Family Secrets (46 page)

EIGHT

Everett had his own business in Miami Beach that winter, his own radio repair shop. His mother had finally given in and financed him. He was still living at Papa’s house because he wasn’t making a profit yet, and to tell the truth he was afraid of being lonely in a furnished room. The thought of renting and furnishing an entire apartment terrified him. Now that he had finished college and was a working man Papa and Etta treated him differently. No longer was anyone responsible to see that he studied and did not flunk out. He could go and come as he pleased, using the demands of his work as an excuse. They also assumed he was dating girls. He wasn’t.

It wasn’t for lack of desire; it was for lack of courage. Girls sometimes brought their radios into the shop for repair, but Everett always found something wrong with the girl—her teeth were funny, her eyes were funny—because he was afraid she would reject him. He had hired a woman to answer the phone and take care of the place while he was out on house calls, a large, motherly woman named Lorraine, whom the employment agency had sent, and he didn’t like the idea of her watching him talk to the girls who sometimes came in. He was afraid Lorraine wanted him to be suave and make out, and this made him all the more tongue-tied. Sometimes he fantasized that Lorraine was in love with him. Big fat cow! She was probably alone and frustrated, dying to invite him to her apartment for a drink and drag him down on the sofa.

When Lorraine said she was leaving to take care of her sick sister, Everett wasn’t at all disappointed. He didn’t like having a substitute mother sitting there all day spying on him. He decided not to accept anyone the employment agency sent this time unless she was younger than he was.

They sent a blonde girl named Frances Riley, “Frankie.” She looked athletic and told him she was twenty-one and came from Vermont. She liked Florida but hated the beach. Her skin was paper white and paper thin, the sort that would probably get red in the sun and was already dry so that it crinkled around her blue eyes when she smiled. She had a smart, shrewd face and slightly crooked teeth, and a crisp Eastern accent that sounded a lot better to him than the drawl he was used to and had started affecting himself.

“How come you left Vermont?” he asked her.

“I like adventure. I’m just moving on.”

A twenty-one-year-old-girl with the courage to move on interested him. Her clothes were shabby and he figured she had been on her own for quite a while.

“Did you go to college?” he asked her.

“Do you think I’d be working here if I did?”

“Why not?” Everett asked, insulted. “My last operator was a college graduate.”

“Well, she left, didn’t she?”

He noticed with satisfaction that her blonde hair had black roots. “You need a new dye job if you’re going to work here,” he told her.

“Then advance me my salary if you’re so smart,” she said.

“I thought you did it yourself.”

“Are you kidding?”

She was his employee and she didn’t scare him a bit. He even thought she was rather pretty. He liked her straight nose and the way everything about her was so goyish: no ass, and flat-chested, and those muscles in her calves, nothing full-blown or ripe about her, just kind of skinny and mean and tough.

“Where do you live?” he asked her.

“With a bunch of stewardesses.”

He couldn’t picture Frankie Riley living with a bunch of stewardesses; she was so casual and they were all so neat and trim and perfect. She glanced at him and seemed to know what he was thinking. Her thin penciled eyebrows drew together in annoyance. “It’s cheap, and they’re never there,” she said.

“How come you never became a stewardess?”

“Because you always have to be somewhere when they want you to. You get calls in the middle of the night to be on some plane because the regular girl is sick. Who needs that?”

“I thought you liked adventure.”

“My kind,” Frankie said. “Not somebody else’s kind.”

“How would you like to go to dinner with me?” Everett said. The words popped out before he realized he had said them, and then he was pleased with himself. Why not? He was the boss, she ought to be flattered.

She looked him over. “Okay,” she said.

Frankie Riley was Everett Bergman’s first date. He was twenty-three years old and she was the first girl he had ever felt comfortable with except for his jerky little cousin Paris, who didn’t count as a girl anyway even though he necked with her sometimes when he was desperate. He took Frankie to Howard Johnson’s, the one that had booths and tables in back at night, and he bought her fried clams and six scotch and sodas. He had only one scotch and soda because he didn’t drink very well, and after dinner he drove her along the beach until he got to his favorite place, the one where there were no houses and no people, and he tried to kiss her.

“I don’t kiss men on the first date,” she said.

He was disappointed because he was hoping she was drunk. She plucked his hand off her shoulder and he noticed that her little hand was very strong. She removed his other hand from her knee and smoothed her pastel cotton dress. For a moment Everett thought of getting tough with her and forcing her, the way he did with Paris, and then he realized you didn’t do that with girls on a date, at least not if you ever expected to see them again.

“Okay,” he said to her. “I respect that.”

“Good.”

“I guess I’ll drive you home now. Show me where.”

She lived in a pea green stucco house that reminded him of the one where he’d spent that terrible night when he’d run away. It seemed very long ago now, but still too close not to make him feel sick about it. Frankie didn’t seem like a girl who would ever be lonely. She could take care of herself. She got out of the car and didn’t ask him in. She gave him a little half-salute with her hand like a soldier, smiled her crooked smile, and headed for the door.

“Don’t be late tomorrow,” he called after her.

“You neither. Don’t cruise around all night.”

Cruise around all night! She thought he was going to get his rocks off by picking up another girl! The thought made him feel so good that he whistled all the way home. He wondered what she did on the second date. He fantasized about her and he really wanted her. He had started thinking about her as very desirable. He wanted to get his hands on that boyish body, to make her shrewd little face turn soft for him. He wished he knew more. He’d read every sex book he could get his hands on, and dirty books too, but that wasn’t the same as doing it. If he could just get his hands on Frankie he would do every last thing he’d read about in the marriage manuals, from A to Z. Before he turned into his driveway he turned the car around and drove over to the all-night drugstore and bought a package of condoms, just in case, feeling very proud when he asked the clerk for them.

Frankie wouldn’t let him kiss her until the fifth date and then she wouldn’t open her mouth. She was efficient in the office, and every time Everett asked her out she went with him, but the condoms remained unused and drying up in his wallet. Whenever he tried to touch her body she pried his hands off. He kept a blanket in the trunk of his car just in case some night he’d be able to talk her into going on his deserted stretch of beach with him under the stars, and he even kept a pint of whiskey there too, but she never would set one foot outside his car except to go home and he’d be damned if he was going to waste his seduction whiskey on her if she wasn’t. As for getting her to do anything in the car, that was hopeless. He was strong, but she was just as strong as he was.

“I studied judo,” she said, “so don’t start with me.”

“Why would you study judo?”

“To keep off guys like you.”

“Don’t you like me?”

“Sure I like you,” she said. “I’m just not that kind of a girl. I know you’re rich and I’m poor, so you think I’m easy. Well, I’m not.”

“I never thought you were easy,” Everett said. “You’re about as sexy as a buzz saw.”

“Thanks a lot.”

“Well, after all, I’m not a monster, am I?”

“I don’t have to go to bed with you to prove you’re not a monster. Poor, poor little Everett. Ums thinks ums a monster, so ums wants to cuddle and feel reassured. Don’t think I haven’t heard that line before.”

“Are you a virgin?”

“Yes.”

“Isn’t that a little outdated?” he said.

“Oh, come off it.”

“None of the girls I know are virgins,” Everett said.

“Then why do you waste your time with me when you could be with them?”

“I sort of like you. You’re like a little sister.”

“If I’m nothing but a sister to you then I think I’ll quit this job and be moving on.”

“You’re kidding, aren’t you?” Everett said. He suddenly realized he would miss her if she left.

“No, I’m not kidding.”

“Well, I was kidding. You’re not like my little sister. I think you’re all girl.”

“Good. Then I’ll stay a while. Let’s go bowling.”

“I don’t know how,” Everett said.

“I’ll teach you. It’s fun. I won three trophies in high school; my team did anyway. I was captain.”

He took her to the Bowladrome and in between games he bought her six paper cups of scotch and soda. She still bowled better than he did, but he was really terrible. Most of the balls he tried to roll down the alley wiggled away at a crawl and died against the side before they got near the pins. Everett was glad he had money in his pocket because at least that showed he was a man even if he couldn’t bowl. He stood there chain-smoking cigarettes and watching Frankie destroy him.

“Come on,” he said. “I’m bored, let’s go for a ride.”

She shrugged and followed him out to his car. He drove her to the fancy section of Miami Beach where he lived with Papa and Etta. He had never taken Frankie there before because there was simply no reason to; they always went out somewhere and he dropped her off at her house. She had no idea where he lived, or how. He stopped in front of the house. Papa had put floodlights in the garden in front of the house, illuminating the graceful giant palms and all the carefully tended foliage. There were lights on in the house and it looked enormous. The street was very quiet and peaceful, safe, the rich people protected behind thick walls. There was a nearly full moon and the whole thing looked like something out of a Hollywood movie.

“This is where I live,” Everett said to her.

“Here?”

“Yes. It’s my grandfather’s house.”

“
Jee
sus!”

“Nice, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, I’d say so.”

“It’s nothing compared to the little place we have in Connecticut. Fifty-five acres. Lake, waterfall, lagoon, river, and we’re going to build a swimming pool. Everybody has their own house.”

“Who’s everybody?”

“My parents and some aunts and uncles.”

“You mean it’s like a ranch or something,” she said.

“More like a little town.”

“Wow,” Frankie said.

“And we have a tennis court, and woods, and there are a lot of horses in the field but they don’t belong to us.”

“Do you ride?” she asked.

“Nope.”

“You play tennis?”

“No.”

“Boy, what a waste.”

“I shoot, though.”

“Shoot what?”

“Guns. In the woods. At targets.”

“Are you good?”

“Pretty good.”

“I hate people who kill living things,” Frankie said.

“I don’t kill living things.”

“Good. I’d hate you if you did.”

“Well, I don’t.”

“I don’t know why you want to live here when you could live there,” she said.

“It’s boring there,” Everett said.

“It wouldn’t bore me.”

“Yes it would.”

She sighed and chewed at a nail. He glanced at her from the corner of her eye. Let her eat her heart out. He knew he had something that she didn’t have, that she’d never had and maybe never would have, and that was money. Well, maybe it wasn’t his money, it was his parents’, but still he had some of it. And that made him feel warm and comfortable with her.

A man had to be better than the woman and a man had to be the boss. But Frankie was tough, and Everett liked that. If she just wouldn’t be so insistent on being a nice girl it would make life a lot easier for him. He’d told her a million times that he would respect her anyway and she’d said that she didn’t care, what about the next guy? It made him feel insignificant that she thought of him as only a way station on her life of dating; it was insulting. She ought to be after him. What he really ought to do, Everett thought, was go out with another girl. But he didn’t know another girl. Even though he saw Frankie a good part of the day at work and then almost every night, he never got tired of her. Everything about Frankie was alien to him, and Everett liked that. She was just the kind of girl his parents would hate.

NINE

That winter Nicole and Basil were married, in a simple ceremony in New York, attended by the groom’s immediate family. The bride did not have family in America. Basil had thought it might be nice to have a spring garden wedding at Windflower, but Nicole did not want to wait. Besides, she told him, they were going to Europe for their honeymoon and only tourists and fools went to Europe in the tourist season, and of course since he was marrying her he would see Europe the way the natives did. They would go to London and Paris, spend a month traveling all over France, and go to Monte Carlo and the Riviera. Andrew was not pleased that Basil was going to spend so long away from the office, leaving the burden of work on him and Papa, but it was good that Basil was getting married at last, not that Andrew liked Nicole. He thought she was awful, and couldn’t imagine what his brother saw in her. Cassie was tiny and pretty and charming, but Nicole was huge and loud and went out of her way to insult people. It gave Andrew a headache when Nicole was in the room. He withdrew into the corner and looked at her out of his soft eyes, wondering how two brothers from the same home could have such different taste in women.

Nicole was not family. “Poor Basil,” Lavinia said. “She’ll give him a hard time.” Now that Basil had gotten his punishment, a lifetime contract with someone who would torture him, Lavinia had her revenge, and along with it the guilt, and so she had decided that her brother was a saint. “He’s so good to her, he waits on her hand and foot. He’s such a good, kind person,” Lavinia said in her vehement, clipped, schoolteacher tone, the one she used when reciting the list of wrongs inflicted on a member of the family, or good deeds performed by same. It was as if she knew her words would fly up to heaven to be written in the Holy Book, and wanted to be sure God spelled everything right.