He said, “I’ve been painting Althea, sure. But it’s gotten pretty heavy between us.”
Mr. Cunningham mopped his high, lightly lined forehead. “Ahh, I see. Heavy,” he said. “You realize, don’t you, that Althea’s only seventeen?”
Gerry nodded, saying quietly, “She’s not an ordinary girl.”
“But only seventeen. She’s still a child. Whereas you are twenty-five.”
“How do you know that?” Althea asked. “More counterintelligence?”
“Try to understand, dear,” said Mrs. Cunningham in her nervous way. “If we were in New York, we would know who all your friends were—or somebody in the family would know. But out here in Beverly Hills, nobody has any roots. There are people here from everywhere. Some of them are, well, meretricious. We don’t live ostentatiously, but still they might want to . . . use . . . They might be interested in us for the wrong reasons.”
“Althea, you’re so single-tracked in what you do,” said Mr. Cunningham. “We have to protect you.”
“Yes,” said Mrs. Cunningham, her shoulders more rounded than ever. “You’re our little girl and we want only the best things in life for you.”
“Oh, Mother, must you be so corny!”
“We checked into Roy, too,” offered Mr. Cunningham placatingly.
“Of course. Naturally,” Althea said. “After all, everybody knows what a dangerous, swindling, avaricious fortune hunter your average fourteen-year-old is.”
“We don’t need to apologize for loving and protecting you,” said Mr. Cunningham. “Or for thinking a teenage girl doesn’t have all the sense in the world. You never invited Roy here and you were at her place all the time. Naturally we had to find out about her people.”
“They’re poor,” said Mrs. Cunningham. “But they come from a fine old Southern family.”
“Then you know where I come from,” Gerry said. “Nothing fine or old or Southern. Just dirty Pittsburgh steel mills.”
Mr. Cunningham planted his English-made immaculately polished shoes slightly apart, as if bracing himself. “There are things I must say to Mr. Horak that aren’t pleasant. You think you’re very adult, toots, and worldly in that art school. But to me you’re still my little girl, and, well, if it were possible, I’d prefer to spare you . . .” He broke off, turning abruptly away.
Not before Althea saw there were tears in his light hazel eyes, actual tears. “There’s nothing about Gerry,” she lied in a thin voice, “that I don’t already know.”
“Not by a long shot.” Gerry grinned at her, the first smile anyone had attempted since the onset of this confrontation.
Mr. Cunningham shifted in his chair, reaching down for his attaché case, resting it on his gray-clad knees, opening it to extricate a manila folder. He took his glasses from their alligator case. His every movement seemed deliberately slow to Althea, as if he wanted to give Gerry time to feel the mortification.
Gerry’s broad face gave the impression of calm, but Althea saw the flat anger in his eyes.
“Born in Pittsburgh in 1919,” Mr. Cunningham read. “Fourth child of Anton and Bella Zneckitch Horak. His father immigrated as the child of a contract laborer, his mother went to school until she was ten and then worked as a servant girl, marrying at thirteen. Their first child, a son, was born five months later—I’ll skip most of this. In 1933, the father was sentenced to six months.”
“Yeah, time in the slammer for trying to organize a union, which was legal. The police work for you, not us. But jail wasn’t the worst of his problems. After he got out, he couldn’t find a job anywhere. Not because of being in the slammer, not because of the Depression, he was top pourer. The mill owners had him blacklisted for being a union man. Christ! Did you ever see anyone die by inches in front of you? Between them, my older brothers managed to keep the house going. Dad stole the food money, stole—he the most honest of men! He drank it up. He couldn’t stand being a deadweight, so he drank like a fish. A couple of months before the war started, he fell down the stairs and broke his neck, but he’d died years before.”
Althea winced. She did not want to hear about the rocky torments of Gerry’s poverty, she tried not to listen to the indignities of his youth—she needed him inviolably strong, without a crack or Achilles’ heel.
“You left school at sixteen and worked in the CCC.” Mr. Cunningham riffled pages. “You won a poster-art competition and were awarded a scholarship to Pratt Art Institute.” Mr. Cunningham ran a buffed fingernail down a fresh page. “In 1940 a Penelope Wertenbaker sued you for child support—”
“She lost,” Gerry interjected. “Mr. Cunningham, Althea knows I’m not a plaster saint.”
“Later in the same year,” Mr. Cunningham continued, “a family called Gilfillan, well-to-do people from Kansas City, used the same agency that we did. They had you investigated because you wanted to marry their daughter—”
Gerry interrupted, “Marriage was Dora’s idea.”
“In any case, the family paid you off.”
“When the Gilfillans decided to become patrons of the arts and buy three of my paintings, I didn’t follow her back to Kansas City.”
“They discovered the two of you had been . . . intimate. You refused to set things right.”
“Would your crowd,” Gerry asked with furious mock humility, “think it the right thing to marry a girl whose parents had just loaded you with dough to steer clear of her?”
“Is this meant to horrify me, Daddy?” Althea asked.
“I want you to get the whole picture here, toots. I won’t deny Mr. Horak’s thought to be promising by his gallery, and he was decorated for bravery.”
“You were?” Althea turned to him.
“I kept firing an M1 at this farmhouse, later the brass decided it was glory humping, but me, I wasn’t about to let the Krauts capture me—those Nazi bastards got their rocks off by working prisoners over.”
At the coarseness, both Cunninghams winced.
“I gather all of this is a heavy parental move prior to breaking us up,” Althea said.
“We’ve never been like that, have we?” reproached Mr. Cunningham. “We want you and Mr. Horak to decide the matter for yourselves.”
“Yes, dear,” Mrs. Cunningham said, her protuberant teeth bared anxiously. “We’ve always let you make your own decisions.”
“But to do that properly, we had to give you the facts,” said Mr. Cunningham, closing the folder.
“All right, now I have them,” Althea said.
Mrs. Cunningham rose to her feet, turning to Gerry. “Mr. Horak, if you’ll excuse me, I’m a little tired. The journey.”
Solicitously holding his wife’s arm, Mr. Cunningham left the library with her.
Althea turned to Gerry, asking quietly, “Was that Penelope girl’s baby yours?”
“Could be.”
“And that other girl, was she pregnant too?”
“She fixed it.”
“You’re a stinker, aren’t you?” Althea said without reproach. How strange it was that hearing the details of Gerry’s impoverished background, of which she was already aware, had repelled her, yet hearing for the first time the details of his sexual transgressions, far from dismaying her, gave her a queer pleasurable sense of superiority.
“That’s hardly what jolted you,” he said. “You didn’t enjoy hearing how rich bastards can grind a man down.”
“Okay, that’s true. But nothing they say can alter the way I feel.”
“Don’t underestimate them.”
“Do I detect faint, faraway bugles calling retreat?”
“Baby, we’ll be together always—if it’s up to me.”
Her father returned to the door. “Mr. Horak, if you’ll excuse us, my wife has a gift for Althea.”
Gerry nodded his good-byes. Althea listened to him echo across the black and white marble squares of the hall, her eardrums rawly sensitive to those fading heavy footsteps. After the side door had opened and closed, she asked with
a truculence she rarely used with her father, “What is this wonderful gift?”
“Come along up and see.”
Mrs. Cunningham was in their upstairs sitting room, one of her plainly tailored Liberty-print robes pulled tight around her. Mr. Cunningham went to close the door.
“Your grandmother gave me something for you,” said Mrs. Cunningham. She reached for a flat leather jewel box, and lifted out a necklace: Thirty strands of tiny, impeccably matched luminous seed pearls were suspended from six flashing diamond bars—Althea had seen this choker riding high on her grandmother’s carefully rejuvenated throat. It was part of the magnificent Coyne pearl collection.
She took the necklace, which was surprisingly heavy and had a metallic odor, moving to the mirror, fastening the diamond clasp with icy fingers. Her neck was far more slender than her grandmother’s, so the masses of small, glowing pearls drooped between their diamond stays. “It doesn’t fit,” she said.
“We’ll take it to the jeweler,” said Mrs. Cunningham.
“Pearls are meant to be worn,” said Mr. Cunningham. “We’ll have to entertain now.”
If her mother had made the remark, Althea would have hit back with poisonous daggers of sarcasm, but since her father had spoken, she tightened the priceless anachronism from an opulent age around her throat, wondering how her mother had convinced the old lady, whose name was hardly generosity, to part with this treasure.
Moving away from the mirror, she dropped the pearls in her mother’s large, soft hand. “Put it with the other loot in your safe.”
Althea went slowly along the tapestried corridor to her room. She accepted their strategy. They were going to woo her with her own wealth, they were going to try to get her to view Gerry as unworthy.
Well it won’t work, she thought, clicking the bolt behind her. Without Gerry, she would return to being that weak, skeletonless creature forced by her natural enemies—people—to dwell in a carapace of pretended indifference.
Yet she could not stop thinking of Gerry’s uneducated mother, married and pregnant at thirteen, his jailbird father drinking himself to death in a Pittsburgh tenement.
28
The next day at the institute, during the lunch break, she was called inside to the phone. It was Gerry.
“What gives?” he asked.
“We keep on with my portrait.”
“Won’t they have something to say about that?”
“Business as usual,” she said, controlling her voice. “I’ll pick you up at the usual place at three.”
* * *
The following few afternoons, they spent in the poolhouse: color and composition fused together.
Her parents said nothing to Althea about Gerry’s continued presence, and neither did they discuss returning to San Francisco. Her mother worked in the greenhouse, where great whirling fans dispelled the excess heat; her father made up for lost time in the kennels. At dinner both spoke to her with the cautiously balanced politeness of strangers at a formal gathering. Sometimes her father would mention a Coyne connection who had given up his own concerns for the duration to serve his country in its hour of need, one as Undersecretary of the Army, another as ambassador to a recently renamed African land, a third in the State Department as personal adviser to Franklin. They were reminding her that these were her people. The ruling class.
Midmorning on that hot, ultraclear August day, her father for the first time visited the poolhouse.
Gerry, with his inhuman power of concentration, continued blocking in a troublesome shadow at the bottom of the canvas.
“So this is la vie bohème,” said Mr. Cunningham, and put on his glasses to examine her larger-than-life, clothed yet nakedly erotic portrait.
Althea, still in her pose, watched her father’s cheeks draw in so that his face went gaunt.
“I’m a bit too old-fashioned,” he said finally. “I can’t judge if it’s good.”
“It’s fabulous,” she said truculently.
Gerry glanced at her. “Let’s take a break, okay?” He set down his palette, rubbing at his chest—the severed, not yet knit muscles ached dully when he stood painting. “Mr. Cunningham, I’m glad you dropped by.”
“Oh?”
“You know exactly the kind of guy I am, so there’s no need for me to horse around politely, is there? So I’ll get right to the point. I’m nuts about Althea, and she feels the same way. Whether it’s now or in three months when she’s eighteen is up to you, but we’re getting married.”
Harry Cunningham’s face drained under its ruddy surface. “Married?”
“It’s set between us,” Gerry replied.
“Yes,” Althea whispered.
Mr. Cunningham sank into a bamboo chair.
“Daddy, are you all right?” Althea asked.
He didn’t reply. After a long silence he repeated, “Married?”
“Yeah,” Gerry said. “The when is up to you.”
Mr. Cunningham’s hands were clasped so tightly that the knuckle bones showed like ivory knobs. “I’m the last man alive to be put in this situation,” he said. “Has Althea told you that I was her uncle’s tutor when I met my wife? There was a huge amount of talk, and I’ve never outlived the charge of fortune hunting. But whatever our varying degrees of wealth, my wife and I had a great deal in common. A love of books, good music, a mutual way of looking at the world.” He turned to Althea. “Those things are what’s important in a marriage.”
“Gerry and I have painting—art. We’re a lot alike.” Althea’s voice was inflectionless. She kept it that way; otherwise she might rush to embrace her father, whose shrunken misery was touching her profoundly.
“Believe me, I’ve been there,” Mr. Cunningham said. “He wouldn’t be half so attracted to you if you were a poor girl.”
“He’s never hidden that,” Althea retorted.
“Jesus, the money!” Dark stains showed across Gerry’s back and in deep circles under his arms. “The money, the damn money!”
“Althea’s kind of wealth has to make a difference.”
“Okay, so it did at first.”
“Are you telling me you’re indifferent?”
“Screw your wife’s billions!”
For a few long moments in the poolhouse there was only the sound of a faraway Belvedere lawn mower. Then Mr. Cunningham’s chest expanded in a deep inhalation. He got to his feet. “Horak,” he said, “until Althea is eighteen and legally of age, I don’t want you seeing or communicating with her.”
“Oh, how rotten!” Althea cried.
“I wouldn’t be much of a father if I didn’t use every advantage in my power,” he said, facing her. “You think that backgrounds don’t matter, Althea, but they do. Believe me, they do. Each partner brings to marriage a pattern imprinted by his own family. A deep-set pattern. When I read the detective’s file, I skipped long parts. There were several reports on the police blotter about disturbances at the Horak household. Mr. Horak beat his wife.”
“It began after life got so lousy for him,” Gerry said directly to Althea. There were tensed lines of hurt around his mouth.
“You have exactly thirty minutes to get off our property, Horak,” Mr. Cunningham said. He walked across the pool deck with the stiff, slow pace of a much older man.
“He couldn’t have laid it more on the line, could he?” Gerry asked.
“He’ll change his mind.”
“Didn’t sound like it.”
“They always give in to me, Gerry. They have to.” Her words rang sharply, like hailstones. “Not to worry. They’ll welcome you into the family with open arms.”
* * *
Once again she drove Gerry the few miles westward to shabby Sawtelle. He had left the enormous, near-completed canvas in the poolhouse, but the smaller portraits he had done of her were in the wagon. Many were not yet dry, and he unloaded them first, strewing them across the sidewalk, which was buckled by the roots of a sheltering pepper tree.
Althea didn’t he
lp. From the car she gazed at the shack whose roof sagged beneath its burden of Algerian ivy. The place had a bohemian rakishness that reminded her of the Waces’ funny little apartment where she had been so happy.
I’ll make them accept Gerry. What if they don’t? Then I’ll have to hit them between the eyes with the truth.
Gerry banged down the back of the wagon, coming to fold his arms on her window. He leaned forward, kissing her cheek. “Darling, darling,” he said quietly. He had never used this endearment before. “I might be a low life, but I’d rather bow out than see you look ashamed and hurt like this. You’re a miraculous, cold, wonderful creature, and I love you too much to see you broken.”
She drove slowly back to Belvedere.
All afternoon she crouched on her bed, steeling herself. Once I say the unsayable, she thought, Daddy and Mother will surrender unconditionally. It’s axiomatic. Yet never had the future seemed more cruelly inimical.
She did not join her parents for dinner. When she heard them coming up the staircase, she went into her bathroom to dash cold water on her face. As she smoothed her hair into its chignon, the face that gazed back at her from the mirror looked desperate.
From the Cunninghams’ sitting room came the strains of a Mozart horn concerto. It was her father’s favorite. Number 2 in E Flat Major, K 417.
She tapped on the door. “It’s me,” she called.
“Come on in, toots,” her father retorted.
He put down the evening newspaper, her mother marked her place in a slender novel. The cool summer night air belled real lace curtains, the French horn bounced along. Althea stood in front of the unlit fireplace.
“Toots,” said Mr. Cunningham gently. “we know you’re upset, and we don’t blame you. But sometimes parents have to be firm. It’s infinitely better to break off now, before anyone gets hurt. You’ll meet a lot of eligible young men.”
“What sort will they be, Daddy?” she asked, sitting on the couch opposite the one where they both sat, her head tilted politely.
“Won’t you try to be reasonable?” her father asked.
“Oh? Is it unreasonable to want to know the type of man you would welcome into the family?”
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