That Christmas was like that.
I did not see Claire again until the Parsons’ splendid annual party on the twenty-third. Everyone in the neighborhood looked forward to Gwen and Carey Parsons’ gala. It was just that; I always thought of the words “gala” and “fête” when I entered their shining foyer at Christmastime. Their house is one of the city’s real showplaces, built in the closing days of the last century by an architect of great local renown who had spent much time abroad and favored the Italians. Gwen and Carey had made something wonderful of the old white stucco villa, set far back on a sweep of lawn and reached by a circular drive. Twin stone urns spilled glossy greenery on either side of the great door, vivid and perfect even in the ice-black of December.
Inside there were rich, faded old tapestries and great chandeliers and sconces and massive black Mediterranean pieces about, but Gwen had lightened and balanced them with pools of color and sweeps of space, scattering hectic Indian rugs on the old tiles and hanging brilliant, explosive contemporary paintings on the vast white walls. The drawing room had a few handsome, heavy pieces of glass and chrome and steel, and books swelled and spilled from floor-to-ceiling bookcases in many of the downstairs rooms. They weren’t all old and leather-bound and matched, either. Rowdy paperbacks and contemporary fiction shouldered in among the dour Russians and Mr. Bulwer-Lytton. It shouldn’t have worked at all, but somehow it did.
I had not wanted to go to the party, knowing that Claire and Roger would be there. I shrank from seeing her, as I knew she would from me. But Walter insisted. He had been deeply angry at Claire when I’d told him about the dreadful words that were said in our den that evening before he got home. He was angry and troubled and nearly as hurt as I had been. He was also, I knew, a little annoyed at me.
“She behaved like a spoiled kid,” he said. “What kind of friend is that? But you had no business blurting out that stuff about the house, Col. Didn’t I tell you what people would think if you did that? Besides thinking you’ve gone around the bend, that kind of stuff disturbs people. Nobody wants to listen to that. Maybe you thought you were doing her a favor, but you upset her, and she was already half-miffed with you, and she just blew up at you. Anybody would. I’m not excusing her. I think she acted like a real shit to you. I didn’t think Claire had that in her. But it’s what you’re going to get from anybody you mention it to. Now, we damned well are going to that party. You’re going in with your head up and a big smile on, with all your flags flying, and you’re going to be nicer than hell to Claire, and we’re going to straighten things out between you two. Why don’t you get a new dress?”
I smiled dimly. “You sound like Rhett Butler telling Scarlett to wear that slutty thing to Melanie’s party after those old biddies caught her necking with Ashley. Are you saying you want me to apologize to Claire?”
“No, of course not. If anybody apologizes, it ought to be her. I just want you to show her she hasn’t gotten your goat and that you’re willing to forget that business if she is. You all have been friends too long to let a stupid house come between you.”
“Can’t you see that that’s probably its next move? Aside from whatever charming thing it has in store for the Greenes. Claire and I are just a sideline. There’s plenty of time to take care of the Greenes and work on Claire and me too.”
“I’d put Captain Queeg over there up against that house any day of the world,” Walter said. “He doesn’t have enough creativity to recognize a first-class ha’nt if one came out of the woodwork and bit him. And from what you tell me, she doesn’t sound exactly fey and ethereal. You’re jumping the gun. Nothing’s going to happen over there this time. If it was, it would have started already. The Harralsons’ troubles started before they even moved in. The Sheehans’ started in less than a week. They’ve been in three and not a peep from nary a spook.”
I knew that he had decided that brisk jocularity was the order of the day. He responded with gentle jibes whenever my fears about the house spilled over into words. I disliked the well-meaning banter even more than I did his reluctant understanding or his infrequent exasperation, and so I did not often mention the house. Except for the anguish of the quarrel with Claire, it was a waiting time, a suspended place in the dying days of the year.
So we did go to the party, me in a shockingly expensive new dress with a rictus of high spirits pinned to my mouth, Walter in the formal evening wear he purports to loathe but looks elegant and saturnine in on the two or three occasions during the year he puts it on.
Claire stood in the foyer with Roger and Norman and Susan Greene, waiting while gentle, elderly black Henry took their wraps. Roger looked like a rumpled parody of George Raft, as he always does in evening clothes, and Norman Greene looked magisterial and perfect in his white tie. Newness puffed from him like a cloud of smoke. I thought he should have a scarlet military sash, medals, a saber, orders of some splendid martial fraternity pinned about him. Claire and Susan looked as though they had bought their floor-length silk sheaths at the same discreet designer salon of the city’s most glittering emporium. Claire’s had chaste beading around the hem and neckline and was blue. Susan’s had fox fur on the cuffs and was green. That was the only noticeable difference, although Susan wore a simple choker of startling emeralds and kept moving her neck as though they were uncomfortable against her throat. I had seen few other emerald necklaces besides Virginia Guthrie’s, but these looked to be flawless.
“Hello, fellow voyagers. Merry Christmas,” Walter said, determined cheer puddling in his voice.
“Hi, everybody,” I said, looking only at Claire.
She hesitated for a moment and then came and gave me her little hug. Her cheek was very cold against mine.
“Hi, Col,” she said. “Hi, Walter baby. You know the Greenes of course.”
“Yes,” I said, and “Not yet,” Walter said, and there was a flurry of introductions, and we walked into the drawing room to greet Gwen and Carey. It is the only room I have seen in the city that can properly be called a drawing room. Anything else would be ludicrous.
We went on into the great paneled library, where the bar had been set up and a giant spruce glowed against a bay of windows overlooking the blackened garden. Gwen—or the servants—had festooned it with exquisite carved wooden ornaments and madonnas and cherubs made from painted papier-mâché. It had an exotic, old-world air about it; the whole house did. I thought of The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, as I always did in Gwen and Carey Parsons’ house. We got drinks from the young man behind the bar and took them over to a low oak table in front of the baronial fireplace, where a great apple-log fire hissed and snapped on the hearth. We dropped onto the facing sofas on either side of the fireplace. It was early yet, and there were no other people in the room.
“I always expect to see a whole steer sizzling away in there, or a boar,” Walter said, gesturing with his martini at the fire.
“It’s a beautiful house, isn’t it?” Susan Greene said with nothing in her voice but pure pleasure. The Parsons’ house brings out the latent covetousness in most of us, and we all do a lot of muttering about white elephants and drafty old barns after their parties. We all love the house.
“If you like this sort of thing,” said Norman Greene. It was such a pointedly uncharitable remark that we all looked at him, not knowing how to respond.
“I’m a simpler person myself,” he added.
I thought about the Buffet paintings and the reproduction French whorehouse furniture Claire had told me about and shot her a tentative look across the table. She twinkled back at me fleetingly and then leaned over to Susan Greene, who was looking unhappily into the fire, and said, “Yours is a thousand times more livable. Your house has been the envy of the neighborhood ever since it went up. You’re seeing this one at its all-time company best. Gwen says herself she’d sell it in a minute if they could get their money out of it.”
“How much are they asking?” said Norman Greene.
Claire shot him
a positive glare. “I don’t think they’d really sell it,” she said. “It was Carey’s family’s house. She just meant that it was big and old and hard to take care of. I don’t have any idea how much they’d want for it.”
“I’m not interested in it, of course,” he said. “Just thought it might give me some idea of what the neighborhood is worth in general. I’d like to think that little place of ours would appreciate over the years.”
“I don’t think you have to worry, Greene,” said Roger in a drier voice than he normally uses. “The street’s not Park Avenue, but it’s not Tobacco Road, either.”
“Who’s with Melissa tonight, Susan?” I said hastily. “And how’s she feeling now?”
“Duck’s pretty girl friend—Libby Fleming, isn’t it, Claire?” she said. “Lissa’s some better, I think, or at least she has been for a week or so. She’s not so hot tonight. It was really awfully sweet of Libby to come and sit with her on such short notice. I haven’t had time to line up baby-sitters yet.”
“I hope you don’t think it was a mere favor to a new neighbor,” Claire said ruefully. “Duck was undoubtedly over there before the front door closed on you. I haven’t seen much of him since he got home from school, but I’m sure the poor Flemings have seen far too much of him. God, I’m glad he’s not in school down here, or she’s not in New Haven. He’d flunk out before the first quarter was up.”
“How’s he liking Yale?” Walter said.
“Who knows?” Claire replied. “I don’t get letters. I just get collect phone calls saying he’s out of money or could use a couple of new shirts, or wants to spend Thanksgiving in New York with some person named Animal.” Pride shone softly out of her eyes; Duck’s full scholarship to Yale was one of the great things in Claire and Roger’s life. He wanted to be a research biologist; I thought, with his gentle hands and leaping mind and Roger’s endless, sweet patience and uncommon sense of responsibility, that he would be a good one.
Norman Greene frowned. “I hope those kids will behave themselves,” he said. “I didn’t know Duck was coming over. The girl’s father is on the board of trustees for City, isn’t he? I don’t need him down on me.”
“We’ve known Libby’s father longer than we have Duck,” Claire said tartly to Norman Greene, “and almost as well. And Libby too. She and Duck have gone together longer than anybody can remember. Ford Fleming has been stricter with her than a convent school. He seems to approve of Duck. I don’t think you have to worry about either of the children. Both of them were raised pretty well.”
“I didn’t mean to imply that anything out of the way was going on,” he said quickly. “He seems a fine boy and she’s a nice little girl. Susan has been fussing over Melissa far too much lately, and she needs to be quiet is all.”
“Duck and Libby won’t bother her,” Claire said briefly. She turned to Susan. “Still the same business with Lissa’s stomach?”
Susan wrinkled her nose, but I thought her blue eyes clouded a little. “Off and on. I don’t think it’s anything much, but if it isn’t better after Christmas I’m going to take her to your doctor, Claire. It’s probably only the excitement of Christmas and moving. Stomachache, some diarrhea—”
“That’s hardly appetizing cocktail talk, is it, Susan?” Norman Greene smiled thinly. “Melissa is overindulged. That’s all. Come on. I see Dr. Holderbein from City over at the bar. He wanted to meet you. He’s the president, you know.”
Susan Greene gave us a little girl’s rueful smile all around. “Excuse us for a minute?”
“Certainly,” I said. They rose and walked away toward the bar. Norman Greene was talking into his wife’s ear, emphatic words we could not hear, punctuated by little jerks of his cropped head. She ran her finger inside the emerald choker as though it were too tight.
“Turd,” said Claire clearly as the Greenes joined the crowd around the bar.
“In spades,” Walter said. “No redeeming social value at all, that I can see. What’s a nice girl like her, et cetera? I wonder what he calls diarrhea? Poo-poo, like Eloise does?”
“Gastroenteritis, probably,” said Claire. “The more I see of that Nazi, the less I like it. She came over the other afternoon almost in tears, wanting to borrow some cleaning fluid. He’d come home the night before and found some stains on his clothes in the big closet—you know, that cedar closet the Harralsons had built in? Well, that’s for his clothes—and just jerked them all off the hangers and dumped them on the floor in their bedroom and said he was going to sleep in the guest room until she got the stains out. On the floor, please.”
“What kind of stains?” I said.
“I don’t know. Something that must have gotten on them at the cleaners in Boston before they moved, because they were still in the plastic hangers. But of course it was her fault. I sent her up to that place in the shopping center we use. She just hadn’t had time to find a dry cleaner yet. And then there were the bedroom curtains.”
“What happened to the bedroom curtains?” Walter said. I could tell that he was enthralled.
“That’s really pitiful. Melissa was pulling on them and they fell, and before Susan could get them up again he came home and found them in a pile on the floor, and he was so angry Susan was afraid to tell him how it happened, so she said she didn’t know why they fell. He told her that if she couldn’t hang curtains properly to get someone to come in and do it professionally. Know any professional curtain hangers?”
“No, but I’ve got a good connection for a professional hit man,” said Walter. “Maybe that’s what she needs.”
“I’d be glad to do it myself, should the need arise, which it already has as far as I’m concerned,” said Claire. “I didn’t appreciate that little insinuation about Duck and Libby one bit. They’re so chaste they almost scare me. And imagine, punishing Susan because his clothes got dirty! By saying he was going to sleep in the guest room! I should think that would be a treat instead of punishment. God, all I can see is years ahead of trying to be her friend and dodging him at the same time. What a ghastly and endless prospect.”
I felt the unwelcome, sick wrench in my stomach again and said, “Let’s go get some of those hors d’oeuvres before the locusts come.”
We got up and drifted toward the dining room, where the buffet glowed, jewellike, on Gwen Parsons’ hundred-year-old damask. The painful estrangement between Claire and me had not vanished, but it had slunk away into a dark corner of the cave under the onslaught of our indignation at Norman Greene.
In the library, as we left it, someone sat down at the piano in a dim corner of the dark old room and began to pick out “Adeste Fideles.”
20
THE WEEK AFTER CHRISTMAS an ornate, gold-scrolled invitation came from Susan and Norman Greene. “Join us for a Twelfth Night celebration,” the message said in curly black script.
Walter ran a thumbnail over the letters. “Engraved,” he said. “Twelfth Night. Jesus, it sounds like Shakespeare. What the hell is Twelfth Night?”
“Epiphany, you heathen. When was the last time you went to church?”
“Never, if you mean C of E,” he said. “Good God, when he climbs he goes all the way to the top, doesn’t he? When’s the last time you got an engraved invitation to a neighborhood party?”
“Maybe it’s more than neighborhood. There are bound to be some college people there. The president and the board of regents, no doubt. Lord, that poor woman.”
“Shall we go?” he said.
“Of course we’ll go. We can’t not go. It would break her heart. I’m sure the engraved invitations and the Twelfth Night business were his doing, not hers. She must be embarrassed practically to tears. Besides, I’m dying to see the inside of the house. Claire said it looked like a French bordello. I guess you’ll have to dress, though it doesn’t say so. But with an engraved invitation…”
“Shit,” said Walter.
We had a quiet New Year’s Eve with Charlie Satterfield and his wife, eating turkey chow me
in in front of their fireplace. At midnight Charlie opened a bottle of champagne and we toasted the coming year.
“To a good year for all of us,” said Charlie, lifting his glass.
“I’ll drink to that,” said Walter.
I said nothing. We exchanged comfortable midnight kisses, and went home early. The next day we walked over to Claire and Roger’s to their small traditional brunch-and-Bowl-games affair. The aroma of black-eyed peas curled into the foyer. Claire met us at the door and gave Walter an exaggerated smack on the cheek, leaving a coral lip print.
“I asked you early just so the first person over my doorstep on New Year’s Day would be a dark-haired man,” she said. “I’m going to have a lucky year.”
It wasn’t an unpleasant afternoon. Claire and I avoided being alone with each other by tacit agreement, but we bantered determinedly and good-naturedly with each other, as we had always done, and if there was a tension, a fine-nerved edge in the air between us, no one else seemed to notice. The Greenes were not there. Claire said they had gone to a reception at the home of the City College chancellor but were coming by for an early supper.
“Melissa was supposed to start Chase day after tomorrow, but she’s still a little under the weather. The doctor couldn’t find anything much wrong, but I think Susan’s going to keep her home the rest of the week,” Claire said.
We refused her invitation to stay for supper. I did not want to spend much time with Susan Greene and felt small and guilty that I did not. Part of me liked her enormously; part of me shrank from becoming intimate with her. I felt no compunction about my growing dislike of Norman Greene. Once, during the week after Christmas, I had heard him shouting in their backyard and had leaned back to look out my office window to see what was going on. It was dusk, and cold. He was standing at the wooden enclosure that housed their garbage cans, throwing something that I could not identify into the cans. Melissa, in a long nightgown, stood on the back deck watching him, shrinking back against the railing.
House Next Door Page 21
