Family Secrets (66 page)

There was no problem of where to sleep. Rooms were not assigned except to the regulars. The others could sleep where they fell.

“A house should be used,” Paris said to Rima. “People should enjoy this place.”

“Yes, but are we enjoying it?” Rima asked.

“I suppose so. What else is there?”

“I always see myself washing those millions of dishes.”

“Then we’ll get paper plates.”

The next summer there were less people, but the rooms were all used. It was important to fill all the bedrooms. There had been too many wasted years, too many memories of lonely summers, too much to make up for. The family still stayed away from The Big House, but now for a different reason than when it had been empty. Now it was too full. Only Jonah walked over in the evening, after he and Lavinia and Melissa and Lazarus had finished dinner and Paris and her company were still having before-dinner cocktails. Jonah liked the liveliness in the house. He thought most of Paris’ friends were strange, but at least she seemed to be having a good time, and that was good. He saw now how sad and lonely she had been all those years, wandering around Windflower alone, and he regretted it. But who had known at the time that it wasn’t such a good idea? Who knew she had wanted company? They had thought the family was enough. Now he saw her surrounded by all her strange friends and he wondered if she was happy. He doubted it. But still, it was better than it had been before, and he was glad to be able to report to Lavinia with perfect honesty that there was no hanky-panky going on at The Big House, no matter what the nasty rumors were, and no, he hadn’t had a drink, just something nice and mild Rima had made for him with tomato juice, called a Bloody Mary.

Sometimes Paris wondered what drew her back, summer weekend after summer weekend, to Windflower, when really she hated it. It was too filled with unhappy memories, and whenever she dared to come alone during the week, to stay a few days and write, her mother came over and hovered, driving her crazy. Her mother nagged her to have dinner at the Mendes-Bergman house, as it was incomprehensible that Paris would want to eat alone, and that meant the evening too. And of course her parents walked her home, with so many admonitions from her mother that Paris ended up locking all the windows and leaping up at any odd sound. There were other places she could go on summer weekends. People she knew had rented houses at East Hampton and said they loved it, invited her to visit. She could have rented her own house. After the first summer her parents were overcome with guilt at the idea of Paris having to pay rent to live on her own family’s estate, so they paid the corporation her share as well as their own. Her mother wanted her to stay. “If Paris goes,” she would threaten, “then I’ll go.” But Paris knew that wasn’t true. Her mother had stayed when she had been in Europe, in California. They always knew she would come back. Why did she come back?

Did she stay on because this was a beautiful place, convenient to New York, and it was free? She wasn’t that cheap. You didn’t pay in money, but you paid in other ways, emotionally, and besides, it was costing her a fortune to feed all those freeloaders and keep them supplied with wine and vodka.

Windflower intimidated her boyfriends. Whenever she was involved with a young man he always wanted her to stay in the city with him, he wanted to call the shots, and she cajoled and begged and nagged until he agreed to come to Windflower instead. Her boyfriends didn’t like to be with so many people; they hardly ever saw her alone. They felt kept. They were usually unsuccessful writers, so-so actors, all struggling, all uncomfortable in the face of such obvious wealth. She kept explaining it wasn’t her money, it was the family, she didn’t even have a piece of paper saying the house was hers; but it didn’t matter, they were still resentful, making her fetch and carry for them to make up for being the dominant one financially. She knew she needed either someone who was more successful than she was, or a contented gigolo. She always lost her boyfriends after she dragged them to Windflower. They couldn’t stand the strain. Then why did she make them come? Why couldn’t she do what they wanted to do, even if it meant spending the summer in the hot city? They always had air conditioning, television; they could go to movies, theater, bars, restaurants, parties, see friends. Her boyfriends said it would be romantic. Paris thought it would be a waste of Windflower. There it was, that beautiful place, and the family kept talking about how expensive it was to keep up until she felt guilty for not being there to enjoy it.

But what did “enjoying it” mean? Just being there, at the expense of her personal life, her emotional life, her very ego? At the center of a hurricane of guests she was the calm eye that had nothing to do with the rest of them, the almost invisible one. She was the one who had brought them together there, and yet if she disappeared it wouldn’t really matter. People kept saying what a good hostess she was because she never organized anything, they were so relaxed in her house, they felt so at home.

Everett had escaped, and spent the summers in Florida where he had to run his business. John had made friends at boarding school and spent most of the summer visiting them and their families. He never brought any of them to Windflower, just came up with his father for the brief mandatory visit. His grandparents went to Florida to visit him for a few weeks during the Christmas holiday and stayed at a hotel. Lazarus complained it was expensive. But her grandson and son were all Melissa had, so every year she managed to drag grumbling Lazarus to Florida. When he got there he liked it.

Even though Hazel spent her summers at Windflower, Richie and Gilda didn’t. Hazel had Rosemary, Richie figured, so he and Gilda took trips. Gilda had had a baby boy, named Harrison after Herman. The family had only seen him once. He had reddish hair, like Gilda’s, and he slept. They all took turns holding him, all except Hazel, who wasn’t allowed to because she was shaky now and they were afraid she would drop him. They passed the placidly sleeping baby around as if he were a doll, and Hazel looked on sadly, her arms held out, waiting for her turn that never came.

“I’m the only one who can’t hold him,” she protested. When they had taken the baby away she took out his baby pictures and looked at them.

Richie and Gilda couldn’t decide whether to take the baby with them on a camping trip through the American West, or leave him with her parents in the Bronx while they went on a safari to Africa. It was dangerous to bring a little baby to Africa, such strange food and water. Finally they decided to go to Africa, and Harrison went to the Finkels in the Bronx.

Harrison Winsor was Adam Saffron’s great-grandson. It was hard to believe. Papa had never seen him, he had never seen Papa, and when he grew older Papa would only be a family legend, not a real person to him at all. Already, John was forgetting his greatgrandfather. It was natural. Buffy said she didn’t remember him too well either. She had been a baby when he was in his prime, and she had only known him as a tired old man who loved his grandchildren and was content to kiss them, not shape their destiny.

There were less of them left, and so they drew in tighter, closing the circle. Lavinia held on for dear life, telling and retelling old family stories, praising her sisters and brothers, reminding Paris that your family was all you had. Melissa remembered her girlhood fondly. Ah, the fun, the parties, the get-togethers, the happy friends! It made Paris wonder how she ever found time to get married. She doted on Lazarus, and he on her, in many ways like a father and daughter. He was visibly much older than she was now, and frailer, and she worried about him. If he didn’t tell his old stories, she did. She knew all of them by heart. Lazarus and Lavinia still bickered, but not as furiously. He didn’t have the energy, and she was more mellow. The old were entitled to be eccentric.

Like pioneer families in the long winter nights on the plains, this family drew together for protection during their long Windflower summers, sitting together on the screened porch, entertaining or boring each other with the old tales they knew so well. They did not read or go to the movies. They lived off each other, their companionship, their irritation, and their memories. Paris wondered if she would end up like them. It was a prospect that depressed her profoundly. Yet she couldn’t see herself doing anything else except as a fond daydream, and she knew perfectly well that the only thing keeping her trapped here was her own self. She who had done everything she had set out to do, the determined one, the achiever, was still ambivalent and therefore powerless to take this one last step.

THREE

What were they to do with Hazel? Since Herman’s death her condition had deteriorated rapidly with what the doctor said was a series of little strokes to the brain and hardening of the arteries cutting off the blood supply. She lost her balance and fell down, she was forgetful, and you couldn’t leave her alone because whenever she felt ill she took her little pills, and the doctor had said those little pills were dangerous if not taken properly. Worst of all, she drove them crazy, following them, wanting to join them, demanding their attention. She was not their responsibility, she was the responsibility of her son. Children were meant to take care of their parents when they were old and sick. But did Richie care? Did Gilda care? No, they were going off on another of their trips, this time to the Scandinavian countries, with little Harrison in tow. Richie wanted his son to see snow. For this he deserted his mother, for snow?

Rosemary said she and Jack couldn’t stand to have Hazel with them another summer at Windflower. It wasn’t fair; she wasn’t a nurse. The family got together with Richie before he left and demanded that he do something. He was the man of the family now, they told him, he had to make decisions. And they had decided the decision he must make was to hire a companion for Hazel, part nurse, part watchdog, to live with her. Richie agreed. They also thought he should make his mother sell that huge house; it was too big and empty and lonely for one person, and there were all those stairs for her to tumble down. They rejected the idea of putting in a chair-elevator, since Hazel would undoubtedly misuse it. No, she should get a nice apartment.

Richie agreed to all of it. He sold the big house in Miami Beach and bought his mother a good cooperative apartment with two bedrooms and two bathrooms, although as it turned out the nurse had to sleep in the same room with Hazel because she often got up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom and forgot where she was. It had been difficult to get a nice nurse because people nowadays didn’t want to be companions. They finally found a middle-aged widow, three hundred pounds and never stopped talking, worse than Hazel they all agreed, if you had to pick one of them you’d rather be with, but what could they do? She was a trained nurse, and she was willing to spend twenty-four hours a day with Hazel, and she could squeeze herself into the driver’s seat of Hazel’s big car and take her around. In her better moments Hazel still enjoyed looking through the stores.

Having arranged everything neatly so the family would stop being mad at him, Richie took his wife and son away on their long trip.

Rosemary felt it wasn’t fair that she was the one who had to live with Hazel at Windflower. They all should have had their own houses; but it was too late now. Sometimes Hazel was just fine, sitting for hours watching television, but other times she would turn around and say to Rosemary: “Did you know my husband?” as if they hadn’t lived in the same house for more summers than Rosemary cared to remember. Jack hated every minute of it. Hazel wasn’t even his relative, just his sister-in-law, and since he never liked anybody it was easy for him to find many things to be annoyed about now. The nurse and Hazel ate with them at the dinner table, and the nurse talked too much and ate too much, even gobbling the food out of Hazel’s plate, and you’d at least think that with her mouth full she would shut up, but no. He began taking Rosemary and Buffy out to restaurants to eat, leaving Hazel alone with the nurse.

“It would be better for everybody,” Buffy told Paris, “if she’d just die.”

“Shame on you!” Paris said. “How would you like it if you were old and someone said that about you?”

Buffy thought about it. “I guess you’re right,” she said.

“You’d better have sympathy for old people,” Paris said. “Someday you’re going to be old, but you’ll still have feelings.”

“But she isn’t old,” Buffy said. “She’s younger than your mother, and Aunt Melissa. She just looks old.”

“That’s because she’s sick.”

“Well, it’s awful for my parents,” Buffy said.

She lives too much in the head, that one, Paris thought. It was as if Buffy had placed all her feelings into compartments of cool, clear logic. The only people she felt emotional about were her parents and herself. Everyone else she filed away neatly and disposed of in the neat compartments of her mind. She thought everyone in the family was crazy except her parents. File under C for Crazy. She adored her father and had ambivalent feelings about her mother, with whom she was always fighting, so she had filed them neatly under E for Escape. Otherwise they would interfere with her master plan to see the world. No matter what anyone said she had quietly and secretly filed Hazel away under E too, for Euthanasia.

“You just don’t know what it’s like to have to live with her,” Buffy kept saying, and when her father didn’t take her to a restaurant she ate out of the refrigerator and refused to come to meals.

“Oh, the poor girl,” Lavinia said of Hazel, “she’s so sick.” Now that Hazel was so helpless and yet so annoying, Lavinia seemed to see her as a girl again, the way she had been when they were all growing up and she had been different from them. “Poor Hazel,” Lavinia would say, “her husband and her son were her whole life … There never was a better wife and mother.”

“I don’t think she should come up here next summer,” Rosemary said. “I’m going to tell her. I can’t go through another summer like this one.”

“Why don’t you send her to the Catskills?” Melissa suggested. “Send her to a nice resort hotel.”