Expensive People (5 page)

“Inflated, Mr. Everett? Certainly not,” Mr. Hansom was saying with more assurance now, as if he'd groped and found the right trail again. “The house on Windsor Crescent, which we just saw, for seventy thousand cannot begin to compare with this, cannot
begin
to compare …”

“Ah—ah-ah,” Father said. “What is that smell? That musty odor?”

“What musty odor?”

“Mr. Hansom,” Nada said, “my husband is not serious. He's testing you.”

“Honey, eighty thousand dollars is a lot of money,” Father said. He was using his flat, serious, husband-to-wife voice, which always unnerved Nada. “There are matters I haven't discussed with you, matters of a personal nature concerning my promotion, and … of course … these things are precarious in today's economy.” And he winked at me past Nada's stiffened shoulder. I turned away, embarrassed for both of them and humiliated by that wink, which he had meant to be just good fun.

Nada turned away. She went to the doorway of a room and stood there, outraged. Or she believed she should be outraged and was waiting for her rage to come. Her shoulders beneath the fine black cloth of
that coat, weighed down by the filmy collar of mink, grew straight and youthful with anger.

“The economy is devious,” Father was lecturing Mr. Hansom, with a florid, overdone camaraderie. “Things go up and down and waver. The price of everything is floating. Here today and gone tomorrow, eh? Right, Dickie? They teach my kid here things like that in school. Howdya like that, kids studying economics, finance? He studies French too. He can speak French like a native, wouldya believe it?”

“Elwood,” Nada said softly.

“Honey, yes? Did you say something?”

She was blinking rapidly. Maybe she was crying—what would pass for tears between them. Who knows? I hated Father for embarrassing her and herding her around like this. She was like an animal being driven into a pen, cut off on one side and then on another, bumped and bruised and pushed back relentlessly into a trap, but like any animal she might lunge out and gift us all with a swift bite.

“Shut up, you stupid son-of-a-bitch! Oh, you loud-mouthed, vulgar son-of-a-bitch,” she whispered.

“Tashya, in front of everybody?” Father cried. The pockets beneath his eyes drooped sadly. His cigar slanted down. His mouth was a fat thick line, just a line, but it too showed how dismayed he felt though— and this is the paradox—this was just what he had wanted.

Mr. Hansom, unprepared, drew in his breath sharply and had no more sense than to stare at Nada, and I smirked a little and tried to catch his eye so he'd know this was nothing unusual, don't be upset, oh, nothing unusual! Common, daily! Please understand, Mr. Hansom! But with Nada around they never looked at me, the men and women both, whole crowds and hordes of them who never looked much at Father either, the two of us males off to one side and watching Nada run through her routine like a rag doll inspired by clockwork, ticking and clicking through tears and anger and exhaustion.

“Oh, you humiliate me! You know nothing, you're ignorant, you're vulgar—you and your goddam promotion! Who the hell wanted to come here anyway? Why do we have to move?”

“I don't understand you, attacking me for my prudence—yes, my prudence,” Father said, blustering around his cigar. “Mr. Hansom here is a man of the world. He understands the precariousness of promotions, business—”

“Look, I want this house. This house,” Nada said.

“And this city is an excellent one. My uncle Edmund lived here all his life—he took part in the cultural renaissance of the city and helped build the library here in Fernwood. Ah yes, Natashya, whether you will grant anyone in my family such powers! Ah yes, Natashya! Vulgar? Stupid? Am I a son-of-a-bitch? And if I am, why does that upset you after all these years? It doesn't upset anyone else, so why you? Why you?” He looked around at me, sought me out and dismissed me. “Does it upset my son, our son? No. Our friends? No, no! My parents, my friends, my child, my associates? The people who pay me money? No! They love me for what I am, and I am a stupid son-of-a-bitch, yes, perhaps eighteen houses we've looked at in two days, and I'm a stupid, vulgar son-of-a-bitch, yes, but you, Natashya, what are you? Let me tell you, Mr. Hansom. My wife is an intellectual. A writer. Ah yes, yes! A famous writer—”

“Jesus Christ,” Nada snorted.

“—a minor but famous writer, you know the kind. Only if they're minor are they any good. The ones we've heard of, Mr. Hansom, you and I, if we've heard of them they're already lousy, finished, just crap to the intellectuals! Crap! Everything we know about or read—and we went to college too, didn't we, Mr. Hansom?—everything we know is crap just because we know it, right? Only the minor, secret people are gifted. They are minor and famous and my wife is prominent among them—”

“Shut up! I said I want this house.”

“Her vocabulary indicates—”

“Indicates, shit. I said I want this house,” Nada cried. “You, take out the papers, whatever the hell you have, and write it down! We offer them seventy-eight thousand, because I want this house, goddam it, and he can talk all night and we still want it. Not enough money, eh! He can live in the bathhouse and babble to himself, who else is listening?”

Mr. Hansom smiled shakily from one to the other.

“Natashya, you forget yourself,” Father said, wagging a finger.

“Don't wag your obscene … finger at me,” Nada whispered.

“This will be our new neighborhood, Dickie's new environment. He must fit in here and be happy with his friends—”

“His name is Richard. Richard, not Dickie. Richard,” Nada said. She stared at me. “Richard, go into the other room. What is that room?”

“A library. No, a sunroom,” Mr. Hansom said, startled. “Which one do you mean?”

“Go in there, get out of the way. You're not interested in this,” Nada told me.

So that was how we bought the house and Father got his way. He was a clever, stupid son-of-a-bitch, Father was.

And so we came to Fernwood, a far-flung suburb of a famous American city, and moved into a house that was too large for us but never mind, we had to live somewhere. Our furniture and belongings were loaded up for us back in our other house (in Brookfield, a suburb of another famous city), and by the time they reached us over the hundreds of miles of winter highways I had already discovered surreptitiously, and Nada announced to us one morning, angrily, that there was a family from Brookfield over on the other street, who had apparently moved at the same time we had; and not one mile away was the same house we had lived in for the last three years in Brookfield, present here in Fernwood like a miracle; and the Hunt Club was the same Hunt Club as Brookfield's, except that it had “Valley” prefixed to its name and had evidently sold its lands, bridle paths and all, to a housing contractor; and worst of all, only two houses away from us was Edward Griggs or someone who looked just like Edward Griggs, a man who had been something of a social catch back in Brookfield. He dealt in expensive antiques and had in his living room Emerson's tin bathtub (so narrow it made you wonder about Emerson's physique) and two Regency tables that had been in the collection of the Duchess of Kent, worth $19,000 and $23,000.

But Father said slowly, “That can't be Griggs, Honey. How could he have moved here so fast?”

“It's Griggs,” Nada said.

“I doubt it,” said Father.

We all went for a stroll one evening after dinner. These first few weeks in a new home (we were always moving) drew us close together, Nada, Father, and I, a happy family even though we had the look of
being three strangers who have met by accident on a walk and are waiting for the first chance to get away from one another. (A clever, bratty classmate of mine back in Brookfield, observing the Everett family on a stroll, had told me we looked like that.) Sometimes on these walks Nada's gloved hand would fall on my shoulder or touch my hair, and Father might pat my back as if urging me on, the two of them perhaps using me to show that they had something in common after all. But they loved me, of course. I think they loved me. Would it be too pathetic for me to write that I pushed this doubt back and forth through my brain until my brain was like a sieve? Like a sieve? Is that pathetic or ludicrous—how does that strike a normal reader? Anyway we strolled by the house Griggs supposedly lived in. It was a baronial Georgian thing, even better than his other house, monstrously large even for this street. It had the blank, dignified, mad look of private homes secretly used as hospitals.

“Do you think he brought his wife so soon?” Nada said.

“Honey what would Griggs be doing in Fernwood?”

“And his cook, that ugly cook? No, she must have been left behind.” Nada had a tense, white, pained look, as if she were staring into a nightmare but could not make out its terrors. “Why do these people keep following us around, Elwood?”

“I'm sure no one has followed us, Dear. The man probably looks like Griggs, that's all.” And Father clapped me on the back. “What do you think, Buster? Eh? Pretty farfetched, isn't it?”

We walked on and they argued without interest for a while, then the talk dissipated with a fresh blast of cold wind and the sight of a new neighbor's Rolls-Royce, a silvery vehicle driven too fast by an old man who did not glance at us. Father admired the Rolls-Royce, with the liberal abandonment of an American businessman who does not flinch at seeing a foreign industry patronized. Nada wasn't sure—perhaps a Rolls-Royce was pretentious? “They are good, solid, stable cars,” Father said.

I was shaken with the cold but did not want to let on. Father was always healthy—a big bear of a man, with nerves buried far beneath fat and muscle, safe. Nada complained of headaches and faintness, but she too was healthy as a horse and certainly had the appetite of a horse though you dared not tell her that, even jokingly (She liked to frighten us with vague tales of her Russian grandmother, who had dropped
dead in perfect health at the age of forty.) Father slid his arm around Nada's shoulders to keep her warm, while my teeth chattered and I walked a little ahead of them, the way a normal child probably would. Or would a normal child say he was freezing and ask to be taken home? I suffered so much, not wanting to disappoint them.

“Ah, this fine winter air!” Nada sighed.

“Good for the lungs,” declared Father.

At such times, uncomfortable as I was, I liked to think that I possessed my parents. I had them. I seemed to be leading them as if on a leash, though when they wanted to go back Father would just reach out and poke me. But I had the dreamy illusion that they belonged to me at these times, Nada and Father, and under my guidance they belonged to each other, they were in love. I did so much spying on them, you know. I'll tell you about it: years of anguished, guilty spying. I had to spy—how else could I have known what life was, or who they were, my parents, what they were? So I spied and I learned and I tabulated, calculated, speculated. But at these special times when we were together I thought that I had somehow, magically, captured a man and a woman from another land, foreign and exotic and not quite speaking my language, who were tamed by my power and love and who walked obediently after me, robust and comely and healthy as horses. Such fine horses! These were my true parents. The others—the dissatisfied Natashya Romanov, minor writer, and the blubbering breast-beating executive Elwood Everett—were nothing but cruel step-parents.

Yes, I loved them. I loved her especially. It was awful.

And who were their people? Well, Nada's people were a mystery. She spoke of them vaguely and with some embarrassment: emigres, obviously, but shadowy and remotely threatening. They had had a minimum of power in their new life, Nada told people. Everyone was puzzled by her choice of that word “power,” and I was puzzled too. But you couldn't get much out of her. Because she was a writer she presumably chose her words with care, but still “power” didn't make much sense. Her parents were exiled nobility, perhaps, dying broken-hearted
in a vulgar, foreign land. I recall something about a hotel in New York City where other Russians were, shadowy intrigue, futility. She hinted that her father was not quite admirable, perhaps unbalanced, that her mother was wrecked by the great journey and that she, Natashya, only child, was born in squalor and had tasted it. So, she threatened Father, she could leave him and return to it at any time.

And Father's people? You could almost guess. They were wealthy. Yes, you could guess that from Father's fluctuation between superb and bestial manners, his inches of exposed hairy skin when he crossed his legs, the way he sampled and rejected chocolate candies, roasted peanuts, hors d'oeuvres both hot and cold, spoke of friends with an anxious condescension (“He's only a doctor, but…” “He's only with KRH, but…”), the way he bossed us even when we weren't listening, the way he tipped waiters and waitresses, doormen and doorwomen, countermen, counterwomen, bellboys, bellmen, everyone in uniform, with a happy, hopeful smile, like a dog anxious to be petted. Ah, Father! As I write this he is still alive and he will certainly lead a long, successful life. Good! Wonderful! And he loved me, yes. He loved Nada and me, and that was what did us all in, his extravagant, stupid love for Nada.

But I was speaking of his family. Philadelphians. His father had been killed at the age of fifty-two while flying a light plane, drunk, reportedly buzzing a friend's pasture of riding horses. The plane crashed at the climax of a daring swoop and the horses fled in all directions, shuddering with terror. I can imagine those horses, their foaming mouths and heaving sides, but I can't imagine the burning plane and the man locked inside it. My mind flinches at such an idea. But that was my grandfather and that was it. My grandmother was a gentle, deaf lady who never seemed to know who I was. One Christmas we flew to Chestnut Hill and were just in time for a dinner party. I had to endure a long, long meal, and at the end Grandmother begged Father to take her out ice skating, it was such a nice night. Father laughed and blustered and joked with her, making excuses while everyone smiled helpfully, and the old woman finally declared to the table, “He always was such a pansy, this Edmund.” And who had been most shocked of all?— after me, of course, since I'd never thought of Father as a flower of any kind—Nada, naturally.