Family Secrets (64 page)

What was to become of Hervé, Basil’s son? He had no interest in the business at the moment, and Adam was rather relieved. The boy spent so much time in France that he was only half American. Nicole insisted on bringing her children up to be half French, half American. To Adam this was peculiar. In his day every person wanted to be an American, would give anything for the privilege, and this woman wanted to take her children away. She even had them chattering in French at the dinner table so they would not forget it. Hervé wanted to be a movie star. What kind of craziness was that? But if he had his heart set on it, then let him try. Adam really didn’t care very much. The boy was so conceited he got on everyone’s nerves. So let there be a movie star in the family, and when the boy failed, then let there be either a playboy, or perhaps eventually a reformed playboy who would let his father teach him something. Basil was too soft, too sweet. He should take a firm hand with his son, make a man of him. But Adam was tired, and he wasn’t going to butt in.

John—now, there was a bright little boy who might grow up to be a credit to them all. Even though there were a few branches not so wonderful, the line went on, sturdy and strong. Adam could tell that John had potential, he with the self-defeating father and the alcoholic mother who had unfortunately gone to an early death. Adam had a feeling about John.

It never occurred to Adam to consider that any of his granddaughters should go into the business. Business was for men. Paris had surprised everybody by becoming such a well-known writer, but when Adam had heard he was not surprised. He had always known the child would do something in the arts. Always drawing, writing her poems and little stories, chattering away when she was so tiny; she had talent and two intelligent parents who encouraged it. It was good to have such a talented granddaughter, who could make her own money, and she could write her books even after she was married and had children. She didn’t have to work, but she wanted to. As for the other girls, Blythe and Buffy and Geneviève, he supposed they would go to college and then find some interesting temporary work to do until they got married. He was glad that all of them had a good future before them with no money worries. It was good that they wouldn’t have to go to work unless they wanted to. They were all three nice girls, and three nice boys would be lucky someday to get them. He was glad that Geneviève, who was as pretty as a movie star, didn’t have the slightest desire to be one. It was her crazy brother with that ambition. His mother had probably put the idea into his head.

Ah! Crazy world today! So much of it good and so much of it meshuggah. People today didn’t know what they wanted. They had so much of everything to choose from they just sat in the middle, like a child in a roomful of playthings, and cried. Adam had no patience with people who complained and whined. America was the good land, where a man with a mind and a will could work hard and get anything he wanted. Adam didn’t go to the movies any more; he fell asleep in the movies. The theater didn’t interest him. Television wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t good either. He liked to watch the news, but the stories they had on afterward were so silly they made him sick. Variety shows, comedy, they were good for Etta. She loved to watch television. It usually put Adam to sleep. What he missed most of all, with his failing sight, were his newspapers. You could always find a world in the newspapers, news, human interest, business, everything. Now he could read the headlines, and some of the stories, but it was a strain and he couldn’t sit there for hours enjoying his newspapers the way he had in the old days. Yes, man was a machine that ran down, and no amount of parts you added could ever make him as good as new. You put on eyeglasses; they helped, but not enough. You gave him a cane if he got tired walking, but it didn’t give him new legs. His heart grew tired, beating, beating, beating, all those years, like an old clock.

His children looked older. They were middle-aged. There was Etta, who had once been his young bride, and she didn’t look out of place among his children; she had gray hair and a lined face and so did they. He had to give Lazarus credit, the old goat. Lazarus lied about his age and got upset if you tried to find out how old he really was, but Adam guessed Lazarus was nearly as old as he was. He was certainly closer to eighty than seventy. But Lazarus crept to his office and crept home, studied his huge dictionary through his thick glasses, and carried on.

It was just as well he couldn’t read the newspapers the way he used to, Adam thought. Every time he looked at the obituary page it seemed as if another one of his old cronies had died. There wasn’t anyone left any more, just himself and maybe one or two others he had forgotten. The surprise was when you picked up the paper and saw that someone had died and you thought he’d died years ago. All his sisters and brothers had died, even little Becky. Poor little Becky, so sick and in such pain for so long that her death had seemed like a blessing. Her husband had gone before her; all the husbands of his sisters had left them widows. Men died sooner. Women were strong. They tried to fool you and act weak, but most of the women he had known in his lifetime had outlasted their men. It wasn’t good to think about death; it was depressing and you couldn’t keep it away anyhow, but when you got older it seemed to be all around you.

Everett should remarry. A man shouldn’t be alone. If he had been younger, his old self, Adam would have done something about that. He would have arranged something, found someone, had a talk with the boy, explained to him that it wasn’t good for John to be in a boarding school so young, that the child should have a home. Melissa said Everett did nothing but work in his shop and go home alone. It wasn’t right. Maybe this winter when they went back to Miami Beach, he would have a talk with Everett. He couldn’t talk to him this summer here at Windflower; Everett hadn’t even come up. John was in summer school, taking a course in reading—reading? at his age?—making up something he hadn’t done well in. No, it wasn’t the reading he had done badly at; it was math. John was good at reading. It was hard to remember these things because they didn’t seem to matter so much any more. You had an instinct, a feeling about a person, and you knew it would work out. When you had lived a long time you saw that you could keep trying to stuff knowledge into an onion and it remained an onion, but a smart person … They said John was coming up for two weeks at the end of the summer after his summer school was over, and maybe Everett would come with him and they could talk then. Otherwise, they would talk in Florida. A few months wasn’t going to make such a difference.

Adam’s heart attack came to him as a betrayal. When he felt the pain he knew right away, and all he could think was:
It’s too soon
. Etta called the doctor, and the doctor insisted he go to the hospital right away in an ambulance. Adam, in his bed in his familiar bedroom upstairs in his house at Windflower, refused. He wouldn’t go to the hospital, he couldn’t go, he was afraid to go. He knew you died in the hospital. He had been in hospitals before, to visit other people, even once himself when they took out his appendix, but this time it was different. He knew that this time if he let them put him into the hospital he would never come out alive.

“No hospital!” Adam said. “No hospital!” His strong voice sounded so strangely weak, not at all the way he had meant it to. It was quavering. “No hospital!”

“Come on, Papa,” they all said. His daughters, his wife, his sons-in-law, even his granddaughter Paris, they were hovering around him, strength in numbers, and two young doctors put him into the ambulance on a stretcher and rushed him off into the night. Safe country night, passing lighted homes of relaxing people, torn out of his own safe home and forced here to this too brightly lit white hospital, put into a small hard bed, dressed in an ugly rag of a hospital gown, stuck with needles and tubes, encased in an oxygen tent, shut off from the world behind this plastic curtain and attached to machines, a human robot. Adam tried to talk, to protest, but his voice was so faint only he could hear it. They were all taking over, his children, making him the child and them the grownups. Andrew was there, and later Basil, who must have been driving for hours. They spoke to the nurse, who was a child, not much older than thirty, and she spoke to them, and all of it was so soft that Adam couldn’t hear. They were taking his power away from him. If he had had the strength he would have ripped off all those tubes and gadgets and gotten up, told them who was still the boss. His own doctor came then, the doctor he knew and trusted, the betrayer who had insisted he come here to this hospital. Adam hoped the doctor would say it was a mistake, he could go home, but he knew that would never happen. He could see from the doctor’s face. The doctor was telling him to be still, to rest, to relax. Ordering him, as if he were a child, to do what he was told. To do what his nurse told him? Only a child had a nurse. And his children, hovering there, going out of the room to talk secrets with the doctor, running everything, taking away his power, forgetting who he was, that he was the boss, that he was Papa, that none of them would be here today or be anything at all if it weren’t for him, that
they needed him
. Why then was he unable to speak, unable to make anyone hear him or understand him? Was this what it was like at the end of a man’s life, to be turned into an infant again as you were at the start of it all?

PART V

Horizons

ONE

The Big House stood empty. It stood empty for the rest of the summer the year Adam died, and it stood empty the summer after. No one went near it except the new Japanese gardener/caretaker/handyman, who went inside once in a while to make sure everything was all right. Etta had gone to live in Texas, near her son, Stanley, who was a senior pilot. No one tried to stop her. She had never been real family, not even after nearly thirty years of marriage to Papa. Her son from her first long-ago marriage was her real family, his children were her real grandchildren, and she felt so too. She was very rich now, and no one had to worry about her. They sent her birthday cards.

The Big House was the first one you saw when you drove up the long driveway, and it stood at the highest point of the hill, so it seemed to be guarding the others, just as Papa had guarded his family when he was alive. He was gone, but his presence was there, and none of them could bear to go into The Big House because it sent them off into a renewal of their grief and loss. Once in a while one of them crept in to retrieve some article of sentimental or material value. Rosemary crept in to get her Mama’s old vase. Lavinia took the clock. Did Etta grab anything? She can have her own things, but we get Mama’s. Buffy was afraid to go near the house at all; she thought it might be haunted.

Ivy and vines grew thickly along the stone walls and up and around the big chimney. The hedges grew high and were trimmed by the Japanese gardener. The roses bloomed in the flower garden, and died. Bees hummed in the thick, syrupy heat of July afternoons, feasting undisturbed on flowers. Birds nested in the chimney, sat on eggs, had young, flew away. Only the sound of the power lawn mower disturbed the stillness. The grass must not be allowed to grow too high. The house would be kept up, but no one would go into it, no one would live there. No one could bear to call it Papa’s house; it was The Big House, spoken with just a pause, a gasp.

Anything of worth or particular emotional value was taken to the other houses, put into city apartments, gathered up. Furniture remained, enough for any family, but it was all furniture that Etta and the decorator had chosen. It didn’t matter. The flowers on the wallpaper and draperies and furniture covers had faded, the carpets were streaked by years into a soft moirè pattern, and no one cared. In bright sun you could see these things, but the drapes were always kept drawn. The dishes in the kitchen cupboard were Etta’s dishes, her everyday set. The good dishes were gone, and the silver too. Only forks with twisted tines, knives with bent blades, spoons with the silver worn off, remained in the kitchen drawer. No one wanted them. When Papa had been alive there had been such warmth in that house that no one had noticed the flowers were faded, the rugs were worn, time had passed. They had all thought everything would go on forever. Now everything hung suspended, between a breath and a breath, no one able to make a decision, no one even able to think.

Paris was in Hollywood, where they were making a movie of her third book. She had rented a bungalow at the Chateau Marmont, with her expense money from the movie company, and filled it with her crazy friends: hopefuls, fakers, failures, hangers-on, a few minor successes, all lonely and grouping together to have fun and forget their troubles. She had parties. Her analyst thought it was good for her to see people and didn’t make her pay for the time she was out of town. She had a car which she never drove because she was afraid of the fast Los Angeles traffic. She used it only to go to the supermarket, to buy more food for her parties. Liquor was no problem. She had an admirer who sent her two cases of wine every week (on his expense account) and most of her friends didn’t drink anyway; they took pills and smoked pot. Paris drank the wine herself, two bottles every day, and didn’t take pills or smoke pot because they didn’t interest her. She wandered through her days and nights, listening to her tapes that played rock music unceasingly, talking to her friends, laughing, watching them steal each other’s lovers and throw scenes, and none of it touched her. She was still locked into her private self, the observer. She had no artistic control over the movie and everything was going wrong. She doubted if it would ever be made, but they were paying her expenses and so she stayed, dutifully turning in the revisions the producer told her to write, watching him mangle her book, frustrated, furious, ashamed. She decided never to come to Hollywood again, but meanwhile it was keeping her away from Windflower, and there were people here her age, lively people. They were weird, but at least they kept her from being lonely. She had a lot of boyfriends. It was like college again in a way and made her forget for a while that she was getting older, that time was passing and it was destined that she always be alone.