The Cousins

by Rona Jaffe

  “Like ‘The Road to Mandalay’?” Earlene asked. “Like the road pictures?”

  “I don’t think so,” Stan said.

  “Well, like Rebecca? I saw that movie. Like Manderley?”

  “No, it’s Mandelay.”

  “Do you remember when Mrs. Danvers set the whole house on fire? And the murder? That place was cursed.”

  “It’s not Manderley,” Stan said.

  “Wouldn’t it be funny if she was trying to be pretentious and got it wrong,” Earlene said.

  “Just cool it.”

  Actually, as Stan was later to find out, most things made Earlene hostile.

  They sat at the long dinner table and Olivia bombarded him with questions about his work. “What happens when you jump off a building?”

  “They spread out these large foam-rubber-filled mats, and they stack cardboard boxes under them to help break the fall.”

  ‘Well, you knew he didn’t hit the ground,” Aunt Myra said with her little giggle. “He’s still here.”

  Olivia ignored her. “Do you scream?”

  Stan smiled. “You bet. The loudest primal scream you ever heard.”

  “I don’t know why you do it, then,” Lila said, disapproving.

  “The adrenaline rush,” Stan said.

  The aunts and uncles looked at each other and at the grandparents nervously, worried what they might make of this. But the grandparents had seen so many amazing things since the 1800s, when they had been born, that they just shrugged.

  “What’s the scariest trick to do?” Olivia persisted, thrilled to be so close to her strange cousin.

  “Gag,” Stan said. “They’re called gags, not tricks.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe because it’s all a joke.”

  “Some joke,” Stan’s father, Uncle Eli, grumbled. He had never approved of Julia sending those checks.

  “I’d pick . . . probably the explosion and fire gag, where you have to crash a car and then get out of it before it blows up. You have to test to be sure the door will open, and then set off the charge, set yourself on fire and jump out. I’d never do that one with a hangover.”

  “Hangover!” Aunt Julia gasped. She glanced again at her parents.

  “Oh, you’d be surprised,” Stan said, and smiled. “Many’s the gag that’s been done after a hard night out with the guys.”

  “He’s just trying to scare you,” Earlene said. She had learned a few things since she’d been going with Stan, and she had a smug little air of authority. “He’d be wearing a protective suit, and there are people with fire extinguishers right there. And there’s a little cage inside the car to protect him from the crash. But they won’t let him do it yet. He’s not ready.”

  “Good,” Lila said.

  “How many buildings can you jump off?” Stan said. “Can’t make a living on motorcycles. Some years down the road I’m going to be doing everything.”

  If you’re still alive, they all thought; but nobody dared to say it.

  Stan and Earlene didn’t want the wedding to be at Mandelay; they said they would prefer to have the money. Also, he was converting to her religion, and would be a Christian, for the children they hoped to have. When they decided to elope to Las Vegas and be married by a justice of the peace, the family was greatly relieved. A year later, Earlene gave birth to their first child, a son, Grady—named after some relative of hers—and two years after that their daughter, Taylor.

  Every summer Stan and Earlene brought the children to Mandelay for two months, to escape the California heat and visit their grandmother, who still sent checks. After a few days Stan would leave them there and go back to Hollywood to work or look for work. Earlene was restless, disgruntled.

  “I don’t know why I gave up my career,” she would say.

  The house was filled with children. Uncle Seymour, the oldest uncle, who had always been independent, had his own estate with Aunt Iris and their children, Charlie and Anna; but the others were there: shy Kenny, Jenny with her dolls, active Melissa, Melissa’s brother, confident Nick; Grady and Taylor, and Olivia, who was a teenager now and already dreaming of getting away. Her mother was too possessive and she had no privacy. There were too many aunts to offer unasked-for advice.

  Later, when she looked back on it, she realized that all these people living together—doting, intrusive—formed a buffer between Earlene and her children, and that Mandelay was the only place they felt safe.

  Grady and Taylor were beautiful children, and Olivia loved them madly. They had perfect little muscles, without even trying, and they were active as monkeys. From the few things she saw, Olivia didn’t like the way Earlene treated them. One evening, in the long upstairs corridor, Grady and Taylor got into a squabble, and when Earlene came running to find out what had happened, Taylor said, “He hit me.” They were very young. Earlene grabbed Grady, holding him off the floor, and commanded Taylor to hit him. Taylor didn’t want to, she was trembling; Olivia suddenly realized it was not her brother but her mother she was afraid of. “Hit him!” Earlene snapped. Taylor took a swing and punched Grady, and then Earlene let him down. He fled sobbing into the bathroom. Taylor ran after him, and Olivia followed.

  He was huddled under the sink, crying, and Taylor was huddled beside him, holding him in her little arms, comforting him, and she was crying, too.

  Earlene and Stan didn’t get along, and several times they separated. She had the children alone, and he told his mother things, which Julia told Lila, who told Olivia. One night when Grady was only six, Earlene locked him out of the house. He had been dressed in his swim trunks, watering the lawn, which was one of his chores, and when Earlene demanded he come into the house he dawdled too long. Night falls quickly and cold in Southern California; it is desert country. Earlene locked the door and left him out there, scarcely clothed, shivering, while she went about her business: making Taylor eat supper, putting her to bed, watching a little TV, having a few drinks. Grady walked barefoot for several miles down the road to his father’s house, which was how the family found out.

  “What do you expect?” Earlene said to Julia. “He leaves me alone with them. I’m the one who has to discipline them. He doesn’t do it.”

  Grady looked like Stan, and Earlene didn’t like either of them. She preferred Taylor, who looked like her. Olivia suspected there were other things none of them knew about. Earlene drank too much, and she hit. What the family heard was the tip of the iceberg: perhaps they would never know the rest.

  One summer evening, when Grady was about eight and Olivia was home from college, while the family was in the living room watching TV, Olivia was taken by an unexpected depression smashing through her like a black rock. She went to her bedroom and sat on the floor, in the corner, behind the desk, her arms around her knees, thinking about Grady. Then he was beside her. He had a way of creeping around the house without your even knowing until he was there. He crouched beside her, his small body seeking her warmth, and she put her arm around him. Then she started to cry. There is abuse going on here, she thought, and there’s nothing I can do about it. Poor little Grady—what would become of him?

  It was the winter when she was seven that Taylor got meningitis. She had a fever so high she almost died, and when she came back to Mandelay that summer the children had been warned she would be different. She was deaf.

  To the family it was The Tragedy, but to Earlene it was The Cross I Have to Bear. She acted as if it was she and not Taylor who was inconvenienced by this lonely world of silence. Taylor had started going to a public school for the deaf, to keep her speech and learn to lip-read. She also had to learn to sign so she could communicate with the deaf community, of which she would now be a part. Earlene, Stan and Grady had to learn to sign too, so they could speak to her.

  Grady and Taylor swung from tree to tree like Tarzan, they col
lected cardboard cartons and lashed them together, the air in the boxes acting as an air bag, and jumped into them from the top of the house. Taylor screamed when she fell through the air, a pure, high scream from the most secret part of her being, and so did he.

  And then it was the early seventies. Grady and Taylor were fourteen and twelve. Their special bond, which had strengthened through the years, was enhanced by their discovery that their rapid fingers could make fun of people in public and no one else would know. Their grandfather had died, and Earlene had stopped accompanying them on their summer visits to their doting grandmother; she’d had, she said, as much of that boring place as she could take. This, of course, delighted them.

  Olivia had gone through her first divorce. She wondered when Stan would finally get around to his, even though he was living with Earlene again. His prophecy about his career had come true: he was allowed to be very versatile in the kinds of stunts he performed. Olivia didn’t like action movies, but she went to all of his and tried to figure out which one he was. Afterward she would sit through the list of credits and feel proud when she saw his name.

  When he came for his brief visits to Mandelay he still liked to shock the family with macho stories about carousing with the boys. He looked like a weathered old cowboy now, more dashing than ever. He would recount the times he had narrowly escaped death at work, and list his injuries. There were quite a lot of them—he was almost forty.

  Late one rainy winter night, his wife and children asleep in the house, Stan got on one of his motorcycles and rode up Mulholland Drive, a dangerous, winding road with a cliff on one side and a sheer drop on the other. It was actually four in the morning, and he took this trip for no reason anyone knew of, or certainly not one he wished to divulge. They knew he had not been sleeping well, and that he often stayed up all night alone watching television, but he had never gone out for a nocturnal ride before, especially in the rain.

  Olivia remembered the way she had asked him questions when she was growing up. “When you take a motorcycle off a mountain, how come you don’t get killed?”

  “I leave it as fast as possible,” he had said, and grinned at her.

  This time he didn’t leave it.

  Because he was a stuntman the story was of more than passing interest, and was in the newspapers. The police investigated the accident and ruled it a suicide. The rain was heavy enough to wash away any skid marks, so no one ever really knew. He had not left a note. But motorcycles had been his specialty and he was too good to go off a mountain by mistake; and if he had, he would have jumped away. Grady always believed it was suicide. Taylor insisted it was an accident. The family told his mother it was an accident so she could live with it as best she could.

  Earlene decided Grady had to be sent away to an all-boys’ boarding school so he wouldn’t grow up in a house of women. It was her opinion, one that was common at the time, that putting the teenage boy into a cloistered male world would keep him from becoming gay. Julia agreed, and paid for it. Then Earlene took in a roommate—a woman friend of hers who liked to drink as much as she did—to keep her company, and gave her Grady’s room. From then on when Grady came home for holidays, he had to sleep on the living room couch.

  Taylor was devastated at the separation from her brother right after her father’s death, and it was then she began to compose her face into a little mask. She was relieved, in a way, that Grady would escape the abuse at home, at least for a time, and that she didn’t have to watch it anymore, but now she was in that house all alone. At first they wrote to each other, in a kind of code they had invented. Grady was apparently very happy away at school. But Earlene was jealous because her son wrote to his sister far more often than he deigned to write to his mother, and after Earlene went on one of her rampages looking for the letters Taylor had gotten from Grady, Taylor destroyed them to keep her secrets. Then Earlene stopped giving Taylor the pocket money with which she had bought envelopes and stamps, and told her she should spend her spare time doing her homework instead. Taylor got all A’s, had friends, became obedient and quiet, and no one but Grady ever knew what she was thinking again.

  As soon as Grady graduated from the fancy boarding school he became a stuntman like his father. It was easier for him to break in than it had been for Stan, because Stan had paved the way. Taylor went to a college for the deaf and then became a yoga teacher. Ever since her father’s “accident” she had stopped doing anything daring. The day after she graduated from college she married Tim, an artisan who made beautiful furniture, whom she had met at a party in senior year. Tim could sign because his parents were deaf, although he himself could hear perfectly.

  Earlene moved to San Diego with a different woman friend. For some strange reason, after Earlene moved away, Taylor and Tim bought a house in Topanga Canyon right near where she and Grady had so many painful childhood memories, and Grady bought one there, too.

  For a long time afterward, whenever Olivia got together with her cousin Jenny they talked about Stan’s death and tried to figure it out. No one else liked to mention it. What was done was done. When Jenny named her firstborn Sam, Olivia asked her if the S was for Stan, to keep his memory in the traditional Jewish way, even though Stan had left his religion and had probably committed suicide. Jenny seemed surprised. She said no, she just liked the name.

  He was, after all, just a cousin. It was up to his kids to keep up the tradition; but Grady hadn’t married and Taylor had chosen to be childless.

  It would be twenty years now since Stan went off Mulholland Drive, but sometimes Olivia still woke up thinking about it.

  3

  SPRING HAD MADE its brief appearance and then disappeared, the way it always did in New York, and now summer was going. Olivia wondered why every year time seemed to go a little faster. Her friends had remarked on it, too. They said it was because time did that when you got older, and then they laughed nervously because they really didn’t want to believe it. She had gotten a postcard from Melissa, who was on vacation in Europe with her husband Bill and the kids, and she had heard from Aunt Myra that Jenny and Paul had taken a weekend house somewhere in Massachusetts on a lake, with their five children, and that Jenny said it was just like camp. She didn’t hear from any of the other relatives, but she didn’t expect to, nor did they expect to hear from her. Everyone was so busy.

  Olivia liked summer weekends in New York with Roger. Everybody who could cleared out and it was easy to get into restaurants and movies. The stores had sales. The family was expected to do their clothes shopping at Julia’s, at the employee discount, because it was good public relations for the employees to see the owners there, and Julia’s had all the best designer collections, but Olivia liked the little boutiques where she could find the crazy clothes she preferred. Of course the family knew it.

  This summer, as usual, it was too hot in New York, and the polluted city air was almost unbreathable, but she and Roger had good air-conditioning. Their four-story town tyhouse was an oasis. They had divided their back garden with a picket fence so half was a dog run, carefully kept clean by their assistants—eager young students—and the other half was for the two of them and Wozzle and Buster. There were trees and flowers out there, and vines grew against the brick wall. There was a gas grill on the flagstones, and a table and chairs under a large umbrella. Years ago they had discussed buying a summer place in the country, but all their money was tied up in the house and the clinic, and besides involving traveling and the purchase of a car, and then garage space, a weekend house seemed too much work, and it still did.

  Roger had just had his forty-ninth birthday. It was hard to believe that he was only another year away from the dreaded Big Five-O. He had insisted on nothing more festive for his birthday than dinner in a restaurant for the two of them, and when she mentioned that next year she should give him a party, he had said he didn’t want to talk about it. They had recently been invited to a fiftieth birthday pa
rty given for one of his friends by the man’s wife. It was a big, expensive affair.

  “Women always give fiftieth birthday parties for their husbands,” Olivia said. “But men never give them for their wives. Why do you suppose not?”

  “Because women don’t want to admit it in public,” Roger said.

  “You don’t want to admit it in public. I would.”

  “Wait till you get there and then we’ll see if you say that,” he said, and smiled.

  He had started going to the gym four times a week, spending an hour on the Stairmaster and then doing weights. He complained that he was fat.

  “You look fine,” she said. What she really meant was that she was used to him. “I can’t stand anorexic men who talk all the time about cholesterol and Pritikin diets. I couldn’t stand it if you looked like an anatomy chart and your eyes bulged out.”

  “What you’re saying is you like me fat.”

  “You’re not fat.”

  Even with all his disciplined exercise he didn’t look much different, and she couldn’t figure that out, but of course she would never mention it.

  They had planned to take ten days off in October and go to Paris. She had already reserved a room in the charming little Hotel Lenox on the Left Bank, where they had been several times before, and had arranged with a doctor to take over their patients and even let Wozzle and Buster live in his house. In Paris they would do the same things they did in New York: walk, eat, see movies, but it would be in a different place—foreign, exciting—and she was looking forward to it.

  In early September, when kids were back from wherever their parents had sent them for the summer and before they had to go back to school, her cousin Kenny was having his son Jason’s bar mitzvah in Santa Barbara. Kenny had reserved rooms for the weekend for the entire family at the luxurious Four Seasons Biltmore, which was supposed to be like a resort. As usual, Roger was trying to get out of the whole thing.

  “Look, sweetheart,” he said, “there’s no way I can go to California for a weekend. Two long plane trips, and all that money—you know I won’t go steerage—and the hotel. And we’re going to take time off in October.”