Family Secrets (54 page)

“What ever happened to that uncle with the candy store?” Paris asked her mother once.

“Oh, he died a long time ago,” her mother said, sounding a little surprised.

Everett and Frankie had come up to Windflower for their two-week vacation earlier than usual this summer because of Richie’s bar mitzvah. Frankie had never been to a bar mitzvah in her life and didn’t even know what one was. She walked around saying hello to the relatives she knew, trying to be friendly. There was Everett, in the corner as usual, not bothering to introduce her to anyone.

There was an open bar with a bartender, because Herman Winsor, at least, was sophisticated. Frankie had already fortified herself with a scotch or two at the house before venturing out into this crowd, and now she made a beeline to the bar and asked for a double on the rocks. She always felt more at home with bartenders than she did with party guests. They were working people, outsiders, like herself. She felt like she should be passing the trays of hors d’oeuvres along with the colored maids instead of standing here all dressed up with a fake smile on her face and a glass in her hand. The little bitty napkin they gave you to hold around the glass was sopping wet already. She drained her drink and held it out to the understanding bartender for a refill. Better just to get smashed and forget about the whole thing. She wasn’t too crazy about Richie. He was a nasty kid. Nobody ever gave her a party when she was thirteen years old, and look at this one! It must have cost more than any of her relatives ever made in an entire year. More than Everett made, maybe. She knew his mother was giving him money. They wouldn’t have two cars if his mother wasn’t helping.

She took a pack of cigarettes out of her purse and the bartender reached forward in a flash and offered her a match. Bartenders were definitely better than this family. None of them ever lit her cigarettes, even Everett, who smoked like a chimney himself. She’d told him a million times: “Everett, light my cigarette,” “Everett, hold the door open for me,” “Everett, hold my chair at the table,” “Everett, a man walks on the outside of the street,” but would he ever listen? She had picked up bits and pieces of etiquette during her life and held on to them, hoping to better herself, and now she had bettered herself in the eyes of the world but in truth she was married to a slob. Maybe rich people didn’t have to have manners. Their money made them look good no matter what they did.

Frankie had a secret this summer, and she wasn’t going to tell any of them. She had made Everett promise not to tell until it showed, claiming modesty. Frankie was pregnant. She knew if her mother-in-law and the rest of them knew it they wouldn’t give her a moment’s peace: “Frankie, don’t drink,” “Frankie, don’t smoke,” “Frankie, you should eat more,” blah blah. They’d have her upstairs taking afternoon naps and having her meals on a tray like a cripple, protecting their precious grandchild. Her baby would be Adam’s great-grandchild. Maybe the family would respect her then. The baby would be half Everett’s, but it would be half hers, too. She knew the family history, they’d told her often enough. Adam Saffron was once a nobody, just like her family, worse even because he didn’t speak English and had to learn it. And look at him now! Maybe her kid would be a genius, like Adam.

Lavinia sat down in a chair on the lawn, tired from all the things she had to do at a social affair like this. There were so many relatives to be greeted—mustn’t leave anyone out and hurt their feelings—and she had to be sure Paris was doing her part and being nice to everyone, especially all her young cousins. It was so important to keep up with the family, be close to them, especially the ones who you didn’t see all the time. Family, in the long run, was all you had. She’d told Paris many times, and hoped it had finally sunk in, that your family was your best friend. Next to your mother, of course. She was Paris’ best friend and always would be. The family cared, some more than others. You had to be close to the ones who cared because they would be on your side in later life, and you had to make friends with the others so they wouldn’t be against you. You saw who was bright and who was not, who was worth bothering with, and you made your moves, gathering them all in together, “keeping up” as they say, keeping close.

Paris was so careless, so remote. She didn’t care about anything but her work. You could hardly ever drag her to lunch with her aunts; first she said she was looking for a job, and now that she had finally found one at that trashy paperback publishing company, she said she had only an hour for lunch. Jonah was the only one who could get close to her. He went to her office and picked her up, took her to lunch at the Stork Club, which both of them thought was very glamorous, and at least he had a chance to talk to her. He talked to her about the stock market. That was Jonah’s favorite subject, and he said Paris seemed interested in it too. He hoped someday she would write some articles about the market.

Melissa came over and sat down beside Lavinia. “My goodness,” she said, “I’m certainly glad to see Aunt Becky. I didn’t think she’d make it, sick as she is.”

“I think the doctor gave her some kind of pain killer,” Lavinia said.

“Between her and Isman, poor things, I don’t know who’s holding up who.”

Lavinia shook her head. “He looks terrible.”

“Where’s Andrew? I haven’t seen him.”

“Jonah took him down to where we’re going to put in the swimming pool. He wanted to ask Andrew’s advice. Andrew designed their pool house, you know, top to bottom.”

“Oh, we wouldn’t want such a big one, would we?” Melissa asked.

“I suppose not. We don’t have all that company they do.”

Melissa looked around and lowered her voice. “Listen, do you think Frankie’s getting fat?”

Lavinia looked toward where Frankie was standing by the bar under the trees. “What do you expect, the way she drinks?”

“I think I should tell her to wear a girdle,” Melissa said.

“Tell her to stop drinking.”

“Oh, sure. Do you think she listens to me about anything? Do you think she even listens to Everett?”

“Does Everett tell her to stop drinking?” Lavinia asked.

“He doesn’t seem to care.”

“Then it’s his problem,” Lavinia said, dismissing them both. “It’s his wife, let him worry.”

At the projected site for the pool Andrew was trying to persuade Jonah to make the family put in a heated pool. The water would come from their own artesian well, and it would be as icy cold as a mountain stream. But the family had decided that a heated pool was an extravagance. The lake was cold, wasn’t it? They managed to swim in it, didn’t they? It was extravagant even to have a pool as well as a lake and a river and a lagoon, but all right, if everyone wanted a pool they would build a pool, but heating it was just too much.

“You’ll be sorry,” Andrew said.

“They voted against it.”

“You can always put in a heater later,” Andrew said. “But we get so much pleasure out of our pool, everyone swims all day. We turn it up to eighty. I can’t imagine swimming in freezing cold water.”

“Hardly any of them swim anyway,” Jonah said. “Just the kids, and me, and I don’t care.”

“Not Rosemary and Jack?”

“Oh yes. I forget about them.”

Jonah often forgot about them, at least as often as he could. He liked to forget about everyone but his own Lavinia and Paris, and Papa. It was hard to live here on this kibbutz with so many different people with so many different tastes. In a family everyone was different and it was often hard to get along. He knew; he had come from a large family. Now he only saw them all together once a year when they went to pay their respects to their parents’ graves. Sometimes he spoke to one or another of his brothers on the phone. But he had always gotten along with all of them. He was always the peacemaker. It was pointless to fight with your loved ones. There were enough problems outside in the world, making a living, just trying to stay alive and well, that you shouldn’t fight with your family. He had never fought with his family; he had just become separated from them, and them from him, with their own children and jobs and lives. Lavinia’s family had taken him in with so much love and warmth that he felt he was one of them. All families were the same. It was Papa who made the difference. Papa made all of them special. Jonah would do anything in the world for Papa, who was such a wonderful man and had given him so much.

Jonah and Andrew walked back up the hill and joined the others, who were just going into the tent to start their enormous meal. It was buffet, with servants to whisk away used plates. Richie, looking proud and solemn, was sitting in the seat of honor, flanked by his parents. This thing must be costing a lot of money with so many people and so much food. Herman always said a party wasn’t any good unless you had to throw out a lot of leftovers, but Jonah still couldn’t bear to waste food. It hurt him in his heart. So many people were poor and hungry, the way he had been once, and much, much worse. This was a far cry from his own bar mitzvah. How serious and religious he had been then! In his heart he was still the same. It was just that you made adjustments to what life demanded of you. Richie seemed serious and religious too. Jonah wondered if he would keep it up. He doubted it.

FIVE

In New York, Paris was living with her parents, well established in her job and in her double life. Several times a week young men she had met at parties or on arranged dates, or because their mothers knew her mother, came to call for her, sat in the living room for ten or fifteen minutes talking to her father about business while she put the finishing touches on her appearance in her bedroom with her mother’s help, and then Paris and the acceptable young man went out to dine or dance or drink at some expensive place and made the most superficial of small talk. She made it clear to these young men that they were not to touch her, never even kiss her goodnight—sometimes by her cold attitude and agile footwork at her front door, sometimes by actually telling them—and they accepted this, believing she was a virgin of exceptional purity and a good future wife. Then, several times a week, Paris called her mother and said she would not be home for dinner because she was going out with a group of her co-workers from the office, and then she met her married lover, an advertising man fifteen years older than she, and they had drinks and dinner and went to a borrowed apartment where they made love.

She found her lover fascinating, because he was older and more sophisticated, because he had been in this New York world longer than she had, because he had a wife and five children, which was wicked, and because he claimed he adored her. She was able to talk to him about herself, her feelings, her dreams, and he didn’t laugh at her. He didn’t think that her ambition to write a novel someday and see it published was ridiculous. And most wicked of all, making him as inaccessible as even having the wife and five children, was the fact that he was not Jewish. Her parents had made it clear she was to marry a Jewish boy. She still kept up with boys she had dated at college who weren’t Jewish, but they were friends, and often she used their names as ploys to get out of the house and meet her lover. Some of them had turned out to be homosexual, and although Paris knew little about that life and was rather shocked and disappointed when she discovered that their roommates were also their lovers, they were good friends to her and enjoyed being vicarious participants in what they thought was her very sophisticated and exciting affair.

How funny, she thought, if her mother only knew that the reason her former college boyfriends would never be her “lasting friends,” which meant potential husbands, was that they preferred boys, not because they didn’t like Jewish girls.

It was husband-hunting time in New York, and probably all over the nation, but it was also wife-hunting time. The boys Paris dated with her parents’ blessing made it quite clear that they either resented her ambition to become a novelist or else they thought it was an absurd girlish dream. They didn’t want to talk about it or know about it. They wanted to talk about their own ambitions, to become a lawyer or a doctor or an accountant, to have two children and live in the suburbs. The only boy who didn’t resent her ambition was an Israeli who was a cousin of a girl she’d gone to high school with, and he planned to go home soon anyway. He was quite proud of her ambition and talent. Maybe girls in Israel were treated differently than they were here, more as equals.

Her two steadiest dates were also her two worst. Paris couldn’t decide if her parents thought so little of her that they could imagine either of these horrors as a son-in-law, or whether they thought she actually cared about them. One was the son of a woman who was her mother’s friend, a sharp-tongued nasty woman who terrorized her son and therefore made him easy for Paris to handle. He was enormously tall and fat, and he stammered, particularly when he had to say her name. He called her “Pppppperry.” Whenever he took her out dancing he got an erection which hit her chest. She found him repulsive. The other one she met at a Halloween party. Trick or treat, and he was the trick. He was fat too, but short, and although she knew he was very clean he always looked greasy. He perspired whenever he set eyes on her. His mother was asthmatic and possessive. Whenever she thought her precious son was serious about a girl his mother would throw herself down on the rug and have an asthma attack, swearing she would die and it would be all his fault. Since his mother sensed that Paris was not interested in her son (although she couldn’t understand why not) she never made any trouble.

The few times she had dated an acceptable boy who wasn’t bad, who attracted her, she found he ran away in terror when she complimented him or let him get too far while necking on the couch in her safe parents’ apartment. Those boys were all so conscious of husband-hunting time, they were suspicious of everything. You could never be spontaneous with them; they didn’t know how to react. They were zombies. Tell a boy you liked him, tell him he was sexy, and he fled. Tell him not to touch you, act too precious to be human, and you couldn’t get rid of him. It was enough to turn a girl into a snow maiden if she wasn’t one to start with.