Bread Upon the Waters (14 page)

“Not really,” Strand admitted.

“When I was her age, the phone was ringing day and night.”

“It certainly was.”

“She thinks she’s ugly,” Eleanor said. “She thinks she turns boys off. That’s why she likes to beat them on a tennis court. I at least confound men with my brains.” She laughed complacently. “It’s more dignified—and more permanent.”

“Ugly?” Strand was shocked. “Caroline?”

“Parents,” Eleanor said. “Do you think when I’m a parent I’ll be blind, too?”

“But she’s not ugly. Just now, Mr. Hazen went out of his way to tell me how delightful she was.”

“Geriatric praise,” Eleanor said. “Not worth one eighteen-year-old squeeze in a movie theater.”

“What if I told you that I think that she’s—well—if not exactly beautiful—a very pretty girl?”

“Geriatric fatherliness,” Eleanor said curtly. “You asked me what I thought about my sister. Now, do you want me to humor you or do you want me to tell you what I think?”

“That’s a loaded question,” Strand protested.

“Loaded or not, what do you want?”

“There’s only one answer to that,” Strand said, trying to sound dignified.

“She thinks she’s ugly because of her nose. It’s as simple as that. Kids have been making fun of it since she was in the first grade. It’s your nose and it’s great on you and it’s okay on Jimmy, he’ll grow into it. But for her—with noses like Mother’s and, let’s face it, mine, in the family, it’s the doomful curse of the Strands. Understand me, Dad,” she said more gently, seeing the stricken expression on her father’s face, “I’m not saying she’s right to feel the way she does or that she isn’t a marvelous little girl, but that’s the way it is. If a girl feels she’s not pretty and she’s off on her own, away from the loving support of good old Mother and Dad and a nice safe bed to run home to every night, she’s very likely to…oh, hell, to fall into the arms…into the
life
of the first boy or man who says she’s pretty, no matter what his motives are and how good or bad he is for her. You asked for my advice? Keep her home with you until she grows up.”

Jimmy was climbing out of the pool, shaking the water off his torso and pulling at his ears.

“Don’t ask
him
any questions,” Eleanor said. “That’s more advice.”

“Some day, Eleanor,” Strand said, “I’m going to ask you what you think I ought to do with
my
life.”

“Stay as you are.” She got up and kissed his cheek. “I couldn’t bear it if you changed.”

Strand was alone on the terrace. Eleanor had gone up to dress for her lunch and Jimmy had wandered off along the beach. Strand was glad that Leslie hadn’t come down. When he was worried, as he was now, she invariably sensed it and she would have pried out the reasons and her blissful lazy morning would have been ruined. One member of the family tormented by the problems of life in the twentieth century was enough for today.

Strand was considering going up and getting into bathing trunks and taking a swim in the pool. For the moment there was nobody around to notice the poverty of his legs or the resemblance of his gaunt frame to Jimmy’s. Just as he was about to stand up Mr. Ketley came out of the house. “Mr. Strand,” Mr. Ketley said, “there’s a gentleman here for Miss Eleanor.”

“Tell him to come out here, please,” Strand said.

When the young man came onto the terrace Strand rose to greet him. “I’m Eleanor’s father,” he said, and they shook hands. “She’ll only be a minute. She’s getting dressed.”

The young man nodded. “I’m Giuseppe Gianelli,” he said. “Embarrassingly melodious.” He laughed. Strand guessed that he was twenty-eight, twenty-nine. He had a deep easy voice and he was strikingly handsome, large green eyes that seemed to have golden flecks in them, a dark face and thick black curly hair. He was almost as tall as Strand and was dressed in white slacks, sandals and a blue polo shirt that left his muscular tanned arms bare, stretched tightly over his wide shoulders and was loose around the middle. Strand was thankful that he hadn’t been caught in bathing trunks.

“Nice little place they have here,” Gianelli said, looking around. “Somebody had thoughtful ancestors.”

“My son said, ‘That’s some hunk of architecture,’ when he saw it last night.”

Gianelli chuckled. It was an easy, soft sound that went with his slow, slurred voice. “Good old Jimmy,” he said. “He had quite a time for himself last night.”

“What did he do,” Strand asked, “get drunk?”

“Oh, no, nothing like that.” Gianelli smiled. His face, which was almost sculpturally masculine in its bold lines of brow, nose and jaw, softened suddenly and surprisingly. “If he’d been drunk, naturally I wouldn’t say anything about it to his father. No, he had only a beer or two. He gave a concert.”

“On what?” Strand had prevailed upon Jimmy not to take his electric guitar along on the weekend, convincing Jimmy that there were limits even to a millionaire’s hospitality.

“Some girl had a guitar lying around,” Gianelli said. “She played a song or two. You know, one of those mournful, why am I alive, why is the world so mean to me sort of jingles. When she finished, Eleanor asked her if she’d lend her guitar to Jimmy and Jimmy went to town, along with the pianist. He really can play, you know, Mr. Strand.”

“So far,” Strand said, “I haven’t educated myself enough in the new music to fully appreciate him.”

“You should have been there last night,” Gianelli said. “He must have played more than an hour. Didn’t Eleanor tell you?”

“We had other things to discuss this morning,” Strand said and knew that he must sound stuffy to the man. “Jimmy keeps saying he’s looking for a new sound and I’ve taken it for granted that when he finds it he’ll tell me the news.”

“I don’t know what he found last night,” Gianelli said, “but he found
something.”

“In the future,” Strand said, “perhaps I ought to accompany my children when they go out at night.”

“You could do worse,” Gianelli said affably. “Do you mind if I sit down?”

“Sorry,” Strand said. “By all means.”

They both sat.

“Eleanor said she’d just be a minute,” Strand said. “You know what a woman’s minute is when she’s getting dressed to go out.”

“Eleanor’s pretty good about being on time,” Gianelli said. “Five minutes here and there. I have no complaints on that score.”

He talks as if he owns her, Strand thought resentfully. He was careful not to show his resentment. If she was prompt with Giuseppe Gianelli, she was behaving unusually. She was notorious in the family for her tardiness. You’re in for some surprises later on, young man, Strand thought, meanly. If there is going to be a later on.

“Has Eleanor told you anything about me?” Gianelli asked, turning his deep green eyes on Strand, looking frank and candid, man-to-man. This lad has been around, Strand thought. “I mean, anything of any interest?”

“She said you wrote poetry,” Strand said. “Then she told me not to look aghast, the poetry was poor and you had a regular job.”

Gianelli chuckled. It was hard for Strand not to be warmed by the soft, agreeable sound. “She’s something, isn’t she?”

“Something,” Strand agreed. “She didn’t recite any of the poetry to me.”

“This is your lucky day, Mr. Strand,” Gianelli said.

“She didn’t tell me what your job was, either.” Good God, Strand thought, I’m sounding like an old-fashioned father inquiring into the qualifications of a suitor to his daughter’s hand in marriage. “She knows a great variety of young men and they all seem to have peculiar occupations.”

“Mine isn’t so peculiar.” Gianelli sighed. “I wish it was. I work for my father. He’s a building contractor. I deal in cement, bricks, labor relations, trucks. I consider it a temporary aberration on my part. My father doesn’t have a high regard for my poetry, either. He thinks I came under the influence of Communist faggots at the Wharton School of Economics.” He laughed, dismissing his father.

The middle generation, Strand thought. Father in shirtsleeves, sonny in white slacks in the Hamptons. Gianelli. Contractor. Reader of newspapers, moviegoer who had seen
The Godfather
, Strand wondered about connections with the Mafia. Cosa Nostra. In the movie the son was a college graduate, too. Ashamed of himself for the thought, he switched the subject “Eleanor did tell me you were thinking of going to a Greek island on her vacation this summer.” He looked searchingly at Gianelli to see if there was any reaction. There was none.

“Spétsai,” Gianelli said carelessly. “I have some friends there who have a house on the water. It’s within invitation distance of Onassis’s former place. Dead now. The idea came up late one night, the way ideas like that do.”

The idea of spending three weeks on an island with a woman who was not his wife, within invitation distance of a Greek shipping tycoon, had never come up in Strand’s life, at any hour of the day or night, but he didn’t think it was necessary to tell Gianelli that. “By the way,” he said, “where did you meet Eleanor?”

“Oh, it was just one of those evenings at Bobby’s saloon,” Gianelli said easily. “Last summer. We were at the bar and we fell to talking.”

Fell to talking, Strand thought, remembering how he had carefully found out Leslie’s address and telephone number, had waited a year before daring to call, had sweated under the glares of her father and mother when he had finally appeared in her family’s living room to take her to dinner and the theater. Fell to talking and then an island in the Aegean and after that, what? This was a generation, he thought, discomforted by nothing. In principle, he approved. But he wasn’t sure of what he felt sitting there in the sunshine waiting for the young man to take his daughter to a lit’ry lunch and then where?

“We found out we had interests in common,” Gianelli was saying.

“Like what?” Strand asked.

“Nondrinking.” Gianelli grinned. “Wallace Stevens. What we like about New York and what we hate about it.”

“That should have kept the conversation going for a while,” Strand said dryly.

“Till about three a.m.”

“Aside from writing poetry, what would you want to do?”

“Do you really want to know?” Gianelli looked at him seriously.

“Of course.”

“I was the editor of the newspaper at Brown. That’s where I went to college. I liked that. Maybe it was just because I liked seeing my name in the newspaper. Vanity. But I think it was more than that. I’d hoped my father would finance me into a small-town newspaper somewhere. Where I’d live in a house with some grounds around it and be my own boss, small crusades and all that—putting the rascals in jail, keeping the unions honest, blowing the whistle on the deals, getting a decent congressman elected, cleaning up the library board and the zoning regulations, no more Vietnams or Watergates, little things like that. Romantic, idealistic, rich boy American dreams. Putting my imprint on the age, within my modest abilities. My father said, ‘Be quixotic with your own money.’ End of interview.”

How willing the new generation was to talk—about themselves, Strand thought. But admirable in its way. “Have you told Eleanor any of this?”

“All.”

“What does she think?”

“Thumbs down,” Gianelli said. “You’re on your own, baby! She’s climbing to the seat of power over the prostrate bodies of graduates of the Harvard School of Business and the idea of putting on a green eyeshade and editing an article on a high school graduation in a little backwater town has no charms for her. Do you think I’m a fool, too?”

“Not necessarily.” Gianelli’s idea was more than a little attractive to Strand, but there were also the dreadful statistics of the annual bankruptcies of small businesses in America and the gobbling up of frail independent newspapers to be considered. “You won’t have much time for Greece, though.”

“There’re better things than Greece,” Gianelli said. “Well, now you know the worst about me.” He grinned again. “Should I leave now and let you tell Eleanor you kicked me out of the house?”

“Stay where you are.” Strand stood up. “I’ll see what’s keeping her.”

But as he was going toward the house, Eleanor came out, looking crisp and haughty, nose short and straight and in the air, a bright scarf tied around her head. “Hi,” she said. “You’re early.”

“On time,” Gianelli said, standing. “Never no mind. I filled in your father on my faults and virtues. Ready?”

“As ready as I’ll ever be. Don’t I look ready?”

“You look glorious,” Gianelli said.

“That will have to do,” Eleanor said. “See you later, Dad.”

“Later when?” Strand asked.

“Just later.” She smiled at him and took Gianelli’s arm.

They went off. Together, Strand had to admit to himself, they
did
look glorious. Being a father had its ups and downs.

After they had gone, Leslie came on to the terrace, dressed for lunch in the long cotton skirt and her hair piled up on her head in the fashion that always gave Strand a sensation that was somewhere between adoration and anguish. “How do I look?” Leslie asked, uncertainly.

“Glorious,” he said.

Strand didn’t enjoy his lunch, although there were perfect cold lobsters and paté and cold wine and avocado salad on the buffet arranged on the terrace, now shaded with a huge awning. And the sea was blue and calm and the two teachers from Southampton College and their wives were amiable enough and moderately intelligent. He kept looking at Caroline, or, more accurately, at her nose. It certainly wasn’t disfiguring, he thought, angry with Eleanor for having made such a fuss about it; in another age it might even have been considered handsome on a woman. But he couldn’t help but notice that while the three young tennis players and two other girls who had been invited were all eating together in a high register of conversation and laughter, Caroline had chosen to eat off to one side with her mother and the wife of the history professor.

Goddamnit, he thought, Eleanor was right. Geriatric fatherliness. He wanted to go over to Caroline and take her in his arms and say, “My darling, you’re beautiful,” and weep into her soft blond hair.

Instead, he turned to the history professor beside him and said, “I’m sorry, sir, what was that you were saying?”