3
She argued with Dan.
They argued whether to see the James Mason movie at the nearby art house or The Big Sleep—Dan considered Lauren Bacall hot stuff. They argued if Beverly would nurse their future babies, Dan said he didn’t want her to, he didn’t want her breasts sagging, he was crazy about her breasts, they were small but pretty and the nipples were gentle, know that? They argued about the formation of a Zionist state, a subject about which she knew nothing (beyond hearing her parents agree they were against such a country) and one where Dan had put his money where his mouth was, and they argued about Guernica, although he was ignorant of Picasso’s intent. Dan never caught on they were arguing. His idea of good conversation happened to coincide with Beverly’s idea of argument. Their longest, continuing battle: she wanted to go the limit. He wanted to wait.
They were sprawling, discomforted by the steering wheel, safe from police flashlights under the Grossblatts’ stone porte cochere. Dan’s fingers traced her quivering thigh. She made her suggestion for the fifth—or was it the sixth?—time that night. He removed his hand.
“Not here,” he said.
“Someplace?”
“We should find some flea-bitten dump and sign in as Mr. and Mrs. Smith?” He kissed her nose. “What’ve you done to me?” A pair more kisses. “I used to spend all my time selling girls they should register with me.”
“I’m sold.”
She had confessed to him that she’d petted above the waist and—on a few occasions—below, and he, amused, had asked how come she hadn’t noticed a certain physiological fact about the male sex organ? Had she assumed a man normally kept it strapped down? Oh, in retrospect her ignorance was monumental. “I want it to be right,” he whispered, curving her fingers around himself. “Buzz, know how great we’re going to be together?”
Three times Beverly ate in the Grossblatts’ huge brick pile in New Rochelle. Next to the front door, nailed to the arched oaken jamb, was a blue enamel case with Hebrew lettering. Dan kissed his fingers to it as they went in. The mezuzah, he explained, contained a parchment inscribed with the Shema (passages from Deuteronomy) plus the visible name of God. Shaddai. The mezuzah blessed this house. Beverly thought the huge stone pile barren rather than blessed. Gloria, the youngest, was away at Ohio State. The middle child, Sgt. Victor M. Grossblatt, USMC, had been brought home from Iwo Jima under an American flag, and the Grossblatts in their bitter grief (Dan told Beverly) had blamed one another for letting Vic enlist underage. Now Mr. Grossblatt never spoke to his wife. To Beverly he spoke in his harsh gutturals as little as possible. He had come from Lodz at fourteen, a penniless cobbler’s apprentice without family or a word of English. By the time he turned thirty the man was a millionaire, and today nobody knew how many millions he was worth, only himself and Shaddai.
“My mother,” Dan said, “has a diamond in the vault. Three and a bit.” Mrs. Grossblatt, short, with a wide, freckled nose, fussed over Beverly’s appetite. Beverly liked her anyway.
“Want to look at settings?” Dan asked.
Beverly said nothing.
“Before we get it made up, I should introduce myself to your parents? Ask for your hand?”
Another cold, drizzly Sunday, they were heading for the park.
“Well?” he asked finally.
“Have you told your father?”
“Screw my father.” Dan put his arm around her shoulder. “Why nervous?”
“Who’s nervous?”
“Any girl who doesn’t want a three-carat ring.” His fingers squeezed through layers of fabric, wet and dry. “Buzz, listen, once he sees he can’t have his own way, you’ll be his idea. It’s been very tough on them since Vic. A wedding’ll cheer them up. A wedding is for families—hey! Watch it!”
She avoided the puddle, walking apart from Dan.
Families.
Her very problem. Families. Idiot, she told herself, cretin. Wasn’t it incredible she never once had considered that marriage is no island? Marriage is a social contract. Marriage is the Grossblatts and the Lindes, marriage is Dan with Caroline and Em and Sheridan and the Omega Deltas. Dan never would accommodate himself to Glendale, and she would feel a nail go in for each shrug, each Yiddish expression, anything that might be construed as loud, including a three-carat ring on a nineteen-year-old girl. A fierce osteomyelitis of shame weakened her bones. Was this the measure of her love? (But how could anyone have her identity mercilessly imprisoned for nineteen years, then expect love, however deep, to throw open every jail door?)
Dan grabbed her elbow, halting her on the brink of a water-filled gutter. He gripped both her shoulders, turning her to face him. Drops caught in his hair. His heavy features were wet. They stared at one another, and she felt that warm, aching need quiver in the pit of her stomach. Her eyes grew moist. “You need a keeper,” he whispered. A car swished by, splattering their legs. Neither noticed. And in that minute her future seemed simple. She would have a difficult time, sure, but not for long. They would be married. They would be together always.
“Your folks have only one daughter, such as she is,” he said. His arm around her, he started to walk briskly. “We’ll do this right, I’ll come out to Los Angeles, right, right, oh, I did right by my wife and my seventeen kids and my peanut stand and my old gray mare.…” He marched faster and faster until they were both laughing breathless into the rain.
4
In Los Angeles Dan spent days with the local S&G rep. Dan had force and humor. He was a natural. Christmas, when wholesalers take off because nobody writes an order, he sold shoes by the gross. Nights he took out Beverly. The Lindes made no comment. But Beverly knew what they thought of him.
Breakfast. Mr. Linde had just left for work, Mrs. Linde, handsome in a cashmere sweater set and the smell of Yardley’s, finished her first cup of coffee and Beverly scrubbed a cocoa stain from her pink robe—since the mumps, Mrs. Linde hadn’t insisted she dress for breakfast. The previous night Dan had been to dinner, the first time he’d been invited, a jarringly awkward evening.
“Mother.” Beverly clenched her napkin to keep her hands from shaking, “I’m asking Dan to the Open House.”
“Oh?” Mrs. Linde, for once rattled, touched her springy gray-black hair. “Are you sure that’s the correct thing?” Behave correctly was the motto blazoned on Mrs. Linde’s firm beating heart.
Beverly said, lied, she was sure.
“I got the impression that Dan is, well, quite religious.”
“He is.”
“Then don’t you think a Christmas party might offend him?”
No doubt about it.
“And he won’t know anyone. He hasn’t met Caroline or Em or Sheridan or Lloyd or—”
“I haven’t asked Lloyd.”
“I see.” Mrs. Linde poured her second cup of coffee. “Well, you’ve always invited your own guests.”
“You don’t want him.”
“Beverly! What on earth has gotten into you? I only asked if you thought it right to ask Dan to this particular party.”
“Mother.” From the kitchen came a deafening roar, the maid using the WasteKing. Beverly, under cover of grinding garbage, asked, “I was just wondering how you and Daddy would feel if he and I.…”
The disposal stopped. Beverly’s words, if he and I, hung in the sunlit breakfast nook. To Beverly it seemed that she and her mother were like the red-jacketed hunters in the paired prints on the wall, forever suspended above an English hedgerow. They were trapped, unable to hurdle if he and I.…
Mrs. Linde recovered. “He’s quite a bit older.”
“Seven years.”
“I know this is difficult for you to believe,” Mrs. Linde said, smiling, “but you aren’t the most mature nineteen.”
“I am nineteen, though.”
“You enjoy your painting, listening to music. Sensitive, quiet things. Dan, even knowing him as little as I do, is a dominating person. And aggressive.”
Beverly stare
d at her mother.
Mrs. Linde looked down at her coffee. “He comes from an entirely different background.”
“Orthodox.” Beverly was thrust back into childhood. She despised her sullen tone.
“That’s not all. There’re differences maybe you can’t realize. Attitudes. For example, I wonder if Mr. Grossblatt respects his wife the way Daddy respects me.” (Here Mrs. Linde was playing a little dirty pool: her sister-in-law had written that the Grossblatts were estranged, something to do with the death of a younger son.) “We learn from what we see at home. Behavior patterns.”
“He’s nothing like his father.”
“Dear, you haven’t known Dan long enough to form judgments.”
“He’s warm and kind and good and generous.”
“I’m sure he is.” Powder showed in Mrs. Linde’s paper-fine wrinkles. “This is the reason your father and I always let you make your own decisions. So that when something important comes along, you’ll know how to behave.” With a click, Wedgwood cup met saucer. “Go ahead and invite Dan. The Open House will be a nice way for him to meet your friends.”
Oh God, Beverly thought, again scrubbing cocoa. God.
The living-room drapes were drawn, the Atwater Kent blared “Adeste Fideles,” and a Douglas fir with blinking multicolored lights cast its spasmodic glow over some twenty guests. Glasses tinkled, men made jovial talk while their spouses covertly glanced at one another’s legs to see who had succumbed to Dior’s calf-covering New Look.
Beverly leaned against the Knabe spinet, hearing but not listening as Caroline’s latest, Gene Matheny, discussed this column he wanted to write for The Daily Bruin. To Beverly, people appeared in sharp outline, a caricaturist’s sketch, with one predominating feature. Gene Matheny was Tolerance. Tall, slightly built, he had a long face that resembled an intelligent hound dog’s. Because of his fair, scrubbed-looking complexion as much as his unfailing sense of decency, Caroline often called him Clean Gene. He went to UCLA, he had a social conscience. When he spoke about his beliefs he would press his thumbnail down on his lower lip. Beverly, watching him, thought, If Mother wants a mismatched couple, she should get a load of Gene Matheny and Caroline Wynan.
Caroline, in her new crimson taffeta, picked one-handed along with “Adeste Fideles,” laughing as she hit a clinker.
Sheridan and Em sat side by side on bridge chairs. Em’s solemn, small-chinned face, lifted toward Gene, was drawn. She was seven months pregnant. Caroline privately maintained this condition was caused solely by lack of adequate toilet facilities in Sequoia. Em never commented. Her bodily processes appeared focused on building the large, peaked stomach over which her hands clasped protectively. A few minutes earlier, Caroline had whispered to Beverly, “Dr. Porter suspects we have here twins, but mum’s the word. You know how she is. Sheridan’s in one foul mood, so ply him with bourbon.” Sheridan made no pretense of listening to Gene. His deep-set eyes were shadowed. Tired, Beverly thought. For a month, Sheridan had been delivering nights for Cambro’s Drugs over on Colorado Boulevard. Who could live on a GI check?
Gene was saying, “… convinced him some people aren’t hot for sorority and fraternity news … maybe do … column on world politics.…”
Draft sucked smoke. The front door had opened.
“I’m dying!” Caroline cried. “It must be him.”
It was. Beverly raced for the door.
Dan, glancing around the tree-lit scene, his thick brows shooting up, bellicose as the MGM lion about to roar. He said nothing. “Come have a drink,” Beverly said, tugging him through the living room past Gene, Caroline, Em, and Sheridan, who gazed with open curiosity. In the dining room Dan stopped to greet Mr. Linde and to present a gold-wrapped chocolate box to Mrs. Linde. Mrs. Linde introduced him to the Harleys, and Thad Harley (Mr. Linde’s partner) said in his veddy British accent that it just can’t be Christmas, not with such masses of flowers and sunshine, then Beverly and Dan, drinks in hand, moved on to listen to a heated masculine discussion of the upcoming Rose Bowl game, and Dan, from Michigan and therefore loyal to the Big Ten, said Illinois by thirty points, and the men tackled him, saying UCLA would win by two TDs at least, and Mrs. Linde tapped Beverly’s shoulder, saying, “Dear, you mustn’t forget your guests,” so Beverly mumbled to Dan she was going in the living room, turning quickly, hoping he’d continue to do battle for the Illini.
He followed her.
Grasping his hand with her icy one, she introduced him to Caroline and Gene, to Em and Sheridan. She stumbled over names.
Caroline invariably blanketed awkward situations with talk. Spooning eggnog, dripping on her chin, a triangular blob she remained blissfully unaware of, she chattered about a favorite subject of Gene’s: State Senator Tenney’s blowing in from Sacramento to huff and puff on liberal professors at UCLA. “He’s about,” she declared, “to attempt mass conflagration of any he thinks bow in the direction of Moscow.”
“And quite a few others,” Gene interpolated.
“The faculty won’t stand for it!” Caroline.
“They will,” Em said. Over her smock her freckled hands clenched. Lately Em had become depressingly aware that fair play does not the real world make. “People with families think twice about losing their jobs.”
“But Em, the way the Tenney Committee works,” Gene said, “is against the state constitution.”
Dan asked, “Going into law—it is Gene, isn’t it?”
“Yes. Gene. No. Teaching.”
“At the university level,” Caroline added. “And, of course, write.”
At the word write, Gene’s pleasant, hound-dog face turned red.
And Em asked, “Dan, where did you go to school?”
“The University of Michigan.”
“Oh?” Sheridan’s finger drummed on his glass. “Grossblatt? I should’ve thought you’d’ve gone to an Eastern college.”
This was one of those inexplicable lulls in party conversation, otherwise you never would have heard the slight inflection in Sheridan’s voice as he said Eastern. His meaning was obvious to Beverly. Admittedly, though, she was a specialist. So was Dan. His smile disappeared.
“Why?”
“Beverly said you live in New York.” Sheridan’s tone was morose, chilly.
“And that limits my choice of colleges?”
The tension around Sheridan’s lips was heavy, as was his dislike. He said nothing. He did not need to.
“We are,” Dan snapped, “allowed out of state.”
Em pushed back a sandy bang. “C-Columbia’s one of the best sch-schools.”
Caroline held up her empty glass. “All gone,” she cried. “Gene, get me another. And Beverly’s is empty, too. Poor thing, she’s dying of thirst, aren’t you, luv?”
Dan took Beverly’s glass, setting it on the piano. “Already she’s shikker,” he said.
Beverly’s face burned. She was pretty stewed, but she could see only too clearly Gene’s questioning expression, three other pairs of eyes glazed with bewilderment. None of them knew the word. She herself had learned it from Dan, a Yiddish expression and one she was positive he’d used with malice aforethought.
“You’re right,” she said to Dan. “I need some air.” And pulled him past a group of PTA ladies, through the door, down the short hall to her bedroom.
It was cool and smelled, faintly, of Apple Blossom cologne that she’d sprayed on two hours earlier. She kicked the door shut. Laughter and sounds of Christmas revelry were muffled, receding in waves. Dan didn’t put his arms around her. Their being alone, though, was comfort. She was sober enough to know they shouldn’t be in here, drunk enough not to care.
She kissed his chin.
“Uhh-uh.”
“Why not?” She kissed his mouth lightly, touching her tongue to his lower lip. His breathing slowed. She could feel it pressing against her. Closing her eyes, she traced the twin tendons in back of his neck. Freshly barbered hair prickled her fingertips.
Loud part
y noises. The door had opened.
Mrs. Linde stood in the hall, her face a pale egg suspended in gloom. Beverly stepped back, hoping in her wild confusion that her mother wouldn’t notice Dan’s pants. Dumb, she thought. Stupid. When his chin looks as if someone used it to clean magenta from a paintbrush.
“Beverly,” Mrs. Linde said calmly, “I need help with the ham biscuits.”
The floor changed directions.
Dan gripped her arm. “Okay?” he asked.
“Beverly.” Mother’s voice.
“Frances, she’s not feeling well.”
Beverly opened her eyes and for the briefest moment saw aversion ripple through her mother’s face. Her mother and Dan were staring at her. Beverly comprehended that she was a dueling ground, but she was too befuddled to understand what the combatants expected of her.
“Come on,” Dan said. “We’ll walk around the block.”
“Beverly, your guests.”
Dan and her mother kept speaking, and in the living room Bing dreamed of a white Christmas.
“Get your coat.” Dan’s voice was angry. Rasping. Was it the Scotch? She heard not him, but his father’s gutturals. Maybe Dan was his father. Maybe. What did she really know about Dan except she loved him? Except right now she hated him.
“I’m fine,” she said.
Her mother blocked the hall. “First go wash your face, dear,” said Mrs. Linde. “And remember. Use a fresh napkin in the biscuit basket.”
Beverly dawdled over the washbasin.
When she emerged, Dan was leaning against the arch between dining and living rooms, talking with vigorous gestures to Gene, who listened, his head tilted attentively. Dan, smiling at her, kept talking. Loudly. About the good works of the B’nai B’rith Anti-Defamation League. In Glendale, Jewish people spoke of such matters quietly and always among themselves. Beverly wished she could erase Dan and his voice. At the table, tall Sheridan, holding a canapé, bent over bulgy little Em. As Beverly approached, they fell silent, and Em’s cheeks, under the pancake makeup, flooded with color. Beverly had a quick drink. Caroline, laughing with the Tinkers, didn’t ask Beverly to join them. Beverly offered beaten biscuits through the living room. She could hear Dan’s voice. She had another quick one.
Rich Friends Page 4
