Family Secrets (63 page)

There were complaints. Richie finally made Gilda buy curtains. He studied hard, and when he and Gilda returned home for Thanksgiving, he refused to answer any questions put to him by his parents. His whole demeanor was serious and deeply religious. Since Richie had always been silent, no one tried too hard to make him talk about his new call to the religious life. Hazel was confused and Herman was disappointed. Herman would have been able to reconcile himself to the idea of his son as a rabbi, although it seemed a waste, but such a religious nut? Richie had always been religious, but this was too much. Some of the things they did at that school Herman had never even heard of before.

“I’d like a grandchild,” Hazel said to Gilda. “So, when?”

“We’re going to have at least six children,” Gilda said sincerely, and while she was in Miami Beach she took the opportunity to go to the drugstore and renew her supply of birth control pills. The school was adamantly against birth control of any kind, and if she’d gone to the local drugstore the community would have found out about it and had her head on a platter.

“You’re not going to be able to support six children on what a rabbi makes,” Herman told Richie.

“You know I’m rich.”

“Somebody’s going to have to handle the business. I won’t be here forever. You can’t just leave it. Everything I did, I did for you.”

“I feel my spiritual life comes first,” Richie said.

Herman rearranged some of his business affairs so that Richie would have to pay a minimal amount of attention to them and the income would still come pouring in. He hoped they didn’t teach them at that school to give everything away like in some of those nutty priest schools. He put everything in trust so that Richie could enjoy his income but not dip into the principal and dispose of it. Oh, what a thankless son to grieve his father so! It was one thing to tell his friends that his son the lawyer was studying to be a rabbi now, but what kind of a rabbi? What kind of a school was that? Gilda chattered on, laughing, about the things they made them do at the school and Herman felt sick. He didn’t understand his son at all. What kind of wife would Gilda make for an Orthodox rabbi? A chorus girl she looked like, not a rebbetzin.

Richie was happy in his marriage and content at the school. He had always enjoyed studying and learning new things. Gilda was his best friend and he always liked being with her. He was never lonely any more. Whenever she did anything outrageous he loved it because it was something he would have liked to do if he had thought of it but would never have dared to do even if he had. She was the only person who could make him laugh. She never shocked him. When the religious community got together and Gilda made some faux pas, as she invariably did, Richie couldn’t look at her, not because he was embarrassed but because he knew she was holding in her giggles and if he looked at her she would make him giggle too. She was so alive. He wanted to give her the world.

John was at school too, settled in. He had made many friends and was a natural leader. He hated to study. His grandmother had told him that she hated to study when she was a little girl, and his father had told him that he had hated schoolwork too, so John knew it ran in the family. When he applied himself, which he did if the subject interested him, he did very well. The headmaster said his tests showed that he was brilliant, but his behavior showed that he was lazy. John still thought that when he grew up he would work in the shop with his father, and since his father would teach him everything he needed to know, what difference did it make if he didn’t study hard at school? On the other hand, his father shouldn’t have sent him away. Maybe he didn’t want to work in TV repair with his father after all. Maybe he would be a scientist, and discover something like a cure for cancer, or maybe he’d be a famous lawyer like Perry Mason on TV. He might even be a school teacher, like Stan, his adviser, whom John liked very much. Stan was only twenty-nine, and he was handsome and athletic and nice. He wasn’t at all like those dried-up old ladies John had had for teachers in school before. Stan taught English and football. John liked football because the younger boys like himself played touch football and you didn’t have to hurt anybody, and he was a good player. He had always disliked English, but with Stan teaching it he tried hard and realized he was good with words. He found it easy to write a story or a composition and he got good marks. Maybe he could even be a writer like his cousin Paris. There were a lot of good things to do instead of staying in the TV repair shop with his father. When he grew up he wouldn’t need his father. He would have better friends.

They had all kinds of awful rules at his school which John and the other boys found ingenious ways to avoid. You had to get up at a quarter to seven in the morning and take a cold shower. All the boys turned on the showers, threw water on the floor, wet their towels and their hair, and avoided bathing altogether. You had to eat everything on your plate before you could leave the dining room, so the boys simply filled their napkins with whatever they disliked, put the napkins into their pockets, and disposed of them down the toilet after dinner. If it was too big to go down the toilet you could bury it. You had to spend two hours in the library doing homework every night, but any boy knew that you could put your favorite magazine into your school book and read that instead until the time was up.

The younger boys like John slept in a big dormitory, and the older ones had rooms of their own with a roommate. All the boys in John’s dorm wanted to be his roommate for later. John thought it was too bad that the boys couldn’t live with the teachers and their families instead. He would have liked to live with Stan, who had a pretty wife and a baby girl. They would have been just like a family. He wasn’t really jealous of Stan’s wife either, because she was always so nice to him. Sometimes Stan invited some of the boys he advised to come to his house for Sunday dinner, which was at noon. John really loved that. At those times he was sure that he would rather be a teacher than anything. You could live in a nice little house and have a pretty wife and a cute baby and invite lots of kids to come and visit. He had never lived in a house like that before, where everyone was so calm and so sweet to each other.

On weekends John went home to stay with his father, who took him places with him. They went to the store to buy things his father wanted, and they went to the grocery to buy food for breakfast, and they went to restaurants for their other meals. Sometimes they went to a movie. His father didn’t seem to have any friends. He didn’t like to play baseball or any other sport either. John told his father about sports and his father told him about fixing things. Most of the time they just sat in the house and watched television. They never saw Aunt Hazel and Uncle Herman, even though they lived right there in Miami Beach. John didn’t mind; he didn’t feel he knew them at all. He wondered if his father went out with any ladies during the week when he was at school, and if he was going to get married again. He supposed it wasn’t fair to hope that his father would never marry anybody, because his father was all alone, but he was relieved that his father never called any ladies when he was around and none ever called him. His father never introduced him to any girlfriends of his either, so maybe he didn’t have any. One of the boys at school, whose father had been married twice, told John that they dragged you places with the future wife so you would get to know her before they made her your stepmother. He said any fool could tell who was going to be his future stepmother because she was always around and made a big fuss over you and sat through baseball games with you and your father. John couldn’t imagine his own father ever doing anything like that. His father had never taken him to a ballgame in his life, and as long as some lady didn’t come along to start them going to ballgames he knew he was safe.

In New York that winter Buffy was training seriously to be a runner. She bought track magazines, and her gym teacher told her that there was a good track at Columbia where they sometimes let people practice even thought they weren’t students. She took the bus up there every day after school, telling her mother she was going to a friend’s house. She was thirteen, and all the girls went to each other’s houses after school, gossiping and playing records and talking about boys. Except Buffy; she went to Columbia and ran around the track. She had bought the proper track shoes and a track suit for cold weather. She was the youngest person there, and the older kids, who seemed to be all boys, treated her as a kind of mascot. During rest breaks some of the older boys talked to her and told her things she wanted to know about training, and about where she should go to college. She also learned there was no such thing as professional. Professional was a dirty word. You were an Amateur runner, and you tried to compete in the Nationals. Naturally everyone’s dream was to be in the Olympics, but you had to be trained for that all your life, and Buffy’s parents weren’t going to get her a trainer and she couldn’t do it by herself. If she got into the Nationals, she could travel. You could go all over the world to compete in meets if you were a winner. It was the best life she could think of.

On Saturday mornings her parents made her go to Sunday school, and Saturday afternoons she had to go to the Youth Group, where you had planned, supervised activities with boys your age. Most of the time Buffy didn’t go; she started out from her parents’ apartment and then just went right up to Columbia. If her parents saw the cute boys there, compared to the creepy, pimply-faced boys her age in the Youth Group, they certainly wouldn’t think she was a social misfit. Not that any of those older boys ever considered her anything but another ambitious runner. But Buffy wasn’t interested in boys yet anyway. Running was her whole life. It was the only way she could think of to get what she wanted. She didn’t want to grow up like her parents. It was all right for them, they seemed to like it, but she felt sorry for them. They never went anywhere, never did anything, and her mother didn’t even have a job. Buffy couldn’t see how they could be happy. Maybe older people had to compromise because when they were growing up they had been taught to do a certain thing and they didn’t know anything else. She was being taught to do a certain thing too, but she didn’t intend to do it. She was different. She thought for herself.

Three months before Richie was to be ordained as an Orthodox rabbi he turned twenty-six. He was no longer eligible to be drafted. He told the school that he had decided he didn’t really have the calling after all, and he and Gilda packed up and left. They went to Europe for six months, traveling with knapsacks on their backs. He told his parents that when he came back he would settle down to work. They didn’t mind; after all, it was such a relief that he had come to his senses again. The only thing they couldn’t figure out was why he and Gilda wanted to travel around like two hippies. Richie could afford to go first class. When had his parents ever denied him anything? It was that Gilda. She came from poverty, she was a hippie, and she didn’t know any better. She had influenced him.

“Next time we’ll go the conventional way,” Richie told Gilda. “But this time I want to see the country like the people do.”

That was fine with her.

THIRTEEN

Adam Saffron was eighty-six, and he was beginning to feel like an old man. On his eightieth birthday the family had given him a big party, and he had enjoyed it. Father’s Day, too, had always been an occasion, with a huge dinner and a cake and someone taking photos for the family albums. But during the last few years he had felt the motor running more slowly. He didn’t want a big birthday party, he didn’t feel up to a Father’s Day celebration; just his family around him was enough. Now he didn’t go to the office every day; he went for only a few hours each day in the winter and in the summer he hardly went at all. Once a week, perhaps, the appearance of Adam Saffron would cause the buzzing among the employees that the arrival of a visiting dignitary would. He would see that everything was all right, have lunch with the boys, and go home. He was tired, and content to rest, although he still kept control of everything, had reports, knew what was going on. He was glad that Andrew and Basil were so good in the business. He wondered which of the younger generation would follow them.

Not Everett, he was hopeless. Everyone had known at the start that Everett had no head for business, and no interest in it. Not Richie; he was off on some trip again, making up for the childhood he had never had. The solemn little old man he was at thirteen was now in his twenties (Adam could never remember exactly how old any of them were) and had turned into a child. Fun and adventure was all he thought about. Well, he would just have to grow up more slowly than the others. Then there were Andrew’s boys, Chris and Paul. Chris had been serving his apprenticeship working for a friend of Adam’s, learning real estate. The man was shrewd, and Chris was learning well. Adam did not believe in paying people to learn, especially not family. It made for ill will. Let Chris start elsewhere, not exactly at the bottom, mind you, and serve his time, and then when he had learned all he had to know he could come into the business and work alongside his father as a young contributor, not someone who got the job as a favor.

Chris enjoyed real estate, and loved competition. As a little boy he had been an athlete, and still was, but the competitive spirit he had shown in sports he now transferred to business deals. He had a good head on him. As for Paul, his younger brother, he was willing but reluctant to come into the business. His interests lay elsewhere. No one, even Paul, knew for sure where they were. Perhaps the stock market? He seemed to like that the best, and was working for a Wall Street firm. There was nothing wrong with that, Adam thought. It was good to have a stockbroker in the family. The main thing was to do something well. As long as someone in the family had his hand in the business and the employees were well chosen, intelligent, and faithful, the business could run. It was no longer necessary for Adam to watch every detail. Andrew and Basil had learned everything. They weren’t what he had been, but he was tired now and not about to get upset about it. There had been a time when his skill and foresight had been indispensable; now they were a good thing to have but the world would not collapse without them. He could relax and leave the main part of the business to the boys.