Cheat and Charmer (45 page)

“He said that? To you?”

Veevi spooned strawberry jam onto her plate, spread the jam on a piece of toast, and took a big bite.

“I guess you don’t remember, Vee, but Stefan and I used to talk quite a lot.”

“Poor Stefan,” Veevi said, putting down her toast. “Poor dear old man.” She took a handkerchief from her bathrobe pocket and daubed her eyes.

Poor dear old man my ass, Dinah said to herself, adding, Whose son you were fucking just when L.J. was letting Stefan know he was through out here. Then she felt ashamed, and her face turned hot as the wave of anger spent itself.

“Yes, it’s awfully sad,” Dinah said. She glanced at her sister and turned away. Veevi’s hair looked dry and dull. Her skin, so blooming once, was rough, coarse. She wasn’t fat, but her muscles were flabby. And the grief Dinah saw in her eyes, day after day, often gave her normally shrewd expression an oddly hapless cast. “How did I end up like this?” her eyes seemed to be asking, and in truth Dinah wondered, too. For Veevi to have come to this seemed eerie, as if some fundamental law of nature had been broken. How had it happened, anyway? Every time Jake came home at night and kissed Dinah on the mouth, Dinah felt Veevi watching and wondering how she, who had been so beautiful and brilliant, could have ended up desolate and forlorn while Dinah, for whom no one had predicted anything beyond a dull and ordinary life with a dull and ordinary man, had triumphed over the odds. It embarrassed Dinah and gave her the oddest, most uncomfortable sensation to be kissed by Jake in front of Veevi. If another adult had been watching too, Dinah was certain, Veevi would have caught his eye with an expression of mockery and disbelief.

Dinah thought Veevi lingered over the toast and jam as if it were her only pleasure now. She knew that Veevi would go upstairs ostensibly to read scripts and books for Jake, but that she would actually spend most of the day in bed crying. Then at three she would get up, shower, dress, and come downstairs to the den, where Dinah and her two kids and Claire and Coco usually congregated before dinner. She would make herself a martini, with either a green olive or a pearl onion. Then another. She would come in to dinner and eat with such gusto that Jake remarked one night, as he and Dinah were lying in bed together, it was “as if Hitler were in Beverly Hills.”

They would talk after dinner, the three of them—Jake, Dinah, and Veevi—or Jake would go upstairs to work, leaving Dinah and Veevi together with the children. For a time, the den was a hive of family happiness. Lorna played with Coco. From the living room, Dinah could hear the
sound of Peter practicing his clarinet. Veevi would have a brandy and read
The New Yorker
and the
Saturday Review
. Claire would sit at the inlaid wooden chess table and write out the answers to her algebra problems. Then, one by one, the den emptied. Gussie would come in to take Coco upstairs for a bath and bed. Claire would traipse off to her room behind the kitchen. Peter disappeared into his to listen to Benny Goodman records. Once her brother had left, Lorna would pointedly ask Dinah if it was time for her bath. Before Veevi came, Lorna had insisted that she could bathe herself. Now she wanted her mother to scrub her back and shampoo her hair. So Dinah would put her knitting away and go upstairs with her daughter. Left behind in the den, Veevi watched television. And drank. That was her day.

Sometimes Dinah did hear typing, which meant that Veevi was writing a synopsis. Jake had hoped to have two or three of these a week; Veevi took a week and a half, on the average, to do one. He complained to Dinah that Veevi wasn’t very productive. After all, he was paying her a salary. Dinah told him to go easy on her, and on sunny afternoons when Dinah didn’t have to do errands or pick up the kids for after-school lessons, she sometimes managed to persuade Veevi not to go back upstairs to her room but to put on something comfortable and join her out by the pool, where the two of them read together or Dinah knitted while Veevi read. Dinah thought the fresh air and sunshine would be good for Veevi and liked being with her.

One day Dinah turned the book she was reading—
Nine Stories
, by J. D. Salinger—upside down on her lap and said so, adding, “It reminds me of that summer we lived on McCadden Place when we lay all day in that big hammock Pop tied from one tree to the other and read library books and ate c-c-c-celery.”

“What summer was that?” Veevi asked.

“You don’t remember?”

“No,” said Veevi. “I try to remember as little as possible about our childhood.”

“Really?” Dinah said, astonished.

“I couldn’t wait for it to be over. But the hammock. When did you say that was?”

“You were ten and I was almost thirteen: 1925.”

“Hmm,” Veevi said, as if she were hearing a mildly interesting detail about someone else.

Dinah was stunned. They had been inseparable during that hot California summer, scarcely communicating in complete sentences and so telepathically linked that a couple of words murmured by one would be instantly understood by the other. Dinah remembered the sound their mouths had made as they munched celery, and the nice, musty smell of the library books and the yellowing paper that sometimes crumbled onto their laps when they turned the pages. How could Veevi not remember it? she wondered.

Suddenly Veevi looked up from her book. “When did you start reading?” she asked Dinah. “I never knew you read.”

Dinah thought she must be sitting with a creature from Mars who had somehow invaded her sister’s body. “Veevi, are you nuts? I’ve always been a reader. How can you p-p-p-possibly not remember me reading?”

“I was the reader and you were the dancer. I was the introvert and you were the extrovert. You were the homebody and I wanted to get the hell out. Fast.”

“You danced, too. I taught you. And I was always reading—when we were kids, in high school. And when you were with Stefan I was always asking the two of you which books I should read. What about all those books we read at the same time? You know, Steinbeck and Malraux and Poe and Mann and Proust and God only knows who else? Not to mention Marx and Engels and all their ilk.”

At the sound of this word both sisters laughed, as they had many years ago, and Dinah felt as if she had broken through Veevi’s bizarre amnesia, for
ilk
was a word they had always found funny. At least some part of their old world of secret jokes was intact, or almost intact, even if Veevi pretended it had never existed.

They were beginning to talk more. Late in the afternoons, perched on either end of a long upholstered love seat in the den under the windows that looked out onto the pool, Dinah got Veevi to talk. They watched the evening news together, and found themselves riveted by footage of Hurricanes Carol, Edna, and Hazel, discovering in their mutual pleasure at the names and the spectacle of natural disasters a topic over which neither had to exercise discretion. They also watched the Army-McCarthy hearings, and in early December, when Welch finally let McCarthy have it, Dinah
looked at the television and said, “I hope that’s the end of
you
, you evil s-s-s-son of a bitch!”

Veevi, looking at her, threw her head back and laughed. “You sound just like Pop,” she said with a sad smile.

Then Veevi got up, took her drink, and went into the living room to visit Peter while he practiced. She often did this, settling herself on one of the sofas with one leg tucked under her. She blew her cigarette smoke away from him because she knew it bothered him. He found her visits disconcerting at first, but he got used to them. For one thing, his aunt was very pretty, and she always said nice things to him whether he played well or not. And when she was there he did play well, because he thought of her as an audience at a recital. He always apologized if he happened to be learning a new piece, as if preparing her for the mistakes he was sure to make. She said she didn’t mind at all, that it was a pleasure to watch a working musician. He loved that phrase: “a working musician.” She would wait for him to finish, and when they went back into the den together she would tell Dinah how gifted he was. But this made him uncomfortable, because he had noticed that Veevi was mean to Lorna.

Dinah was aware of it, too. She couldn’t help observing that Veevi’s first martini was quickly followed by a second and a third, which seemed to liberate a sharp tongue that was always aimed at Lorna. Yet Dinah was always too startled to say anything about it. She couldn’t believe that her sister would treat her own niece, who was now eight, with such overt nastiness—and right in front of Dinah, too. “Stop eating peanuts,” Veevi said once to Lorna after the child had taken a handful from a ceramic dish on the coffee table. “They’ll make you even fatter than you are!” Lorna’s face turned red and she ran out of the room. Another time, Lorna, who adored her cousin Claire, brought her reading homework over to the chess table where Claire was doing Latin exercises and spread her book out on her side of the table. “Don’t sit there, Lorna,” Veevi snapped at her. “Can’t you see you’re getting in Claire’s way?” Claire was concentrating so hard that she wasn’t even aware of what her mother was saying, but Lorna burst into tears and ran from the room.

Lorna, who had expected to love her aunt, now hated her and told her mother so one night when Dinah gave her her bath. “Why didn’t you say something when Veevi was mean to me?” Lorna asked. “It’s our house, Mom, and she should be polite.” Dinah explained that Veevi’s harshness was just her way of being different, like her preference for being called
“Veevi” and not “Aunt Veevi.” She pointed out to Lorna that Veevi wasn’t particularly warm even with her own children—it wasn’t her style. Hadn’t she noticed that Veevi never kissed Claire or cuddled with Coco? She said that Lorna shouldn’t take offense at Veevi’s tone of voice because Veevi was a member of the family and people in families sometimes talked to children this way.

But Lorna wasn’t having any of it and keenly felt the injustice of her aunt’s barbs and her mother’s cowardice. She could sense that in spite of the nightly bathtimes with her mother, she was not uppermost in Dinah’s thoughts. And she was right. What was more important right now to Dinah were the brief but powerful bursts of euphoria she felt during those late afternoons, when their enlarged family seemed to come together in—she used the word pointedly to herself, making a private joke—“relative” harmony. Jake would come in, tired and hungry, grabbing handfuls of peanuts, and his face would light up at the sight of them—Dinah and Veevi and the children, gathered together in the cozy, plush-carpeted, book-lined room, a fire glowing in the fireplace.

Once Dinah got past the embarrassment of being kissed in front of Veevi, she was proud that it was in her house that they were all together, and that Jake, unlike her own father, was providing handsomely for them all. His ebullience was infectious. He often remarked now that this was how families used to live, with aunts and cousins often under one roof. He said his new project was about an immigrant family living together and working together, and it was good for the work that he should come home and find them like this; in fact, he told Veevi that she should drop whatever she was reading and start doing some research on immigrant families in Chicago at the turn of the century.

“Research?” she said. “Where?”

“It’s simple,” Dinah said. “You go to UCLA and get a library card and start looking up whatever you want to know.”

“I know that, dear,” said Veevi acidly. “The point is, I’ll need a car.”

“We’ll get you a car,” Jake answered. “But I need the material fast. Can you do it?”

Dinah looked up at him: “Go easy on her,” she seemed to say. He grabbed another handful of peanuts and Lorna came over to him, took a handful of her own, and climbed onto her father’s lap, looking at her aunt with a hatred Dinah pretended not to see.

After dinner, the Lasker children loved to go into the living room to
dance and sing and engage in a little horseplay. It was a family tradition. Dinah played the piano, Jake played show tunes on the new hi-fi system he’d brought from the studio, and Lorna and Peter invented silly dances, getting their little cousin, Coco, whom they loved and petted, to join in. Jake got out his cameras and took pictures or made home movies, ordering Dinah to place the living-room lights just so, and calling out “Action” and “Cut” and making them do several takes. They called in Gussie to join the fun and she danced with the family, picking up Coco and snapping her fingers and singing “Toot, Toot, Tootsie, Goodbye” and Nat “King” Cole’s “Keemo-Kymo,” which she’d sung to the Lasker kids when they were babies. Dinah would get up from the piano and do the time step and a soft shoe and the Charleston while Jake captured it all on film. Veevi and Claire sat on the couch and acted as the audience for these impromptu show-biz antics. They smiled at the children, but Dinah caught their sidelong glances of shared superiority and disdain. It was at such moments that Dinah was certain that Veevi disliked her and looked down on her life, and was staying with them only because she had nowhere else to go. And that, Dinah told herself, was her fault. It was her testifying that had brought this all about.