Beautiful Girl (12 page)

“She’s crazy.”

“You’re quite right there.”

“Well. Good night.”

“Good night.”

A heavy engraved invitation invited Richard to the Erdmans’ engagement party for their daughter. “Oddly enough,” Richard said to Ellen. “Since they’re being married at Tahoe I’m surprised they didn’t do the whole thing up there. Or simply not mention it until later. God knows I don’t read the society pages.”

Richard was not asked to bring Ellen.

The Erdman house, in Seacliff, was manorial. Broad halls led into broader, longer rooms; immense windows showed an enormous view of the Bay. And the décor was appropriately sumptuous: satins and velvets and silks, walnut and mahogany and gilt. Aubusson and Louis XV. For that family those were the proper surroundings. They were big dark rich people who dressed and ate and entertained extremely well.

In those crowded, scented, overheated rooms Richard’s pale lined face was wet. He went out so infrequently; the profusion and brilliance of expensive clothes, in all possible fabrics, of jewels—all made him dizzily stare. The acres of tables of incredibly elaborate food made him further perspire. He stood about in corners, trying to cope with his dizziness and wildly wondering what he could find to say to anyone there. Lunatic phrases of gallantry came to him. Could he say to the beautiful blonde across the room, “I just love the way you do your hair, it goes so well with your shoes”? Or, to the tall distinguished European, who was actually wearing
his decorations, “I understand you’re in money, sir. I’m in Greek, myself. Up to my ass in Greek.” No, he could not say anything. He had nothing to say.

Roger’s new circle included quite a few Europeans, refugees like his father-in-law to be, and Mr. Erdman’s friends, and transients: visiting representatives of banks, commercial attachés and consuls. The rest were mainly San Francisco’s very solid merchant upper class: German Jewish families who had had a great deal of money for a long time. They were very knowledgeable about music and they bought good paintings on frequent trips to Europe. Among those people Roger looked completely at home; even his heavy Southern courtliness took on a European flavor.

Mrs. Erdman was still a remarkably pretty woman, with smooth dark hair in wings and round loving eyes as she regarded both her husband and her daughter. Richard found this especially remarkable; he had never known a girl with a nice mother and he imagined that such girls were a breed apart. Ellen’s mother had jumped under a train when Ellen was thirteen and miraculously survived with an amputated foot.

Mrs. Erdman was a very nice woman and she wanted to be nice to Richard, once it was clear to her who he was. The two boys were so unlike that it was hard to believe. “I’m so sorry that you won’t be able to come up to the lake for the wedding,” she said sympathetically.

“But who’d want a corpse at a wedding?” Richard cackled. “Where on earth would you hide it?” Then, seeing her stricken face and knowing how rude he had been, and how well she had meant, he tried again: “I just love the way you do your hair—” But that was no good either, and he stopped, midsentence.

Mrs. Erdman smiled in a vague and puzzled way. It
was sad, and obvious that poor Richard was insane. And how difficult for poor Roger that must be.

Roger was beaming. His creased fat face literally shone with pleasure, which, for the sake of dignity, he struggled to contain. Having decided to marry, he found the idea of marriage very moving, and he was impressed by the rightness of his choice. People fall in love in very divergent ways; in Roger’s way he was now in love with Karen, and he would love her more in years to come. He was even excited by the idea of children, big handsome Californian children, who were not eccentric. He stood near the middle of the enormous entrance hall, with Karen near his side, and beamed. He was prepared for nothing but good.

Then suddenly, from the midst of all that rich good will, from that air that was heavy with favorable omens, he heard the wild loud voice of his brother, close at hand. “Say, Roger, remember the night they put the swastika on our door?”

There was a lull in the surrounding conversations as that terrible word reverberated in the room. Then an expectant hum began to fill the vacuum. Feeling himself everywhere stared at, and hearing one nervous giggle, Roger attempted a jolly laugh. “You’re crazy,” he said. “You’ve been reading too many books. Karen, darling, isn’t it time we went into the other room?”

It is perhaps to the credit of everyone’s tact that Richard was then able to leave unobtrusively, as the front door opened to admit new guests.

And a month later, two months before the June wedding at Lake Tahoe, Richard had a severe heart attack and died at Mount Zion Hospital, with Ellen and Roger at his bedside.

They had been watching there at close intervals for
almost the entire past week, and they were both miserably exhausted. Even their customary wariness in regard to each other had died, along with Richard.

“Come on, let me buy you some coffee,” said Roger, fat and paternal. “You look bad.”

“So do you,” she said. “Exhausted. Thanks, I’d like some coffee.”

He took her to a quiet bar in North Beach, near where she was then living, and they sat in a big recessed booth, in the dim late-afternoon light, and ordered espresso. “Or would you like a cappuccino?” Roger asked. “Something sweet?”

“No. Thanks. Espresso is fine.”

The waiter went away.

“Well,” said Roger.

“Well,” echoed Ellen. “Of course it’s not as though we hadn’t known all along. What was going to happen.”

The flat reasonableness of her tone surprised Roger. Ellen was never reasonable. So he looked at her with a little suspicion, but there was nothing visible on her white face but fatigue and sadness. The strain of her effort at reasonableness, at control, was not visible.

Roger said, “Yes. But I wonder if we really believed it. I mean Richard talked so much about dying that it was hard to believe he would.”

The coffee came.

Stirring in sugar, regarding her cup, Ellen said, “People who talk about jumping under trains still sometimes do it. But I know what you mean. We somehow didn’t behave as though he would die. Isn’t that it?” She lifted her very gray eyes to his blinking pale blue.

He took the sugar, poured and stirred. “Yes, but I wonder what different we would have done.”

In her same flat sensible tone Ellen said, “I sometimes
wouldn’t see him when he wanted to. I would be tired or just not up to it, or sometimes seeing someone else. Even if the other person was a boring nothing.” She looked curiously at Roger.

But he had only heard the literal surface of what she had said, to which he responded with a little flicker of excitement. “Exactly!” he said. “He was hurt and complained when I went to boring dinners or saw business friends instead of him, but I had to do that. Sometimes for my own protection.”

“Yes,” said Ellen, still very calm but again with an oblique, upward look at Roger, which he missed.

“People grow up and they change.” Roger sighed. “I could hardly remember all that time at Harvard and he always wanted to talk about it.”

“Of course not,” she said, staring at him and holding her hands tightly together in her lap, as though they contained her mind.

Roger was aware that he was acting out of character; normally he loathed these intimate, self-revelatory conversations. But he was extremely tired and, as he afterward told himself, he was understandably upset; it is not every day that one’s only brother dies. Also, as he was vaguely aware, some quality in Ellen, some quality of her listening, drove him on. Her flat silence made a vacuum that he was compelled to fill.

“And remember that time a couple of years ago when I wanted to borrow the money?” Roger said. “He was so upset that I offered him interest. Of course I’d offer him interest. Otherwise it wouldn’t have been fair.”

“Of course not,” said Ellen, looking deeply into his eyes. “Everyone has to pay interest,” she reasonably said.

“It was the least I could do,” Roger said. “To be fair to him. And I couldn’t spend the rest of my life thinking and talking about how things were almost twenty years ago.”

“Of course not,” Ellen said again, and soon after that he took her home and they parted—friends.

But in the middle of that night Roger’s phone rang, beside his wide bachelor bed, and it was Ellen.

“Pig pig pig pig pig pig pig pig pig!” she screamed. “Horrible fat ugly murdering pig, you killed him with your never time to see him and your wall of fat German business friends always around you and your everything for a purpose and your filthy pig-minded greed and your all-American pig success and your so socially acceptable ambitions. Richard was all Greek to you and you never tried to learn him, how lovely he was and suffering and you found him not socially acceptable to your new society and your new pig friends and I would even rather be thin and miserable and ugly me than fat you with your blubber neck and your compound interest and you couldn’t believe his heart and now you can get filthy blubber fatter on his money—”

She seemed to have run down, and into the pause Roger asked, “Ellen, do you need money? I’d be more than happy—”

She screamed, but it was less a scream than a sound of total despair, from an absolute aloneness.

Then she hung up, and a few weeks later Roger heard that she had had a complete breakdown and was hospitalized, perhaps for good.

After the excellent dinner of moussaka, salad and strawberries in cream, Karen and Roger settled in the living room with strong coffee and snifters of brandy. It was an attractive, comfortable, if somewhat disheveled room, very much a family room. Karen’s tastes were simpler than those of her
parents. Her furnishings were contemporary; the fabrics were sturdy wools or linen; the broad sofa was done in dark-brown leather.

Roger leaned back; he blinked and then sighed, looking up to the ceiling. Karen could tell that he was going to say something about Richard.

“I sometimes wish,” said Roger, “that I’d taken the time somewhere along the line to have learned a little Greek. It seemed to give Richard so much pleasure.”

“But, darling, when would you ever have had the time?”

“That’s just it, I never had the time.” Roger’s tone when talking about or in any way alluding to his brother was one of a softly sentimental regret; Karen gathered that he regretted both his brother’s death and their lack of rapport in those final years.

Roger also sounded sentimentally regretful when he referred to anything cultural—those soft pleasures which he valued but for which he had never had time.

“I wonder what’s ever happened to that girl. Ellen,” said Karen.

“I’m not sure I’d even want to know,” said Roger. “Did I ever tell you that she called me the night he died?”

“Really? No.”

“Yes, she was quite hysterical. I think she was angry because she knew I was Richard’s heir.” By now Roger had come to believe that this was indeed the case. He was convinced that other people’s motives were basically identical to his own. “Yes,” he said. “She probably thought I should give her some of his money.”

In the large safe room, beneath other large rooms where her sons were all sleeping, Karen shuddered, and together she and Roger sighed, for Richard’s pain and death and for poor lost Ellen’s madness.

“Here,” said Karen, “have more coffee. Poor darling, you look as though you need it.”

“You’re right. I do.” And Roger reached out to stroke his big wife’s smooth dark cheek.

On being told that his wife was having an affair with a black orderly in the hospital where she worked, Stuart Macmillan experienced great rage and a piercing anguish; and also, to almost the same degree, he felt vastly surprised. It was not something that he would ever have expected of Martha.

To begin with, she was plump. Although her face was smooth and pretty, her body ballooned out above short legs. “The thalidomide kid” was how she sometimes referred to herself. She had a quick mean mind that always appealed to Stuart. But one of his reactions was that she had been singled out for love.

Aside from the fact that he liked her face and her head, Stuart had probably singled her out at least partly because he was fairly funny-looking too. He was tall and scrawny, with small bright eyes and a long scraggly black beard. He moved along lopingly, like a bird that might take off into flight. As a couple they appealed to most people’s sense of humor, including their own, but somehow Stuart did not think the black orderly had chosen Martha for laughs.

•  •  •

Stuart and Martha were from a medium-sized city in Virginia, and there they had gone to high school together, and halfway through college, until simultaneously they decided to drop out and head West, and, more or less incidentally, to marry. Apart from their somewhat freakish looks, the circumstance that made them friends was their I.Q.s, known city-wide as staggeringly high. Thus they were alone together at the top of the class, sharing prizes and similarly poor at sports or dancing. They were known locally as hippies, in a town that the hippie movement had totally bypassed.

The town also viewed Stuart’s attachment to Martha as a sign of great virtue—in him. This very Southern and sexually chauvinistic view stemmed from a theory that such a fat girl was lucky to have a beau at all; it ignored Stuart’s equal (in conventional terms) unattractiveness. Martha should be grateful, and the fact that she was not, that she was mean to Stuart, made him look even better to the town. “That boy must be a saint to put up with that mean old fat little girl” was the general view.

“Go peddle your masochism” was what Martha sometimes said to Stuart, and he had to admit that there was something to her theory.

But he argued: “Your self-hatred is really the problem. You think anyone who digs you is crazy, of all the banal female hang-ups.”

Most of their conversation, and their fights, took place in an outlandish bar just out of town called the Porthole. They chose it for its sheer dreadfulness, from the dingy brass rail around the roof outside to the jaunty saltshaker that was in the shape of a sailor boy. They also liked it because no one they knew from school would ever have dreamed of going
there. They sat drinking beer, which made Stuart moody and introspective, and which only added to Martha’s fat.