With each step his shoes were printing wet ovals behind him, until he halted just in front of her, so close she could hear his breathing. “Raining cats and dogs,” he said, and Bea felt her mood strain toward these old schoolyard words, as if for this one instant he and she were children again. But he had no other greeting.
“Helluva job tracking you down. How d’you live with it, place smells like puke —”
“It’s only the disinfectant they use on the floors,” Bea said.
“Stinks anyhow, let’s get out of here pronto. Goddamn stairs, is there an elevator somewhere?”
There was no elevator. She led him down five flights. His body, the hurtling panting bulk of it, sent out a heaving strenuousness: he was well past middle age.
In the street, under a nearby awning funneling a watery spew at either end, she asked, “Where are you staying?” A courtesy one would put to a visiting foreigner.
“The Waldorf. Good business location.”
“So it’s work that’s brought you —”
“No,” he said. “It’s you.”
Bea considered. “Come back with me then.”
“Back where?”
“My apartment. There’s a bus, it’s not far.”
“Nothing doing. I’ve been there, got myself soaked. No doorman, one pile of bricks same as any other, helluva way to live —”
“It’s not your way, no,” she said. “Will you come?”
“Listen, I didn’t fly out here ten hours three thousand miles and changing planes twice to have a goddamn cup of tea —”
“Then why did you?”
“The point is there’s something you need to understand, and right away, that’s the point, you follow what I’m saying? Fine, your place, when it comes down to it what do I care —”
He had turned indifference into a command. He lifted an autocratic finger. A cab slid to the curb, splashing their shins.
Bea’s place — here he was then, improbably, inconceivably: a monarch at the dining table that had usurped the space where the grand once reigned. Where she had never imagined him. He was loosening his tie; he had already undone the top button of his shirt. A fat neck — she saw in the father at least this much of the son. She had hung his dripping coat on the shower rail.
“It’s not so bad,” he said, looking around. “Two and a half rooms, you’d think it’d be a lot more crowded.”
“It used to be.”
“Is this where you . . . your husband and you . . .”
Bea said drily, “Where we cohabited? No, that was long ago and far away.”
“Well, how would I know? For years you didn’t keep in touch.”
“Nor you,” Bea said.
“I’ve had a business going, there’s the difference. And a family, what do you know about having a family? And then when you finally get around to writing, you don’t answer, it’s start and stop, it’s nothing and then it’s bits and pieces, and hints and hidings, and then it’s nothing again. That last letter, it was goddamn cold. Cold as ice, and believe me, it won’t stand, over my dead body it’s going to stand, you follow me?”
“Marvin,” Bea said, “what’s this about, why didn’t you let me know —”
“Let you know! And have you throw some sort of cockeyed excuse at me, when it’s got to be stopped, I mean stopped right now,
corked,
why can’t you understand this, are you so dense . . .” But he broke off, and again Bea saw his look travel from corner to corner, from the window to the door, and across the newly naked floorboards.
“Don’t tell me you were actually planning to put my boy up in this rabbit hutch —”
“I intend to give the two of them my bedroom, same as when Iris was here, that was only the one night, but Julian’s coming with his wife, so —”
“His wife! His wife! Are you out of your mind? To send me a crazy letter like that, and to think I’d let it happen? It won’t happen, Bea,
it is not going to happen,
can’t you get this into your head?”
“They’ll be here in six days,” Bea said, and stood up and walked away.
“Where the hell do you think you’re going?” he called after her.
“To get me some supper.”
“I need to talk to you! Considering I left everything in the middle, canceled a meeting, didn’t even stop to look in on m-Margaret . . .” She heard him falter; it was almost a stammer, but he was quick to recover. “Bring me some coffee while you’re at it, will you? And make sure it’s good and hot.”
In her little kitchen — and how miniature it all at once seemed, a rabbit hutch of a kitchen — Bea put up the coffee, scrambled half a dozen eggs, toasted four slices of bread, and carried it all out on a tray.
“What’s this?”
“Thanksgiving dinner,” she said.
“Listen, there’s a swanky restaurant over at my hotel, what do I want with this stuff?” But he ate hungrily.
She did not know what to make of him. He was unshaven, and the stubble aged and roughened and hollowed his face. His nose was broader than she remembered. His mouth had thinned to a dry line. Flecks of white dotted his eyebrows; two or three hairs, blacker and longer than the rest, curled upward like insect antennae. She thought he was even balder than when she had seen him weeks ago, on his way to the pool behind the hedge — but that had been at a distance, and from across the road.
“I don’t see why you’re objecting,” she said — she was careful to
be direct, to avoid any shade now of vitriol. “It’s exactly what you wished for, isn’t it? What you wanted, what you wanted from me, what you asked me to do.”
A crumb of toast hung scornfully on his lip. “What d’
you
know about what I want?”
“You wanted Julian back. He’s coming back.”
“Good God, not like this! I never wanted this!”
“He’s very young,” she admitted.
“Young’s got nothing to do with it, Margaret and I weren’t a whole lot older, and Margaret — Margaret was Margaret, that’s the point. Margaret couldn’t take a thing like this, she wasn’t made for it —”
“She took
you,
” Bea said.
“And I put an end to it, didn’t I? I finished it off, it wasn’t supposed to get into the next generation, and it never did, I stopped it right from the start. You saw Iris —”
“I did. Right off the Mayflower.”
“Cut it out, Bea, you’re not the one to talk. I’ve kept my name just the way it came from pop, which is more than you’ve done, and I’m not about to have some little old grandma with broken English creep into my family. I’m sick over it, I won’t allow it, the boy’s a goddamn fool, I can’t sleep, I can’t think, I’m only half alive — a fool, you had a look at him and you made a secret of the thing, and now you think you’re going to sneak him past me . . . well, you can’t, I’m here to stand in your way, and I know how to do it . . .”
Marvin in full rant. Her throat heated up; she was embarrassed for him, and for herself, for her petty retaliations — that Thanksgiving dinner remark, the silly Mayflower jab, why so sardonic, wasn’t he suffering, even from his own awful contradictions? He made her more tired than angry.
Tiredly, heavily, she said, “Why not just wait and meet her?” But she could hear how simple-minded this was.
“
You’ve
met her, one’s enough. I don’t want to set eyes on the woman. I know what’s coming, I’ve seen the films like everybody else, and I can’t have one of those, not in my own family. All that’s
blood under the bridge, it’s not my business, and I don’t intend to invite it in. And don’t think I don’t know what you’re thinking —”
“You wanted him back,” Bea said, “you wanted him back at least for Margaret —”
“Callous, that’s what you’re thinking, I’m callous, I don’t have a drop of what d’you call it —
compassion,
wouldn’t that be the word you’d like? Not to mention that I’ve got my own little war medal and earned it at forty-four, if that counts for anything, and look, I’ll contribute all they want to those organizations, whatever they are, same as I give to the Red Cross and such, and more if they think I owe it to ’em for solidarity’s sake . . . solidarity! But I don’t want any of those people in my house, I was done with all that a long time ago, and look at you, you’re no different from me, in fact you’re worse, you haven’t got the means for the type of donations I can swing, so what good is all your fancy feeling without the money to back it up? I don’t want to see her — I don’t want to smell her — and I don’t want to see my son, the damn fool . . . Bucharest, where the hell is that, Romania, Bulgaria, who cares? He’s gone back three generations into the past, the boy’s digging up skeletons —”
Bea said narrowly, “But you went to the oboe, nothing stopped you from that.”
His eyes jumped: two quick beasts in a cage.
“What are you talking about?”
“Leo Coopersmith.”
“How do you know that? Who told you?”
“He did.”
“What, are you in touch with him?”
“No. But I saw him. I saw his house. I saw his . . . instrument. It isn’t an oboe, it never was an oboe.”
“My God, Bea, a stale old quip, the way you can hold a grudge —”
“Someone you’ve had contempt for your whole life, and then you go looking to him for influence —”
“He didn’t come through anyhow. Julian’s got the idea he’s a bit
of a scribbler, they could’ve made something of a boy like that in the movie business, why not?”
“You thought you could use me to get to Leo.”
“It didn’t harm you, did it, and damn it, I’d do anything for my son, can’t you see that? Even now, even now . . .”
Bea watched him pull up from his chair, bisonlike, with his shoulders humped and his chin thickened, reconnoitering as if measuring the distance from one wall to another, or impatiently inspecting whatever his nostrils drew him to: an agitated ruminant sniffing for fodder. After another turn or two he came back to her and tossed a paper on the table, among the sticky plates.
“That,” he said, “is a whole lot of money. A tremendous lot of it. You could say it’s enough to live on decently for fifteen, maybe twenty years, depending, and this is
not
the way it’s done, I’ve got lawyers, I’ve got bankers, it’s got to be done with trusts, the whole paraphernalia, I know damn well how it ought to go. But hell, I don’t want any goddamn lawyers, not yet, the complications I can take care of later, I want it the way I want it, and right now this is how I want it — plain and simple, never mind what’s behind it, the kid has no more idea than a two-year-old how anything works in the real world. I want it the way the boy can understand it.”
His neck and forehead had dampened; his breath was coming fast.
“Now listen to me, what you’re going to do is get this check to my son pronto, air mail special delivery, you follow? Before he has a chance to put a foot out the door, wherever he is. And tell him to stay put. Stay where he is. Keep away. He fell into some muck over there, let him stay there.”
Bea went on staring: the big chest under its moistened shirt was bobbing dangerously. “You really want to do this?” she said. “When he’s finally ready to come home?”
“He’ll see I’ve made it worth his while, I guarantee it.”
“But what about Margaret,” Bea pursued, “you said it was for Margaret he had to come back, her health depends on it —”
“It doesn’t matter, not anymore. She’s too far gone, in the last few
weeks she’s stopped making sense. I told you, she hallucinates, she has visions, you’d think she knows things before they happen . . . My God, Bea, I’m a man without a wife, I live like a monk.”
“Do you?” Bea said. The leafy path, the girl in the cape, the pool; but she let the lie pass. “And what if Julian won’t accept your money?”
“He’s not that much of a fool, and if he is,
she
can’t be. People who’ve gone through all that over there have to be practical, they take what they can get.”
“You think she’s a user —” She held up the word like a mirror.
“What else could she be? Why else would she hang on to a boy like Julian?”
“And despite what you think you’re willing to provide for this woman?”
He threw up his arms and wailed, “He
married
the creature, didn’t he?” — and sent out a broken rattle that Bea at first could not recognize for what it was: the start of a spurt of short high laughs, giggles almost: a paroxysm of grieving hilarity. She comprehended him then — her blunt brother was capable of a hideous irony. She was moved to embrace him, to hold his head against the safety of her body while he vomited out those cackling convulsions; yet she did nothing; and if he had wept, possibly she might have wept with him, for the pity of it (she pitied him unresistingly now), but he had no tears, not one, and what was she to do with his laughter?
When he left her, she remembered that he had scarcely mentioned his daughter at all. Nor had she confessed her clandestine visit to his wife — a deceiver’s lie of omission yet again.
S
HE COLLECTED
the dishes and carried them away to be washed, and when she was done she looked fleetingly at Marvin’s check inert on the table where he had hurled it, and with the long evening still before her went to fetch the book Leo Coopersmith had declared to be his talisman — had declared it defiantly, or defensively, in that gaudy grand house reeking of old butts. But when she passed by a second time, with
Doctor Faustus
in hand, the check, as thin and light as a leaf, fluttered from one spot to another, seeking escape — so she plucked it up and stuck it into the body of the book to prevent it from flying off again. How thin it was, this check, and how light: but the sum on its face was weighty. An unfathomable fortune, a treasure, a king’s ransom: in this sum Bea could count a hundred times more than the two decades of her wages; of her life. Marvin, she saw, was willingly surrendering to his son — to his son and his son’s wife — a royal inheritance. But the conditions for it! An inheritance intended to punish with the lash and sting of exile, and an iron door inexorably shut. He could not imagine Julian’s refusing it. And surely Lili . . .
people who’ve gone through all that over there have to be practical, they take what they can get.
Whatever else Marvin was, he was worldly, he was sharp, he was a virtuoso of self-interest.