Reinhart's Women (2 page)

Reinhart shook his head. “But you had a New York offer. And if you
had
gone, you would be famous from coast to coast.” His conscience was clean: he had not stood in her way. Winona really had no ambition for spectacular success and little attraction to any way of life that could be called glamorous.

She started away from the kitchen, murmuring, and then she turned and stepped back. “Dad, I must say you have not said much about Grace. What’s she like? How does she strike you, really?”

Reinhart cocked an eye at his simmering strips of bacon. He turned to Winona. “I guess you’re right. I haven’t told you much about Grace—for any number of reasons. Even after ten years away from your mother I still feel funny speaking of other women in front of you. But apart from that—” The subject was important to Reinhart, but he could not fail in his responsibility to the meal: again he tossed the mushrooms in their lemon-juice bath. “In addition,” he resumed, “I have all my life generally had difficulty in telling one female person anything about another. Whether that’s my own foible, or—”

Reinhart cleared his throat. The possibility that he might be turning into a garrulous old bore suddenly suggested itself to him: it was not a simple matter to identify oneself with the tedious sort of old-timer one remembered from one’s own youth. Consciousness, however far back it can be remembered, always seems about the same. It is an effortless thing to recall, across half a century, one’s intent to become a cowboy when one grows up.

“Sorry, dear. I’ll make it snappy. To begin with, Grace, while not being quite as young as you, is even further from being as old as I. That is, she is not old enough to be your biological mother, whereas I suppose I
could,
technically speaking, have been her father, if just barely: she is forty.” He frowned in thought. “She’s a nice-looking woman, but what really matters is she’s smart. I don’t mean to imply that women aren’t usually, but Grace has made a success in a man’s world.”

He closed one eye briefly and laughed. “First time we met I took her for a housewife, and a fairly dowdy and out-of-date one at that. She was wearing a cardigan and the kind of shoes that years ago were called ‘sensible.’ In fact, she was generally reminiscent of an earlier era, which is why I noticed her in the first place. I’ve found myself doing that sort of thing more and more. I suppose it’s a sign of growing senility!”

Winona suddenly excused herself and left the kitchen. But when Reinhart had finished blanching the bacon she was back. She now wore the third outfit he had seen within a quarter hour: a long, long skirt, a puffy sort of blouse, and a kind of bandanna tied around her forehead. He liked this ensemble least of all: it was rather too mannered for his taste, but of course he said something flattering.

Winona thanked him. “But you weren’t finished talking about Grace.”

He raised his eyebrows. “Grace, you see, is all wool, no nonsense. Fact is, it was
she
who first asked me out. And why not? There we were, in front of the Mexican packaged foods—that’s where we met, in the supermarket, as I mentioned earlier. She turned to me, in that cardigan and those sensible shoes. ‘Say,’ she said, ‘do you really buy any of this stuff?’ She asked it so aggressively that I thought she might be hostile to it herself. ‘Not much,’ says I. ‘I don’t cook in any Hispanic cuisine, though mind you I’ve nothing against any. I’ve eaten a taco or two in my time, and once, in that Mexican restaurant in the Wulsin Building downtown, I ate a chicken
mole,
which was fascinating with its peppery chocolate sauce, but—’

“‘I am really interested only in the Pancho Villa line,’ she said, and she pointed at the cans bearing that label, which carry a picture of a Mexican bandit or general, Villa himself I suppose, with crossed bandoleers and a saber and two guns. ‘I’m one of the guys who distribute that,’ she said, ‘and what I’m listening for is public reaction. The opinion-testers are more scientific, but I like to get the street-reaction on my own. Now, you look like a normal member of the public. Do you think this picture of a bloodthirsty-looking greaser would encourage you to buy, uh’—she chose a can at random and read the label—‘uh, refried beans?’

“That’s Grace’s style, I’m afraid,” said Reinhart. “She’ll never get the mealymouthed award.” He laughed heartily, though in truth he found that quality the least of Grace’s attractions. “It turned out that she was an executive with this food-distributing firm, a vice-president no less. When she found out I did the cooking at my house she wouldn’t let me go until I had given her a complete rundown on my choices of brands, the types of food I buy, the type of meal my family prefers, and the rest of it.” Reinhart gestured with his wooden spoon. “And that would have been that, I’m sure, had I not mentioned that I had a daughter who happened to be the foremost model in town.”

Winona blushed. “Oh, Dad, come on.”

Reinhart chuckled happily. “No, I’m afraid I was just a statistic until then. But I didn’t mind, dear. I like nothing better than bragging about you. Well, as I told you, that’s how it began. That was just two days back. We found ourselves having lunch in that restaurant in the shopping center that used to be Gino’s.” Reinhart winced at a series of unpleasant memories under the old management. “It’s a better place now, with a more expansive though somewhat hokey menu sometimes: pineapple with baked fish, and ginger with anything. Grace had the New York steak, hold the potato, and helped herself only modestly at the salad bar. I ordered the
escalope de veau
—we don’t have it here very often because the price of veal is really insane”—not to mention that Winona wouldn’t eat it—“and when the orders arrived, the waiter needless to say put the cutlets in front of her. ...They were by the way more Wiener schnitzel than
escalopes,
breaded, for gosh sakes, but not badly, with grated Gruyère and what tasted like a little real Parmesan in the breading...”

Winona was wearing a sweetly bored look by now.

“Anyway, we also had a drink before eating: I had the vermouth cassis, and Grace, the Jim Beam and water, and the bartender remembered which was which and kidded us about it. Grace is not so big, you know, in body.”

At that point the doorbell sounded. Winona gasped and scampered back to her room. Reinhart had never seen her in such consternation over a visitor: she was not above greeting a gentleman caller in an old wrapper and curlers—in which, needless to say, she still enchanted him.

Reinhart opened the door. This was but the third time he had seen Grace and the first occasion on which he might have called her almost pretty. Something had been done to her hair, and her eyes had been skillfully made up. Though she was wearing a suit, as she had on their second meeting, a dinner date, it now seemed more subtly feminine, somehow: lace blouse underneath, a bit of jewelry, and so on.

Grace was not, as Reinhart had mentioned, a large woman. To shake hands with Reinhart, her forearm was put at a steep angle.

“Welcome to the humble abode, Grace,” said her host, with an expansive left wrist.

Grace controlled the shake, irrespective of the remarkable difference in fists, and peering around, she penetrated the living room. “It’s hardly humble, Carl,” she said in her brisk voice. “But then why should it be?” She suddenly looked vulnerable, an unprecedented and, Reinhart would have said, a most unlikely phase for Grace Greenwood. She continued to walk about in a military stride.

“Won’t you sit down?” he asked. “May I give you a drink?”

She produced an abrupt, barking laugh. “Anything that’s wet!”

She strode to the windows and laughed again. “There’s the river, huh?” But the view was not sufficiently riveting to keep her there for a third second, and she turned and marched to the middle of the room, where presumably she could not be jumped by surprise—so it might have looked to someone who was not aware of Grace’s credentials. Reinhart had never known anyone so confident at the core of her being; there was no bluster about Grace, none of the self-doubt usually apparent in some form in the boldest of women, and not one iota of vanity.

Despite her apparent indifference to the choice of potation he remembered how precise Grace had been about her preprandial drinks at their other two social engagements. (At dinner she had specified Johnnie Walker Red, diluted only by a sparkling mineral water called Minnehaha, of which, it turned out, her firm was the local distributor.)

He now poured her what she had drunk at their shopping-center lunch, a Jim Beam with tap water and ice, and was on his way to deliver it when Grace seemed all at once a frozen image in one of those cinematic stop-actions which had become a cliché in recent years, from an actress fixed toothily in mid-laugh to a car forever hurtling from a bluff into the ocean. Grace was arrested in a slight hunch of body and an enigmatic moue.

The fact was that Winona had slunk almost silently into the room, but if Grace had seen her, it was through the back of her own head, for she, Grace, was still facing Reinhart.

“Aha!” he cried, perhaps too stridently, but he wanted to get beyond this purposelessly awkward moment. “Grace Greenwood, this is my daughter Winona.”

But Grace remained in her stasis, facing him. Was she deaf? Or had she actually suffered an attack of paralysis?

Meanwhile Winona continued her sneaky approach, which seemed literally on tiptoe, but this was not the least of her eccentricities. She had changed her attire for the fourth time. She now wore black slacks, a tight black turtleneck shirt, and black shoes with high heels—it was her manner of walking in this awkward footgear that Reinhart saw as tiptoeing. Finally, her hair was pulled severely around the back of her head, where it was presumably gathered into a knot. Her eyes had a suggestion of the mysterious East: they had been slightly almondized by the tension on her skin at the temples.

Reinhart knew he would never understand the mysteries of women’s styles of dress. Winona of course would have looked perfect in anything, but why for a spring luncheon she had finally settled on a costume suggestive of a Hollywood gunfighter’s, sans only the pancake Stetson, was inexplicable.

At last she, as it were, rounded Grace’s corner, for Grace had still not moved, and in a special low voice, one Reinhart had never suspected she could produce, she uttered only one word, “Hello,” but put a good deal of force into that word, and having said it, she stepped back one pace, put her hands on her sleek black hips, and stared severely at the other woman.

“Winona,” said Reinhart, “this is my new friend, Grace Greenwood.”

Grace now emerged from her absolute fixity, but only so far as slow motion would take her. It seemed as though she might actually curtsy, but if so she changed her mind. Instead she glared at Reinhart and then abruptly seized the drink from him, almost spilling some in the swirl.

“Here,” she said, in a kind of screech as unprecedented as Winona’s baritone, and she thrust the whiskey at Reinhart’s daughter.

This was the most remarkable display of something or other that he had ever witnessed, and he was so unsettled by it that he took a largish draft of the bourbon and water, a drink that he would ordinarily have put at the bottom of his list, owing to the cloying, almost confectionary effect it produced on his palate. However, though he winced at the earliest taste, the warm aftereffect now was comforting. He realized that he found Winona’s performance to be lacking in graciousness: this was not like her at all.

Alas, it was obvious that she and Grace made a poor mix. He would of course stop seeing Grace, but meanwhile she was his guest and he would feed her.

“Winona,” he said with a certain asperity, “I have to go now and work on the meal. Please be hospitable. Oh, Grace, if you don’t want the Beam, there’s Johnnie Walker Red. I’ve, also got your favorite Minnehaha mineral water.”

But Grace seemed not to hear him. As for his daughter, she said obediently, sweetly, returning to the old Winona, “Oh, I sure will, Dad. Grace, won’t you sit down, please.”

“Where?” asked Grace. She seemed bewildered.

Whatever the state of the world outside, everything made sense when Reinhart was with his pots and pans. With his big chef’s knife he minced an onion and then a clove of garlic, and put them in a deep skillet with the blanched bits of bacon: all of these were sautéed together until they turned golden. At that point the half-cup of chicken stock was introduced, and two cups of red wine (a vintage Cabernet Sauvignon from California—not dirt-cheap, but the resulting liquid would become the sauce and must be edible), then salt, pepper, and sugar to taste (lest the reduced wine be too acid), and finally a
bouquet garni:
bay leaf, thyme, parsley, and two cloves, bundled in cheesecloth. He put this concoction on to simmer, and he trimmed the crusts from three square slices of a firm white bread, divided each slice in two, and sautéed the six little rectangles in butter.

Ten minutes had been consumed by these labors. The fragrant, simmering liquid would profit by ten more. He now had a moment in which to check on his guest.

The women were silent when he came into the living room, and they sat as far from each other as the arrangement of furniture would permit.

Grace held a glass full of ice cubes and colorless fluid.

“Um,” Reinhart asked of her, “vodka or gin?”

She hastily, even guiltily, took a sip, then elevated the glass in a kind of triumph. “Diet Seven-Up!” she cried. “Delicious!”

“Good God,” said Reinhart. “Is that your work, Winona? Here, Grace, let me get you something to
drink.
Winona, how could you?” He went across the room with outstretched hand.

But Grace fended him off, and from his left Winona wailed, “That’s what she wanted, Daddy! You just ask her.”

Grace shouted desperately, “I
love
it!”

Reinhart decided to give up his mission, whatever the truth of her averment: emotions, even if politely hypocritical, should be discouraged before any kind of meal (with the possible exception of high glee at a ball game, followed by a mustard-drenched hot dog and a paper-cupful of warm beer).