Family Secrets (57 page)

By the summer of 1956, when John was three, Frankie realized that not only would her plan never come true but fate had been even nastier than she had imagined. She was still the outsider. But John, her son, also son of Everett and great-grandson of Adam, was an insider. He was totally absorbed into the family, totally theirs. They resented her as if she were a kind of inferior nursemaid.

“John doesn’t need steak,” Frankie would snap at the cook. “He can eat weiners.”

“John will eat steak like the rest of us,” Melissa would say firmly.

Frankie gave John a crew cut so he would look masculine. The family protested. “He has such lovely hair,” Melissa said. “Why can’t you let it grow? You could part it on the side.”

“My son is going to grow up to be a real man,” Frankie would snarl. How they annoyed her!

She wanted John to learn to swim as soon as possible. In Florida the children started taking swimming lessons as young as two, because many people had swimming pools and they didn’t want their kids to fall in and drown. Frankie took John to the pool at Windflower every morning and threw him in. He screamed and cried with fear and hatred of the icy cold water. Why was he screaming so? He had his life jacket on. Frankie would stand at one end of the pool—the short side of the shallow end, she wasn’t a murderess, after all—and force him to swim to her. He had no other recourse. She wouldn’t let him out. He would scream with fear until he was hysterical, but he would be dog paddling too, and he would finally make it. The family was very upset. They told her to stop, she was cruel, he was too young.

“My son is going to learn to swim,” Frankie would snap at them. She would show them, she would make her son a real person, better, not a spoiled rich sissy like his father.

When John finally learned how to swim and actually began to enjoy it, Frankie began teaching him how to dive. He feared diving as much as he had feared swimming, but she forced him, making him kneel at the edge of the pool, head down, arms stiffly straight parallel to his ears, and then roll him in. He was going to be the best swimmer in the family, she would see to that.

He was going to have a lovely little body. Already he had small round muscles in his legs and arms although he was born skinny and would stay that way. He had lovely smooth skin with blondish down on it, thick dark eyelashes, and a mischievous grin. He was a tease. He liked to run full tilt at some member of the family, his little almost-shaved head like a bullet, and ram his head into the grownup’s stomach. Standing there, knowing he was going to have the breath knocked out of him by this child, the hapless victim would have only one other recourse: to dodge aside at the last minute and let John crash himself into the wall. He was running so fast he couldn’t stop, so sure that the victim would not escape, and the victim chose to be victimized instead of escaping, because you couldn’t let a child give himself a concussion.

John was always active. And how he could eat! He never spit up any more. He ran around all day and then ate as much as the grownups at dinner. They let him sit at the dinner table with them, which Frankie did not approve of. They took him to restaurants with the family on the cook’s night off, and they let him run around the room and get under the table to bite people’s legs. He could do anything he wanted to. Frankie hit him. She spanked him and slapped him and yelled at him, but all he would do was cry and shut himself into the bathroom while the family yelled at her, telling her how mean she was, such a strict mother, so unfeeling.

“You love your mother, don’t you, John?” Frankie would say whenever she knew they were listening. “You’ll never leave me, will you? When I’m old, you’ll make a lot of money and take care of me, won’t you?”

John loved her. He would do anything she told him to. From someone, certainly not her, certainly not his father, he had a kind and gentle spirit. He could knock the breath out of an aunt or uncle or cousin, but if that same person hurt a toe John would get right down on the floor to kiss it, tears in his eyes. He kissed cuts and sores and bee stings, looking as pained as the people who had them.

“Such compassion,” Lavinia marveled.

“Maybe he’ll be a doctor like Lazarus,” Melissa said.

A doctor wouldn’t be bad, Frankie thought. Or a lawyer, or maybe an architect … But she would let him be what he wanted to be, not what they wanted him to be. She couldn’t stand the way they had taken him over, but she would have been able to stand it if they had not taken him in so completely while still keeping her out. She was nothing to them, the vessel. Crack the mold, who needs it any more? She would fix them. When he got older, John was going to go to church.

In the meantime, Everett would dump her and John at Windflower, stay a few days, and then scurry back to Florida, claiming he couldn’t be away from his business. He had hired another girl to take her place. She had to stay home with the kid now. She could hardly wait until John was old enough to go to school and be off her neck. She hated to sit in the house. At Windflower they all wanted to take care of him and fuss over him, and sometimes she let them. Now they were all marveling how John swam like a fish, such a little fellow, and loves the water so he won’t get out until he turns blue. Yet at the beginning of the summer they were all calling her cruel. Did they ever give her credit, say how clever she was for teaching him to swim? Not them. She was stuck here for the whole summer. Everett said it was the least he could do for his mother. Who cared about her, Frankie? She was supposed to be grateful to be stuck here with nothing to do, no place to go, waited on by maids.

She drank all day.

By afternoon Frankie was always drunk now, and by dinnertime she would be in a rage at John, smacking him, picking on him, not because he was any more naughty than any other child but because he was an insider and she was an outsider and she had been cheated. He was supposed to help her, not ruin her chances. Before, they had just resented her because she was a stranger, but now they resented her because they had the bad luck to have her come along in the package deal with John. Everett telephoned long distance every night. Money meant nothing to him, as long as he was spending it on himself. He had had the decency to leave her the car and fly back. She sometimes took John on a ride to the Westchester County Airport and let him watch the small planes land and take off. He liked that. There was a small snack bar at the airport and Frankie could sit there and drink beer while the kid watched his planes. Buffy wanted to come too, and Frankie would have been glad to take her, but Rosemary said no.

“I’m not letting her take
my
child in a car,” Rosemary would say. “You can smell liquor on her breath.”

Frankie knew Rosemary better than that. She wouldn’t let Frankie take her child anywhere, drunk or sober. Buffy was Rosemary and Jack’s property. Frankie had never seen a family with such jealous ownership of their children. Had they all gotten together and decided to have just one apiece? It was really funny how they had arranged that, building their houses with just the right number of rooms and having just the right number of children to fit into them. They were so precise, they planned everything, no moment just happened for them. Even Paris had everything planned. Every morning she got up at the crack of dawn to commute into New York on the train with Lazarus, she went to her job, and then she came back with Lazarus in time for dinner, and then at night she stayed in her room with the typewriter going tap-tap-tap. You’d think she came from a poor family, you’d think they were starving, the way she worked so hard when she didn’t have to. In a way, Frankie admired her. At least she had a goal that meant something. Maybe she’d never get what she wanted, but at least she was trying hard as hell to get it.

EIGHT

Paris was not commuting with Lazarus because she liked him; she was taking the same train because someone (usually her father) had to drive them to the station and there could be only one trip. Lazarus arose at five because it took him so long to get ready. He had to shave twice, with an old-fashioned straight razor, to be sure no trace of shadow remained on his perfect face. His hot shower took a certain number of minutes, and then his cold shower a certain number of minutes, and he never deviated. He had to consume his enormous breakfast, chewing slowly the prescribed number of times. As he grew older he was slower. He insisted on being at his office at nine o’clock, and as it was in Brooklyn he had to take the train and then the subway, so he had to catch the seven-fifty-eight. To catch the seven-fifty-eight they had to leave the house at seven-thirty. So Paris had to get up at six-thirty, which she detested, and then she always got to her office by eight-thirty, the train being an express, and the doors were locked until nine. She was not given a key to the office, not being an executive, so she would wait in the coffee shop downstairs, cursing all of them and wishing she were still in her cool bed asleep. Lazarus made her so mad that she wouldn’t even sit in the same car of the train with him. When they got to the station Paris would make a beeline for the smoking car. Lazarus hated smoke and gave long lectures on the hazards of that filthy habit tobacco. Paris didn’t smoke herself, but she would rather breathe in the foul air than sit next to the villain who made her get up at half-past-six in the morning when the thing she hated most in the world, had always hated most, was getting up early.

For years Aunt Melissa had pleaded with Lazarus to get an office in New York, closer to their hotel, closer to the country, but Lazarus couldn’t; his old patients were all in that Brooklyn slum, they needed him, they knew him, and he needed them. He was too old to start over. Why then, Aunt Melissa would ask, didn’t he retire? He wouldn’t think of it.

Paris’ office let her out at five o’clock. She would dart out the minute the hands of the clock hit the hour and run all the way to Grand Central Station because she and Lazarus always took the five-twenty-nine express. In the summer she didn’t have drinks with friends after work. If she didn’t take the train with Lazarus she wouldn’t have her free ride from the station, and a taxi cost a dollar and a half. She was now making sixty-four dollars a week take-home pay after taxes. Every penny of that except for meager diet lunches went into the bank. Money meant escape. Besides, as long as she was going to have to be in the country she might as well enjoy it. It was nice to be where everything was so green, so cool, where it smelled so fresh and a sunset was a sight worth watching. She would lie on the cool thick grass before dinner and look at the hills and trees she remembered from so many summers and she would be filled with a mixture of love and hate—love because of the beauty, hate because of always feeling trapped here and so lonely. The beauty of Windflower only made the loneliness worse. This was a place where you should be with a lover, with friends, looking at the water and the graceful hills and being happy together. To lie here alone and watch the sky or sit on the hill and watch the riderless horses frolicking in the lower field was sad.

Lazarus (Paris no longer called him “Uncle” because they were both working adults) always found a discarded newspaper on the seat of the train and brought it to Windflower in triumph. He was so weird. Look what this place cost him, and then he was so happy to get a five-cent newspaper free. He never let anyone touch it until he was finished. There was always a paper in the house which Paris’ father had bought, so she didn’t care. She could read that one.

Nothing disturbed the rhythm of their summer days until the scandal, and even then there were those who tried to pretend it had never existed. One day the butcher in town told Aunt Melissa and Etta that Henny, Etta’s cook, and her daughters, if indeed they were all her daughters, had been running a successful and well-known whorehouse in town during the winters when Grandpa and Etta were in Florida. “They been giving it away free anyhow,” Henny had said philosophically, her cigarette bobbing from her upper lip, “so might as well get paid for it.”

Adam Saffron’s cook the madam of a whorehouse! Etta didn’t know what to do. A good cook was hard to find nowadays, big salary or not, and how could she get along without Henny? She was used to Henny. Henny was used to her, to the house, to Papa’s ways. After all, so what if the butcher knew, and therefore also the grocer and the baker and the candlestick maker and God knew who else? They were only tradespeople. Who would they tell? The Saffron family had no friends in this town. Who were the clients of Henny’s alleged whorehouse anyway: help, butlers, chauffeurs, subservients? No one knew them socially. They wouldn’t tell the people they worked for. It was best, Etta finally decided, to pretend she hadn’t heard about it at all. Let Henny do what she pleased during the winters. In the summer she was still the superb cook, and her daughters slunk around the house in shapeless uniforms and house slippers, looking highly unlike courtesans or ladies of the evening. Maybe these were the ugly daughters, and the sexy ones were still working at the whorehouse? Or maybe the whorehouse shut down during the summers? Henny wouldn’t let a profitable business operation go on without her personal supervision. No, Etta pretended it was all a lie. And Aunt Melissa (and Paris’ mother, whom she had told instantly) also said it was a lie. “A damned lie!” Paris’ mother said, rising to the defense of her family, whose help were of the highest moral caliber.

Then why did Maurice, Grandpa’s fat colored chauffeur, give Henny those knowing looks, and she give them back, as if they had outwitted the enemy? “What looks?” said Etta. Her son, Stanley, and his wife and two children were visiting for the weekend, and tonight Etta was having all the Windflower relatives over for dinner. Who else but Henny could or would make dinner for eighteen people without protest?

And besides, Etta said, and they all agreed, the final truth: Who cares what “they” do?

Paris hoped it was true. She would have loved a scandal. It would have been so much more interesting than life usually was here. She was still in love with her married writer, and he with her. Since she was a virtual prisoner here at Windflower every night, and he had a wife, it was convenient for both of them to confine their affair to lunchtime trysts. He telephoned her every day, even weekends when she was at home with her parents. Her parents didn’t scare him. He felt he was a friend of hers, which he was, and therefore perfectly free to call whenever he wanted to talk to her.