Everything and More (31 page)

Gerry, unaware of the catastrophe, continued to work.

“Well, what do you know,” she said in a loud, jocular voice. “Surprise of surprises.”

He turned, blinking. “What gives?”

“The Belvedere delegation to the UN has returned.”

“Your parents?” Still holding his paint-smeared palette knife, he walked over to the diving board.

“Rich bastards.” She used his term. “See the horns and hoofs.”

“I’ll put on my shirt.”

“That’s right, play the ardent suitor.”

“Althea, they have to know about me sooner or later, so what’s wrong with sooner? Besides, aren’t you the girl who said she could handle them?” He was grinning, but he reached a comforting arm around her waist.

At that moment her father glanced down the terrace. She was too far away to read his expression, but she saw him pull his shoulders back as he continued to gaze down at them.

“You’re getting paint on my dress,” she said, moving from Gerry.

Her father waved.

Why am I so afraid? Althea wondered as she waved back.

  
27
  

In the cool, austere hall, Luther eased forward, murmuring to Althea that the Cunninghams were awaiting them in the library. Althea’s dread increased, and she drew apart from Gerry.

The mansion, while lacking the Belle Epoque excesses of earlier Coyne homesteads and in Mrs. Cunningham’s eyes a simple home, was hardly a cozy place, being furnished with excellent early-nineteenth-century English antiques of a decidedly formal nature. Nowhere was this formality more obtrusive than in the library. Occupying the entire downstairs portion of the east wing, the carved butternut paneling, the exceptionally high ceiling, and the shelves filled with thousands of books that ranked up to it emphasized the room’s massive proportions. Next to the mammoth fireplace, the concert Steinway appeared a small ebony toy.

The late-afternoon light filtered through thick silk curtains onto a pair of Hepplewhite armchairs where Mr. and Mrs. Cunningham sat so still that they appeared to be sculptured red granite effigies. Then Mr. Cunningham rose, holding out his arms.

“Toots,” he said.

“Althea, dear,” her mother said.

“Daddy, Mother, what a surprise.” Althea crossed the enormous carpet that had been woven for this room. Parental kisses did nothing to assuage the banging of her frightened heart. “Why didn’t you tell me you were coming?”

“We didn’t decide until this morning. We took the train down,” said Mrs. Cunningham.

Althea said, “But what about the conference?”

Gerry had halted at the door.

Mr. Cunningham, staring at him, said in a louder tone, “Come on in. You must be Mr. Horak.”

Althea said, “Yes. I wrote to you about my friend.”

Mrs. Cunningham, who had somehow transmuted her bovine shyness into a regal chill, remained seated while Mr. Cunningham,
who wore clothes easily and well, stood stiff in his summer-gray suit as if it were a general’s full-dress regalia. Gerry came toward them in his paint-smeared, unironed fatigues, a peasant. Althea had a sudden vision of her lover touching his curly brown forelock.

She introduced him formally.

Gerry, of course, showed no subservience. He behaved with his usual surly ease, as if he belonged wherever he happened to find himself, as if he were innately equal to kings—and Coynes. “Pleased to meet you, Mrs. Cunningham,” he said.

“Ahhh, yes. Mr. Horak,” Mrs. Cunningham said.

“Sit down, Mr. Horak, Althea.” Mr. Cunningham waited until they took places at either end of a ten-foot black leather sofa. “I won’t beat around the bush,” he said. “We left San Francisco for one reason. We’ve been having some disturbing reports—”

“Reports?” Althea interrupted sharply. “What do you mean, reports?”

“Every week M’liss telephones me,” said Mrs. Cunningham breathily.

“She
spies
on me?” Althea whispered.

Mr. Cunningham replied, “She telephones your mother to tell her about Belvedere. You know how close they are.” M’liss had been nurse to Gertrude Coyne as well as Althea. “Of course the main topic of their conversations is you. We want to hear all about you.” Mr. Cunningham’s weak, handsomely amiable face retained its unaccustomed lines of sternness. “We’ve been very disturbed to learn about the increasing intensity of your, uh, friendship. You seem to spend all your free time with Mr. Horak. Afternoons, evenings, weekends.”

“Gerry’s been painting me—”

“Althea,” Gerry interrupted, looking at her. “Your father’s right. They haven’t left the United Nations to play word games.” He raised one thick eyebrow expressively.

Althea, furious and wretched that M’liss, her nurse, her friend, had been spying and tattling, told herself that Gerry was right, the betrayal made no difference. Sooner or later her parents would have to learn where her affections lay. She nodded at Gerry.

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?”