Family Secrets (15 page)

“No, I don’t see.”

He wanted to take her somewhere for a bite to eat, but this place looked suspicious, and that one looked doubtful, until finally he found a nice clean cafeteria. He had a swiss cheese sandwich because it was kosher. Lavinia had a ham sandwich and a glass of milk to drive him away, but he pretended not to notice.

After they ate, he lit up a cigarette. “I can’t stand the smell of cigarettes,” Lavinia said. “To me, they’re a dirty habit.”

“I’ll get a pipe,” he said.

“Well, you certainly don’t have to do that for me.”

“No, I like a pipe. If you don’t like cigarettes, I wouldn’t want to disgust you.”

Lavinia smiled, flattered. “That’s really very nice of you,” she said. It occurred to her that by allowing this lunatic to spend some of his hard-earned money on a pipe, just to please her, she was committing herself to seeing more of him, but the thought rather pleased her. He was stubborn, and she admired a stubborn man. But he also gave in, and she liked that.

“I want to take you out every night,” he said.

“Oh, I couldn’t do that.”

“Then as often as possible. Although, since I know we’re going to get married eventually, there’s no point in dragging it out.”

“Who
says
we’re going to get married—
ever
?” Lavinia said.

“I say.”

“Ha!”

“You’ll see.”

After he walked her home, she was bathing her sore feet in hot water and epsom salts when the telephone rang. It was Jonah.

“What’s the matter?” Lavinia asked.

“I just called to say good night,” he said. “And to tell you I love you.”

“You nearly scared everybody out of their wits,” she said. “Don’t you know that when you phone someone after ten o’clock at night it could only mean that somebody’s in the hospital or
dead
?”

“Oh, I didn’t know that,” Jonah said cheerfully. “You see, we don’t have a telephone.”

“Where are you?”

“In the candy store on the corner.”

“Well, you ought to go to bed. It’s late.”

“I will. What are you doing? I want to imagine you.”

She certainly didn’t want him imagining her soaking her sore feet in a basin of water and epsom salts. “Oh, I was just reading a little before going to bed.”

“What were you reading?”

“Freud.”

“What do you think of Freud?”

“Jonah, I’m not going to get into a discussion about Sigmund Freud in the middle of the night. It’s nearly eleven.”

“I just wondered if he was your favorite psychologist.”

“I don’t really have a favorite. Each one has something interesting to say, although sometimes I can’t really agree.”

“What does Freud say?”

“Jonah!”

“Can I see you tomorrow night?”

“I told you I have a date.”

“What time?”

“Eight o’clock.”

“All right, then I’ll call you around six. Will that be okay?”

“Fine. Good night, Jonah.”

But the next night he called her at a quarter of eight instead of six, and then kept her on the phone for forty-five minutes so that her date was twiddling his thumbs in the living room waiting for her for half an hour. It occurred to Lavinia that she didn’t have to talk to this transparently devious young man for forty-five minutes unless she really wanted to, and therefore she must really want to. But what a pest he was! In order to spare herself the repetition of another such phone call she was obliged to accept a date with Jonah for the following night.

But it also occurred to her that she didn’t have to accept a date with him unless she really wanted to. Lavinia never did what she didn’t want to.

She also did exactly what she wanted to. And so, because she wanted to, when Jonah came to call for her she handed him a little present she had bought for him that afternoon. It was a pipe.

SEVENTEEN

It was hot that summer, well into September, but Melissa was glad that the family hadn’t gone away to the beach or the mountains because she was having such a good time at home. Being wined and dined by Lazarus, and sneaking off to see Scott, her time was full. Lavinia had stopped bothering her about her mysterious excursions because finally Lavinia had found a fellow she liked and her mind was on herself. Actually, with Lazarus so respectable and appearing at the house so often, no one would ever suspect that Melissa was seeing an unrespectable young man on the side.

“I think you’re really swell, Melissa,” the unrespectable young man said. “I’m serious about you. I’d like you to come home and meet my folks.”

Since she was so busy making sure that he was not just toying with her, it never occurred to Melissa that perhaps she was the one who was toying with him. She dressed in her most refined and ladylike manner to impress his parents. They were all to have an early supper together at his parent’s apartment before Scott had to go to the theater.

Melissa had never seen anything like Scott’s parents’ house. Aunt Becky was poor, but her apartment didn’t look like that. To start with, everything seemed to take place in the kitchen, an ugly small room with flowered oilcloth on the table, torn flowered linoleum on the floor, and rings and stains on top of everything. His parents were English all right, but they didn’t talk a bit like the actors she had seen on the stage, nor like Scott for that matter. They were Cockney, and she couldn’t understand half of what they said. There was beer and whiskey in the kitchen, in plain view, and both his parents drank it. His mother even offered some to her. They were so strange, so different, but what made them particularly frightening was that basically they were so ordinary; they didn’t think they were odd, they didn’t have wicked thoughts or swear or act unkind, and they were really trying to be nice to her and make her feel at home, and that was terrifying. If they were eccentrics, the Parents of an Actor, then she could have understood. But they were ordinary. His mother was a drab little housewife and his father was a drab little milkman, and their son the actor was just a nice ordinary boy.

Melissa saw it all in a flash. Ordinary! Not only was Scott ordinary, but he was unforgivably different: he came from another world, one which she had never seen before and which she had no desire whatever to enter. No wonder her Papa forbade her to go out with goyim. What in the world would goyim have to offer her except confusion? She felt homesick, although home was only within a subway or trolley ride away, and she wanted to cry.

She was stuck there and had to eat supper with them, and she knew she would not be able to get a bite beyond the lump in her throat. His mother was putting it on the table already: some boiled grayish meat that smelled nauseating, some big boiled carrots, and boiled potatoes.

“What is this?” Melissa asked sweetly.

“Mutton,” the father said, his mouth already full of it.

“I hope you like mutton,” the mother said.

“Oh, yes,” Melissa said. She had never even heard of it.

She couldn’t eat anything that smelled and looked like that, she just couldn’t, but she couldn’t insult them either. There was his mother, looking at her with concern.

“You don’t feel well?”

Melissa shook her head.

“It’s the heat,” his mother said understandingly.

“I’m particularly susceptible to heat,” Melissa said. “It’s my metabolism.” These were things Lazarus had said to her, and now suddenly she missed him. He would have told these people that greasy, fatty mutton was bad for them to eat in this intolerable heat. She put her head down, feeling faint.

“Oh, Melissa, you should lie down,” Scott said, full of concern.

“Put her right on my bed, ducks,” his mother said.

Melissa allowed herself to be led into the parents’ bedroom, and lay on the tacky flowered spread (they were flower mad in this house!) while Scott brought her a cold, damp cloth for her forehead. There was flowered linoleum on the bedroom floor too, and over it was a small, oval, braided rug, rather dirty. Across from where she lay she could see the dresser, painted and chipped, with a dirty lace antimacassar on top of it, and on top of that a tray filled with gewgaws. She noticed a hairbrush, full of hair.

“I’d better go home,” she whispered to Scott.

“Oh, poor Melissa, I hope you aren’t coming down with something,” he said.

“My cousin has chickenpox,” Melissa said.

“Oops! I’d better get you home.”

For once she didn’t protest. She apologized to his parents and let Scott lead her away. In the subway she sat with her head on his shoulder, feeling better but very sad and nostalgic. She felt as if he were her brother, or perhaps a cousin. She liked him. But she knew it was over. There was no future for them, none at all. He wasn’t glamorous any more, and she was tired of sneaking around. When they got off at her stop she let him walk her right to her front door, because after all she didn’t want to faint in the street, and then she gave him her hand.

“Thank you, Scott,” she whispered. “Good night.”

He was looking at her house with some amazement. Perhaps where she came from was as big a surprise to him as his origins had been to her. “May I call you tomorrow to see how you are?” he asked.

“If you like.” She gave him her phone number. It didn’t matter now, not at all. He wasn’t her boyfriend. She could tell whoever asked that he was just a boy she knew from class.

“I hope it isn’t chickenpox,” he said.

“Oh, I’m sure it isn’t. Don’t worry. I’ll see the doctor tomorrow.”

She watched him walk away. It was still light out, and as he grew smaller and farther away she wanted to run after him and hug him because she was sorry that she had been mean to him, and that she was going to be meaner still because she would never see him again. But he would forget her. She was sure of that. There were lots of other girls who wanted him, and he would have a happy life.

The next day she did see the doctor—Lazarus. He took her to the theater, to see
Cyrano de Bergerac
, and afterward they went dancing and had a light, cold supper. She did not mention her brief illness. She felt fine now, and they hardly noticed the time fly by.

When Lazarus proposed to her, Melissa said yes, and when he asked Papa for her hand, Papa said yes too. They planned to be married in January, at the temple, with a reception afterward at Delmonico. There would be chauffeur-driven cars to take all the guests who did not have cars of their own. Melissa was the first girl in her crowd to have a reception all the way in New York, but then, no one had married anyone nearly as distinguished as Dr. Lazarus Bergman. The girls who were already married were no older than she was, and they had all married young neighborhood boys, whose parents were friends of their parents. She spent weeks planning the wedding and changing her mind about her wedding dress. She bought an etiquette book to make sure everything was just perfect, from the invitations to the seating arrangements. By the time she and Lazarus and Papa had finished compiling the list of people to be invited there were two hundred guests. Those were just the people they simply had to invite. There were a great many more whose names had finally been stricken regretfully from the list. Imagine! Two hundred close friends and relatives!

She had never dreamed there were so many things to be done before a wedding, and she had only four months to do them in. Papa told her to go to town and buy anything she wanted for her trousseau. She and Lazarus found a nice apartment, but then she had to furnish it, and what did she, a girl of twenty, know about furnishing a whole apartment? Mama simply didn’t have the strength to go shlepping around to department stores with her, so they hired a decorator. That was terribly très chic. The decorator was a hatchet-faced old woman, but she had the strength of a man, and she and Melissa spent many days finding exactly the right things. There was a lovely bedroom set, and a wonderful, modern dining room set, and the living room had an Oriental carpet and a grand piano in it. That was nice; Melissa could play and sing for her friends. Then the wedding invitations went out and the wedding gifts came pouring in, the silver tea set with the coffee \ pot to match, the everyday silverplate (Mama gave her the good silverware, of course), and the good dishes and the everyday dishes. Melissa thought, amused, that they might as well be kosher with two sets of everything like that, but that was what grown-up people did: they gave parties and they had good things, and then they had normal things. Oh, and there had to be two sets of glasses too, the ones with stems and engraving on them, and the regular ones. And there had to be linens, sheets and towels and tablecloths and doilies and blankets and pillows and a bedspread, and there seemed to be no end to it. No wonder people had long engagements. It obviously wasn’t to get to know each other better, since she and Lazarus hardly had time to see each other, she was so exhausted; it was to buy things.

Wallpaper or paint? The decorator said paint was more modern. Melissa thought wallpaper was romantic, but then she remembered all those horrible flowers in Scott Brown’s parents’ apartment and she decided to make everything very simple and gracious. It would be paint. Simple red velvet draperies would be nice in the living room with the Oriental rug, and a sofa to pick up one of the other colors. She was learning. There had to be bookshelves, of course, for all of Lazarus’ books. They would be in the living room, so that everyone could see them. Besides, there was no place else to put them.

She even bought a painting to go over the sofa, a romantic, sweet oil of a summer country scene with sheep in it. Sheep looked so nice and gentle. Darling Andrew made her a painting for a wedding present, a portrait of herself in her wedding dress. It actually looked like her. Basil gave her a clock. That seemed like a strange present until she remembered she would need one when she was cooking … and she didn’t even know how to cook! There were all those brand-new pots and pans in her new kitchen-to-be, and she couldn’t make one single thing without consulting a cookbook. At least she wasn’t stupid, she could cope.

It was nice of all her sisters and brothers to give her presents they bought with their allowances (of course, Lavinia had a salary, if you could call it that, although it was hardly more than an allowance). Lavinia chipped in for some of her everyday silverware. Rosemary gave her a cookbook. And Hazel made her something odd which she said was supposed to be an egg warmer: it was a little knitted cap for a boiled egg.