Ex Officio
Page 15
And the final two adults? These were Harrison’s younger daughter Martha, and her husband Maurice Simcoe. Martha, for all the thirty-eight years of her life so far, had been terrorized by her sister and mother, both of whom used her as a scratching post between bouts with one another, and the result was a silent nervous woman, eager to please but fumble-fingered in every way.
Well, not every way. In one area she was as precise and methodical as a Swiss clockmaker. Her eldest daughter, Pam, had been born sixteen years ago on the seventh of June. Two years later, Robin was born on the twenty-third of June. Another two years and Barbie was born, on the sixteenth of June. Two years more and Tamara was born, on June third. And finally, two years after that, eight years ago, Jackie was born on June ninth. As Howard once said, “Don’t ever call the Simcoe house in September.” He also claimed it was the most literal interpretation of the phrase planned parenthood in the history of the human race.
The husband of this maternal metronome, Maurice Simcoe, was a stout balding man who owned a string of drugstores scattered around all the poorer suburbs of Los Angeles. He was silent. Wellington Lockridge might be invisible, as Evelyn had just recently discovered, but Maurice Simcoe was silent. One was always aware of him, sitting in an easy chair in a corner, a newspaper folded in his lap, a cigar jutting from the corner of his mouth, a faraway look on his face. What was he thinking of? September? No one had ever found out.
A charming group of guests, all in all, and that was only the adults. As to the children, the Simcoe girls were merely the identical brat in five different sizes. They fought constantly, and always about the same thing: who owned what. Their craving for possessions was permanently unassuaged, and in her mind’s eye Evelyn saw a composite Simcoe girl sitting on a bare wood floor, surrounded by broken toys of all descriptions, as many as possible of which she was enfolding in her arms or holding down with her legs, while she bared her teeth in a snarl at the world. Pam, Robin, Barbie, Tamara, Jackie. How hopeful the names were, their mother’s vain attempt to assure herself children who wouldn’t bully her as her sister and mother had done. Completely vain; all five bullied her.
And the sixth child, Bradford Chatham. Evelyn couldn’t help liking him, by which she meant she couldn’t help pitying him. Earl Chatham, four years younger than his wife, had been Patricia Chatham’s revenge against her first husband, John Kent, for not only leaving her but taking their two sons with him. (The family had persuaded her that John did have the goods on her, and a court fight would get her a black eye, but not the children.) And Bradford Chatham was the replacement of those sons, a child she didn’t really want but whom she had to have in order to prove a point. Named after Bradford for all the wrong reasons, just as he had been conceived for all the wrong reasons, and ignored ever since, young Bradford at twelve was a skinny silent child behind huge hornrimmed glasses, who lived his life in books and who flinched when he heard an adult voice. His mother was impatient at his existence and his father was embarrassed by it, and the result was that a period of time spent in young Bradford’s presence always left Evelyn emotionally drained.
As she waited now for the return of the bus, Evelyn felt a little knot of tension forming between her shoulder blades. It would form in any case, the next three days would be dreadful in any case, but she had done what she could.
The extra help was here, five domestics from an agency in New York. Evelyn had given all five of them a welcoming-cum-warning speech, and then the regular cook gave a long loud Swedish-accented speech which in essence said, “This is my kitchen.” No one disputed her, all five promptly obeyed the orders she gave them, and it was beginning to look as though she might stay after all. So the servant situation seemed to be well in hand.
Now for the guests.
iii
PATRICIA WAS THE FIRST one off the bus. “At first,” she said coldly, not looking directly at either Bradford or Evelyn, “I thought we were being arrested and taken to a concentration camp. But apparently not.” She looked around in the sunlight at the house and the grounds, the servants waiting to carry luggage, Bradford and Evelyn, and behind her the bus, from which came the clamor of squalling children. “Do we sleep in the main house?”
Evelyn had expected Bradford would answer her, but the silence continued five seconds, ten seconds, and when she glanced sideways at Bradford she saw that he wasn’t going to say anything to Patricia at all. He wasn’t even looking at her, he was looking at the bus, his eyes half-closed in the direct sunlight and with something like the beginnings of an amused smile lurking at the corners of his mouth.
The silence was becoming painful, a physical ordeal. Patricia was glaring at Bradford. Behind her, Harrison was just descending from the bus, a nervous smile on his face.
It was far too late to answer Patricia now, but Evelyn did so nevertheless, suddenly blurting, “Of course, Aunt Patricia!” And as Patricia snapped a look at her as though she were a servant who had suddenly spoken without having been spoken to, Evelyn added lamely, “We thought, Bradford thought the children might enjoy the bus.”
“Bradford was wrong,” she said coldly, but her words were over-ridden by her husband, who had now stepped down onto the gravel and was coming smiling forward, his eyes hidden behind California sunglasses but the nervousness evident anyway in his mouth, saying, “Hello, Brad! Beautiful weather! We had beautiful weather from coast to coast!” He pumped Bradford’s hand, while Bradford stood looking at him, the smile now fully in possession of his face, both amused and sardonic.
Herbert Jarvis was coming next. A stocky graying man of fifty-six, his long-time California residence was reflected in his tan, his sunglasses and his inevitable bright-hued tie and shirt (today’s were predominantly gold and rust), while his East Coast origins were displayed in the stolid dark grayness of his suit, the conservativeness of his plain-toed oxford shoes and his insistence on wearing a hat. The hat was in his hand as he stepped down from the bus now, but he put it on and removed the sunglasses instead as he came forward to shake Bradford’s hand. Out from behind the green glass, his eyes looked pale and weak, as though they’d been underwater too long.
“Bradford,” he said, taking the hand that Harrison had reluctantly given up. Harrison was looking more nervous than ever now, having gotten nothing from Bradford but that odd smile, and he was making quick jumpy head moves as he tried to watch Bradford and Patricia simultaneously. Patricia was still glaring at Bradford’s profile, but with something slightly uncertain beginning to creep into her expression.
“Herbert,” Bradford said, and continued to smile, and Evelyn looked at him in even greater surprise, wondering if Bradford could possibly be consciously mocking Herbert’s style of greeting. (The inevitable Herbert Jarvis salutation was one’s own name, announced as though it were a stop on a commuter line, and unattached to any sentence, as though Herbert considered it greeting enough to acknowledge the other person’s existence.)
“If someone would show us to our rooms,” Patricia said.
Evelyn said, “Oh, yes! It’s the same ones as always, Aunt Patricia. I’ll show you. The servants will bring up the luggage.”
“Naturally,” Patricia said.
Evelyn understood that Patricia would now savage her, Evelyn, for a while, to make up for having had no effect on Bradford. Retaliation, even self-defense, were obviously impossible, since she wasn’t equipped to fight in Patricia’s league, but there was no reason she couldn’t remain calm. It was easy to allow oneself to be rattled by Patricia, but unnecessary. When a person is always attacking, they need no longer be taken seriously after a while.
She led the way now to the house, but let the guests make their own way upstairs. These advents were fairly frequent, two or three times a year, so the same guests were given the same rooms as a matter of routine, and by now none of them needed to be shown.
Except Herbert, of course, who had only been here three or four times in his life. Evelyn sent him up with a maid to show him his
room. She pretended, of course, not to see the pat Herbert gave the maid’s behind as they went up the stairs, but her heart sank at this reminder of their extra guest’s proclivities. Herbert, unlike many men who have never married, was neither a latent homosexual nor low in sex drive. The business world was his wife—as the military world was BJ’s—but Herbert supplemented that wife with a string of mistresses and a longer string of passing amours, these latter frequently among the ranks of maids, waitresses, carhops, usherettes and (if a story of Howard’s was to be believed) at least one lady cabdriver. Don’t let him cause trouble among the servants, Evelyn thought. And especially not the cook.
Meanwhile the guests were still streaming in. Herbert had followed Harrison and Patricia, and now Patricia Chatham came in, complaining in a low harsh voice to her husband Earl, who was wearing his usual pained smile. He seemed always on the verge of apologizing to the world in general for his wife’s bad disposition. A tall and slender man of thirty-eight, Earl Chatham had soft blond hair on a narrow fine-boned head and a soft blond slender moustache above the deprecatory smile of his mouth. He looked like someone who wanted to look like an RAF spitfire pilot but who didn’t quite have the strength of character to bring it off.
This Patricia looked like the other Patricia, but eighteen years younger. Both were rigorously slender and sharp-featured, both dressed stylishly but somehow aggressively, and both were, always spoiling for a fight, their rather hawklike good looks marred slightly by a deep vertical line of frowning discontent on both foreheads.
Their voices were alike, too. Evelyn couldn’t make out the words Patricia Chatham was saying, but the inflections were just like the mother’s. She forced herself to smile at the Chathams anyway, saying, “Hello, Patricia. Hello, Earl.”
Patricia ignored her, exactly as though no one were standing there at all, but Earl, his pained smile a little more pained, waved over Patricia’s head en passant and said, “Hallo, Evie. Good to see you again.” He was the only one who had ever called her Evie, a name about which Evelyn’s feelings were ambivalent.
“Are you listening to me?”
“Yes, my love.”
Bradford Chatham, age twelve, trailed in after his parents, who had now started up the stairs. “Hello, Aunt Evelyn,” he said apologetically, as though despite all his best endeavors he had just now yet again filled his pants. He was holding to his chest, one finger inserted to mark his place, the paperback reprint of a Eugene Burdick novel.
“Hello, Bradford,” Evelyn said, resisting an impulse to pat his head, and watched the skinny bespectacled kid trudge up the stairs in his parents’ wake. Thank God, she thought, for Gutenberg.
No one left but the Simcoes. The five daughters, ranging in age from eight to sixteen, burst in all together, squalling and yowling at one another. They passed Evelyn without noticing her, being too passionately involved in their intramural struggle, and crash-banged up the stairs like an animated wool tangle falling up. They were followed by their mother, Martha Simcoe, who came in stoop-shouldered and apologetic, blinking and saying, “Hello, Evelyn. If there’s anything I can do, just let me know.”
“I will,” Evelyn promised. The first few times Martha’d taken her through this ritual, Evelyn had pointed out that in a houseful of servants there was little enough for the hostess to do, much less anything for a helpful-minded guest, but as Martha persisted in the offer Evelyn had come to understand it was a kind of nervous tic, the necessary price of admission. Offer to work, and maybe they’ll let us stay. These days, Evelyn merely accepted and then neither she nor Martha ever made reference to it again.
The yowling of the Simcoe girls reached a sudden crescendo at the top of the stairs, and Martha gave a jangled jump and muttered, “Oh, those kids. Excuse me, Evelyn.”
“Of course.”
“We’ll talk—I so want to—” She was hurrying toward and then up the stairs, moving with short rapid worried steps, dropping in her wake short apologetic sentence fragments. “I’m sure we’ll—such a long trip—they’ll be all right when—”
They would never be all right, and everyone knew it. Evelyn turned back to the door, and now servants were coming in, carrying luggage. Amid them came Maurice Simcoe, almost disappearing in their midst, a slow-moving portly silent man never without his cigar. “Hello, Maurice,” Evelyn said, and Maurice took his cigar from his mouth but didn’t say anything. He never said anything. He bowed his head at Evelyn and sailed on for the stairs, still surrounded by servants, a trout in a school of perch. Howard, having once seen Maurice sit silent and impervious among his five daughters for over an hour, had come to the conclusion that he was a deaf-mute, and refused to consider any other explanation. Evelyn knew that Maurice Simcoe could both hear and speak when he chose to, but he chose to so seldom that it was a temptation to believe that Howard was right.
Bradford himself came in last. He’d stood out there to the end, greeting each of them as they’d emerged from the bus, like a minister at the church door after Sunday service, except that his smile had contained more a touch of the diabolical than the holy, and now he came in from the sunlight, the same smile still on his face, and quietly closed the door behind him. He looked at Evelyn and said, in the manner of a quiet observation, “Well, they’re here.”
“They certainly are,” Evelyn said.
“I will see you at dinner,” Bradford said.
“Where will you be before? Just in case I need you.”
“In the back library. But don’t need me.”
Evelyn wasn’t sure the smile on Bradford’s lips was directed at her—he seemed to be smiling about something private, inside his own head—but she answered it with one of her own anyway, saying, “I’ll try not to.”
“Good.” He nodded—that seemed a distant gesture, too, as though he’d caught from Harrison’s family the trick of never quite acknowledging Evelyn’s existence—and went on down the hall. He would take the back stairs, to avoid running into any of his guests.
Evelyn watched him go, her expression troubled. Bradford was in a mood she’d never seen before, both remote and hostile and yet at the same time full of a pushing kind of good humor. It was probably the combination of the Paris mess with the Harrison mess right on top of it, and she hoped it wouldn’t result in his making these three days even more difficult for Harrison—and everybody else—than they would be anyway.
Thinking enviously that the back library was soundproofed, Evelyn went off to see how the uneasy truce was surviving in the kitchen.
iv
AFTER DINNER, BRADFORD AND Harrison went for a talk into the green study, a small room on the first floor, facing the orchards and the farther off woods and the distant mountains to the rear of the house. Patricia went with her husband, of course, and the rest of the family scattered to its various concerns. Dinner had been a strained affair, in the downstairs dining room overlooking Dinah’s garden, but it had at least not been calamitous. Martha Simcoe and Earl Chatham had made most of the abortive attempts at starting a lighthearted general conversation, with Evelyn dragging herself in to help them from time to time against her sure knowledge that nothing would do any good. Rage simmered beneath the surface here and there around the table, and everyone was aware of it, but it stayed beneath the surface for now, and that was blessing enough. Also, there was so far no trouble in the kitchen.
Evelyn stayed in the general vicinity of the green study after Bradford and Harrison and Patricia went into it, both because of her worry about Bradford’s odd manner—the smile had been gone at dinner, replaced by a grim silence—but also because Earl Chatham had already started his routine doomed flirtation with her. It wasn’t that Earl was hard to resist, but that he was too easy to resist, that he padded on with such a strained smile and apologetic manner of bruised self-mockery that after a while he began to affect Evelyn exactly as did his son, making such urgent demands on her pity that it became physically painful to be in either male Chatham’s presence.
Don’t let him have an attack, Evelyn thought, remembering that his first attack, five months ago, had also been in the presence of Harrison and Patricia. At the same time, she was relieved that the tension had boiled over so soon, which might clear the air. It would ultimately have been worse for Bradford—for everybody—if all the rages had continued to simmer for another day or two.
The shouting the other side of that door went on and on, both voices frequently sounding simultaneously, striving to drown one another out. Evelyn waited around indecisively in the hall, not too close to the door, half-expecting and half-dreading a sudden silence, the door thrown open, her own name called. By Patricia? More likely by Harrison.
She hadn’t heard Bradford angry like this for several years. In his days in active politics he had been known as a man slow to anger but capable of cold violent rages. This shouting now brought back to Evelyn dim memories of other such incidents, with family members or political associates or White House staff, during Bradford’s tense four years as President.
The door flung open. Evelyn stopped where she was, mouth open, waiting for the call.
It didn’t come. Patricia appeared in the doorway, hand on the knob as she glared back into the room. “I’ll talk to you later! Harrison? Are you listening to me?” Through Harrison’s embarrassed mumbled reply, Evelyn heard the echo of Patricia’s daughter saying the same thing to Earl this afternoon, coming into the house. “Are you listening to me?” Same voice, same inflection, same intensity. Did the two Patricias really believe they had to force the world to attend them, did they really appear that colorless in their own eyes?