Reinhart's Women: A Novel

by Thomas Berger

  “Well, I don’t think it’s humorous,” said the hostess. She looked very pale. “I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

  Now Reinhart laughed in amazement. “Leave? Because I was duped?”

  The young woman trembled. He realized that she was afraid of something. She reached towards the phone on the kind of pulpit that held her equipment. “I’ll call the police.”

  “No, don’t do that. I’ll leave peacefully, if you want. But first will you please tell me what I’m supposed to have done?”

  The hostess kept her hand on the telephone. “The lady with you at lunch yesterday—you don’t know that she came back in here later and threatened me?”

  “God.” He moved towards her, but then caught himself and retreated: it might seem as an attack. “Believe me, I knew nothing about it. How lousy for you! If it’s any relief to know, she’s in the hospital now. She cracked up suddenly, I guess. It was nothing personal.”

  The young woman made a silly grimace. “Now I feel worse,” said she. “The poor thing. ... But I tell you, it was pretty scary. And I don’t know you at all, do I, sir? She accused me of carrying on with you.”

  “You smiled as you took us to the table,” said Reinhart. “No doubt that’s what she was thinking of. It’s too bad. I’m very sorry, miss.” He shook his head and in so doing caught sight of the impostor who had directed him to wait in the bar. It was with relief that he saw the man jollily eating lunch with three companions: he had considered the possibility that the guy was another deranged soul, with delusions of grandeur.

  “I hope she gets better,” said the hostess. “I really do. Was that her doctor who picked her up in the white car?”

  “When was that?”

  “Right after she left here,” the young woman said, with raised brow. “The second time. You and she had left, and then she came back to make that threat, and I said I’d have to call the manager if she didn’t go away, and then she went outside and this white Cadillac pulled up and she got in.”

  Reinhart apologized again and walked out the door into the parking lot. He would certainly have some questions for Helen. ... But he had momentarily forgotten about Edie!

  He returned to the bar. “Sorry. I was checking on some private matter.” He noticed that she had not yet drunk any of her wine. “Well, shall we have lunch?”

  “You’ll want to kill me, Mr. Reinhart,” Edie said sheepishly, holding up her wrist as if in defense, but she was actually displaying her watch. “But I’ve got a dentist’s appointment in fifteen minutes, and I want to run you home first.”

  “What a rotten host I’ve been,” said Reinhart. “I’ll make it up to you, Edie.”

  She stood up. “Actually, I’ve had a wonderful time.”

  They went out to the car. Edie went to the passenger’s door, but Reinhart stopped her.

  “I’m not going to need a ride home. I’m going to stay here for a while. I have to get something for my grandsons, whom I am going to see tonight.”

  “How will you get back?”

  “Oh, there’s a bus that’s near enough.” He touched her forearm. “Thanks again for offering to lend us the car last night. I’m afraid we Reinharts haven’t done much for you in return, but—”

  “That’s what you think,” said Edie with uncharacteristic pertness. She got into her little yellow car and drove rapidly away.

  CHAPTER 10

  PARKER RAVEN, AGE FOUR, Blaine’s younger son, opened the door on Reinhart’s ring of the bell, but he blocked the entrance with his small body so that his grandfather and aunt could not proceed.

  Winona pleaded: “Come on, Parker...”

  Parker extended his hand. “Let’s have your money,” said he.

  Reinhart gently moved Winona out of his way, and then he lifted Parker from the threshold and, carrying him, entered.

  The boy did not resist this action. Instead he chortled and asked: “What you got for me?”

  “A punch in the nose,” said his grandfather, holding him, as usual marveling silently at what tough stuff a child’s body is made of: not only sinew but the flesh is so hard.

  Winona was digging anxiously info her purse. Reinhart said to her: “Huh-uh. I’ll take care of this.”

  “And what else?” asked Parker. “Come on, Grandpa.”

  Reinhart had always believed that both boys favored his son in appearance, but in his new awareness of their mother he realized that Parker anyway bore a strong resemblance to Mercer.

  “I’ve got a terrific story for you,” he told Parker. “If I told it to you now, then you wouldn’t have it for later.”

  Parker struggled in his grasp, and Reinhart put him down.

  “I mean a thing,” said the boy, “not talk. Come on.”

  “Well,” said Reinhart, “I tried. I don’t like to see you being so grasping, but I can remember when I was little I too was a materialist.” He took a folded paper bag from the pocket of his raincoat, unfolded it deliberately, and removed from it a blue bandanna. “See this? Every cowboy wears this around his neck at all times. It keeps dust from blowing down his shirt. He can wipe his face with it when he’s hot. He can put it across his nose and mouth when he’s in a sandstorm.” Reinhart demonstrated this use, knotting the bandanna’s ends, and then he handed the blue-and-white figured cloth to his grandson. “Oh, this thing’s got a hundred and one uses. A bandage if you’re hurt. Or you can put your money and other valuable possessions in the middle of it, tie it in a bundle, and hide it—or whatever you want.”

  Blaine appeared in the entrance hall. He was wearing a cardigan. It had been years now since Reinhart had seen his son in anything but a business suit and tie. In informal garb, with an open-necked shirt, Blaine looked somewhat vulnerable.

  “Well, I don’t like that,” he said peevishly. “Teaching him to be a holdup man.”

  Reinhart saw that Parker had put the knotted bandanna across his mouth and nose to protect himself from the imaginary sandstorm. The aperture was too generous for his small head, however, and the cloth fell around his neck.

  Reinhart’s explanation was not received sympathetically by Blaine, who made an even more disagreeable face and then scowled at his sister.

  “You know where to put the coats, I hope.”

  Winona went to help Reinhart take off his outer garment. It was amazing: her brother’s ability to make an instant servant of her.

  But one guest should not so serve another, and her father fended her off. He removed his outer garment without assistance.

  Blaine asked: “When’s it supposed to rain?”

  “Oh, come on,” said Reinhart, “it’s perfectly sensible to wear a raincoat as a light topcoat, and you know it.” He gave the article in reference to Winona, who took it, along with her own, and went down the hall and opened a closet.

  “Do you have to go to the toilet?” asked Blaine.

  Parker, pulling at his bandanna, was galloping into the doorway of the living room. But he stopped now to laugh and say: “Toilet.”

  Reinhart could remember from the childhoods of his own offspring as well as his own the special interest invariably evoked by that word. And he remembered another, which he now shouted at his grandson: “Underpants!” Parker naturally was rendered hilarious by this bon mot.

  Blaine found nothing amusing in the exchange. “You know,” he said bitterly, “you have to finish your first childhood before going into the second.”

  He marched through the door on the right. He had not invited his father to accompany him, so Reinhart waited until Winona came back. She was dressed in an exceedingly conservative style, by his judgment: dark dress, pearls, little earrings.

  He asked her: “Where do we go now?”

  She shrugged. “Living room, I guess.” She preceded Reinhart through the door on the right.

  Parker meanwhile had disappeared, but his shrill voice came from somewhere in hiding: “Hey, Grandpa! Poopoo and doodoo.”

  “No, Parker,” sai
d Reinhart, “we’ve changed the subject.” The human animal, from pup to patriarch, was such a bizarre creature. What other breed found its wastes so comic?

  They entered a large room full of ponderous, men’s-club kind of furniture: at least so it seemed to Reinhart, who had seen that sort of place only in movies and on TV. It seemed incomplete without a bald or white head here and there amidst the dark-green leather chairs, and the mantel cried out for a moose’s head, though equipped with the next best decoration, viz., a mountainous landscape within a dark frame inner-edged in gold and illuminated from a tube lamp below. It was indeed the latter which provided the only light in the room at the moment.

  Reinhart squinted. He asked Winona: “Do you see your brother anyplace?”

  “Not really,” said she. “He’s probably in the den.”

  They steered towards the lighted doorway across the room. The den, when reached, proved to be an appropriate neighbor to the living room. Though much narrower, it was furnished with similar leather-covered overstuffs, and the table lamps here, as next door, were four feet high, with husky shafts in old gold. Along one wall were built-in bookshelves.

  Reinhart’s son sat at the end of the rectangular enclosure, behind the sort of desk that looked as if it were not made for use, being of carved leg and high-polished finish, its flat top a glossy expanse of tooled leather.

  “Nice den, Blaine,” said his father.

  “It’s the library,” said Blaine. As could have been expected, he did not invite them to take seats.

  Reinhart looked at the row of titles on the bookshelf near his elbow. They were so uniform and lifeless in gold-stamped leather that for a moment he took them for a Potemkin collection, an unbroken façade of book-spines only, cemented to a solid board, in front of no texts. But he poked the Iliad, and it receded.

  “I see you’ve got some good yarns here,” he told Blaine. “Did you have these specially bound?”

  “Or something,” said his son, who reached into a desk drawer and brought out a pad of yellow so-called legal paper. “Now I’ve made a few preliminary notes...” He probed at the pad with a closed silver pen or pencil.

  Reinhart plucked a book off the shelf. You didn’t often come across volumes bound in real leather nowadays. This one proved to be The Last Days of Pompeii and belonged, with the rest—the Aeneid, Black Beauty, and so on—to a series entitled The World’s Greatest Masterpieces.

  “Dad,” said Blaine, looking up. “Put that back and pay attention.”

  “I thought I’d make a pile of books for us to sit on,” Reinhart answered. “Here, Winona, lend a hand.”

  “For God’s sake,” Blaine said, throwing down his pencil. “Is this the way it’s going to go? Winona, get some chairs from the main sitting room.”

  “No,” said Reinhart to his daughter, “I’ll get them.” He found a couple of straightbacked chairs just inside the big room, one on either side of the door, where presumably the footmen used to sit in the house of Bulwer-Lytton, author of The Last Days of Pompeii: Reinhart had some vague recollection of his being a lord.

  “Here’s the point,” Blaine said when his father and sister were seated across the desk from him. “We’re going to have to come to some kind of terms about Mother.” He sucked his body in slightly and opened the center drawer of the desk and found a pair of eyeglasses within. He unfolded the temple pieces and put on the spectacles. The lenses were undersized. The little glasses looked like something he had retained from his countercultural days, but when he wore them now Blaine seemed to have a foot in middle age.

  “Now,” he went on, squinting through the small spectacles at the pad before him, “I have sketched out what really seems to me a really fair arrangement, because this is not the kind of thing a family really ought to squabble over.” He tapped his silver implement on the pad. “A three-way split is what I’ve come up with.” He looked between Reinhart and Winona and smiled. For a moment his father believed that someone had entered the room behind them, but then his attention was claimed by the import of what Blaine had so easily said.

  “A split of what?”

  “Why,” said Blaine, smiling pseudo-warmly now, but at Winona and not his father, “the expense of treatment and care.”

  Reinhart was reminded once again of life’s tendency regularly to face one with the choice of folly or swinishness. On an impulse he decided not to choose; that is, to say nothing at all—and then he was shamed anyway, because what Blaine proceeded to say was quite true.

  Blaine addressed Winona. “Of course you’ll want to take Dad’s share.”

  “Oh, sure,” she replied immediately.

  Reinhart sat forward on his chair. “Now just a minute,” he said. “First, Dad has no share. Blaine, you’ll just have to face the truth: I am not related to your mother. I haven’t been for ten years, and I absolutely refuse to accept any obligation with regard to her. True, that’s academic in my current situation, but it should certainly apply to Winona’s assuming a burden that is supposed to be mine.”

  “Oh, Daddy,” his daughter said in sweet reproach, “you know you don’t owe me anything.”

  Blaine was still smiling, but now with a venomous quality. “I don’t see it’s your affair, then, Daddy. Winona and I agree.”

  Reinhart put his hands on his knees. “So you pay one third, and she pays two thirds.” He looked at his daughter. “I’m not going to let you do it.” He pointed his finger at her. “Do you hear me, Winona? I won’t stand for it.”

  Her eyes began to fill with tears.

  Now Blaine showed himself enough of a diplomat as to toss his chin in apparent indifference and say: “Well, we’ve got lots of time to make up our minds. ... Let’s enjoy our get-together!” He started to make a toothy smile but obviously decided that his talent was not up to such an imposture at this moment, and his face returned to its habitual pale length and the expressionless character, presumably a professional tool, that he showed to the world, except when, disdainful of his relatives, he wore a pronounced sneer.

  “How’s about a glass of sherry, Winona?”

  At his sister’s refusal Blaine smirked in what seemed, for him, good humor, and Reinhart could not help reflecting that the guest who would most please his son was the stubborn abstainer from everything.

  “But she’s got one coming,” he told Blaine. “So I’ll take it.”

  Blaine now produced a dirty grin, and it occurred to Reinhart that perhaps they could, father and son, someday create a kind of friendship based on cynicism alone.

  “O.K., Dad,” Blaine said. “Fair enough.” He rose, went to one of the doored cabinets beneath the open bookshelves, and brought back a faceted decanter half-full of an amber fluid, and a stemmed receptacle of small capacity: in fact, a liqueur glass. Either the wine was an Olympian elixir, too rich for earthlings to take except by the thimble, or Blaine was being consistent in his meanness.

  When Reinhart was a boy, before World War II, the local drugstores had sold pints of fluids called sherry and port, and high-schoolers on New Year’s Eve would contrive to get a bottle and drink it empty and puke on the sidewalk by midnight. Domestic fortified wines had improved greatly since that era, but Blaine seemed to have acquired, no doubt at great expense for such a rare antique, a store of that peculiar decoction of rubbing alcohol and caramel coloring.

  “Mmm,” Reinhart murmured after wetting his tongue and grimacing in an effort not to celebrate a nostalgic New Year’s on the library rug. But to save face he had to go through with it. “Where’s Winona’s? I’ve got another coming, remember?”

  “Ah,” Blaine answered, actually enjoying this badinage, “you’ve got hers. I didn’t ask you to have one, if you’ll recall.”

  “By Godfrey,” said Reinhart, “you didn’t, for a fact. You son of a gun!” He saw that Blaine was seriously gloating, and realized that they had each won a victory. What was incongruous, however, was that the horrible “sherry” had been served in a glass made of exqu
isite crystal. He held it to the light of the brass lamp on Blaine’s desk and turned it so that the facets could do their work. He saw no reason why he could not occasionally be civil: “This is a fine thing, Blaine.”

  But Blaine’s return broke the mood. “Be careful, for God’s sake. Those glasses are very expensive.”

  He took another glass and poured himself a minimeasure. He went behind his desk.

  Winona, sitting on her father’s left and slightly behind, had been silent. Reinhart now turned and looked at her.

  She thereupon, as though they were in league and this was her cue, asked Blaine: “How’s Mercer?”

  His answer was bland. “No reason why she need be bothered with this. She doesn’t know about Mother, and so far as I’m concerned that’s all to the good.”

  Reinhart had wondered all his life which made the more sense: Ignorance is bliss, or The truth will make you free. There was something to be said for both. In this case the former was probably to be recommended for all the principals: if Mercer was unaware of Genevieve’s current situation, Blaine presumably was still ignorant of Mercer’s adventure. At the moment only Reinhart seemed to know everything about everybody. But he was old enough to know as well that the person who occupies such a situation is likely to be the greatest dupe of all, serving as mere audience for all performances.

  He now asked: “Where’s my other grandson?”

  “In his room, I would think,” Blaine said impatiently. He sniffed and finished his wine. “Now, if we could just wrap up this matter.” He tapped his pad of yellow paper. “Maybe the most practical thing would be to get down to details, the actual dollars and cents involved.”

  His sister spoke humbly: “Whatever you think, Blainey.”

  Reinhart said: “Tell me this, Blaine: has any determination been made of your mother’s problem? Has there been a diagnosis of any kind?”