Reinhart's Women (23 page)

Blaine appeared in the entrance hall. He was wearing a cardigan. It had been years now since Reinhart had seen his son in anything but a business suit and tie. In informal garb, with an open-necked shirt, Blaine looked somewhat vulnerable.

“Well, I don’t like that,” he said peevishly. “Teaching him to be a holdup man.”

Reinhart saw that Parker had put the knotted bandanna across his mouth and nose to protect himself from the imaginary sandstorm. The aperture was too generous for his small head, however, and the cloth fell around his neck.

Reinhart’s explanation was not received sympathetically by Blaine, who made an even more disagreeable face and then scowled at his sister.

“You know where to put the coats, I hope.”

Winona went to help Reinhart take off his outer garment. It was amazing: her brother’s ability to make an instant servant of her.

But one guest should not so serve another, and her father fended her off. He removed his outer garment without assistance.

Blaine asked: “When’s it supposed to rain?”

“Oh, come on,” said Reinhart, “it’s perfectly sensible to wear a raincoat as a light topcoat, and you know it.” He gave the article in reference to Winona, who took it, along with her own, and went down the hall and opened a closet.

“Do you have to go to the toilet?” asked Blaine.

Parker, pulling at his bandanna, was galloping into the doorway of the living room. But he stopped now to laugh and say:
“Toilet.”

Reinhart could remember from the childhoods of his own offspring as well as his own the special interest invariably evoked by that word. And he remembered another, which he now shouted at his grandson: “Underpants!” Parker naturally was rendered hilarious by this bon mot.

Blaine found nothing amusing in the exchange. “You know,” he said bitterly, “you have to finish your first childhood before going into the second.”

He marched through the door on the right. He had not invited his father to accompany him, so Reinhart waited until Winona came back. She was dressed in an exceedingly conservative style, by his judgment: dark dress, pearls, little earrings.

He asked her: “Where do we go now?”

She shrugged. “Living room, I guess.” She preceded Reinhart through the door on the right.

Parker meanwhile had disappeared, but his shrill voice came from somewhere in hiding: “Hey, Grandpa!
Poopoo
and
doodoo.”

“No, Parker,” said Reinhart, “we’ve changed the subject.” The human animal, from pup to patriarch, was such a bizarre creature. What other breed found its wastes so comic?

They entered a large room full of ponderous, men’s-club kind of furniture: at least so it seemed to Reinhart, who had seen that sort of place only in movies and on TV. It seemed incomplete without a bald or white head here and there amidst the dark-green leather chairs, and the mantel cried out for a moose’s head, though equipped with the next best decoration, viz., a mountainous landscape within a dark frame inner-edged in gold and illuminated from a tube lamp below. It was indeed the latter which provided the only light in the room at the moment.

Reinhart squinted. He asked Winona: “Do you see your brother anyplace?”

“Not really,” said she. “He’s probably in the den.”

They steered towards the lighted doorway across the room. The den, when reached, proved to be an appropriate neighbor to the living room. Though much narrower, it was furnished with similar leather-covered overstuffs, and the table lamps here, as next door, were four feet high, with husky shafts in old gold. Along one wall were built-in bookshelves.

Reinhart’s son sat at the end of the rectangular enclosure, behind the sort of desk that looked as if it were not made for use, being of carved leg and high-polished finish, its flat top a glossy expanse of tooled leather.

“Nice den, Blaine,” said his father.

“It’s the
library,”
said Blaine. As could have been expected, he did not invite them to take seats.

Reinhart looked at the row of titles on the bookshelf near his elbow. They were so uniform and lifeless in gold-stamped leather that for a moment he took them for a Potemkin collection, an unbroken façade of book-spines only, cemented to a solid board, in front of no texts. But he poked the
Iliad,
and it receded.

“I see you’ve got some good yarns here,” he told Blaine. “Did you have these specially bound?”

“Or something,” said his son, who reached into a desk drawer and brought out a pad of yellow so-called legal paper. “Now I’ve made a few preliminary notes...” He probed at the pad with a closed silver pen or pencil.

Reinhart plucked a book off the shelf. You didn’t often come across volumes bound in real leather nowadays. This one proved to be
The Last Days of Pompeii
and belonged, with the rest—the
Aeneid, Black Beauty,
and so on—to a series entitled The World’s Greatest Masterpieces.

“Dad,” said Blaine, looking up. “Put that back and pay attention.”

“I thought I’d make a pile of books for us to sit on,” Reinhart answered. “Here, Winona, lend a hand.”

“For God’s sake,” Blaine said, throwing down his pencil. “Is this the way it’s going to go? Winona, get some chairs from the main sitting room.”

“No,” said Reinhart to his daughter, “I’ll get them.” He found a couple of straightbacked chairs just inside the big room, one on either side of the door, where presumably the footmen used to sit in the house of Bulwer-Lytton, author of
The Last Days of Pompeii:
Reinhart had some vague recollection of his being a lord.

“Here’s the point,” Blaine said when his father and sister were seated across the desk from him. “We’re going to have to come to some kind of terms about Mother.” He sucked his body in slightly and opened the center drawer of the desk and found a pair of eyeglasses within. He unfolded the temple pieces and put on the spectacles. The lenses were undersized. The little glasses looked like something he had retained from his countercultural days, but when he wore them now Blaine seemed to have a foot in middle age.

“Now,” he went on, squinting through the small spectacles at the pad before him, “I have sketched out what really seems to me a really fair arrangement, because this is not the kind of thing a family really ought to squabble over.” He tapped his silver implement on the pad. “A three-way split is what I’ve come up with.” He looked between Reinhart and Winona and smiled. For a moment his father believed that someone had entered the room behind them, but then his attention was claimed by the import of what Blaine had so easily said.

“A split of what?”

“Why,” said Blaine, smiling pseudo-warmly now, but at Winona and not his father, “the expense of treatment and care.”

Reinhart was reminded once again of life’s tendency regularly to face one with the choice of folly or swinishness. On an impulse he decided not to choose; that is, to say nothing at all—and then he was shamed anyway, because what Blaine proceeded to say was quite true.

Blaine addressed Winona. “Of course you’ll want to take Dad’s share.”

“Oh, sure,” she replied immediately.

Reinhart sat forward on his chair. “Now just a minute,” he said. “First,
Dad has no share.
Blaine, you’ll just have to face the truth: I am not related to your mother. I haven’t been for ten years, and I absolutely refuse to accept any obligation with regard to her. True, that’s academic in my current situation, but it should certainly apply to Winona’s assuming a burden that is supposed to be mine.”

“Oh, Daddy,” his daughter said in sweet reproach, “you know you don’t owe me anything.”

Blaine was still smiling, but now with a venomous quality. “I don’t see it’s your affair, then,
Daddy.
Winona and I agree.”

Reinhart put his hands on his knees. “So you pay one third, and she pays two thirds.” He looked at his daughter. “I’m not going to let you do it.” He pointed his finger at her. “Do you hear me, Winona? I won’t stand for it.”

Her eyes began to fill with tears.

Now Blaine showed himself enough of a diplomat as to toss his chin in apparent indifference and say: “Well, we’ve got lots of time to make up our minds. ... Let’s enjoy our get-together!” He started to make a toothy smile but obviously decided that his talent was not up to such an imposture at this moment, and his face returned to its habitual pale length and the expressionless character, presumably a professional tool, that he showed to the world, except when, disdainful of his relatives, he wore a pronounced sneer.

“How’s about a glass of sherry, Winona?”

At his sister’s refusal Blaine smirked in what seemed, for him, good humor, and Reinhart could not help reflecting that the guest who would most please his son was the stubborn abstainer from everything.

“But she’s got one coming,” he told Blaine. “So I’ll take it.”

Blaine now produced a dirty grin, and it occurred to Reinhart that perhaps they could, father and son, someday create a kind of friendship based on cynicism alone.

“O.K., Dad,” Blaine said. “Fair enough.” He rose, went to one of the doored cabinets beneath the open bookshelves, and brought back a faceted decanter half-full of an amber fluid, and a stemmed receptacle of small capacity: in fact, a liqueur glass. Either the wine was an Olympian elixir, too rich for earthlings to take except by the thimble, or Blaine was being consistent in his meanness.

When Reinhart was a boy, before World War II, the local drugstores had sold pints of fluids called sherry and port, and high-schoolers on New Year’s Eve would contrive to get a bottle and drink it empty and puke on the sidewalk by midnight. Domestic fortified wines had improved greatly since that era, but Blaine seemed to have acquired, no doubt at great expense for such a rare antique, a store of that peculiar decoction of rubbing alcohol and caramel coloring.

“Mmm,” Reinhart murmured after wetting his tongue and grimacing in an effort not to celebrate a nostalgic New Year’s on the library rug. But to save face he had to go through with it. “Where’s Winona’s? I’ve got another coming, remember?”

“Ah,” Blaine answered, actually enjoying this badinage, “you’ve got hers. I didn’t ask
you
to have one, if you’ll recall.”

“By Godfrey,” said Reinhart, “you didn’t, for a fact. You son of a gun!” He saw that Blaine was seriously gloating, and realized that they had each won a victory. What was incongruous, however, was that the horrible “sherry” had been served in a glass made of exquisite crystal. He held it to the light of the brass lamp on Blaine’s desk and turned it so that the facets could do their work. He saw no reason why he could not occasionally be civil: “This is a fine thing, Blaine.”

But Blaine’s return broke the mood. “Be careful, for God’s sake. Those glasses are very expensive.”

He took another glass and poured himself a minimeasure. He went behind his desk.

Winona, sitting on her father’s left and slightly behind, had been silent. Reinhart now turned and looked at her.

She thereupon, as though they were in league and this was her cue, asked Blaine: “How’s Mercer?”

His answer was bland. “No reason why she need be bothered with this. She doesn’t know about Mother, and so far as I’m concerned that’s all to the good.”

Reinhart had wondered all his life which made the more sense:
Ignorance is bliss,
or
The truth will make you free.
There was something to be said for both. In this case the former was probably to be recommended for all the principals: if Mercer was unaware of Genevieve’s current situation, Blaine presumably was still ignorant of Mercer’s adventure. At the moment only Reinhart seemed to know everything about everybody. But he was old enough to know as well that the person who occupies such a situation is likely to be the greatest dupe of all, serving as mere audience for all performances.

He now asked: “Where’s my other grandson?”

“In his room, I would think,” Blaine said impatiently. He sniffed and finished his wine. “Now, if we could just wrap up this matter.” He tapped his pad of yellow paper. “Maybe the most practical thing would be to get down to details, the actual dollars and cents involved.”

His sister spoke humbly: “Whatever you think, Blainey.”

Reinhart said: “Tell me this, Blaine: has any determination been made of your mother’s problem? Has there been a diagnosis of any kind?”

Blaine passed a hand across his eyes. “Please,” said he, “I’m trying to be understanding, believe me. But how can I see these questions as more than hypocrisy? When any question of money comes up, you say you have no obligation. Then how can you really care? Forget it! I’ll carry on as best I can alone.”

Winona said: “Well, you know I won’t let you do that.”

“No, no,” Blaine cried, throwing his hand on a diagonal rise. “I’ve made my mind up now. I apologize for introducing the subject. You’re here for pleasure. Let’s finish up our wine and then go to the billiards room.”

“You have a pool table?” asked Reinhart.

“Doesn’t everybody?” Blaine obviously did not enjoy being taken literally in his self-righteous irony.

“All right, Blaine,” his father said. “I don’t want to be callous. And believe me, I don’t wish your mother bad luck of any kind. Furthermore, I do think Winona is right to feel a duty. But I don’t want her taken advantage of.”

Winona spoke with quiet force. “Daddy, I think this is really my affair, if you don’t mind.”

And all at once Reinhart was struck by a sense that beyond this point he would be out of order; perhaps he had already crossed the line. In his earlier life he had so often been the fool that in compensation nowadays he was capable of erring in overcaution, excessive shrewdness.

“You’re right,” he said to his daughter. To Blaine he said: “So, probably, are you. I’ll go shoot some pool by myself, if you’ll show me where.”

“Go out to the entrance hall,” said Blaine, “and turn right. The billiards room is downstairs. The door’s next to the closet where Winona put the coats.”

Reinhart followed these instructions and descended to what persons of a lower social order would probably have called the game room, though, true enough, it contained only a pool table. The multicolored balls were nicely collected into the classic vee on the vibrant green felt, which looked very new. Reinhart had not had a cue in his hands since the Army, and never in his life had he had access to such a glowingly virgin table.