.

“The Marx brothers,” Eddie said.

“Really? Are they related?” The secretary looked up for a few seconds, her hands poised above the keys.

“I meant us—we’re the Marx brothers. My father says when he dies we can change the name on the trucks.”

Isadore was dialing noisily, his index finger snapping the rotary dial faster than it was meant to go. “Florence! What’s for lunch?” He nodded at Eddie—as if to say, Okay. It’s gonna work. “You like salmon salad?” Eddie nodded back. “Florence! Can you make another sandwich? Or two? I’ve got a big strapping fellow here who looks like he can put away a coupla sandwiches for lunch.” He banged the phone down happily.

“Follow me,” he said.

F
lorence Cohen, trim and smartly dressed—early fifties, my father guessed—fed the interloper at the kitchen table after sizing
up his Bermuda shorts and his big nylon shirttails. She was correct without being gracious. She offered Eddie seconds and thirds and, later, even some cookies for the road, but Eddie knew she wasn’t pleased to have him.

“Is your daughter home for the summer?” he asked conversationally within minutes of arriving.

“She’s home for the summer; she’s just not home at the moment,” Isadore explained. His wife’s expression scolded him for giving away too much.

“Where is she?” Eddie asked.

“At Barbara’s.”

“My brother’s daughter,” he explained. “They have a built-in pool.”

“Does she have any special summer plans?”

Florence didn’t think this large, coarse-featured fruit peddler should be inquiring about Audrey’s summer plans, either. “A few,” she said.

Isadore was embarrassed by his wife’s tone. He knew the deep freeze when he heard it, and thought Florence had turned into a snob despite having been a salesgirl in a dress shop when they met. “Florence’s father grew up in Chelsea. And she grew up not too far from there. Maybe the two families knew each other,” he tried, a warning.

Florence murmured, “I doubt that.”

“Why not?” asked Isadore. He passed the plate of sliced cukes and tomatoes to Eddie, then helped himself to thirds. “A ragman and a fruit man might have had the same route,” he said pointedly.

Florence returned her plate and her husband’s, prematurely, to the sink. Eddie said nothing. His parents had their own version of this game (descendant of a horse thief versus descendant of a promiscuous tailor). Happily, the back-screen latch clicked and Audrey was home. Her red hair was pulled back into a careless ponytail—she’d never let a boy see her with her hair up—and her skin was tanned the color of a ripe Bosc pear. She was wearing
scuffed white pumps and—to a boy with no sisters—almost nothing else: a two-piece plaid bathing suit with a bandeau top. Eddie jumped to his feet and said, “Hi, it’s me—you probably don’t remember—Eddie Marx.”

Audrey took off her sunglasses and stared joylessly. “Is that your truck?” she asked.

He asked if it was blocking hers.

“I don’t have a car,” she said, and looked at her father disapprovingly. She reached over her mother’s shoulder and took a cherry tomato. “Anything left to eat?”

Eddie eased himself back down into the kitchen chair. Audrey took a plate from a cupboard, opened the refrigerator, found a carton of cottage cheese, opened another cupboard, and found a can of cling peaches.

“Wait?” said Eddie.

Audrey looked up unhappily.

“I have fresh peaches on the truck.”

Audrey, vaguely annoyed, asked, “Are they ripe?”

“They’re ripe, they’re juicy, they’re delicious. I ate four driving out here”—inviting my grandmother to inspect his shirt for stains.

“Okay,” Audrey said.

Eddie went quickly out the back door and returned with two peaches, a nectarine, and a pint of strawberries.

“I might be allergic to strawberries,” said Audrey. “Sometimes I break out from them and sometimes I don’t.”

Eddie said, “Want to go out and choose something else?”

“This is fine.” She looked at the fruit in his hands. It was quite perfect. “Unless you have a cantaloupe …”

“I do,” said Eddie. “Let me see if I have one that’s ready for eating.”

“How do you know that?” my grandmother asked. Eddie signaled that they should follow him. He jogged to the truck, picked up a cantaloupe with one hand, and ordered them to sniff the melon.

Mother and daughter murmured their consensus: not much, a faint whiff of hard cantaloupe skin. Eddie chose another. “Now this.” They sniffed. “It smells like ripe cantaloupe,” said Audrey. He showed them one more trick: the green spot, the blossom end? It should give a little.

Audrey said sharply to her mother, “How have you been picking out cantaloupes all these years?”

“I thought you were supposed to shake them.”

“Which is why
we
choose the fruit,” Eddie said. He smiled at Audrey, his ally, and handed her his first-choice melon. She put her sunburned nose to it and, with a look that asked, “Here?” took a deep breath from its green spot.

“So,” said Eddie, grinning the big grin that had earned him a reputation among the customers as the nicest of the Marx boys, “am I right?”

With the fruit lesson over and Audrey not a foot away, he allowed himself to take in the smell of her suntan oil, something like black olives. Her skin was shiny from it, and there was a line of sunburn at her waist and above her bandeau top, as if today’s suit had exposed more skin than yesterday’s.

Audrey didn’t notice, or couldn’t be bothered to interpret, the strain in his face. “Cut it up over the sink,” she directed, my mother’s first order to my father.

A
s she explained to her cousin Barbara, when Eddie phoned, Audrey had agreed to go out with him because he was offering to take her to a movie Saturday night in Boston and she was dying to get out of Fitchburg. And there was something, frankly, about Eddie’s jumbo presence, something like a bodyguard’s or a football player’s, that was normally off limits to a Jewish girl. Big hands and knuckles, big feet, wide calves below his Bermuda shorts, ruddy, even rubbery-looking face. She’d never dated a man who looked like Eddie, or who had one sunburned arm from driving the truck, or who viewed her as a prize beyond his grasp.

Audrey thought this might account for the strange goings-on in Boston, her kissing Eddie Marx in his brother’s car when it was parked in Winthrop with a view of the beach.

“Are you going to go out with him again?” asked cousin Barbara, who in her life had kissed only Stevie Poppel, who had moved away. “I know I sometimes go for an older guy who I wouldn’t have looked twice at if he was my age.”

“Next Saturday.”

Barbara had smiled. She admired Audrey, and was happy her parents had built the swimming pool, because Audrey might not otherwise have spent so much time with a younger cousin. “So don’t worry whether you like him or not. Just go and see what happens,” said Barbara.

B
arbara was her maid of honor, because all three of her sisters had carried on so obnoxiously about her having to get married. Pregnant at nineteen by Eddie Marx. She hadn’t even
told
her sisters; her mother had blabbed to Charlotte, the oldest, who’d spread the word until it reached Roberta, the next-to-youngest, who had actually laid eyes on Eddie, which made the astonishment bounce back up the sister corridor in record time.

“She doesn’t love him!” Florence had screamed at her husband when he reported that Eddie had come by Interlon for a man-to-man talk and had left with money for a ring.

“How would you know?” was his mild retort.

“Because I know how she acts when she’s in love,” said her mother. “And it’s not like this. Look at her.”

“I’m nauseous,” said Audrey, “and you know it.”

Mrs. Cohen turned on her husband. “You brought this on. You had to invite him here for lunch. You had to find her a husband.”

Red-faced, picturing a tiny grandson taking form, he said, “She doesn’t have to keep our grandchild! His parents will raise him. Eddie told me this, about their offer.” They had lost one of theirs, they said, and this might be the way God was replacing Solly. Audrey
didn’t have to be its mother! Audrey could go back to college, if that was more important, and study her singing and forget she’d ever met a
mensch
like Eddie Marx or had his baby.

Florence Cohen said it was not the parents’ job to fix their children’s mistakes, meaning, Don’t expect me to start raising grandchildren like some woman off the boat.

So the Marxes drove to Fitchburg to have a somber engagement fish dinner with the Cohens. Mr. Marx, my other grandfather, was short, blue-eyed, and so utterly bald that whatever had taken the hair from his head had also taken his eyebrows and lashes. Mrs. Marx was big and heavy. Her dress was brown cotton, ironed and starched, buttoned down the front like a housedress, except for the big star burst of fake topaz above her left breast.