Treasures (2 page)

Lara said softly, “One thing, anyway, should be a comfort. She was never alone. One of us was always with her. And she did appreciate that private room, Eddy. Remember how she kept asking whether you really could afford it?”

“She’d have had that if it had taken my last penny or if I’d had to steal, so help me!”

“Oh,” Lara cried, “she must have known there was no hope for her, yet she never said a word. How brave she was!”

“No,” Connie said. “The real reason is that she was afraid to admit how lousy life can be.”

The grim, harsh comment shocked. But there was no sense in challenging it. Connie would defend herself by saying that she was merely looking truth in the face. She had few illusions, young Connie. The elder sister felt that was a pity, but answered only, “Let’s go inside. No, leave the dishes, Connie. I’ll clear them later. I’ll be needing something to do tonight after you go home.”

The living room had once been an upstairs sitting room when the house had been built for a banker’s family a century ago, before everybody who could afford to move had left town for the new wooded suburbs in the hills. The small space was dominated by the television, whose great blank eye was staring as they all sat down. It would have been unseemly to activate it on this night, and no one did.

Connie pulled down the shades, complaining, “Damn rotten weather!” as if, on this day at least, the rain need not have been so furious or the wind so wild in the trees.

“Your mother would say,” Davey responded in his mild way, “that rain like this nourishes the earth.”

No one answered. Yes, Eddy knew, that would be typical of her. When, in high school, he had broken his arm she had told him to be thankful he hadn’t broken it before the soccer season. But I’m not like her, he thought, nor is Connie.

Too restless to be still, he went back to a window again and raised the shade that Connie had lowered. The houses across the street were mirror images of this one where Lara lived, a tall, shingled Victorian with a second door cut into its front to accommodate an upstairs flat. Before each house lay a narrow, woebegone yard bordered with neglected, weedy shrubs and dotted with piles of soiled, melting snow. Above the rooftops, in a brown sky, thin clouds raced toward evening.

“God, what a miserable way to live,” he thought. “So many years gone by already in this confining town!”

He turned around into the room. Davey was reading the newspapers. The two women had laid their heads back and closed their eyes. The silence ticked in Eddy’s head.

Then the street door slammed, vibrating through the walls. In the flat below, where five children were crammed, a fight exploded. Somebody was trying to start a balky engine in the driveway next door; it wheezed, it whirred, it coughed.

An impetuous fury rose in Eddy. No rest, no privacy, no beauty, no money!

His sisters had not moved. They were exhausted. And he felt compassion for them, for their tenderness in a
tough, hard world. He believed that he understood them; he knew how desperately Lara longed for a child and would probably never have one; he knew how Connie, like himself, longed for betterment, for color, for life, he knew that her feet, like his, wanted to run.…

Now as they rested, unaware of his scrutiny, he observed his sisters. Connie had a nineteen-twenties look, one which was becoming fashionable again; her lips were a bold cupid’s bow, her nose short and straight, her eyebrows two narrow, graceful curves above alert gray eyes. She was unusually vivacious and knew how to make the best of herself. People looked at her. Yet it was always said that Lara was the beauty, having what were called “good bones”; her face was a pure oval, and she had contemplative sea-blue eyes, the same color as Eddy’s own.

His, however, were not contemplative, any more than Connie’s were. Their eyes were quick; everything about us two, for better or for worse, is quick, he thought suddenly. And thinking so, it seemed to him that now was as good a time as any to say what had to be said, not that any time was really a good one for the dropping of a bombshell.

He said evenly, “I’ve something to tell you. I hope you won’t be shocked too much, but I’m going to be leaving you. Leaving town. I’m moving to New York.”

“You’re what?” cried Connie, sitting up straight.

“There’s a guy I’ve known since college. He’s an accountant like me, only the difference is that he happens to have an uncle who’s lent him enough to get started in
brokerage. He wants a partner. He wants me, and he’s willing to stake me, to take me in with him.”

A gleam of interest shot through Connie’s eyes. “Wall Street?” she asked.

“Yes, ma’am, you bet. Wall Street.”

“Leaving us!” Lara cried. “Oh, Eddy!”

“Minutes away by plane, honey. I’m not leaving you. Not ever.” And he repeated, “A matter of minutes. All right, a couple of hours. Not Afghanistan or the end of the world.” His smile coaxed.

Lara was dismayed. “But you’ve been building up so nicely! I can’t understand why you’d want to leave it all behind like that.”

“Building? Yes. But it’s too gradual, too slow, compared with this opportunity. It’s small potatoes.”

She thought, We’re splitting apart already. Peg’s six hours in her grave. Then it’s true what they say: When the mother dies, the family breaks up. Couldn’t he think of that, Eddy, Peg’s golden boy with the bright hair, the sea-blue eyes, and the nonchalant stance? She felt suddenly hopeless.

Davey asked quietly, “How long have you known this?”

“About three months. I probably should have told you sooner, but I thought, well, we were all going through enough without having any more on our minds, so I waited.” Eddy reached into his pocket. “Look. I had cards printed.”

“ ‘Vernon Edward Osborne, Jr.,’ ” Lara read, and in a voice that rang with sad reproach observed, “You’ve always hated the name Vernon.”

“I know. But just for the card, it’s distinguished. A little different.”

Davey had another question. “Don’t you have to put up any money at all, Eddy?”

“Sure, but not much. I’ve saved twelve thousand dollars out of my earnings, and I was incredibly lucky at cards one night a while back. Made another fifteen, believe it or not. So I’ve got enough to put down for my share of the partnership, and I’ll pay off the balance out of what I make in the market.”

Davey said slowly, “
If
you make it in the market, you mean.”

“I’ll make it. I have a feel for the market. I’ve kept a phantom investment account in my head. If I’d had the money to do it, actually I’d have made a killing.” When Davey made no comment, Eddy said, “The market’s on the rise, a long rise. Anybody can see that. Besides, you don’t get anyplace in life without taking a few chances. You have to be willing to risk. That’s what this country was built on. All the great inventors, all the industrialists, took risks.”

Davey glanced at Lara, and she saw that he was reading her mind, feeling her sadness, as he always could and did.

Then he said quietly, “To each his own. I guess New York will agree with you, Eddy. It’s no place for us. Lara and I have our places here. The shop’s doing a whole lot better than it did when my dad had it, and I’ve got some inventions, some ideas I’m working on—” He stopped, took Lara’s hand, and pressed it.

She could read her brother’s mind. How good is “a lot
better”? Eddy must be thinking as he glanced around the room. It was a pretty room, furnished with secondhand pieces that she had slip-covered herself in a scheme of pink, red, and cream, copied out of a glossy magazine. But the carpet, which had come with the flat, was threadbare.…

Eddy used to come home starry-eyed over some house he had seen or some car he had ridden in. Like Pop before him he
aspired
; like Pop, too, he’d been quick to imitate the ways of the upper class, its dress, its speech, everything about it. But unlike Pop he was smart. He might do very well. Yes, it was possible. Oh, this was a blow all the same! To lose Eddy, for no matter what reason! To lose his native, almost invaluable good humor, the very sparkle that he brought into the room when he walked in! All this family, this family that was far too small in the first place, would miss him so. The empty space that he would leave would gape at them.

Now Connie, in her practical way, asked how soon he planned to go.

“I thought in about two weeks. First I want to help you get out of that apartment, find something nicer for you. In the first place it’s too large for you alone, without Mom, and too glum besides. Do you feel up to going out with me tomorrow to look?”

“Well,” she answered. “Well.” Her eyes moved about the room, as if searching, then to Davey and Lara, and finally, looking down at the tear in the carpet, she said, “It looks as if we’ve both picked the same time to surprise each other. But maybe it’s better to get it over with all at once.”

Alarmed again, Lara cried, “What are you talking about?”

“Well, you see—you see—oh, you know, Lara, how I’ve been wanting to just—just
go
somewhere! I’ve never really
been
anywhere.”

“Will you get to the point, Connie, please?”

Now Davey took over. “You don’t need to apologize, Connie. Just tell us what’s on your mind.”

“Texas. I’ve been hearing so much about it. It’s booming. You can always get a job.” Emboldened, she continued, “There’s something exciting just in the sound of it. Texas. Houston. I want to see it.”

Lara’s mouth went dry, and the palms of her hands were wet. “You don’t know a soul there, Connie. To go alone, leaving the only family you’ve got—it doesn’t make any sense. None at all.”

“But I think it does. And that’s what matters, isn’t it?”

“You’re only twenty, Connie!”

“Yes. Twenty. Not sixteen, not twelve, or eight.”

Lara tried another tack. “What kind of a job do you think you’ll get without a single contact? How will you even know where to begin to find a place to live?”

“Darling, don’t be a mother hen. I’ll buy a newspaper and read the ads, what do you think?”

Lara’s thoughts were sad and bitter. Yes, I was a mother hen. I had to be, hadn’t I? All the years while Mom was too sick from chemotherapy to take real charge of things, and I with a teenage sister eight years younger than I and a lively brother five years younger than I.

“It’s not so easy to find a job, Connie. You have no training. At least you do have a job here that you can depend on.”

“What, selling slacks and skirts in a tenth-rate department store, when there’s so much in the world to do and see?”

“You might take some courses and learn to do something better.”

“I haven’t the will just now, or the patience.” Connie stood up and laid her hand on Lara’s shoulder. “Don’t look so hurt,” she said. “I’m not staying away forever. Can’t you make believe we’re very rich, and I’m taking a year off to travel around the world?”

“She’s right,” Eddy said. “A young woman wants a change, a touch of adventure in her life. It’s natural. Okay, you didn’t want it, Lara. But if you hadn’t fallen in love with Davey, probably you would have felt the same way.”

Lara, knowing she was expected to smile, did so, faintly. “We’ll talk some more,” she replied.

Davey agreed. “Good idea. Today was a hard one, but tomorrow’s another day, so let’s try to lighten up a little. As Eddy says, nobody’s going to the ends of the world.”

Lara got the message. “Stay here for the night, Connie. It’s no good going back alone to the apartment.” It was a bleak place at best, sunless all day and noisy half the night because of the bar and grill beneath it. Now Mom’s clothes were still hanging in the closet. “I’ll go get some blankets from the spare room.”

The spare room, she thought as she straightened the bed, was meant to be the nursery. It was to have had
lemon-yellow walls, a frieze of Mother Goose figures, or maybe Winnie-the-Pooh, going all around. The furniture would be white, and for a girl the crib would have a canopy of dotted Swiss, or perhaps organdy.…

She hated the room. She kept the door closed, dusted it every week or two, then shut the door again. Seven years married, and nothing. Doctors, thermometers, hormones, sperm analyses, watching for the fertile period in the month—and nothing.

“Why don’t you fix this room? You could have a nice little den,” Connie remarked as she came in.

Connie doesn’t know how that hurts, Lara thought, not answering.

On the dresser stood the room’s sole ornament, a photograph of their parents, taken on their wedding day. The two sisters stood looking at it now. Their parents had been handsome people, Vernon dark with a sporty boutonniere and flashing teeth, Peg’s sweet face tiny in its frame of lavish hair.

Connie sighed. “How happy they were that day! And how it all turned out! A good thing Mom couldn’t have seen ahead.”

“She loved Pop no matter what. Remember how he used to call her ‘Peg o’ My Heart’?”

“I don’t see how she could have kept on loving him. I guess it was noble of her, but I’m not made that way. Life’s too short.”

“He was a good man except for the booze, and that wasn’t his fault. It ran in his family. Thank God none of us has inherited it.”

Pop had been a salesman, traveling back and forth
through the Midwest, selling—depending upon the company for which he happened to be working at the time—anything from shoes to toaster ovens to used tires. As often as he lost his jobs, so often did the family move from one flat to another, always in the oldest part of a town, above a hardware store, or a Laundromat, and under a crumbling pediment bearing some inscription like
FERRY BUILDING
, 1894, or
BUMSTEAD BUILDING
, 1911. The longest period that they had ever stayed in one place was when his liver and then his heart had finally failed; then Peg had opened her little beauty parlor and eked out a living for her children.

And yet … “He was a good man,” she repeated.

Connie’s look was a mingling of pity and disbelief. “I guess you’ve forgotten the nights when he came staggering home.”

“No, but I remember the nights when he read poetry aloud to us.”

Then Peg, who knew nothing about books, had nevertheless smiled in pleasure because her children were being taught to love them. Lara sighed. The ache lay heavy within her. Through all this dreadful day the memories had been aching.…