Everything and More (33 page)

As usual, it was her mother’s anxious, breathy voice that detonated Althea’s final fuse.

During the afternoon Althea had planned the words she would use if worse came to worst, an eventuality she had been unable to believe—hadn’t her parents always given in to her?—but her emotions carried her in violently destructive waves and she forgot the phraseology.

“Yes, isn’t it horrendous that Gerry’s parents were such low peasants? I couldn’t agree more. I wish he came from some fine, respected family where the father doesn’t work for the money, but marries it.”

Mr. Cunningham turned to grip the edge of the mantelpiece, his white summer dinner jacket stretched eloquently across his shoulders.

“You are not to talk like this!” Mrs. Cunningham’s cold, harsh whisper was one that Althea had never heard before—it was the exact
intonation that old Grover T. Coyne had used so destructively in his killing rages.

Althea held her head higher. “Gerry and I are getting married, it’s decided.”

“You are not,” whispered Mrs. Cunningham in the same terrifyingly malevolent tone. “We love you too much to let that happen.”

Althea’s fixed smile remained acidly cynical, but the eighteenth-century chords rattled inside her skull and her mind raced unbearably.

“I know how much Daddy loves me, Mother, but do you? When I was ten, on New Year’s Eve, he came to my room.” As Althea spoke, the old, unquenchable shame burned like a fresh scald and her voice rose, high-pitched and childlike. “When I was ten he showed me how much he loved me—”

Her mother slapped her across the face.

There was vicious power behind that seemingly soft hand. Althea, surprised, fell back, stumbling into a chair.

“You little slut, you filthy little slut, cohabiting with the dregs of the earth!” hissed Mrs. Cunningham.

Althea’s jaw began to tingle, her left eye to throb.

“You know . . . you must have guessed . . . about Daddy and me. . . ?” Althea heard and loathed her beseeching note.

“You’re a liar, a lying slut!”

“It only happens when he gets very drunk,” Althea whimpered as placation.

“Liar!”
panted Mrs. Cunningham, grabbing Althea’s upper arms, pulling the girl to her feet, shaking her so violently that the thick, streaky pale hair cascaded from its tether of bobby pins.

“Mommy . . . you must have heard—”

Mrs. Cunningham slapped her again.
“I refuse to hear lies!”

Mr. Cunningham had leaned his forehead on the chastely carved marble fireplace, his tall, slender body racked by shudders.

Mrs. Cunningham dragged Althea to the door. Opening it, she hissed in that awful whisper, “We don’t want to see your lying face until you’re ready to apologize!” She shoved her daughter into the hall, slamming the door after her.

Althea leaned against the jamb. The record ended, and during the interim before the next one dropped, she could hear her father’s gasping sobs, her mother’s breathy consolation.

She ran to her own room, falling across her bed.

  
29
  

Althea’s sobs were uncontrollable. “I am wicked, so wicked” went repetitively through her mind in the bouncing rhythm of the Mozart horn concerto. She tried to remind herself that she was the victim here, but each time her weeping lessened she would recollect her father’s animal shudders, and her tears would gush anew.

It was nearly midnight before she recovered from the crying jag. Throwing off her clothes, she crawled between the monogrammed sheets of her mother’s trousseau. Her throat and chest ached from prolonged gasping, her jawbone throbbed from her mother’s harsh slaps.

Heretofore, although irritated by her mother’s timid stance and breathy platitudes, she had loved her. She found the transformation almost impossible to accept—it was as though a pet white rabbit had monstrously expanded into a devouring snow leopard. She knows, Althea thought. Of course she knows, but she’d send a squadron of B-52 bombers to raze Beverly Hills if it would protect Daddy.

Althea wept herself to sleep.

She awoke to the sound of the door opening.

The corridor was pitch black, as was the room with its interlined curtains, and in this impenetrable darkness the creaking of solid brass hinges wrapped itself around Althea’s neck, choking her.

“Daddy?” she whimpered in a thin gasp.

There was no reply.

The door closed. Was the intruder in the room?

“Daddy?” she whispered again.

Silence.

After what seemed an hour, she gathered the courage to reach for the switch of the bedside lamp.

The large familiar room with its ell of bookcases and bay window was empty.

*   *   *

The next time it was sunshine that awoke her.

M’liss was opening the flowered chintz curtains.

“Miss Gertrude said you were feeling peaky, so I brought up your breakfast.” The pink tray with its wicker stand rested on the other bed.

“I’m fine,” Althea lied. She felt stiff and sore, as if her body had been beaten with Ping-Pong paddles.

M’liss came over to the bed. The yellow-tinged old eyes peered worriedly down at her. “You sure don’t look so fine.”

Wondering about bruises or puffy eyes, Althea said, “I had a touch of insomnia, that’s all.”

“Mmm,” M’liss said, nodding her gray hair with its smart navy straw hat.

She was dressed in her good summer outfit for services at the African Methodist Episcopal Church on Adams Boulevard: going to church with other black people was the sum total of Melisse Tobinson’s social life. She was the only black servant in Belvedere, and the others never invited her to accompany them on their days off, not because they scorned her color but because Negroes did not venture into the churches, stores, restaurants, and movie theaters of Beverly Hills. There was no law against such excursions, nor even overt pressure, only the strangling discomfort of being totally unwanted. Althea, in her own loneliness, had recognized symptoms of the same disease in M’liss. After a tormenting day at Westlake she would head for M’liss’s warm downstairs room. Once Althea outgrew the need for a nurse, M’liss had taken over Belvedere’s sewing. The wrinkled brown fingers sped a needle while Althea used her crayons, the two of them companionably listening to soap operas on the small domed radio.

M’liss puffed Althea’s pillows against the headboard, then set the tray in front of her—the
Los Angeles Times
and
Examiner
funny papers were tucked in a side basket.

Althea sat up cautiously. “Did Mother say anything else about me?”

For a moment Althea caught a flicker of some viable unhappiness in M’liss’s high-cheekboned, coffee-colored face. “Like what?” She began picking up clothes.

“Dear heart,” Althea said, “no coyness necessary. She told you about the ban on Gerry, didn’t she?”

“He’s not your kind of people.”

Suddenly Althea remembered who it was that had been telephoning her parents. “You’re a wonderful friend, aren’t you!”

“He’s trash.”

“Even the servants around here are too tony for words!” Althea’s
tears threatened again, and she turned her head on the pillow, drawing a deep, shuddery breath to get control of herself.

M’liss laid a cool hand across Althea’s forehead and throbbing cheek. She went into the bathroom, returning with the thermometer.

When the glass was under her tongue, Althea lay back. Red squiggles darted through her head, and an odd lassitude made her aching body feel heavy. Maybe she
was
coming down with something.

“A hundred and one,” M’liss pronounced, briskly shaking down the thermometer, then unpinning her hat.

“You’ll be late,” Althea said.

“The church’ll be there next week. Come on, eat some breakfast.” She set the footed tray over Althea, removing the china covers.

Althea looked with distaste at the crustless triangles of buttered toast, the still-steaming poached eggs. She hadn’t eaten lunch or dinner the previous day, and this meal, too, repelled her.

When M’liss carried off the untouched tray, Althea lay flat on the bed. That scene with her parents had used up her defiance. She was woefully in need of some proof of continued parental affection—a warmly spoken “Good morning” would do. Normally, during her infrequent illnesses, her father spent hours in her room, and her mother dropped by often with small gifts. Today they ignored her.
We don’t want to see your face until you’re ready to apologize.

She longed to hear Gerry’s voice, but she had no number for his new place.

Monday morning, Dr. McIver called. The deep-voiced old gentleman listened through his stethoscope, held her wrist, and took her temperature. Exchanging glances with M’liss, he intoned that the patient must remain in bed.

She couldn’t stay in bed. Yesterday’s lethargic sense of having survived a beating was gone, and she crackled with nervous energy. In her white silk pajamas she paced around the room inventing scenes in which her parents repented, recanted, lifted their anathema on Gerry and scourged themselves for causing her illness. She was determined that
she
would never apologize—the thought of groveling made her cry again.

She was frantic to see Gerry.

When, on Wednesday morning, M’liss informed her that she still had a hundred and one, it struck Althea as strange that she did not feel the least trace of those migratory cranial twinges that accompany a fever. She had never learned to read a thermometer. As soon as her onetime nurse left, she held it under her tongue for three full minutes by her clock, then went to the bathroom window, shifting the glass
tube this way and that. She could see the mercury: it stopped at the red normal line.

She let the thermometer drop, and it shattered on the tiles.

She was showered and dressed when M’liss returned with the breakfast tray.

“Well, if it isn’t the great jailer-spy herself.” Althea said. “I know all about the phony temperature, the great intrigues with the doctor.”

“Honey, your parents didn’t want you making the mistake of a lifetime. The reason I went along with them is they’re right.” M’liss, who was seventy-three, lowered herself segmentally to her arthritic knees to gather the tiny shards of glass. “You’re a Coyne. You can’t mess around with trash.”

“Words of social wisdom from faithful old Mammy.” Althea’s voice broke a little; then she said, “One valuable lesson I learned from this. Trust nobody.”

“You learned that years ago,” M’liss said. On her knees, she regarded Althea with sadness and understanding, then pushed stiffly to her feet. “I care about you, honey.”

“You’re still my friend, M’liss.” Althea sighed. “I’m going to see him. Will they take it out on you?”

“You know better than that. The family’s always been wonderful to me.”

The station wagon was in the garage, and nobody was around to stop her from driving it. Pedro, without demur, opened the wrought-iron gates.

Althea exceeded the legal speed limit to Sawtelle, squealing to a halt in the shade of the pepper tree. She ran up the cracked cement path to rap on the door. The rustle of Algerian ivy was her only answer. Loud, repetitive banging brought the same lack of response. She sat on the splintery step to await Gerry’s return.

Across the street in a vacant lot, thin brown children played war, crawling along their adobe-soil foxholes to aim wooden sticks. “Ksh, ksh! You’re dead!” The shrill, exuberant cries of their mock battles halted at noon. There was a nearby taco stand, but Althea did not move to buy lunch.

It was after five when the old Ford pulled up behind the station wagon and a blonde got out, hefting a big grocery sack against her hip. With a raised, questioning eyebrow she swayed on very high-heeled sandals toward Althea.

Althea stood. Her legs and backside were numb and prickly. “Hi,” she said. “I’m looking for Gerry Horak. Know when he’ll be back?”

The woman used her free hand to push back her bleached hair,
which she wore in a Veronica Lake swoop over her left eye. “Gerry?” she said. “Gerry left.”

“Left? Where?”

“Who knows? He just got together his junk and took off.”

“No address, no nothing?”

“Gerry’s hardly the type who gives out itineraries.”