Blessings (6 page)

“He’s not a fussy eater. You needn’t go to so much trouble.”

“You must be serious about him, Janine. You never invited a boy to have supper here before.”

She wished her mother would stop saying “boy.” Peter was a man. But she answered quietly, “Please don’t jump to conclusions, Mom. You’ll embarrass me.”

Perhaps it had been a mistake to invite him. Yet it would have been more embarrassing not to invite him, when he was going to be right in the area.

“Don’t worry, I understand. Play it cool, isn’t that what you young people call it? Go, give the silver a wash, will you?” Her mother picked up and weighed a fork. “It’s good silver plate, the best. Wears as long as sterling. Put a towel in the sink so you won’t scratch it.”

From the window over the sink one looked directly into the Danielis’ kitchen, across the concrete strip that divided the yards. In the summer when it was too hot to eat indoors, everybody moved card tables to the back porches. You could smell the pungent gravy that was always simmering on the back of the Danielis’ stove.

“Yes, they all chipped in where I worked and gave me that set when I got married. So generous. I remember I cried …”

Pop, curious about the preparations, came into the kitchen. “Why does he call you Jennie?”

“At school everybody does.”

Mom, who was energetically chopping onions, joined in. “Why do you let them change it? Your name is Janine, such a beautiful name.”

“It doesn’t go with Rakowsky.”

“Sam, do you hear? So it’s Rakowsky she doesn’t like. A good thing your grandfather—may he rest in peace— can’t hear. He was proud of the name. He was a hero. That time there was a fire, you remember—”

“Mom, I know about Grandpa.” Jennie spoke with affection. “How many times have I heard it?”

“Well, so you’ll change the name,” Mom said cheerfully. “You’ll pick out a man with a beautiful name.”

Jennie moved toward the dining room, where the best plates lay on the best cloth and the plastic covers had been removed from the chair seats. Her father’s voice followed her.

“Mendes. What kind of a name is that? Mendel, I know, it’s common, but Mendes—”

“It’s Spanish or Portuguese.”

“Spanish! Well, Jews are everywhere. Even in China, I read someplace. Yes, even in China.”

Everything went well, so Jennie needn’t have worried. Peter brought a bunch of daffodils and she arranged them in a low bowl on the table. It was surprising what a few flowers could do for a room. Mom’s dinner was delicious. She was her usual talkative self but made no remark more personal than when, bringing the ketchup bottle to the table, she patted her husband’s head and declared that Sam would soon be putting ketchup on ice cream too.

Pop did more talking than he usually did. Peter and he were both enthusiastic about baseball. It surprised Jennie to know that her father knew so much or cared so much about the Orioles. Probably, living in a house with two women, he hadn’t felt the need to talk baseball.

She could see that he liked Peter. “Janine tells me they call you Shorty.”

“She doesn’t, but a lot of people do.”

“If you were any taller, you wouldn’t get through our front door,” Pop said. “Have you heard the one about the dwarf and his brother?” And he went on to tell a joke in Yiddish.

When Peter obviously didn’t understand, Jennie explained it as best she could. Pop was astonished.

“You don’t understand Yiddish?”

“I’m sorry, I never learned it,” Peter apologized.

“Learned it! It’s something you don’t learn, you just know it. Your people come from the other side, don’t they?”

“From Europe, yes, but a while ago.”

“Your grandfather came?”

“No, before that.”

“How long?” Pop persisted.

Jennie hoped Peter would understand that he wasn’t being rude but merely interested and curious.

“Well,” Peter said, “they came to Savannah from South America sometime in the 1700s. Before that, they’d been in Holland.”

“Two hundred years in this country?” Pop shook his head in wonderment. Probably he thought that Peter didn’t know what he was talking about.

When jokes—in English now—were exhausted, they came inevitably to politics. They were all concerned and angry over the Vietnam war and the American role in it, which they believed to be senseless and wrong. While the talk went on, Mom filled Peter’s plate again. Then came warm apple pie, merging the smell of cinnamon with the sweetness that came from the narcissi. Peter ate and argued and was, Jennie saw, at home. She had good feelings.

Of course, if they had any idea about Peter and herself, that would be something else… . But these were other times. Mom and Pop weren’t out in the world enough to know, except from reading the papers and being shocked by what they thought of as exceptional behavior, how different these times really were.

So the evening wore on, until Peter said someone would be coming at nine to take him out to Owings Mills.

“Too bad you can’t stay here overnight,” Mom said. “We can put a cot in the front room. It’s a very comfortable cot.”

“Thank you, I’d like that, but they’re expecting me.”

The man who came for Peter drove a station wagon. When the front door was opened, they could hear barking and see three terrier heads in the back of the car. Peter peered out and signaled that he was coming.

“Tell your friend to come in and have a cup of coffee with us,” Pop urged. “And there’s plenty of pie left too.”

“I don’t think he can, on account of the dogs. He won’t leave them in the car even for a minute. They’re show dogs, very rare, Tibetan terriers. They’ve a wall hung with blue ribbons in their house,” Peter explained.

Then he thanked the Rakowskys, was careful to be casual with Jennie, and went down the steps.

Pop and Mom watched the station wagon drive away.

“Blue ribbons,” Pop muttered. “What was he talking about? But he’s a nice fellow, all the same. Very nice, Janine, even if he does call you Jennie.”

Peter said, “I liked your parents. They’re good people.”

“I’m glad. They liked you.”

“I hope you’ll like my family too. Will you come for a few days over next spring vacation? I’ll have my mother write next week if you want to.”

He had never said much about his people, except that he had one sister, age fourteen. His father was in some sort of investment business, which, Jennie supposed, you would call “banking.” She imagined a fair-sized house with a tennis court, the sort of prosperous white house that one saw on Sunday drives through the suburbs.

“He wants his parents to meet you, and if they like you —why shouldn’t they?—” Mom fancied, “then he will ask your father if he can marry you.”

“Mom! This is 1969. People don’t ask fathers anymore. Besides, for Pete’s sake, neither of us is ready for marriage. We’re too young.”

“So you’ll wait a year or two. I was nineteen,” Mom said positively.

A long dark blue car driven by a black man in a dark blue uniform met them at the airport in Atlanta. Jennie assumed it was a hired limousine, and, never having ridden in one before, was impressed.

Then the black man said, “Good to have you home, Mr. Peter. Seems like a long time between visits.”

“How’s everybody, Spencer? Mother? Father? Aunt Lee?”

“Your folks are all right, and your Aunt Lee, she’s still the same salt of the earth. Isn’t that what you call her?”

“That’s what she is, the salt of the earth.”

This was their own car and chauffeur! Jennie smoothed her skirt. She smoothed and smoothed the good gray wool that Pop had made.

“Hand-stitched,” Mom had marveled. “You know what this would sell for in the stores? Golden hands, your father has. Now you need a yellow blouse, black patent-leather pumps, and you can go anyplace.”

Peter put his hand over hers. “You’re nervous.”

He saw everything and felt everything, as if his nerves were connected to hers.

“Yes. Do I look all right?”

“You look beautiful.”

She couldn’t say “It’s this car that’s done something to me. Riding in this car. I’m scared.”

Somebody had left an umbrella on the floor, a Burberry plaid. A girl at college had one, with the raincoat to match. “Cost a fortune,” Mom would say.

They turned off the highway into city streets and then onto a wide road bordered with old trees, now in full leaf. Then there were lawns, hedges and fences, and houses set back at the end of long driveways. Soft air, much milder than it was at home, poured in at the window, cooling Jennie’s hot cheeks.

“Jennie, my parents won’t eat you. They aren’t ogres.”

Peter’s parents. It’s absolutely stupid to feel like this. So what if they have their own car and chauffeur? So what?

The car slowed down, swung into a long drive, and moved up a slight slope under a ceiling of pink blooms.

“Dogwood. Atlanta’s famous for dogwood,” Peter said.

At the top of the rise the car turned around an enormous circular bed of scarlet tulips and came to a stop. It flashed through Jennie’s mind that they must be stopping to call for somebody at a country club or a private school. Two-storied columns blazed white against red brick; a short double staircase curved and joined the veranda under the columns. She had a second’s vision of Gone with the Wind, or perhaps the Parthenon. When she saw people standing in the white doorway, she understood in a second flash that this was the home, Peter’s home.

She had to say something. Trivial words came from her mouth. “Oh, all those tulips!”

He was already out of the car and running up the steps. The driver helped Jennie and took her suitcase. She went up the stairs to where, with a welcoming gesture, Peter had already turned to her.

“Mom, Dad, this is my friend, Jennie Rakowsky.”

Jennie put her hand out to a blur of a woman, a symmetrical, pale blur with elderly pale skin and keen, quick eyes.

“How do you do, Jennie? We’re always glad when Peter brings another of his friends,” said Peter’s mother.

The father was a large man, white-haired and powerful, like someone you see on the television news, a senator or a general. She felt small beside these tall people, under these tall columns.

Inside there was a lofty, two-storied hall with a crystal chandelier on a long golden rope, and more curving double stairs that united with a landing halfway up and under a bright window.

“Here’s Sally June,” Peter said.

A young girl was coming down the stairs, wearing a short white tennis dress and swinging a racket. She had her brother’s red hair and freckles.

“Hi,” she said, not smiling, and went on past them out the front door.

You don’t even hug your brother? And you’re supposed to smile when you greet someone, Jennie thought, with her own smile unacknowledged. The girl had made her feel foolish.

“Let me show you to your room,” Mrs. Mendes said.

Jennie followed her up the stairs. It was pleasant to climb on such wide treads and low risers. But the straight, narrow back ahead of her looked in some way forbidding. There had been a vice principal in high school, a formidable, correct woman with dark, gray-streaked hair in a French twist, who had walked like that.

They entered a room at the end of a wide corridor. “Dinner’s in half an hour,” Mrs. Mendes said. “You needn’t bother to change, after all that traveling. Just make yourself comfortable and join us downstairs whenever you’re ready. There’ll be drinks in the library. Oh, yes—if there’s anything you need, just ring. Press the button next to the light switch.”

I shall be careful not to press it by mistake, Jennie thought, and said, “Thank you. Thank you very much, Mrs. Mendes.”

Mrs. Mendes closed the door. It clicked neatly, letting silence fill the room. Jennie stood at its center, circling it with her eyes. A mahogany four-poster bed was covered with a print of miniature lemons and green leaves on a dove-gray background. Full draperies of the same print were looped back from the windows. The carpet was a gray sea on which stood plump yellow-and-white chairs; a pair of dark, gleaming wooden chests; and a round table that bore a bouquet of the red tulips she had seen outside.

Change. You needn’t bother to change. Change into what? I’d have thought my suit would do for supper … dinner. Then my dark blue silk in case we go to the movies or someplace tomorrow— The thought broke off and she went to the window. Automatically she always went to a window to see where she was.

The room overlooked the front of the house. Over to the left was a corner of lawn, very green. There was no other house in sight, nothing but grass and thick trees. The late afternoon lay in deep quiet.

Here, indoors, it was also completely quiet. At home one always heard things: a flushed toilet, voices from the yard next door, trucks passing, or footsteps going up the stairs on which there was no carpet. “It wears out too fast on stairs,” Mom said.

Now she opened her door and looked down the corridor into the face of a grandfather clock. No, you were supposed to call it a “tall clock,” she remembered, having read that someplace, maybe in House and Garden, which she sometimes picked up at the beauty parlor when she went for her occasional haircut. Another piece of random information, she thought, that I seem to collect without trying to or wanting to. The clock struck: Bong! Bong! Come downstairs whenever you’re ready. She’d better wash her hands and go.

Her room had its private bath, all pale yellow tiles. The towels were thick and white with yellow monograms, the same monogram that had been on Mrs. Mendes’s notepaper: a large M, flanked by a small c and a small d. C for Caroline, M for Mendes, of course, and the d must be for her maiden name. That’s the way you did a monogram. Another piece of useless information that sticks on me like flies on flypaper, she thought, beginning to laugh. She felt silly. Shall it be when—if—we are married, shall it be Janine Rakowsky Mendes? Monograms! Mom buys our towels at Sears when they wear out, and they’re good enough.

She ran a comb through her hair, her good, strong, curly hair, so easy to maintain, which meant one less worry and expense. A fresh comb had been provided on the dressing table. On the bedside table were a carafe of ice water and some magazines, Town and Country and Vogue. If the guest were a man, the magazines would probably be Time and Newsweek.