Reinhart's Women (35 page)

Whereas Genevieve’s sense of decor, if it could even be so termed, was unfailingly pedestrian. Indeed, very much like Reinhart’s own, it seemed to him in all frankness, and that would have been quite O.K. had not the woman, sporadically throughout their years together, been vociferously interested in interior decoration and aggressively vain about each of her successive versions of the living room, imposing them on their neighbors (envious wives, indifferent hubbies) at lavish holiday open houses, which added even more to the bills Reinhart had to pay from the proceeds of whichever will-o’-the-wisp he was chasing at the moment in “business.”

His ex-wife now completed the circuit of eye and at last brought her vision to bear on her daughter.

“Oh, Winona,” she said, the name shading away in a fervent sigh. “Oh.” She threw a loose wrist towards the nearest wall, presumably to indicate just everything. “It’s certainly
you,
every inch of it.”

“Thank you,” said Winona, who, Reinhart could have sworn, was turning pigeon-toed and concave-chested before his eyes.

His command applied to them both: “Sit down.”

But Genevieve, as he might have known, turned suddenly and walked to the windows at the far end of the room, those which overlooked the river. For an instant he couldn’t remember whom this action reminded him of, and then he could: Grace Greenwood. But one thing about Gen: she had never seemed dykey. You could say that for her.

Reinhart suddenly remembered the children.

“Where’d the boys go?”

“To take a nap,” said Winona. “They were all tuckered out.”

Reinhart asked: “What did that cost you?”

Genevieve whirled suddenly and came back. She pointed a finger at Reinhart. “The security in this building leaves something to be desired. I walked right in past Stepin Fetchit. I could have been a criminal.”

“He could see you were harmless,” said Reinhart, knowing she would hate to hear that.

Genevieve exposed her front teeth in a snarl, but it was a parody, and she seemingly remained in her good mood. “I suppose you’re wondering why I came here?” She took a seat at the other end of the couch from Winona and leaned back against the cushions. “Call it pride.”

“Pride?” Reinhart hospitably gave her the expected cue: she was after all a guest in this house.

“I didn’t handle myself too well the last time you saw me.” She stared at him. “But who among us is always at the top of his form?” Her grin turned dirty. “I can mention certain episodes that would scarcely be flattering to you!” And for only the second time since entering did she look at Winona. “And you too, God knows. Don’t get me started.”

“Genevieve.” Reinhart spoke in quiet menace.

“O.K.! O.K.!” She crossed her legs and leaned forward over her knees. “I came to say good-bye.”

This time it was Winona who did the courteous thing. “Where are you headed, Mother?”

“California,”
Genevieve said decisively, slapping her top knee as she leaned back. “I should have done that long ago, but the time never seemed ripe. But now’s the moment. Oh, I know it.”

Reinhart stood up. “I’m sorry, Genevieve. Where are my manners? Would you like a cup of coffee or a drink?”

“Carl, did you hear me? I’m getting out of your hair for good.” Genevieve spoke vivaciously, uncrossing and spreading her legs in an almost indecent movement even though she was wearing slacks. “I’m remarrying.”

Winona stood up. “If you’ll both excuse me...”

“No, Winona, I won’t,” said Reinhart. “I have some things to talk over with you when your mother leaves.”

His daughter sat down.

His ex-wife shrugged and said: “I can take a hint. I just wanted you to know that I’m riding high again.”

Reinhart stood up. “So it would seem, Genevieve. No doubt your prospective husband is a wealthy and powerful business- or professional man.”

“You don’t believe me, do you, Carl?”

Reinhart said sincerely: “I shouldn’t have said that, Genevieve. I apologize. The fact is that it’s none of my business.”

She rose from the couch. “You tell her she can come home now.”

“You mean Mercer?”

“Yeah, the society girl.” Genevieve snorted and turned to her daughter. “Good-bye, Winona. Be sure to let me know when
you
meet Mister Right. I’ll come back for the wedding with bells on!”

Reinhart snapped his fingers. “I’ll bet you’re going to San Francisco. Isn’t that where your pansy brother Kenworthy has lived for years?”

Genevieve looked stoically at the floor, then flung her head up sharply. This had been a gesture of her father’s. “I know you think you’ve given me a devastating shot,” she said. “But I didn’t come over here for petty bickering.” She put her hands on her hips. “Let me put it to you straight: I
have
got an opportunity out there, but I’ll admit I’m strapped at this moment. I need the price of the fare—one-way only, I assure you.”

Winona went to the sideboard and opened the drawer in which she kept the big flat checkbook used to pay the household bills.

“That’s to Los Angeles,” Genevieve said. “And better add enough for cab fare. That airport is supposed to be miles from town.”

Reinhart said: “Just a minute, Winona.” He asked Genevieve: “She just the other night gave Blaine a sizable sum that was supposed to be spent on you. Is that all gone already?”

“Oh, God, Daddy,” wailed Winona. “Let’s not have a scene.” She opened the checkbook and groped in the drawer for a pen.

“I’m just trying to establish the truth,” said Reinhart.

Genevieve said: “It seems to me that’s your lifelong complaint. It ought to begin to occur to you that life is just a collection of stories from all points of self-interest.”

Winona ripped the check from the book, folded it in two, and gave it to her mother.

Genevieve said defiantly to Reinhart: “You expect me to unfold it and examine it, don’t you? You haven’t ever thought I had any class.”

This was a phony attack. From the first it had been Genevieve who was the snob.

“If you say so,” was the best he could come up with. Besides, he was longing for her departure.

She stood up. “Well, now you can all rest easy. I’m leaving for good. You won’t see me again.”

“Mother...” Winona murmured feebly.

“Good-bye, Genevieve,” said Reinhart. Staring at her, he began to walk towards the door.

His ex-wife looked stubborn for a moment, but then she shrugged and followed him. At the door she took a kind of stand.

“I caught you on TV, Carl. You have a lot of nerve, I’ll say that for you.”

Reinhart opened the door.

“If you could of found that kind of gall years ago you might have made something of yourself. What a con artist you are! Remember Claude Humbold? He couldn’t hold a candle to you. Cooking! What do you know about food aside from being a glutton?”

As real-estate salesman for Humbold just after the War, Reinhart had met Gen for the first time. She was Claude’s secretary.

She went on now: “And that boogie-woogie bugle boy, Splendor Mainwaring. The two of you were inseparable. Frankly I always thought you were a couple of qu—” Without looking back she called: “Oops, sorry, Winona.”

Reinhart took her by the shoulders and steered her firmly out into the corridor.

She made no resistance, but when he took his hands off her, she said: “What would happen if I screamed bloody murder? You know you can’t push women around any more.”

“I’m sure that Winona would cancel payment on the check. For another, I’ve got a lot of friends in this building, including the owner’s daughter.”

Genevieve’s transitions were breathtaking. She went from the onset of rage through a crooked, perhaps crazed simper, into a broad grin. She threw her open hand at Reinhart. “Congratulations, Carl! Put ’er there!”

He didn’t understand this, but he shook with her anyway. “I hope things work out for you in California.” He suddenly remembered how frail her shoulders had felt under his fingers. “If they let you out of the hospital you must be in good health.”

“I’m all right. I’ve got plenty of steam left. I just need a break.”

“And you’ve got one waiting in California, right?”

“That’s right.” Her eyes darkened with suspicion. “Don’t you worry about me, fella. Maybe I’ll take a leaf from your book and try television. At least I wouldn’t be any worse than you. And that’s the TV capital of the country, not a tank town like this.” She winked at him. “A TV chef, huh? I’ll bet you think you’re King Shit.”

“You have a way with words,” said Reinhart. Nevertheless he walked her down to the elevator. He suddenly felt reluctant to let her go. “Hey, Gen,” he said, “remember Jack Buxton, the actor? Didn’t we see him together lots, in the old days, in the old movies?”

“He kicked off yesterday. Good riddance. He was always a real scumbag. I happen to know, through some friends who are high in Chicago law-enforcement circles, that Buxton was arrested once for molesting an underaged boy, but the charges were dropped because the kid’s family didn’t want the publicity of a trial.”

“Buxton?”

Genevieve wore her tough-guy grin. She spoke in fake sympathy. “Aw, and he was one your idols too, wasn’t he?” She shook her head. “My, my. I wonder what that says about you.”

“For once, can’t you put aside that malicious crap?” he asked. “I saw the man die, yesterday at the TV station. I was the last person to talk with him while he was still conscious. It’s really strange to remember that I started seeing him in movies when I was still a boy in high school, forty years ago, and then through the War. I even saw him at the Onkel-Tom-Kino, a German movie-house in Berlin! And then in the early Fifties, remember, before we got our first television, we’d go to the Regal on Friday nights? After we did have the set of course, we watched all his old films from the Forties and Fifties. I think that by that time his career had faded...”

“Jesus Christ,” Genevieve said in contempt,
“who cares?
He was a forgotten ham actor and also a pervert, his pictures were stupid garbage, and if he suddenly dropped dead, it was probably as a result of an overdose of drugs.”

“I wasn’t really thinking of him personally. I was thinking really of the recent past in what?—entertainment, publicity, or whatever: that funny illusionary plane of existence which one is in when watching TV or movies, where a Jack Buxton is a recognizable figure. It’s a shock to have it proved, and in a brutal way, that there is a real man who has served as a pretext for an image which consists of impulses of light.”

Genevieve punched the button for the elevator. The doors opened immediately: the car had been waiting. She said: “You haven’t changed. You’ve never learned: if you’re going to be an ass-kisser, then you ought to at least kiss the asses of winners.”

She gave him the cocky World War II salute that in fact Buxton had specialized in cinematically. Was this a conscious parody or coincidence?

“Good-bye, Genevieve.”

“So long, sucker.” She stepped into the elevator and the doors closed behind her.

Reinhart stood in position for a moment. Despite his relief at any departure of hers nowadays, he felt as though it were a historic occasion, marking the end of something that should be ended.

He returned to Winona. Already she seemed distracted by other matters.

“Do you think that Genevieve alone is to be blamed for the trouble between Blaine and Mercer?”

“Well, it’s a theory.” Winona frowned. “I wonder if the boys are asleep. Because if they aren’t, I want to go to my room and get something.”

Reinhart spoke from experience. “No, it’s the other way around: you should go in if they
are
napping and stay out if not. Sleeping kids aren’t bothered by intrusions, but they tend to obstruct you when awake.” Apropos of nothing he asked: “Winona, you know our neighbor Edie Mulhouse, well—”

“That creep. Has she come around looking for me?”

“She’s not so bad,” said Reinhart, feeling, with this wan defense, like a traitor. “Did you know she’s the daughter of the owner?”

“The owner of what?”

“This apartment house. You know, the Mulhouse Corporation.”

Winona shrugged indifferently. “If you say so. Excuse me, Daddy, I think I’ll just check on the boys, according to your theory.” She went down the hall.

Reinhart went to the kitchen. His larder needed replenishment. He began to draw up a grocery list, but heard Winona’s good-bye shout from the door. This seemed rude of her. He came out.

“You’re not leaving already?”

She put the suitcase down. “I really have to... You were sure right about the boys: they didn’t even wake up when I got this off the high shelf and dropped it.”

“I wish you would ask me to do things like that,” Reinhart chided. He looked at the suitcase, and then at her. “Have you made your permanent plans yet? Of course, at the moment Mercer and the boys are still here.”

“You mean, will I be coming back?” She smiled in a fashion that was meant to be helpful but looked uneasy. “Gee, Daddy...”

“I’m not trying to pry, believe me.”

“I know you’re not. ... It’s just that...”

Reinhart picked up the suitcase. It felt empty, but then women’s clothes weighed nothing. “I’ll go down to the car with you. By the way, I still have your Cougar. Do you need it?”

Winona shrugged. “Not really, and you do.”

As they went along the hall he asked about Grace. “I heard she was under the weather. Is that true? Because I have a couple of matters to discuss with her.”

“She’s fine,” Winona said quickly. “I’ll remind her to call you.”

“She
is
at home, then? I don’t want to disturb her. I can wait till she’s back at the office.”

“She’ll call you,” Winona said firmly.

They went silently down in the elevator, and then, past a gravely smiling Andrew, out to the front walk. Winona led her father down the street a way and stopped at a glistening vehicle. Reinhart had not kept up on the latest makes of cars in recent years, but there was no mistaking a Mercedes. This one was colored beige. Winona unlocked the trunk. The interior was a kind of handsome little living room.