Beautiful Kate (2 page)

On our first day here, though, a Saturday, it was almost one o’clock before the old man blew his little whistle and Sarah went scurrying up to his room, which caused Junior to snort with derision.

“Weekdays I have the privilege,” he said. “I get to take him breakfast in bed.”

Toni was incredulous. “Why don’t you just put him away somewhere?”

“Because I live off him. Because I’m a leech.”

“What a neat family,” Toni said. “And here I always thought mine was the pits.”

Sarah appeared at the top of the stairs. “He’ll see you now,” she announced.

Toni laughed. “Well, hot damn! Aren’t we fortunate!”

But suddenly I had no time for her or her pragmatic sarcasms, because my heart was beginning to pound at me and the old dryness was powdering my throat. Even if I had wanted to, which I did not, I doubt if I could have explained to her the special character of the relationship between my father and me. To love someone without liking him, to fear him without respecting him, that was only part of the problem, as was his longstanding but erroneous conviction that he knew me totally, in all the secret chambers of my soul. More to the point was the fact that I knew he always had blamed me in some willful and senseless way for what had happened to Cliff and Kate, as if I had not loved them more than life. But he never knew that, you see. Together, the two of us spoke only the language of contention.

As I followed Sarah into his room I experienced again the old feeling of growing smaller in his presence, of shrinking back to some childhood moment of guilt and confrontation. Over the years—in my four brief visits here—it has been such a recurrent phenomenon that I even have a name for it,
diminishing returns
, as if humor could mitigate the humiliation I feel in such moments. Toni had followed me into the room, but I was not aware of her or anything else except those laserlike black eyes following my progress to the foot of his bed.

“Well, the prodigal returns once more,” he said, in a voice much frailer than I remembered it. “What happened? Did your Santa Barbara millionairess dump you?”

“A few years ago, yes.”

“And this is your new one?”

“This is Toni,” I told him. “Toni, meet my old man.”

“Jason,” Sarah amended.

Toni for once had nothing to say, an affliction that my father unhappily has never experienced.

“A very pretty girl. But then you always could pick ’em, couldn’t you, Greg?” He grinned at Toni. “His only problem is holding on to them. You all get his number eventually.”

“And what number is that?” Toni asked, having found her voice now.

Jason pretended innocence. “Don’t ask me—I’m not a girl.”

“You want to know why we’re here?” I asked him.

“You want to tell me?”

“Not particularly, but I suppose I should. You remember Janet?”

“The one before the millionairess?”

“Yes, that one. She’s got the police on me for non-support,” I lied. “And I’m broke. I had nowhere else to go.”

It was a speech that Jason relished. His seamed face settled into an expression of patrician disdain as he looked up at Sarah now. “And this is your hero? This is the man who’s—what is it you always say—the man who’s had it all?”

Sarah took a deep breath and suggested to him that, since we were all going to be living together for a while, it might be a good idea if we tried to get along.

“Of course, it would,” Toni interjected. “But you know men. They like to think they’re boys. And boys fight.”

Jason was not amused. “Are you reprimanding me, young lady?”

“Why not? The two of you don’t sound like a father and son—more like a couple of kids.”

I could see in Jason’s eyes that he was teetering between outrage and feigned indulgence. And I’m convinced it was only Toni’s looks that made the difference, that easy, disarming sexiness which made the old martinet break into a brittle laugh finally.

“Well, maybe we do at that,” he said. “Maybe we’ll have to clean up our act, eh, Greg?”

I said nothing, as usual unable to give the man any quarter at all.

That evening, after Jason had gone to bed, the four of us sat around the kitchen table drinking beer and eating popcorn. Sarah had got out the family photo albums and Toni for some reason was captivated by them. Normally she had a hard time evincing interest in anything that did not relate in some way to herself, but the albums proved to be an exception. What seemed to intrigue her most of all were the early snapshots of Cliff, Kate, and me as children on the farm and how totally different that world was from the one outside our windows now. The open fields looked immense and beautifully peaceful, with cattle and horses on them instead of cheerless ranks of deteriorating tract houses. And the house and barn and corrals in the photos were a startling white and so well kept it beggared belief that they too could have turned to ruin in a single generation. Yet they had—don’t ask me why. It’s as if all of us—the people in Woodglen Estates the same as the Kendalls—fell into some sort of pernicious time warp in which a millennium of degeneration was miraculously compressed into a few decades.

But as Toni continued to leaf through the pages of the albums, firing questions at us, I realized that it was not decline that fascinated her but Kate.

“You know who she looks like here? A young Vivian Leigh. Only blond.”

“No way.” For some reason, the comparison irked me unreasonably.

“Oh yes she does,” Toni insisted. “She’s got that same—I don’t know what.”

“Wildness?” Sarah asked. “She was always pretty wild, wasn’t she, Greg?”

It was not a subject I liked, that of my twin sister, flesh and spirit once so close to mine, so inseverable, that I sometimes lost sight of that arbitrary line where she left off and I began, even to the point where I found myself wondering whether she was half male or I half female. No, that’s both silly and inaccurate, for what we really were together—with Cliff—was something almost asexual, a troika yoked by spirit and empathy, not sex. Not then, anyway.

“Wild?” I said. “Yeah, I guess you could say that.”

Junior was laughing, wiping the beer foam from his beard. “I remember she had a name for everybody. Chief Tan Pants for me.” He smiled ruefully at Sarah. “And remember what she called the two of us?
Emily’s kids
. Which meant, I guess, that she and Greg and Cliff were Jason’s.”

“Well, we did come along pretty late,” Sarah said. “I really don’t remember that much about her. Except that I always wanted to look like her. And sound like her. And—”

Her face reddened as she broke off.

“She was very attractive,” Sarah finished. “Very unusual.”

Toni was smiling at me. “And she was
your
twin?”

“Not identical,” I said.

“I’d say not.”

But Sarah would not have me denigrated, even by my lover. She flipped the album to a snapshot of me sitting on the corral. “He was just as attractive,” she said. “And he still is.”

Continuing to smile, Toni looked me over, like a used-car buyer. “Hmmm, I don’t know—twenty-five years
is
twenty-five years.”

“No, it isn’t—it’s more,” I said.

As the evening wore on, Junior kept at his beer as if he were being paid by the can. And with each one he emptied—and crumpled—he seemed to recover a bit more of that bitchy belligerence he had greeted us with on our arrival, before the sight of Toni in her samurai robe had begun to play tricks with his head. He kept going on about the “trinity” as he called us—Cliff, Kate, and me—and what a drag it had been growing up as a member of “Emily’s family.” And Kate had been so right, he said, dubbing them that, because that was exactly how Jason had always treated them, as if they were poor relations. It had always been “Cliff this” and “Kate that” even after the two of them were both dead and buried.

“And it really stuck in my craw,” Junior said. “You’d have thought Sarah and I were just some niggers who worked here, somebody who didn’t count, you know? And
you—
” Looking at me, he sneered openly, not unlike a silent screen villain. “The old man always goes on like you’re his biggest disappointment, you know? Like he hates your guts. But in the next breath he’s mumbling about what an athlete you were and how talented and all that shit, like you could’ve been somebody famous if it wasn’t for your weakness, as he calls it. His word for cunt.”

I had pushed back my chair, getting ready to leave. But he reached out and took hold of my wrist.

“Now, come on—stick around,” he advised. “Toni likes all this dirty linen, don’t you, sweetheart?”

“Sure, I really dig it,” she said, laughing at the look I gave her.

With my free hand I took hold of Junior’s wrist and squeezed until he let go of mine.

“See? Just what I said—the great athlete!” He stopped rubbing his wrist long enough to pop another can. “Never mind that Sarah and I’ve been taking care of him all these years, while you just drop in for funerals and spend the rest of your time living off women and pretending you’re a writer. Never mind who keeps this place going and keeps the dudes from burning us out. No, that’s not important. No way. It’s the
past
, that’s all that matters with him. You and
them
—a suicide and a lunatic.”

I did get up then, resisting a powerful urge to punch my little brother’s drunken face.

“Come on,” I said to Toni. “We’re going to bed.”

Her face was a pout. “Aw, just when it was getting interesting.”

Our room upstairs once had been the guest room, where Jason put up all the cranks and phonies who shared his passionate views on organic gardening, agrarian populism, and the vital importance of securing elective office for Jason Kendall. In the forties Governor Stratton had appointed him to fill a vacancy in the state senate, but when he ran for the same office two years later he was soundly defeated in the primaries. He was similarly slaughtered in a bid for a U.S. congressional seat, the main reason being his generously expressed contempt for all politicians and “public leeches,” whether Democrat or Republican. This sorry political record seemed to have no effect on his houseguests, however, who through the years doggedly addressed him as Senator, possibly because his mail still went out under the letterhead of Illinois State Senator Jason Cutter Kendall.

In time, though, their visits became increasingly infrequent—why, I never knew. Perhaps they tired of the master-slave relationship favored by Jason, or maybe like most people they prospered sufficiently during the boom years of the late forties and fifties so that the old causes no longer seemed quite so important. In any case, as the room stood empty more and more, Cliff and I campaigned to get it for our own, not only because it was larger than the one we had then but also because it had its own private door to the upstairs bathroom. It was a change Jason would not hear of, however, not until Kate began to work on him with her considerable weaponry. And all she demanded from us in payment was two weeks free from milking the three cows we kept on the farm. So Cliff and I got the room and had it until the end. And now, with so many rooms in the house vacant, it once more had been designated the guest room, and thus was mine again, mine and Toni’s.

As the two of us came in here that night, after Junior’s drunken show of belligerence, she promptly began to pump me about Kate and Cliff: what had Junior meant about their being “a suicide and a lunatic”?

“He’s just smashed,” I told her. “Who knows what he means? They were in a car crash, like I told you. Cliff crawled out and made it home before he died of loss of blood. I guess he thought Kate was already dead. But she wasn’t. She died in the hospital some time later.”

It was not the truth of course, or at least not the whole truth. But then I had never been able to talk easily about their deaths with anyone—not Jason or my mother or any of my lovers and wives over the years—so I saw no reason to start now, with Toni. If I have anything in me like a soul, I figure that it resides in my memory of the two of them, Kate and Cliff. And if I have any religion it is simply not to profane that memory. So I lie or change the subject.

“Let’s take a bath,” I said.

“Together?”

I made like Charles Boyer. “But of course.”

“The bed’s softer.”

“Don’t argue. I’ll punch you out.”

In the bathroom, naked but still dry, we kissed and fondled and did other unspeakable things until the tub was full and then we slipped into it. With Toni, the basic problem in sex is simply in trying to make the damned thing last, like a kid with the most delicious ice-cream cone ever fashioned. The inventive little things she does with her body—that perfect ass and those sinewy legs and high small incomparable breasts—I’m sure would turn even the Pope into a red-eyed ravening monster of lust. And I’m no Holy Father. So in a short time—too short a time—we were lying there together in the tub, twined and sated, indifferently soaping each other, occasionally kissing. Finally Toni spoke.

“Where do they get their money?”

“What money?”