Very Rich

by Polly Horvath

  Rupert nodded.

  “Well, good. I always did think I would make an excellent detective,” said Mrs. Rivers. “Now, let’s get going.”

  She put the car in gear and pulled onto the street.

  “Where are we going?” asked Rupert in alarm.

  “We’re going to have a little adventure,” said Mrs. Rivers.

  “What if someone wakes up and notices I’m gone?” asked Rupert, looking frantically out the back window, expecting to see people dashing out the door and gesticulating at the disappearing car. It was one thing to be gone all Christmas day and another thing to be driven off somewhere at night.

  “If they didn’t catch you going down the stairs and outside, it’s doubtful anyone will notice,” said Mrs. Rivers. “I speak from experience. I go out every Tuesday night and don’t come back until dawn and so far no one has noticed me missing. I often wonder if my absence would be noticed if I lived in a smaller family. There’s something about so many people living together that makes it easier to slip out. Be grateful for small blessings, Rupert.”

  They drove to the edge of town, and now she turned the car onto the road that took them to the highway ramp.

  “Rupert dear, is that the same hole-ridden sweatshirt I saw you depart in at Christmas?”

  “Yes,” said Rupert.

  “Well, that won’t do. You can’t go into Zefferelli’s wearing that.”

  “Zefferelli’s?”

  “It’s a restaurant in Cincinnati. A very smart restaurant. People dress up.”

  “Why are we going to a restaurant in Cincinnati?” asked Rupert, growing more and more concerned. Every time he saw this family, strange things seemed to be afoot. Strange to him at least. He was always worried that people thought his family peculiar for cat stealing, but perhaps in the larger world peculiarities abounded. Perhaps cat stealing was nothing.

  “Mr. Rivers and I go there every year for our anniversary and it’s where I now go every Tuesday night. It’s a wonderful restaurant. Great food. So when I decided I wanted to be a chef, that’s the restaurant that came to mind. I mentioned this to Mr. Rivers, who said he didn’t like the idea of a wife who worked. He said it would make him look bad at the club. He said that there would be whispering that he could not support his wife. That our fortune was falling. Because if he could and it wasn’t, why was his wife becoming a cook? Not a cook, I corrected him, someday a chef. Although, really, I wouldn’t mind being a cook either. Have my own little diner. That might be fun too.

  “Now I know in this day of women’s rights you would think we were beyond that. You would think I wouldn’t tolerate such an attitude, but marriages are complicated things, Rupert. With their own pacts and war zones and unspoken contracts, and I wasn’t ready to go to war about this. So I decided I would just have to learn to cook behind Mr. Rivers’s back. Then I came up with a plan. Cooking school was out. I could hardly do that secretly. I needed a restaurant that I could sneak into at night and learn the trade. And where else but Zefferelli’s? I asked the head chef, Chef Michaels, at Zefferelli’s, if I could hang out in the kitchen nights and he said, yes, but only on Tuesdays, because they’re not quite so crazy as on the weekend with lines at the door. I’ve learned a lot, Rupert. At first, I just watched the cooks on the line and tried to stay out of their way. Then one night one of the cooks couldn’t come in, so I convinced Chef Michaels to let me take the absent cook’s place, and I did such a good job that now he lets me come in and take over someone’s station or cook on the line in the later part of the evening so that one of the cooks can go home early.”

  “What’s the line?” asked Rupert.

  “That’s a bunch of cooks all standing next to each other who make whatever the head chef tells them to. He might have a cook making a steak au poivre every time an order for it comes in. Steak au poivre after steak au poivre after steak au poivre. It’s not inspiring work, Rupert. Not unless you’re simply in love with cooking steak au poivre. Now, I realize that any kind of work, even artistic work like cooking or ballet, has its share of grind. Something you have to do over and over and over until it’s in your BLOOD. I’m sure ballerinas are half the time flitting across the stage looking all ethereal but saying to themselves, ‘Oh, pas de chat, pas de chat, pas de chat—when does it ever end?’ That’s how I began to feel about steak au poivre if you want the truth. And that’s why I decided cooking on the line would never be enough for me. I want to create the dishes that Zefferelli’s serves, not simply implement them. That’s where my true talent lies. So I’ve hatched yet another plan. It turns out, Rupert, I’m very good at plans. This one kills two birds with one stone. But you never know these things if you don’t spread your wings and fly, do you, Rupert, do you?”

  Mrs. Rivers went back to driving with a little smile on her face. Rupert felt some response was required from him, but he really did not know what. Finally, he just said, “That’s very nice, Mrs. Rivers.”

  “Why, thank you, Rupert,” she replied.

  They sped along down the highway for a while in silence. The sea of lights coming toward them through the snow was obscurely reassuring. Rupert liked Mrs. Rivers, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to be alone on the road in the car of someone who had gotten him up so late and driven him smiling and thinking of other things to someplace she wasn’t supposed to be. It all had a vaguely dangerous air about it. Not menacing but off the rails. Rupert always tried to be very very good. Off the rails was not his style.

  As they drove, Rupert grew sleepy again. He was thawing out. In fact, he was growing warmer and warmer. Did he have a fever? His back was particularly warm. It felt lovely, his muscles melting into the seat. Could you be so feverish that you simply melted? Rupert remembered his teacher’s first aid lesson about hypothermia—that people with hypothermia, as their body temperature dangerously dropped, often got very comfortable and felt warm. In fact, sometimes so warm that they ripped off all their clothes, thus hastening freezing to death. Was this what was happening to him? Suppose next he had the uncontrollable urge to rip off all his clothes? Here in the car with Mrs. Rivers! Should he warn Mrs. Rivers that this was impending? But what could he say? Mrs. Rivers, I don’t want to alarm you but any moment I might have the irresistible urge to strip to my socks? No, no, there must be a better way.

  Finally he blurted out, “Mrs. Rivers, I think I may have half a fever. My front is fine, I don’t think I am yet in danger of hypothermia, but my back seems to be heating up. And it may spread.”

  He felt this covered the situation.

  Mrs. Rivers didn’t take her eyes off the road, just said mildly, “Yes, I have seat warmers. If you’re too warm, there’s a control on your side, right there on the dashboard.”

  She pointed.

  Seat warmers! And here he’d been worried that among other things he might be about to burst into flames!

  “Wow,” he said. “This is great. I wish there were such a thing as floor warmers.” How handy this would be at home for his cold nights under the bed. Mind you, if his family could afford floor warmers, they could probably afford enough beds and the rooms to keep them in. And more heat.

  “They do have floor warmers. Mr. Rivers had them put in in the bathrooms,” said Mrs. Rivers. “I’m not such a fan, myself. I like a good cold floor.”

  “Wow,” Rupert said again.

  “Oh, brave new world,” said Mrs. Rivers, and she seemed to be both laughing at and delighting in him at the same time.

  Rupert didn’t care. He was nodding off in the deliciousness of warm, relaxed muscles. He shook himself and tried to think of some conversation to stay awake. He had the uneasy feeling that he should stay alert during such an odd situation.

  “Do Turgid or Rollin or Sippy or the cousins ever come with you like this?” he asked.

  “No,” said Mrs. Rivers.

  Mrs. Rivers was a very intense driver, and she drove very fast, her hands at ten and two o’clock, gripped tightly around the steering wheel. She
leaned forward as if trying to gaze as far down the road as she could and squeezed the wheel as if this were what was making the car go.

  “You may think my children have unusual names,” she reflected.

  “Not so unusual really,” said Rupert politely.

  “You must have realized how the names Turgid and Rollin go with Rivers. Sippy doesn’t go with Rivers unless you’re thinking of someone drinking a river out of a sippy cup, but that’s stretching things. I just liked the name Sippy. I’m afraid Turgid and Rollin were spite names. I kept suggesting names to my husband like Bill or John but they weren’t grand enough for him. He wanted names that were in keeping with the old money of his family name. The Rivers helped found Steelville, you know. For a while they planned to call it Riversville, but old Josiah Rivers, who started the steelworks, refused. He wanted the name Steelville because he thought it would attract more workers. He wanted word to spread through the Kentucky hills that there were jobs to be had in the steelworks of Ohio and he thought calling the town Steelville was the best advertisement for that. Of course, he was right.”

  “My parents’ families are from Kentucky,” said Rupert.

  “Well, there you go,” said Mrs. Rivers, nodding. “Many of the Rivers through the generations have been important. They have monuments built to them. In steel. There is a steel statue of Josiah Rivers in the center of town.”

  “I know,” said Rupert.

  His class took a field trip there every year. The school had two field trips they sent the children on annually. The first was to the statue of Josiah Rivers. “Because of him you may be lucky enough to work in his steelworks one day,” the teachers always said.

  The other was to the steelworks.

  Those two field trips seemed to cover everything the children needed to know about their futures.

  “It annoyed me, the importance he put on giving them old money names,” Mrs. Rivers went on, “because I didn’t want my children to be simply the representatives of old money. I wanted them to be whoever they wanted to be. So after Mr. Rivers had nixed Francis and Martin and Edward, I threw out the name Rollin. As a joke, you know. Rollin Rivers. But he didn’t get it. He wasn’t putting it together. He liked the name Rollin. He insisted on it in the end. And when the next boy came along I playfully suggested Turgid, thinking surely he would get the joke this time. But he didn’t. He loved it. He thought Turgid sounded medieval. And knightly. And that’s when I realized that I’d married an idiot. Someone with no sense of humor at all. And although he’s very smart in a business kind of way, he hasn’t the kind of intelligence that maybe I should have been looking for. So my advice to you, Rupert, when you finally start looking for a mate, is don’t just think about how cute some girl looks in her blue jeans, consider the kind of conversation you’re going to have to have with her for the next fifty years.”

  “Did you ever think of…divorce?” asked Rupert tentatively. This seemed like a rather impertinent question to ask a grown-up, but he wished to be helpful and many of his classmates had divorced parents.

  “No, no, the name thing? Water under the bridge. You can’t go around divorcing people just because you can’t stand to talk to them. But by the time Sippy came along I’d tired of the joke. And I was beginning to think about the boys’ futures and how their names might affect them. Have you ever noticed, Rupert, them being beaten up in the schoolyard because of those names?”

  “I can’t honestly say I have,” said Rupert.

  “Well, that’s lucky. I regret terribly having been so silly about it all. You can’t imagine how you look back down the decades, years, or months even to the you of the past and say to yourself, What a jerk! I have always wanted to be a good mother to my children and that was not a very good start. I hope I have made up for it since.”

  “I’m sure you have,” said Rupert kindly. “Turgid certainly seems to like you.”

  “Children should like their mothers,” said Mrs. Rivers musingly.

  “Indeed,” he said again just for something to say. He wasn’t used to using the word indeed, but he found himself being a bit stilted in conversation with someone grown up and so rich. He worried his natural vernacular wasn’t equal to the occasion.

  So far, whatever they were doing, whatever venture Mrs. Rivers had taken him on, seemed a bit cracked, but he liked her. She was kind. Despite the way she talked about Mr. Rivers, she had a comforting, easygoing, plump goodness about her. Like a big old blond bear squinting to puzzle out the world constantly and trying to find a way to make it work for everyone.

  “And to further elaborate on your question,” Mrs. Rivers continued, “no, I have never taken any of the children or anyone in the family or anyone at all to the restaurant at night with me. Nobody knows about this but you.”

  And then amid the blowing snow and trucks hurtling by, Mrs. Rivers seemed to make a sudden spontaneous decision and with a jerk turned the wheel of the car and drove right off the highway.

  Rupert grabbed the center console with both hands and hung on in terror as the car skidded on the icy pavement and finally came to a swerving stop on the shoulder.

  “Really, dear,” said Mrs. Rivers mildly, “you’d think you’d never been in a car before.”

  She put it in park but kept it running, then turned to Rupert and gave him a long look as she tried to think of how to phrase what she wanted to say.

  “Rupert,” she said finally, “perhaps it is time I explained to you what you are doing here. I felt terrible on Christmas when you, a guest in my house, met with the crushing defeat of losing all those nice prizes you’d spent the day accumulating. I know you felt you’d won them fair and square, and you had won them fair and square, so losing them must have come as a surprise. A horrid one. I felt for you, I truly did. I know Henry says that I mustn’t. That I’ve no business feeling for you. That the only thing that makes the games exciting and fun is the prospect of terrible disappointment. There must be a chance that you will fail miserably or success means nothing. Kindness means nothing without the reality of cruelty. Et cetera. And to that end we are never allowed to break any of the rules of the games or make exceptions. Some people win. Some people lose. That’s just the way it is. Some people get bitter, some get determined, some are elated, some are depressed. But the games remain the games. I understand all that. I even, for the most part, agree with it. And I know Henry did finally allow for the extra thirty seconds, but what, I ask you, are thirty seconds in the scheme of things? So I felt for you. After all, you were not familiar with our ways. We could hardly expect you to walk into our home and understand such a philosophy right off the bat. I believed, in a word, you’d been shafted. So I decided to secretly make amends. I said to myself, I’ll take him to Zefferelli’s. That will make things right. And that is why you are here. In part.”

  She nodded to herself, put the car back into gear, pulled onto the highway, and drove onward to Cincinnati.

  Rupert fell asleep for a while after that. He could not help it; the ride was so long and the car so warm and he was not used to being awake at this hour. He awoke when he sensed the car slowing. They were no longer on the highway but going down a ramp into city traffic. It had stopped snowing and to Rupert, who had never been out of Steelville, Cincinnati looked like a fairyland. He had never seen so many lights in his life. Or such big buildings and so many of them! There were people out everywhere despite the late hour. Some of them looked very sketchy even by Steelville standards, lounging about on icy sidewalks. Others looked rich and prosperous and purposeful. But where were they all going at such an hour? What were they all doing?

  Mrs. Rivers and Rupert drove up and down city streets. Rupert had his nosed pressed to the window. He could have driven like this forever. The world was so much bigger than he knew. Of course, he knew everywhere was not like Steelville, but until you were out into it, you couldn’t imagine, you couldn’t imagine how small your own world was, how little you knew. It made him feel very peculiar. It di
soriented him. All of these people who looked so different, who had lives so different from his own, thought their worlds were real too. And their Rupertless worlds were real.

  For some reason, this scared the pants off him. Suddenly he had seen enough. He wanted to go home and get back under his bed. Fortunately, at that moment Mrs. Rivers turned into an underground parking lot, and Rupert was saved from the crowds of too many different people with too many different true lives and pulled into the quiet dimness below.

  “Here we are,” Mrs. Rivers said briskly as she parked the car. “Come on.”

  She exited, walked around and opened his door, grabbed his arm, and ushered him out from where he had been sitting thinking, Let’s just stay here in the quiet dark. Then she surveyed him again critically.

  “I really can’t take you into the restaurant looking like this. What are we going to do? We’re in a pickle, Rupert.” She frowned and her squinty eyes got even squintier. Then she brightened. “I know. I’ll find you the smallest chef’s coat I can and tailor it. People will think it’s some kind of strange costume, no doubt, but I’m handy with scissors and pins and at least you won’t sit there with holes in your clothes. But we must hurry because I’m late relieving one of the cooks. Chef Michaels has got a temper. All chefs have tempers, I am told. Maybe it’s the hot stoves. Maybe it’s the pressure of getting so many dinners out on time. Maybe it’s that people who want to cook for a living are unhinged. Anyhow, I can’t risk being fired. Not tonight. Not the night of the plan. Come on.”

  Mrs. Rivers practically pulled Rupert off his feet rushing him through the back door of the restaurant into the kitchen. She seemed to be a different person here at Zefferelli’s. Back at her house in Steelville she was quiet and nervous and motherly. But here she was decided and full of energy. She gave merry waves and hugs and greetings to all the staff as she and Rupert raced along. It was bedlam: sizzling food on grills, pans of things bubbling over, the shouted voices of the cooks along the line. Waiters ran through the kitchen door and pinned up orders with screeches of “Why isn’t table thirteen’s chicken ready?” Cooks ran behind the line shouting “Behind, behind, behind,” as they went to the walk-in cooler for ingredients. Mrs. Rivers seemed unfazed by it all.