Dreams Are Not Enough (11 page)

“Is this the Cordiner place?” inquired a vaguely familiar masculine voice.

“Yes.”

“Give me Barry, will you?”

She looked at Barry.

“For you,” she said.

He got up.

“Dad?” he whispered. He listened silently, blinking, his face going white.

“Where is she?” Pause.

“We’ll be there right away.”

Hanging up, he stared at Beth.

“It’s Mom,” he said.

“She’s at Cedars.

It’s her heart. “

Beth, her lips trembling, was already opening her purse for her keys.

“No,” PD said, gripping her arm.

“Let’s not risk an accident here.

I’ll drive. “

“We’re in my car, cousin,” Maxim pointed out.

They were at the doorway. Alicia ran to turn off the stove, reaching for her blue cashmere.

“Hon,” Barry said.

“It’ll be best if you stayed home.”

Beth added in a politely placating tone, “They won’t let anyone see her except the immediate family anyway.”

The door closed on the four of them.

Odors of champagne and Mexican food surrounding her, Alicia didn’t move for a full minute. Abruptly she yanked off the soft wool sweater and began clearing the table.

Maxim and PD dropped the twins off at the bottom of the long flight of steps that fronted Cedars of Lebanon Hospital. It was after visiting hours. Alone in the elevator, Barry gripped Beth’s hand and was still holding it when they emerged.

Footsteps sounded heavily in the empty corridor. Their father came toward them, a tall, thickset man whose burly shoulders were slumped beneath a shabby car coat.

Barry couldn’t speak.

It was Beth who whispered, “How’s Mom?”

He peered at them with bloodshot, frightened eyes; the once handsome, fleshy face seemed collapsed.

“Not too good, but she’s resting.”

Beth, who had been fearing to find her mother dead, murmured.

“Thank you, God. Shima Ysroel….” Unlike Barry, Beth knew the prayers and could read and speak Hebrew—not only to please her mother but also because her mixed heritage disturbed her and she needed the structure of the sternly traditional religion.

Tim reached out hesitantly to Barry and they hugged with masculine awkwardness.

“It’s good to see you. Dad,” Barry said, choking back his desire to weep.

“Uncle Desmond’s arranged for Doctor Prinzmetal to come to see her tonight.” Myron Prinzmetal attended to the overstressed hearts of the Industry’s upper echelon.

“And I got her a private room and private nurses around the clock.” Tim voiced these extravagances with pathetic pride.

“Can we see her?” Barry asked.

They had been walking up the corridor. Tim tapped on room number

513.

A capped gray head popped out.

“No visiting right now, Mr. Cordiner.

Our girl needs her rest. “

“My son and daughter wanted to look in on her.”

“Oh, you must be Barry,” the nurse said.

“She’s been asking for you.”

Barry slipped into the dimly lit room. Clara Cordiner’s thin face looked as white as if the skull beneath were showing.

“Mom?”

Her eyes opened slowly.

“Barry… ?”

“Hi.”

“My heart….”

“Don’t try to talk, Mom,” he said, smoothing her hair.

“Doctor Prinzmetal’s on the way. He’ll patch you up.”

“Missed you….”

“And I’ve missed you, Mommy.” How long since he had called her that?

“Your school… ?” she whispered.

“Practically have a Phi Bete key in my pocket.” The still hospital air seemed to vibrate with his lie. He hadn’t even told Alicia the bad news when his self-addressed postcards had arrived with ten units of Ds and four of Incompletes.

“Mom, I sold a story. A famous literary magazine’s going to print my work.”

Clara’s white lips curved in a weak semblance of a smile, then her eyes closed.

The nurse tapped Barry’s sleeve. As he left the room, thick tears spurted. Embarrassed, he ran up the corridor to the men’s room, where he gasped out his filial remorse. When he emerged, he saw his Uncle Frank standing with his arm around his brother-in-law. Frank Zaffarano was five four, and Tim Cordiner nearly a foot taller, but the director, virile in his alpaca sport jacket, appeared the dominant figure.

Seeing Barry, Frank raised his clenched fist.

“You’re lucky we’re in a hospital, Barry. If we weren’t, I’d give you a good beating.” In his thirty years in California, Frank had lost much of the Sicilian accent of his youth, but the final syllables of his words became more lyrically inflected when he was in the midst of emotion-drenched family brouhahas like this.

“What sort of son are you, staying away from your mother?”

“Uncle Frank,” Beth murmured, “Barry came the minute Dad called.”

Frank shook his head, from which thick gray hair grew in profusion, as if bewildered by the ways of irresponsible sons.

“And where has he been all these months?”

“Barry, how’s Mom?” Beth asked.

“She spoke to me,” Barry said, trying to sound confident. Frank tapped his stocky chest.

“Seeing her son is the best cure for a mother’s heart.”

Myron Prinzmetal pronounced his patient’s condition to be serious. Tim Cordiner and his two children sat up all night in uncomfortable hospital waiting room chairs. When the doctor arrived at seven he reported that Clara’s condition had stabilized. The twins and their father returned to the tract house in Westchester.

The breakfast was like thousands of others, except that Beth, not Clara, scrambled the eggs. Barry and Tim ate, then lingered over black coffee at the kitchen table, splitting the Times, Tim reading the sports section while Barry turned to Robert Kirsch’s book review.

Despite his guilty anxieties about his mother, Barry felt more at peace than at any time since he’d left this house with Alicia.

//

“Do you think it’s a good idea for me to buy a used car?” Alicia repeated.

“What did you say, hon?” Barry’s pen stopped racing, but he continued to scan his yellow notepad.

“I’ve been thinking,” she said.

“We have enough for a down payment on a car. You won’t need to drive me to work.”

“If a car’s what you want, fine with me.”

“Can you go with me to look this weekend?”

Barry had begun to write again.

This was one of their rare evenings together: he had gone to the afternoon visiting hours at the hospital.

During the five weeks that Clara Cordiner had been at Cedars of Lebanon, Barry had spent at least two hours every day with her. On the night of her heart attack, horrified by her absolute weakness, he was convinced that if he’d been around she never would have been stricken. And he was positive that she would recover only if he dedicated himself to becoming a far better son than he’d ever been.

Clara no longer needed private nurses; she was wearing her gift bed jackets and reading her gift books, yet that slave-driving guilt brought Barry back each day. He never suggested that Alicia accompany him—after all, hadn’t their marriage quite literally broken his mother’s heart? Usually he had a bite afterward with Beth and their father and whoever in the family happened to be around.

“Barry?” Alicia said.

Frowning, he looked up.

“What?”

“Is Saturday or Sunday better for you?”

“This’ll be your car. Pick whatever you want.”

“I don’t know the first thing about motors and stuff like that, or financing.”

“I can’t spare the time,” Barry said, then softened.

“But PD has a good grasp of financing. Let me see if he’ll go with you.”

Saturday afternoon Barry went to see his mother. Alone in the apartment, Alicia peered critically in the bathroom mirror. Barry’s pointed exclusion of her at the hospital had increased her insecurity about being with his family. Would PD think her new white slacks too tight? And what about the sweater? It had come from Saks, Hap had made the selection, so it had style . yet wasn’t the royal blue garish on her, and the fit too snug over her breasts?

A firm tap sounded on the door.

“Coming, PD,” she called.

But it was Hap who stood outside.

The blood drained from her head, and she experienced the same weakness in her legs as when she had passed out picking strawberries in Oxnard.

The Central American sun had deepened Hap’s tan, and streaks of his hair were bleached to tow. Dressed in a white Oxford shirt and khaki slacks, he looked top drawer—and far too handsome. And he’d been avoiding her.

Selfconsciously wetting her lips, she bestowed a dazzling stage smile.

“Welcome home from Guatemala,” she said.

“When did you get back?”

“Two weeks ago.”

“I was expecting PD.”

“He asked me to fill in. That okay with you?”

She made another smile.

“Otherwise PD can probably do it tomorrow,” Hap said, adding, “He’s a much better bargainer than I am.”

“You took me by surprise, that’s all,” she said, reaching for her purse.

Traversing the rows of freshly waxed cars at Baumgarten’s Used Chevrolets, she decided that Hap’s easy friendliness and calm advice was proof positive that he, as opposed to her, had recovered from being in too deep.

She liked a two-tone ‘56, but the down payment was out of her range.

They drove two blocks east to Alton’s Foreign Cars.

A roly-poly salesman in a navy suit and navy shirt bounced over to them.

“Well, sir, and what can I do for you and your gorgeous little wife?”

“This is my cousin. She’s buying the car,” Hap said, explaining Alicia’s needs and price limit. They were led to a maroon Volkswagen bug with fifty-three thousand miles on the odometer. They drove around the block and Hap decided the engine seemed in good shape. In a small, airless office, he co signed the sheaf of forms. The rotund salesman told Alicia that when her loan application was approved, the VW would be hers, “—and the bank’s, hah aha

“How long will it take?” Hap asked.

“You know how banks are. Slo-o-ow.” The salesman laughed again.

“The little lady won’t have her VW until Wednesday at the earliest.”

As they left the lot, Alicia said, “I really appreciate you cosignine, Hap.”

“You’re not going to run away, are you?” he asked.

“Besides, Dad’s got you on the preferential treatment list, so you’re good for the payments.”

“Anyway, thank you.”

And then he smiled.

He hadn’t smiled since he’d picked her up. Hap didn’t go in for forced joviality like PD, or polite laughs like Beth, or a nervous baring of teeth like Barry; he was never wittily caustic like his brother Maxim, but on the other hand, he never went for hours like this without cracking a grin.

His smile had a reassuring warmth.

“You’re wearing the sweater,” he said.

“I do all the time. I love it.”

He opened the door of his MG for her. A Buick was waiting for the parking space, but he didn’t start the motor.

“When PD asked me to fill in,” he said slowly, “I almost refused.”

“Why didn’t you” -She coughed to clear the rustiness in her throat.

“Why didn’t you turn him down?”

“I wanted to see you.”

“But it’s been months. I thought….”

“What?”

“It’s nothing.”

“No, tell me.”

In the hazy March sunlight she stared at him, knowing the attraction of the magnet for the pin, and heard herself come out with the unadorned truth.

“I figured you’d been avoiding me.”

“I was.”

“Ohhh….”

“I explained, Alicia.”

“Yes, but by then you’d heard my life story. A major turnoff for anyone.”

“You sure don’t understand me very well,” Hap said. The driver of the waiting Buick honked rapidly. Hap ignored the blasts, taking her hand, twining his large fingers between hers. She began to tremble. He raised her hand, pressing their clasped knuckles against his cheek.

“You don’t understand me at all.”

On Monday Alicia was in a street scene on the Magnum back lot. In the early afternoon Hap dropped by to suggest he drive her home. Her face was hot when she phoned the apartment.

“Great!” Barry said enthusiastically.

“This way I can head right on over to Cedars.”

But Hap did not take her home. He drove along Hollywood Boulevard turning left on a side street, pulling up at Don the Beachcomber’s.

The restaurant, decorated as a Polynesian jungle with rocky nooks and a ware houseful of plants, was extremely dark, and the candlelit hurricane lamp on their table cast a glow on Hap’s face, intensifying his tan. She requested a Coke. Hap ordered a rum drink that came in a coconut shell.

“Want a sip?” he asked.

She sucked at the red cellophane straw.

“Mmm, delicious.”

“That’s why I chose it—I figured you’d like it.” He paused.

“Alicia, isn’t it lonely for you with Barry gone so much?”

“He’s swamped,” she said, defending her husband.

“There’s his studying, his work in the Student Union and his writing—I guess you heard he sold a short story to a big literary magazine? And to top it off there’s his mother’s illness.”

“I wasn’t knocking him, Alicia. Yeah, I suppose I was. So he never takes you to the hospital?”

“I’d hardly help Mrs. Cordiner’s recovery.”

“Did he tell you that?”

“Sort of,” Alicia sighed.

“He says it’d upset her and that might be dangerous.”

“You wouldn’t have to be in her room. Everybody else drops by and afterwards has dinner with him and Beth and Uncle Tim.”

The Cordiner gatherings were news to her. She said nothing.

“Why let Barry shut you out?” The knobs of Hap’s jaw showed. He’s mad at me, she thought, and immediately understood that his anger was directed not at her—or even at Barry and his parents—but at the injustice of the situation.

“He’s not really shutting me out,” she said, and changed the subject.

“I’ve been getting a lot of work. Hap, when I went to those cruddy theaters, I used to tell myself one day I’d be up there on the screen, but in my heart I knew it was a ridiculous daydream. And now look at me—I feel like Alice through the looking glass. The dream’s come true.”