Reinhart in Love (37 page)

He was laughing out loud at the blindness of justice when Gen said: “What are you babbling about? I've invited my family to dinner.”

“Call me Blaine,” said Genevieve's father over his brandy, coffee, and panatella. He alternated sips of one or the other with puffs at the third, at which moments his eyes were smugly slitted. If already in April he had had a tan, he now was dark as Splendor Mainwaring—indeed it was difficult for Reinhart to see more of him across the table than eyes and teeth, in the candlelight Gen had provided.

Now, it was once true that you could be accepted into Reinhart's trust by no more than calling for the use of Christian names, but not since he discovered it was an obligation rather than a privilege. Besides, his father-in-law had so far called him nothing at all, while eating great quantities of the food that Gen may have chosen but Reinhart had to pay for.

Gen's mother was present, too—somewhere in the shadows on the right side of the card table: a person of her type was all but eradicated by candlelight. Of the family, only the estimable Kenworthy was missing; he had indeed run off to the Navy. Otherwise, the clan was strategically placed for an explosion of the water heater:
bang
, virtually no more Ravens, whereas the Reinharts would have lost only Carlo.

“The name,” Raven went on, “has been in my family for generations but it is always given only to firstborn males. It is an exclusive privilege, there having been only six of us since the seventeenth century. However, the tendency of our women is to be spirited and willful, and the line I think has not suffered but—”

“Really!” said Reinhart, doing his best to get along. “You mean that there have been only six men in the family since—”

“Silennnnnce,” ordered his father-in-law, and the two women gasped, Genevieve actually kicking Reinhart's ankle. But Raven smiled with his perfect range of teeth and explained: “In our house we get everything right first time out.
Firstborn males
is what was said. And if our Gen hasn't put you straight by this time, you might want to know we sunk our roots on this continent in 1659, when the first American Blaine Raven, ex-lieutenant of Oliver Cromwell, left his native shores after the death of the great Lord Protector and sailed westward on the brigantine
Sobriety
, touching Plymouth harbor some three and a half months later.”

A candle almost went out in the gale of his expelled cigar smoke. Perhaps because the brandy was in a water goblet, he mistook it for iced tea; anyway, he threw it down in one swallow and dabbed at his bronze lip with a paper serviette, crumpling it when he finished and hurling it over his shoulder, as Charles Laughton did bones in the movie about Henry VIII. There was no doubt he had style. Genevieve hastily filled his goblet from the flask of Courvoisier, with its big belly that reminded Reinhart of her condition.

Reinhart, incidentally, was radiant with euphoria; he hated being on bad terms with people, and now that he got along with his father-in-law and that the little misunderstanding with Gen was cleared up, he had only to return the MS to Splendor with a blunt note, give Fedder some simple explanation for the rump-kick (“I have a nervous ailment”), and all his problems were solved. He buoyantly tossed off his own brandy. In crossing her legs, Gen kicked his shin again.

“That first Blaine,” the latest one continued, “had been a Sussex landowner in England, very handsomely well-to-do. It is all wrong, you know, to think that all the best folk were with the Royalists and the slobs with Cromwell. Far from it. The only real issue there was religious. The Ravens have always despised Catholics, be they even kings!” He smote the card table with the flat of his hand, with the other one protecting the brandy bottle from the vibration.

Reinhart's mother-in-law spoke in her mousy voice, startling everyone and infuriating Raven. “I think it depends on the individual.”

“Watch yourself,” Raven warned, and flicked a great bread crumb in her direction.

“Help yourself to the Courvoisier, Daddy,” said Gen.

“We Ravens never drink anything else but,” he noted, rolling his shoulders from front to rear. He wore a knitted sport shirt, lemon yellow, so tight that it might have been sprayed on him in liquid form. His blazer he had earlier removed. “May I compliment you on your choice of dinner wine.” He sucked his tongue, frowned, and looking at the corrugated ceiling, said: “Château Margaux … and the year is …”

“One moment,” said Reinhart, playing Helpful Harry, “I'll go look at the bottle in the trashcan.”

Again the women gasped, and again he saw his father-in-law's cruel smile.

“That's all right, all right,” Raven said after a moment, threw down another drink, dried his lips with another napkin and pitched it over his back. “The year is … Nineteen forty-three,” he finished rapidly.

“Right-o, Daddy,” crooned Genevieve. “You never miss.”

Good old Reinhart, getting a bit high, assumed this was a joke, because before the arrival of the elder Ravens, Gen told him Daddy had ordered her to serve Château Margaux ‘43 when he came to dinner. “That was the great one,” she had said in explication, “and Daddy refuses anything but the best.”

“He never will miss,” said Reinhart now, winking at his father-in-law. “He knows the script.”

“No, that's all right,” Raven said to Gen, interrupting her remonstrance. He put his hand on her wrist. “I don't mind him. He hasn't penetrated the skin—yet.” He turned slanted eyes and white fangs towards his son-in-law. “But when you do, mister, I promise to let you know.”

Reinhart was still not sure how much of this was in fun; but if the Ravens were as vintage a lot as they made out, their wit was certain to be high and fine, just as his tended to be coarse. He chewed the end of his cigar, and as soon as Gen's glare was off him, seized the brandy bottle and refilled his glass, which was none too big, having lately held chipped beef.

“Where was I?” asked Raven, his sneer shading off into a solipsist grimace of the type people sometimes wear on public buses: they are aware only that they exist and life is mean.

“The first American Blaine Raven,” said Reinhart.

“What do you know about him?” shouted his father-in-law. “What did you do in the war? Were you in the Corps?” He picked up one of the crackers accompanying the dessert cheese and hurled it at his wife, who ducked neatly.

For a moment Reinhart was paralyzed because of the sudden breakdown of convention. Then he snatched up a missile of his own—the leftover cork from the wine—and was preparing to fire it at the brute when Gen burst into a sob and ran from the table. Going after her, Reinhart fell over a piece of furniture, for it was quite dark, the Ravens having come two hours late. What an outrage in Reinhart's own house! He picked himself off the floor and caught Genevieve at the screen door.

“Shh!” he warned, indicating Fedder's hut next door.

“Who cares?” Gen asked, her face all tearfully pinched. “Everything's gone wrong. Thank you for ruining my evening.”

It didn't take Reinhart long to decide that her condition took precedence over his sense of fair play. “I'll be good,” he promised, but while saying it, looking over Gen's shoulder at the candlelit table, he saw his father-in-law throw a whole handful of crackers into his mother-in-law's face.

“Gen, Gen,” he whispered, drawing her outside onto the little duckboard-platform that posed as a porch. “Gen, now keep calm, but your father's in there right now mistreating your mother. Don't you think we'd better take the booze away from him?”

Her face caught some light from Fedder's windows. “They've been kidding around like that for years.”

“Isn't it strange?”

“Well,
I don't think so,”
Gen replied. “You know, if I wanted to, I could say something about hypochondriacs, but I won't.”

Reinhart's frustration inflated his head. “Look, I don't want to argue about our families. This is an emergency.” Thinking of her pregnancy, he hastily added: “But I don't want you to worry.”

“I'm not worrying,” she answered loftily. “You just don't seem to understand anyone with spirit. Only a clod is even-tempered at all times.”

“You mean me,” Reinhart said in aggrieved stoicism.

“Let's put it this way, Carl,” Genevieve said softly, “in everybody there's room for improvement. Everybody. We all should become more than what we started as.”

“Listen here!” he shouted, and then lowered his voice for the rest, for although his emotion continued to rise, his caution did too. That he was never really unilateral, he felt, saved him from unconditional disasters. “Listen here,” he whispered, “the only kind of aristocracy I believe in is the natural one.”

“That's just what I'm saying,” Gen whispered back. “Not everyone can be born into a family like Daddy's, but there are other compensations. One can develop grace and style and exquisite manners.”

“Hahaha,” jeered Reinhart. “You mispronounced the word.” But he felt no real glee.

“That's a good example. Among the better class of people, you don't correct someone's English. Do you know why? Because if
they
say it, it's automatically right.”

“They have to be pretty good people,” said Reinhart through clenched teeth. He was seething: to be instructed by a slip of a girl who had never been to college! An educated man knew that to any genuine
haut monde
, American “aristocracy” was a vulgar joke; the original John Jacob Astor, for example, was a Kraut from Heidelberg, Germany, who came to this country and swapped beads for fur with the Indians, no doubt speaking in a clownish accent.

Nevertheless, Reinhart was determined to make every effort to do his part. From where he stood the worst thing you could be called was unfair. So he said: “You mean like Roosevelt, who pronounced “decadent”
deck-a-dunt
and everybody else has followed suit though it doesn't make sense when you think that the word has the same derivation as “decay.”

Genevieve brushed that aside with: “Be that as in May—”

“What?”

“Now don't correct me. I know what I'm saying.”

“Yes, but I don't,” said Reinhart.

“I'm sorry, Carl. Goodness knows I have tried, but your sarcasm is really too much. Added to your lack of breeding, your lack of sensitivity—well, you may be brilliant, but that is not enough. There must be heart as well as head. But besides that, how does so much education help you in the art of living?”

Reinhart lowered his head and said tragically: “You never told me any of this before. I am absolutely astonished, Genevieve; it was you who wanted to get married. For your sake I gave up my freedom at twenty-one years of age, and this is how you repay me.”

“I gave you enough rope,” said Genevieve, drawing back as if from a bad odor, “and here is what I found.” She began to enumerate the particularities of his failure, placing her thumb on her little finger, in rather masculine, decidedly common style, the fashion in which a garage mechanic tells you four things that must be done to your Dodge before winter or he won't be responsible. Similarly, so she implied, Genevieve was nothing but a detached and expert observer of their marriage, hired as it were to gauge his performance.

The lights went off in the next-door Quonset: Fedder, ass that he may be, was realistic enough to keep on good terms with his frau, and bedded with her at a reasonable hour. Elsewhere in Vetsville there were instances of modest revelry: an old college song on the night air, controlled laughter, the clunk of an empty beer can striking the bottom of a trash barrel. This was a harmless population.

“First,” Genevieve was saying, resting the small of her back against the little porch rail of one-inch waterpipe, “you try to hide with a great deal of nervous energy the fact that you have no real ambition. You do twice the required amount of college homework, but could do half and get farther if you had a direction—which you don't. Who cares if you read all the
Iliad
or whatever old book? Why don't you study accounting or something useful?”

Her thumb moved to the ball of the next finger. “Second: You will have to face the reality of your job with Claude. You haven't made a sale since the Onion, and that was March. I know you go out every day with clients, but you might as well sit home if you don't sell anything!”

Gen was hitting the target. He could only whine: “I get a salary from him.”

“Yes,” said she, “and there's something fishy about that. Why should Claude Humbold, the world's most famous deadbeat, pay you twenty-five dollars a week for contributing nothing to his business? Frankly I don't believe it.”

He wanted to ask a question, but she waved her hand in his face, with the thumb on its middle finger. “Third: I wouldn't ask a dog to live in this hobble.” She threw her elbow towards the hovel, which just sat there rustily insolent but Reinhart was desperately wounded and caught at himself in the midsection, lurching against the pipe, which made a bleak noise as the flange attaching it to the rusty wall came loose screw by screw. But he had a moment to recover his balance as well as to support Genevieve, before the railing gave way.

Gen never batted an eye. Leaning against his forearm as she had leaned on the pipe, she closed thumb and index finger and said: “Four: Tactlessness, sneering, sarcastic comments, inconsiderate behavior, rudeness—these are some of the things that constitute your flaws. For example, you don't know how to react to graciousness on the part of the next person. I ask about your short story and you tend to veer away, sort of hanged dog—”

Reinhart belched out a confession, and felt great relief. “I'm a liar, too, Gen. I didn't write that story, a friend did—well, actually—”