The War of the Roses (3 page)

To make it with Eve, Ann knew instinctively, was to find some important way to illustrate her trust in the girl. She detested being so calculating as she searched for opportunities. But it meant a great deal to win Eve's favor, especially in practical terms. The job in the Roses' household was a stroke of luck. Banishment, for whatever reason, would be a personal and financial disaster.

The opportunity arose when Eve flunked math at Sidwell Friends School, a posh private school of Quaker origin for the children of the Washington elite. Eve, too frightened to tell her parents, confided the horror to Ann.

'I've disgraced them,' she cried.

Calming her down, Ann agreed to act as go-between, a role not without its risks. Oliver had been disappointed, but resigned. Barbara had been angry.

'Lack of preparation is a curse,' she had snapped. 'I know.' Ann had learned by then that Barbara had married at nineteen and had dropped out of college.

'I promised them you'd go to summer school if there were no recriminations or bad words,' Ann had announced proudly to Eve, who collapsed in shivery tears. In its way, it was a kind of victory and certainly represented a turning point between them.

'I'll make them proud,' Eve promised, her lips pursing in determination. There was, Ann had discovered, an invisible, fiercely competitive standard loose in the household. She wondered if it was a good thing.

This standard was at its most obvious in twelve-year-old Josh. What he wanted most of all was to be a member of the Sidwell Friends junior-varsity basketball team. She heard his basketball rattling, with irritating punctuality, against the backboard that his father had made in the alley over the double garage.

Like his sister, he, too, was a well-made mixture of his parents' genes: hazel eyes, cheekbones like his mother's, and a space between nose and lip that would surely in late adolescence sprout his father's thick moustache. His hair, sadly, was his mother's chestnut, which meant that he might not grow his father's salty, waved hair. Like Eve, he wore braces and it was a family joke, one of many, that the Roses were an orthodontist's dream.

Ann's relationship with Josh started out vague and unpromising. She h
ad barely any memories of prepu
besceht boys, having gone to a Catholic girls' school. To the stern sisters of that establishment, young boys, if they existed at all, were messengers of Satan. To her, Josh was, nevertheless, a challenge to be surmounted.

She found him one day hunched over his basketball on the third-floor landing outside her room. She had been studying and it was obvious when she saw him there, gloomy and distraught, that he had been waiting for her to come upon him 'accidentally.'

'You look like you just lost your best pal,' she had said, standing over him. He was holding the basketball in a tight embrace. He looked up at her, dry-eyed, but with a visible trembling of his lower lip that threatened the total collapse of his pseudo-manly courage. She sat down beside him, noting that he had deliberately left room for her on the step.

'Damned coach,' he said, telescoping the message that he hadn't made the team. It was enough of a signal to set her mind racing to find something reasonably reassuring to say. Providentially, the Johnstown house was on the edge of a school attended mostly by black children.

'Any black kids on the team?' she asked. He held up one finger. 'Get a chance to play with any black kids?' He shrugged, obviously having no idea where she was leading him.

'Go to the schoolyards where the black kids play. Couple months of that and you'll run rings around those lily-white honkies.'

He took the advice, still sulking as he brushed aside her attempted caress of his shoulders. It was weeks later, when he suddenly broke out in black street talk, that she knew he had taken her advice. Pure chance, she had decided, but a definite icebreaker.

The sun was barely visible through the arborvitaes and would soon be hidden behind the cedar fence, leaving a soft hush in the air. From the kitchen two floors below, exotic, mouth-watering odors wafted upward. In the oven, Ann knew, was a crusting
cassoule
t
,
layers of simmering goose, pork, lamb, and sausage on a bed of flageolets, bubbling in an essence of garlic, thyme, bay leaves, and other glorious herbs and spices. Cooling on the marble of the kitchen island was, a deep sniff confirmed, a loaf of fluffy banana bread. Barbara was at that moment probably mixing a light salad of greens and mushrooms in the big wooden bowl inundated with the tart oils of a thousand previous concoctions. There would be sliced
pate de campagne
as well and a chocolate
mousse
to sweeten the celebration.

God's in his heaven and all's right with the world, Ann thought, prompted by the smells and the delicious knowledge of her treasure chest of family secrets. The festivities were Barbara's original idea to celebrate Eve's summer-school victory, a B-minus in advanced algebra. Ann had spent half the summer sweating over that one with Eve, certain that her effort had lifted the grade by one whole letter jump.

And Oliver had embroidered the victory with his own contribution. He had bought Eve a silver Honda, which, unbeknown to the victorious scholar, lay in wait in the garage next to his prized Ferrari, rarely used but fondled and caressed like a precious baby.

'You mustn't breathe a word,' Oliver had warned. 'Not a word.'

Barbara had come to her that morning with two secrets.

'Josh made the team. But don't tell Oliver. It's a surprise. We'll spring it at dinner.' 'You said two secrets.'

'I just got a hell of an order. Chicken
galantine
for twenty-four. For the Paks. They're entertaining the French ambassador Tuesday night. Just don't tell Oliver. Let it be my surprise.' Barbara took Ann by the shoulders, looking deeply into her eyes as if they were a mirror. 'You know, I'm going to make it big as a caterer someday. I mean big.'

Eve came into her room sometime later with a further announcement and Ann literally had to turn away to hide her amusement.

'You might think this dinner is for my B-minus, but Dad's got a topper to that. The firm picked up one of those big Fortune Five Hundred clients in New York. But don't tell Mom. He's going to break out the Chateau
Lafite-Rothschild '59. When he does that, we're into heavy duty.'

Any more secrets and Ann was certain that she would burst wide open. Surprisingly, she didn't feel left out. She had her
little
secret, too, reminded of it again as she passed Oliver on the back stairs. He had just come from the sauna that he had built in the basement, complete with adjoining shower. Sometimes the family gathered there. Nakedness was not a hang-up, although in deference to Ann they no longer went about the house without robes, another secret that Josh had confided.

Passing him on the stairs, she turned quickly away as her eyes caught a tantalizing picture. The damp had curled his hair and the terry-cloth V showed a profusion of jet-black body turf down to his navel. She could not bring herself to look below that but she could not ignore the piny scent that his skin exuded, embellishing the exciting aroma of his maleness. Passing him this close, with him in a state of semi
-
undress, was dizzying.

'Soon,' he said, winking as he passed her. 'I'm going to give Eve the Honda keys at dinner.'

In the kitchen, Barbara was wearing a long mauve velvet at-home dress with a single strand of matched pearls and even Eve had parted for once from her jeans and was wearing a more fitting, preppyish outfit of pleated skirt, blouse, and saddle shoes. As always, when it came to clothes, Ann felt inadequate, despite the fact that she wore one of Barbara's beige slack-suit hand-me-downs, a far cry from the J. C. Penney polyester she had worn that first day.

As if by silent consent, Ann picked up the cooling banana bread and joined the procession to the library, which doubled as a kind of family den. They moved through the marble-floored foyer, over which glistened a huge crystal chandelier, hanging three stories high in x brass-banistered stairwell. From the foyer's corner, a tall clock in an inlaid-mahogany case offered seven chimes to underscore the Roman hour on its dial.

Oliver had built the walnut bookshelves in the library to hold their rows of leather-bound old books. Against a blank wall was a huge, carved nineteenth-century armoire, nine feet high, which he had fitted with shelves that now held an assortment of liquor. On the fireplace mantel was an array of Staffordshire figures. The Staffordshire collection was Oliver's pride and there were more than fifty figures scattered around the house -milkmaids, sailors, Napoleons, Garibaldis, Little Red Riding Hoods, and crude, rosy-cheeked farm boys.

On a marble table in the foyer were displayed what had become the legendary Cribb and Molineaux, poised in their eternal pugilistic confrontation. The story of the Roses' first meeting had been repeated in the household ad infinitum.

Over the library fireplace hung a large English oil, a hunting scene, appropriate to the leather Chesterfield couch and matching chairs in front of it.

It was, Barbara admitted, a mishmash room, but perfect for squatting around a heavy, low oak 'rent table,' on a Sarouk blue-and-red Persian rug, to have Sunday dinners.

'It seems to be the only time we're all together,' Barbara had told her, offering a mysterious, wistful look, disturbingly out of character.

By the time Oliver arrived, with Josh trailing smugly behind, the platters of
cassoulet
and
pate
and the big wooden salad bowl had been laid out. An unsuspecting Eve picked at the banana bread and dropped little morsels in her mouth, unaware of the impending surprise.

The family squatted around the table while Oliver, with great ceremony, poured the Lafite-Rothschild
'59
into crystal wineglasses. He looked about, offering a cryptic smile, winking at Barbara and lifting his glass.

'Before we dine on this magnificent repast,' he said, savoring the arcane language, 'we must toast this moment of triumph.' He looked at Eve, who sm
iled broadly, two rougelike puff
s of excitement on each apple cheekbone. 'B-minus will not an A make, but it's a hell of a long way from F.'
Josh snickered. He always brought home straight A's and was not above teasing his sister on that score. 'And a longer way from H.'

'H?' Eve asked, squinting in bemusement.

'H for Honda,' Oliver said.

'Honda?' Eve looked at the faces around the table in confusion. Oliver raised his glass higher and from his pocket drew out a set of keys and his electronic remote-control garage door opener.

'Just don't hit the Ferrari on your way out.'

'Not if you value your life,' Barbara joked.

Eve squealed with hysterical joy, grabbing her father around the neck, kissing him with passionate gratefulness. She repeated the ritual with Barbara, then with Josh and Ann, finally picking up the keys and garage door-opener and dashing out toward the rear of the house.

'We're spoiling her rotten,' Oliver said when she had gone, bringing the rim of the wineglass to his lips. Everyone followed suit 'But it feels so damned good.'

'We didn't get our first car until three years after we were married,' Barbara said.

'Different times,' Oliver shrugged. 'Why all the hard work if not for this?' He moved his free arm through the air, the gesture taking in all the visible surroundings, including the people.

'I made the team,' Josh said suddenly, as if a bubble had suddenly burst inside him.

'Damn,' Oliver said, putting down his glass and slapping hands in black-jock fashion. 'Bad. Man.' He had picked up some of the jargon from Josh.

'I'll drink to that,' Josh said, lifting his glass and swilling down the expensive wine as if it were Coca-Cola.

They heard the horn blasts of Eve's new Honda, which she had driven around to the front of the house. Gathering at the window, the family waved and Eve sped off in a cloud of carbon monoxide.

'Lucky bitch,' Josh said.

'Well, now it makes it obligatory for you when you hit sixteen,' Oliver said. 'You now have a standard. That's what fatherhood means. Setting standards.' He laughed at his own little joke, then the family regathered around the table.

'There are other family victories t
o announce,' Barbara said quietl
y, her eyes smiling in their deep sockets, her full lips curling tremulously over her white teeth. She made her announcement in a flat, somewhat restrained tone, but with a determined flourish. There seemed a disturbing note of bravado in it as well, although Ann felt she was the only one who appeared to notice. Oliver moved closer to Barbara and kissed her on the lips.

'Fantastic,' he said as Ann quickly turned away, annoyed at her sudden burst of jealousy.