Always and Forever (17 page)

She had given up trying to persuade him to postpone the trip. She worried about his flying in the sometimes treacherous March weather. But he was impatient to be out in the field. It was as though he had to show his father what an asset he was to Julius Kohn Furs.

“Remember the charity dinner tomorrow night,” she said as she brought dessert to the table. “If we do get snow, maybe you should start out early from the city. Your father and mother are going, too.”

“I doubt that I can make it.” He had forgotten the dinner, Kathy understood. “I’ll be working late with the publicity team tomorrow night.” At intervals now he remained in the city to work well into the evening, taking the train to Greenwich and coming home from the station by cab. He’d always said he’d move back to Manhattan if he had to travel by train. “Dad and Mother will go. They never miss one of those bashes.”

“I’ll call and cancel the baby-sitter.” Occasionally Clara would sit, but she admitted the years were catching up with her and she was tired the next morning.

“You can go with my parents.” All at once Phil seemed self-conscious. “They’ll pick you up and bring you home.”

“I’d just as soon not.” She debated for a moment about telling him tonight that she’d taken her road test. No, wait and see if she’d passed.

He pushed back his chair and yawned broadly.

“I’m beat. I’ll watch a half-hour of TV and hit the sack.”

While Phil went into the living room, she carried the dishes into the kitchen, washed them, and stacked them in the rack to dry. She debated about running a mop across the kitchen floor, then decided to leave it until tomorrow. On Fridays now Lottie Mae came in to clean. She smiled, remembering how Bella had brought this about.
“Phil, Kathy needs a woman in to clean once a week. I’ll line someone up for her.
” Her mother-in-law was accepting her. Not Julius—he still resented her facing up to him about a big wedding.

In the living room she walked over to turn off the TV. Phil was sprawled across the sofa, asleep.

“Phil—” She frowned at the glass on the floor beside the sofa. Like his father, he’d begun to take a straight shot of Scotch after dinner. It was beginning to show in that tiny roll around his waist. “Phil, wake up and go to bed—”

Later, lying awake while Phil snored beside her, Kathy worried about the road test. It would be awful if she didn’t pass. Mom, too, said she had to learn to drive. It wasn’t good to be alone in the house with Jesse without a car. Living in Greenwich wasn’t like living in Levittown. She had never exchanged more than a few words about the weather with any of the neighbors.

The following morning her driver’s license appeared in the mail. She was jubilant, yet dreading the confrontation with Phil. She’d worry about that later, she decided in a surge of pleasure. She phoned home and told Aunt Sophie she had her license.

“Good,” Sophie approved. “Twenty years ago I told your mother she should know how to drive. Why is it always the man who sits behind the wheel?” Not that the Ross family had owned a car since Dad’s second-hand Chevy collapsed of old age in the early days of the Depression.

Ten minutes later her mother called to congratulate Kathy.

“Now you won’t be stuck in the house so much,” her mother comforted. She’d never complained about that, Kathy thought, but Mom understood. “You’ll make friends out there.”

She phoned Marge, in her last week on the job before heading for San Francisco, and on impulse invited her to come out to stay for a couple of days before leaving town.

“In the middle of the week?” Marge asked, and Kathy understood she’d prefer avoiding Phil for most of the time.

“Great. I’ll pick you up at the station,” she said blithely. “We need some time together before you leave town. I’m going to miss you like hell.”

While Jesse sprawled contentedly in the playpen—installed now in a corner of the kitchen—she prepared a dinner that featured Phil’s favorite dishes. She’d set up the card table, and they’d eat before a roaring fire. She remembered the first time she and Phil had made love—before a fireplace in that little house at the edge of Paris.
What had happened to the magic she’d felt then?

She breathed a sigh of relief when she heard the car pull up in front of the house. The roast would have been overdone if Phil had not come home on time tonight. But he’d worked late last night, and he didn’t do that two days in a row.

Phil came into the house and down the hall to the kitchen. After the routine kiss and comment about the traffic on the Merritt Parkway, he scooped up sleeper-clad Jesse from the playpen and headed upstairs for the nursery. Kathy hurried into the living room to set up the card-table before the fireplace, lit the crumpled newspaper that laced the chunks of log and kindling wood in the grate. Phil would roughhouse with Jesse for a few minutes until Jesse’s eyes would begin to flutter in drowsiness. Then he would put him in his crib and come downstairs for dinner.

Kathy waited until they’d eaten and she’d taken the dishes out to the kitchen to tell Phil her news.

“I wanted it to be a surprise for you,” she told him. “I was scared I’d fail the test. So many people fail the first one.”
Why was she rattling on this way?
“But I passed it. My driver’s license arrived in the morning’s mail.”

“Who taught you to drive?” He was staring at her as though she’d committed some monstrous act.

“The driving school.” She hesitated, “I borrowed the money from the emergency fund. I wanted to surprise you,” she stammered.

“You took money from my emergency fund?”

“I thought it was
our
emergency fund.” All at once anger welled in her. Why did she have to apologize to her husband this way?

Phil reached into his pocket, pulled out his car keys. “I have another set in the car.” Now he was taking money from his wallet. “Here, you buy the groceries this week. You don’t need to drag me over to the supermarket anymore.” Radiating hostility, he tossed bills onto the coffee table, pushed back his chair and crossed to the television set. He ignored her completely for the next few hours until he sullenly went to bed.

Kathy was happy that Bella was taking more interest in her grandson. Two or three afternoons a week she drove over to spend an hour with Kathy and Jesse. Now she made an effort to bring Kathy into some of the local socializing, though Brenda and Gail continued to ignore her.

Late in the spring Bella announced that she and Julius were driving out to Southampton on Saturdays to look at houses.

“If we find a place and buy it, we’ll expect you and Jesse to come out for the summer along with the girls and their kids. Julius and Phil can commute from Southampton.”

Three weekends later Julius gave a binder on a fifteen-room house right on the ocean at Southampton. Now he behaved, Kathy thought, as though the Southampton house was his own idea. He ordered Bella to hire a decorator to furnish the house. Kathy gathered from Phil that this had been at the persuasion of their new public relations woman, who hoped for a magazine spread built around “the charming Kohn estate at Southampton.”

Kathy was pleased that she had persuaded her father to put his long-time friend Mannie in charge of the store one Sunday every month so that he could bring her mother and aunt out to the house for the day. On Sundays Phil slept till noon. After Sunday brunch he would drive to Julius’s to spend much of the afternoon in conference with his father. Kathy explained to her family that Phil was pushing toward the partnership his father had promised him. She enjoyed having most of the day alone with her father and mother and aunt.

Rhoda came up for the Memorial Day weekend. Her depression over the break-up with Derek had receded. Now she was enthusiastic about having bumped into Frank at the Times Square BMT station. She was seeing him again.

“Just for fun,” she told Kathy. “Remember what a great time I had with. Frank in Hamburg?”

On impulse Kathy invited Rhoda to come up to Greenwich with Frank the following weekend. Why not? Phil would be flying to the Coast early Saturday morning to discuss a concession in a prestigious San Francisco store. It would be good to spend time with Rhoda and Frank. It would be like reliving those days in Hamburg, she thought sentimentally. But David was in Berlin.

Phil enjoyed these trips around the country, Kathy thought while she saw him off from the local airport for the flight to New York. He enjoyed flying around the country, entertaining important merchandising people out of town. It gave him a sense of power.

She waited until his plane lifted off the ground, then slid behind the wheel of the new Cadillac that Julius had presented to Phil as a “company car.” She had hoped to inherit the old one as her very own—because she lived in fear of even the smallest dent on the Cadillac—but Julius had taken it to give as a bonus to his publicity woman.

Kathy drove away from the airport with a guilty sense of freedom. For eight days Phil would be away from Greenwich. And in an hour she’d be picking up Rhoda and Frank at the station.

At Idlewild Phil checked his luggage, then jumped into a taxi and headed for the city. He was taking a westbound flight tomorrow morning. Kathy wouldn’t phone the Mark Hopkins to see if he’d arrived, he told himself with confidence. She’d be all wrapped up in her stupid houseguests.

Leila was still in bed when he used his key to let himself into the apartment.

“Hi,” she drawled, naked beneath the blanket, sure Phil would be ready to jump into bed the moment he arrived.

“Any coffee?” he asked, shedding his jacket.

“Now?” she pouted.

“Now,” he said. “Go on, don’t be so lazy.”

“All right,” she said aggrievedly and tossed aside the blanket. Phil swatted her across the rump as she headed toward the closet kitchenette.

Leila had been a great lay at first, he thought while he watched her move with deliberate provocativeness about the kitchenette, a minuscule apron making a parody of her nakedness. Now she was beginning to irritate him with that constant yammering about introducing her to people in theater. He’d told her that Derek was his main connection, and right now Derek was out in Hollywood.

He undressed and sprawled on the bed, still warm from her body, exuding the heavy scent she favored. He’d leave the keys here today, seemingly accidental. He’d phone from San Francisco and tell the old man to fire her while he was away. Dad was trying so hard to get into the new publicity gal’s pants. Maybe he could do what the old man couldn’t.

“Coffee, sir,” Leila flipped.

Phil reached for the cup, took a few sips, then set it down on the night table. Just thinking about that sexy publicity gal got him hot.

“Come on, baby. Show me how good you are.”

On June 24th the civilized world was alarmed to learn that Stalin had imposed a blockade on Berlin. Earlier the Communist nation had tried to induce inflation in the western zone of Germany in an effort to thwart recovery. The Russians had interrupted rail traffic between Berlin and West Germany for two days, stopped highway bridge traffic, and now this.

“Phil, what’s going to happen now?” Kathy asked him anxiously when he came home from the city that evening.
How would this affect David?

“Truman will be afraid to make a move,” Phil guessed. “He doesn’t want to start another war.”

“But if Berlin is blockaded, how will the people get food? How long can the city survive?”

“They’ll find a way to fly in food.” Phil was impatient with her. “West Berlin has two airports. It may be tough, but the Allies will figure a way out.”

Two days later all the Kohns moved into the spectacular fifteen-room house in Southampton for the summer. Bella had insisted that the decorator be given a freehand, and Kathy was enchanted by the results.

Brenda and Gail’s older daughters went off to camp. A summer nursemaid was hired to take care of the two younger daughters and Jesse, though Kathy took on most of his care. Jesse was the focal point of her existence, the source of her joy in life. Her reason for being, she told herself.

Kathy relished her early morning strolls along the beach while the others slept. To her the ocean was mesmerizing, to be worshipped afresh each day. It was as though, for a little while, she walked alone with God, she thought.

Julius was furious when he discovered that, despite his space-grabbing publicity woman and the prestige of Julius Kohn Furs, he was not likely to be invited to join the choice clubs. The anti-Semitism of earlier resort society still lingered in Southampton’s “Old Society.” Families that had reluctantly survived without footmen during World War II and recognized that it would be impossible to replace them in the postwar era had not opened their minds—or their homes—to Jewish arrivals. A Pulitzer, a Belmont, an Otto Kahn might be welcomed in their sacred enclaves. Not a Julius Kohn.

When the Southampton household assembled on their third Saturday for what was becoming a ritual brunch, Brenda and Gail announced that they were taking off for Europe for three weeks. Their husbands exchanged a glance of resignation. They’d obviously fought a losing battle.

“We’ll arrive in Paris in time for the couture shows.” Brenda’s usual petulance had given way to a glow of triumph. Brenda and Gail would have been attractive if they weren’t forever sulking over some grievance, real or imagined, Kathy thought. “Our travel agent managed to get us reservations at the Ritz. Then we’ll spend some time in Cannes. At the Carlton. They have an exciting summer season there now.”

“How do you expect to spend time in Paris and Cannes?” Phil challenged. “Each way by ship will—”

“We’re flying,” Gail announced. “We’ve never flown to Europe before. Everybody’s flying these days,” she forestalled her mother’s objections. “Air France has nine flights a week between New York and Paris. We’re taking the Golden Comet—it’s an all-sleeper flight that leaves every Saturday.”

“We make way-stops at Gander, Newfoundland, and Shannon, Ireland,” Brenda picked up. “Then we’ll fly from Paris to Nice. It’s much more chic than spending the summer here.”

At Phil’s advice—derived from a sarcastic remark about Southampton anti-Semitism made by Kathy—Julius ordered Bella to give one of the most extravagant parties of the season. Phil realized—as Kathy had said—that “Old Society” might not come calling, but monied café society would rush to socialize where champagne and caviar were lavishly offered them. Already Phil was negotiating through their publicity woman with post-debutantes to model in the fall charity show.