Come Pour the Wine

by Cynthia Freeman

  Shutting the door bearing the name plate, McNeil’s Pad, Bill sat on the edge of his bed, allowing himself the indulgence of reliving years past. The times of Janet and Bill … small things adding to … ? Champagne running down his suit … a naive young girl in a marbled lobby waiting for him to step out of an elevator … the virginal young woman who’d given herself so completely … the anxious months … the insecurity of waiting … Maine in November … a vision in white satin walking down the aisle to become his wife … the joys of the first-born, and then another … nineteen years of living … a shattering, awful parting … five long years of separation … And now, for her, a new love … Oh, God, Janet, how could I have been so blind to lose so much? Well, be happy, my darling … And then even the silent monologue was washed away in the tears he could no longer hold back.

  When Nicole finally left, Janet felt almost lightheaded. She had a greater sense of herself than ever before in her life. She felt a huge relief. A weight was now truly gone. She could fly. She called Kit. To share her joy with her, who better, more appropriate for that, than Kit? She was going to grab the brass ring, you bet.

  Kit closed her eyes, said to herself, I love you, God. You really did work it all out. To Janet she said, “Have a ball, baby … have a ball. I’ll take care of your mail and the bills. What about the shop?”

  “Give it to Renée.”

  There were still a few calls to make. She wondered if there’d be the same confrontation, explanation with Jason. Well, the Fates, never mind the facts, were on her side … “Darling, I have some wonderful news to tell you. I’m going away for a while, with Allan Blum. It all sort of happened very unexpectedly, but I’ll write you a long, long letter explaining everything. What’s important, Jason, is that we love each other and—”

  “That’s enough for me, mom … the past is past. Be happy, mom. You deserve it.”

  Janet brushed away the tears. “Thank you, Jay. You know, for a very young man you’re pretty damn smart. Also, it seems I’ve been blessed with two wonderful children.”

  Hanging up, she wondered how best to tell her mother. A phone call? Too abrupt. A long letter would be the right way. Unlike Nicole at first, Janet knew her mother would understand, not judge her. The most painful thing was anticipating Bill’s reactions. He would be sad, regretful, look back at all they’d had and lost, the way she had done so often in the beginning. It would not be easy for him to accept another man in her life. And in a strange way she still loved him, as she knew he loved her. But life had its own way of dealing …the acute, malignant losses eventually became benign. And Bill did have the children and grandchildren, and she would never pretend he didn’t exist, that they had not existed … their family, if nothing else, proved otherwise. But from now on the man in her life was Allan … it was the way it was….

  When Allan had taken out the last of the suitcases and put them in the car, Janet locked her door, and didn’t once look back….

  EPILOGUE

  IT WAS TWO YEARS now, two years that they had been away, two years lived as a lifetime, not just a new beginning, but a beginning all on its own, at once an evolution for both Janet and Allan from their pasts and a revolution in the quality of their lives. Neither would have claimed, or even intimated, that what had come before they met was somehow merely a prelude, to be forgotten or somehow downgraded. Without the acknowledged pain—and yes, pleasure too—of their relationships with their previous spouses, and without for Janet the love and special growth through her children and their lives, none of this would have been possible for either of them. An Allan Blum whose life had not been seared by a rejecting wife, who had not learned the price of presumed happiness through outward appearances, would never have had the wisdom, the compassion, and above all the patience to make himself available for a woman as complex and surely apprehensive and confused as Janet was when they first met. And Janet, without her testing, without the living that had taken her from the well-meaning if remarkably naive nineteen-year-old girl who came out of Wichita, Kansas, would never have had the courage to take advantage of the new depths of feeling and involvement that a man such as Allan offered her.

  And perhaps paramount among what he offered her, gave to her, reinforced in her, was his sense of origins, his Jewishness that gave room for her own to grow and merge with her hardly Jewish upbringing. The process, on a personal level, that had begun for her all those years ago on a tenement street in New York City with a woman with, to her then, the improbable name of Fayge, and that was further opened up by her long-delayed talk with her father about his background, and therefore hers, was now accelerated and given fresh meaning by her association with a man who had lived as a Jew—and all that that meant, regardless of his station in life. Janet Stevens no longer felt like an outsider, looking in at her origins. Now she felt she belonged to her own roots, whereas before she had only occasional reminders of them. This was indeed the entirely new part of her life, and with Allan she was free and able to pursue it in a way never before possible. It was one thing to have a Jewish son-in-law like Mark Weiss, and to have a daughter who had converted, embracing her husband’s religion, its special teachings and joys and deep sorrows. But now it was she, she becoming for herself, she learning to feel and know who she was and whence she came at a level altogether new and enriching. Not that they dropped off in every synagogue in every city they visited—although they did some of that and she was astonished, for instance, to discover that Jews and their traditions were not only known but important in such faroff places as Brisbane, Australia—but there was a new tone, a new sense of belonging in her life that was an undercurrent to the person that was now Janet Stevens.

  As for Allan, it was a surprise and a matter of great satisfaction for him that he was of some help to Janet in coming into her own in terms of her Jewish origins and sensibilities, but there was much more that he received from her. Janet was a woman in a way that he had never quite understood the term. He was not inexperienced with women, and had thought that in both his personal and professional life he had had perhaps more understanding of the opposite sex than most men. But Janet was a new experience, a kind of revelation. She had a generosity of spirit, an openness to new things and ideas in a way that was exciting and enormously gratifying to him. Yes, he was in some ways her teacher, but she, on perhaps an even more profound level, was his as well. The law, as he knew it, was a profession of adversaries, of combat, of anticipating the worst in people more often than the best, and finding out that such expectations were not only justified but often conservative. Add in the bitterness from the experience of his marriage and Allan Blum was a man who had a genuine skepticism about the innate goodness of the human animal, and in particular about women. In Janet he had sensed, as he said, from the beginning a woman of a different sort, and he responded. But actually living with and sharing life with Janet had gradually allowed him to let his excessive guard down, to be more open in his fashion to the pleasures of life without doubting them so much, and in particular to the unique kind of giving, of trusting love that Janet was able to offer him.

  Together they were a quite remarkable complement, in nearly every respect, including the one without which all the rest might have been nice but irrelevant—they were simply crazy about each other. They liked each other out of bed as well as in it, and they even learned to make each other laugh sometimes, not always to take themselves too seriously. They knew it was impossible for a person to be perfect, not to annoy and grate at times on the other’s nerves—they had plenty of experience in those negative areas—and so they did not demand or expect the impossible. Perfection was possible, Allan would remind her, only in the cold ground of the grave, or the chiseled marble of a statue. They were flesh and blood, and that was a fact of life to rejoice in….

  Today, sitting in a deck chair aboard the S.S. Eastern Pearl, en route to Tokyo, Janet had some of these thoughts as she waited for Allan to come up from his swim. When he appeared, she was almost
startled, unaware how deeply she had been in her thoughts about these remarkable two years together.

  “You look mighty thoughtful, my lady, though, no question, as beautiful as ever. What’s up?”

  She took hold of his hand. “Oh … I was just looking back at me, at us. My God, how much I’ve changed. Hopefully, for the better, and surely because of you. Darling, you know you’ve made me happier than I ever, ever thought possible.”

  “After seeing me twenty-four hours a day? Maybe I’m just an addiction.”

  “Definitely.”

  He bent over and kissed her. “Darling, maybe we should go down and change, it’s almost five.”

  “Is it that late?”

  “No … that early, and I’m ready to pour the wine.”

  Hand in hand, they went off to their cabin …

  He looked at her, dressed in her white chiffon gown, held her close and had the nerve to whisper, “Come grow old with me and be my love … the best is yet to come.”

  She smiled, kissed him soundly. “Oh, yes, my dearest. Oh, yes.”

  Kit looked at the dateline on the cablegram. Tokyo. Quickly she tore it open, then laughed out loud. It read …

  RABBI ABOARD MARRIED AT SEA WILL BE HOME

  FOR THANKSGIVING LOVE TO ALL

  MR. AND MRS. ALLAN BLUM

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  TO MY DEAR HUSBAND whose shoulder was always there when I needed it.

  My deepest gratitude and profound thanks to my publisher, Don Fine, for all his efforts.

  And to Jessie Crawford, who started out as my senior editor and ended by becoming my dear friend. For her devotion, which went beyond the call of duty, she has my warmest gratitude.

  Turn the page to read an excerpt from Cynthia Freeman’s Fairytales

  1

  IT WAS ONE OF those glorious mornings in Santa Barbara that sojourners from the damp, dismal fog of San Francisco dream about, in fact, look forward to every year. The men were already waiting in teams of twos and fours to get on to the green lush golf course. It was the promise of a great day for eighteen holes of golf as they stood swinging their clubs limbering up, but Catherine Rossi couldn’t have cared less as she lay alone in the middle of the luxurious oversized bed, in the luxurious oversized room reserved at the Biltmore for herself and her famous husband. The famous Dominic Rossi. Famous stud, that’s what he was as far as she was concerned. He’d given her seven famous children, hadn’t he? Well … this morning Catherine had it up to here. Every time she thought about last night she did a slow burn as her anger smoldered … How dare he not remember to make arrangements for her to be seated at the speakers’ table alongside of him and all the other dignitaries? Good question … how come? Wasn’t that where the future United States senator’s wife belonged? … he’d better believe. That’s where she and four of his famous children belonged … but where were they seated … at a round table in the shadows, in the corner like paying guests. She doubted if anybody knew she was present, but more important, did anyone give a damn? Especially Darlin’ Dominic standing up on that platform making speeches with such dramatic flair that would have made Marlon Brando look like a piker … why he could easily have won an Academy Award and knowing Dominic, he would have accepted it. Well, there was one advantage … in case of fire she was so close to the exit she sure as hell would have had no problem getting out fast … why the very idea …

  How dare he treat her like she was some insignificant Sicilian wife cooking pasta. Well, the odds were eight would get you five in Las Vegas that Dominic Rossi would be the next U.S. senator from California, that he was a winner, invincible. No contest. There was no one that could come up against him and place, much less win. But that’s what they thought. There was one person who could beat him. Indeed there was. And by God, she would even if it meant her marriage. What marriage? Why she hadn’t had a husband in the last six-and-a-half years. He’d gone off this morning to pursue his quest on the campaign trail without her, and Catherine Antoinette Frances Posata Rossi was tired of taking second place and today, more than any other day, she remembered who and what he was when she married him, a starving young attorney from San Francisco. But angry as she was, Catherine wanted to be fair, if even begrudgingly, with herself (and at this moment, it was damned hard to be perfectly fair). He hadn’t been exactly poor, since his father and all of the Rossi brothers from Sicily had made it big in fish, or produce, or booze, or whatever they made it in after one generation. But nonetheless, he wasn’t her equal when he’d come down to New Orleans that summer to meet her. Bet your little Sicilian ass he wasn’t. Why her family had been American born for three generations. Southern born, and they were rich, really rich. However they got rich, by now they could afford to forget that Pasquale Posata had jumped ship at New Orleans without papers and melted into a society struggling in a civil war. So with all that going on, who noticed an immigrant from Sicily? His heritage of survival from the old country had trained him well, he found a very lucrative business in rumrunning for the North and gun-running for the South. He did anything and everything that was illegal or illicit, but the most important thing was his shrewdness to stay out of jail and above all, not to get deported. As far as he was concerned, it didn’t make one damn little bit of difference who won, as long as he came out in the end with more than he had started and Mama mia, that he did. When the dust had settled, and the fray was over, Pasquale Posata decided to remain in this most divine, magnificent country of opportunity because where else in the world, but in America, could anyone become a millionaire over night from a revolution. When he thought about it, he laughed. In all the twenty years of his life, he’d known nothing but chaos and revolution in the old country, but out of that, one either found himself dead or starving, and here, from revolution, you could become rich.

  Now he decided to become respectable and a gentleman. He changed his name to Peter and married an impoverished southern belle of Italian extraction with a crumbling dilapidated mansion and a ruined plantation. But he needed her and she needed him. Not only did he restore the mansion and eventually yield the greatest harvest of tobacco in the state, but he produced four sons and two daughters and Peter Posata was a very happy man. Life had been good to him. Mama mia, had life been good to him. He would even have been happier had he been able to foretell that, from the Sicilian earth from which he had come, four generations later, out of his loins would emerge a woman of prominence and distinction.

  But this morning, Catherine Rossi wasn’t concerned with her lineage nor her great-great-great-grandfather, her mind was filled with the past which didn’t go back quite so far. It went back to a lavish garden party given by her parents, who lived in a house one hundred and fifty years old in perfect repair, one of the best in the Latin Quarter, furnished with the most elaborate antiques, and there she met, for the first time, Dominic Rossi, fresh out of Harvard. The meeting was more than casual or coincidental, although it was made to appear so. However, the Rossis of San Francisco and the Posatas of New Orleans had met on many occasions through mutual friends and relatives in their travels and through the years had developed a strong bond of friendship and it was they who had decided it was important the two young people meet. When Catherine’s mother, in her most diplomatic, gracious manner, mingled with her southern accent, mentioned that Dominic Rossi was to be their houseguest for a time, Catherine exploded. “You mean, Mama, you’re bringin’ him here so as I can marry him, and that’s the truth … isn’t that the truth?”

  “Now, Catherine, that’s no way to talk to your Mama.”

  Catherine’s Sicilian blood, of which there was more than a little residue after all the generations, bubbled. “Maybe not, Mama, but that’s why you’re havin’ him come. Why, you’d think I was an old maid.”

  And that’s what Catherine’s Mama really thought. With the few eligible Italian young men in New Orleans from the best families, for some reason Catherine, pretty, petite five-foot-three, brunette, brown-eyed little b
elle that she was, had more beaus than one could count, but not one proposal. She was going on twenty-five and not one on the horizon and Mama knew why. It was because Catherine lacked her southern, quiet, coquettish style. Instead, Catherine was blunt and outspoken, half scaring, if not discouraging, the young men, and Mama swore it had to come from the Posata side, not hers. Rosa Ann was like her. She knew when to say yes at the right time, how to appeal to a man’s ego which was the only way to grab a man at the right time, and that was why Rosa Ann, who was only eighteen months younger than Catherine, was married and expecting her second child. Well… God almighty, somethin’ had to be done even if it took importing a northerner, or more to the point, a westerner who was two years younger than Catherine, but Mama had read Gone With the Wind and decided she would think about that tomorrow (as Scarlett had suggested). But when Catherine saw Dominic Rossi for the first time, entering the garden with the orchestra playing softly, with his father at his side, her blood did bubble, not from anger this time, but from passion. He was virile, handsome, six feet tall with a shock of dark auburn hair, with a clear light complexion. His charm and smile were captivating as was his amazing wit which added to his allure, but he also had made a name for himself as best halfback of the year at Harvard. However he wasn’t all brawn, there was a brain so keen and exceptional it had taken him to Harvard at the age of sixteen, from where he graduated first in the top ten, magna cum laude. Yes, sir, the moment she saw him, she could have swooned (if that were the sort of thing Catherine did) as he approached her, standing in that celestial setting with the violins playing in the background, dressed in the most exquisite, most expensive apricot silk organza dress (that Mama or money could buy) with lots and lots of ruffles and on her pretty little feet were four-inch heeled silk shoes to match. Her hair was coiffed to perfection (because Mama always knew a woman’s crowning glory was her hair). She pursed her lips in a rather Mona Lisa style, crinkled her eyes as an inner smile tickled her. Yes, sir, by God, Dominic Rossi had met his mate in Catherine Posata and she made up her mind then and there she was going to marry him, make no mistake about that. In spite of his size, she was every inch the woman to handle him. The two fathers embraced one another around the shoulders as Catherine and Dominic looked into each other’s eyes for a moment. The spell was broken as Angelo Posata said with enormous pride, taking Catherine’s diminutive hand in his, “May I present my daughter, Catherine … this is Dominic Rossi.”