The Jane Austen Book Club (19 page)

He walked around the table to sit next to Dean. This put his back to the rest of the room. Bernadette would have thought a writer would want to see what was going on.

If he'd taken the empty seat next to Bernadette, he'd have had his back to one of the huge columns and been able to see the dance floor
and
the podium
and
the band. Bernadette could see fully three other tables of people. But she had herself become invisible, especially to younger men. This had begun back in her fifties, so she was used to it by now. She'd become more audible to compensate.

“This whole event puts me in mind of my first husband,” she said. “John was a politician, so I know from fund-raisers! Comb your hair, dear, wash your face, and here's a list of things you can say if anyone tries to talk with you:

“One: What a lovely event this is.

“Two: Isn't the food delicious?

“Three: Aren't the flowers beautiful?

“Four: Isn't my husband the best man for the job? Let's all be quiet now and listen to him talk! I myself am going to smile like an idiot the whole time he's speaking.”

Even without music the room was noisy enough, the table big
enough to make conversation across it difficult. Bernadette could see that Mr. Bellington wasn't planning to try. He spoke to Dean. “If you have any questions about my books,” he said, “that's what I'm here for. Content? Process? Where do I get my ideas? The word ‘last' in
Last Harvest
is kind of a pun. ‘Last' as in ‘final,' but also ‘last' as in ‘most recent.' Ask me anything.”

There was something pompous, self-important in his delivery. Bernadette had just met him and already she was liking him less. The first course arrived, a lovely mushroom soup with maybe a dash of sherry.

“This is delicious,” Mr. Bellington said. “Well done.”

He directed his words toward Bernadette. What was that about? Did he think she'd made the soup?

“Do you love Jane Austen?” she asked. There was only one possible answer to the question. She would like to think that any man who wrote would get it right. She spoke loudly to lessen the risk of being ignored, and repeated her question just in case. “What do you think of Jane Austen, Mr. Bellington?”

“Great marketing. I envy her the movie deals. Call me Mo.”

“Which of her books is your favorite?” Prudie smiled in that unhappy way that made her lips disappear.

“I liked the movie with Elizabeth Taylor.”

Prudie's hand had become unsteady. Bernadette saw the tremor in her Bloody Mary. “Your favorite Jane Austen is
National Velvet
?”

Prudie was being mean. Bernadette resolved to stop her. Soon. Meanwhile, it was good to see her putting up a fight. Not five minutes earlier her mother's death had been painted across her face like one of those shattered women Picasso was so fond of. Now she looked dangerous. Now Picasso would be excusing himself, recollecting a previous engagement, backing away, leaving the building.

Dean coughed helpfully. Somewhere in the cough was the word “persuasion.” He was throwing Mo a lifeline.

Mo preferred to go down. “I haven't actually read any Austen. I'm more into mysteries, crime fiction, courtroom stuff.” This was disappointing, but not damning. On the one hand it was a failing; on the other, manfully owned up to. If only Mo had stopped there.

“I don't read much women's stuff. I like a good plot,” he said.

Prudie finished her drink and set the glass down so hard you could hear it hit. “Austen can plot like a son of a bitch,” she said. “Bernadette, I believe you were telling us about your first husband.”

“I could start with my second. Or the one after that,” Bernadette offered. Down with plot! Down with Mo!

Dancing master Wilson complained about certain figures, such as “lead down the middle and up again” or “lead out to the wall and back,” noting that they were angular and dull. “Straight lines,” he said, “are useful, but not elegant; and, when applied to the Human Figure, are productive of an extremely ungraceful effect.”

“Start with the politician,” Prudie said. “We'll get to the others. We have the whole evening.”

Bernadette loved to be asked to tell a story. She settled in for a long one. Anything for Prudie. “His name was John Andretti. He grew up in Atherton.”

 

John made the best first impression. He had an instant charm; you were the most fascinating person in the room. Until someone else caught his eye.

I met him up at Clear Lake, where we were tapping on the Fourth of July. It was my last year with the Peppers and we weren't the Little Peppers anymore, because we were kind of grown-up for that. We were the Red-Hot Peppers by then. And I was the shortest. I was the last stair, even though I was nineteen years old.

My family was supposed to go to Hawaii for three whole weeks that summer. I was so looking forward to it. But my father felt he couldn't leave his patients for that long, and so it was a trailer instead of a bungalow, a lake instead of the ocean. One damn tap dance after another. Madame Dubois had us all in polka dots that year. There was a flamenco craze. Going on in her brain.

Dad came with us, because he loved to fish. There was mercury in Clear Lake, from the old mines, but we didn't think about that at all then. Now they tell you to only eat one fish from that lake a month, and this after years of cleanup. I didn't like fish, so I would pick at my plate, even though Mother was always nagging us to eat it. She used to call fish “brain food,” which is what we all thought back then. Now I read how they're putting warning labels on tuna. But eggs are good again. You have your good fats and your bad fats.

I once bit the end off a thermometer just to see if I could. Turned out to be dead easy. I spit the mercury right out, but Mother was so upset she gave me ipecac anyway. Then there she was all those years later, trying to get me to eat those fish.

I went swimming a lot, which was probably no better for me. I'd just learned to water-ski. So I was out on the lake one day, and John cut too close with his boat and upended me in his wake. Steered round to apologize and picked me up, shouting to my father how he'd take me in to shore. He used to say that he'd landed me like a fish. You're the littlest thing I ever pulled out of
the water, he used to tell me. I should have been made to throw you back.

He was a good politician, at least as far as the getting elected went. He remembered people's names, and not just their names, but the names of their wives, husbands, children. He had a narrative line.

 

Bernadette nodded politely to Mo. “People don't always realize how important that is in running an election. The voting public likes a good plot. Something simple.”

 

John's was a classic. Or else it was a cliché. He was born real poor, and he made sure you knew that straight off. His speeches were all about his hardscrabble background—the obstacles overcome, the disappointments survived. The pledges he'd made to himself when discouraged. As God is my witness, I'll never be hungry again. Brave stuff.

With just a hint of some old betrayal. This was the genius part. Nothing too specific, but the clear implication that he was too good to give you the details. Not one to tell tales and all. Not one to hold a grudge. You had to admire him for his generosity as well as his determination.

In truth he was the angriest man alive. He kept a list of insults. I mean an actual list, and there were items on it that went back twenty years. There was this boy named Ben Weinberg. They'd gone to school together; John's father worked for Ben's father. Ben had brains, friends, athletic ability, and lots of old money. The best of everything. John had to struggle so to get one-tenth of what was just handed to Ben. In the story of John's life according to John, John was Oliver Twist and Ben was Little Lord Fauntleroy.

One day when John was sixteen Ben called him a nasty little climber, and there it was, twenty years later, number three on John's list. His mother had places one and two.

“So easy not to be a climber when you're born on top,” John said. We were married by then, and I was starting to get a clue. Before that I bought it all. I didn't see the list until I made my first appearance on it. I was certainly no judge of character back then.

I hope I've learned a thing or two since. No one with real integrity tries to sell their integrity to you. People with real integrity hardly notice they have it. You see a campaign that focuses on character, rectitude, probity, and that's exactly when you should start asking yourself, What's this guy trying to hide?

But, there you go. Hindsight is twenty-twenty, just as they say.

“Tout le monde est sage après le coup,”
Prudie said. “Yes, dear,” Bernadette answered.

After Lloyd and Mattie left to get married, Madame Dubois said we couldn't any of us date anymore, as it was bad for the act if we got reputations. We were to remember we were ladies. So John and I snuck around, and finally I left my dancing shoes behind and we ran off and got married in Vegas at the Wee Kirk o' the Heather. There was the nicest woman working there, Cynthia something-or-other. I remember she said she'd been a clerk at Woolworth before this job, and she missed the free fabric ends she used to get. Isn't it funny, the things you remember? The chapel had some dresses, and I tried them all on, but they were too big for me. I really was the tiniest thing back then, couldn't fit into anything off the rack.

So Cynthia altered a skirt for me right on the spot, and she
combed my hair and did my makeup. There were a few couples ahead of us; we had a bit of a wait. She gave me a cigarette. I never smoked in my life but just this one time—the occasion seemed to call for it. Cynthia pointed out how now I was going to be Nettie Andretti; I'd never even thought of that. I was going by Nettie then. That's the day I began using my full name, Bernadette.

While she did my hair, Cynthia told me this story—how there was a curse on her family because her grandpa had once hit a pure white cat with his car. He said it was an accident, but it probably wasn't, because ever since, whenever anyone in the family was about to die, they saw a white cat. Her uncle saw a white cat from his bedroom window when he was only twenty-six. It streaked through the yard, grabbed one of his socks from the clothesline, and made off over the fence with it. And then he went out that very night with some friends and got killed in a bar fight by someone who thought he was someone else. They never did find that sock.

Cynthia was in the middle of telling me this. She had just said how her mother said she didn't believe in any of that nonsense and to prove it went out and bought herself a white cat. I know something weird happened next, because of the way Cynthia was telling it, but I never heard what. John and I were called just then and I had to go get married. I was in a bad mood when I said my vows, because I wanted to hear the end of the white cat story. I've always wondered how that ended.

The year before I met John, Mattie had begged me to come and visit her and Lloyd. He'd gotten religion, and they were living in a commune on this ranch in Colorado. Mother was so angry to think I might have married Lloyd with just a little effort, since he really had been sweet on me first. And now he'd turned out so spiritual. Really, she was very middle-class. She should
have known there'd be nothing respectable about the truly righteous. She packed my clothes like I was off for four weeks of Bible study.

The commune was run by a Reverend Watson. I thought he was a megalomaniac. Lloyd thought he was attentive. Lloyd always had liked being told what to do.

I don't think Reverend Watson had any religious training at all. His inspiration was the Latter Rain sect, but he cut and pasted as suited him. He preached that the trappings of the occult—things like zodiac signs and numerology—had been stolen from God by the devil and it was up to him to wrest them away, put them back to their holy purposes. And there was something about extraterrestrials, too; I forget exactly what. They were coming to get us, or they'd already been and left us behind. One of those two.

While I was visiting, he had them all reading a book called
Atomic Power with God, Through Fasting and Prayer,
which said that if you could learn to control your appetites you'd gain supernatural powers. You'd be released from gravity. You'd be immortal. So Reverend Watson said we were all to fast and be celibate. They mostly served boxty, because it was cheap, so the fasting was sort of redundant, and the celibacy was nothing to me, but Mattie minded. No one in the community drew a steady paycheck. God was to provide. I would have called my parents to come and get me, but the phones had all been turned off.

The minute Lloyd heard immortality was possible, then immortality was what he wanted. Every day that passed without him floating up to heaven was a great disappointment to him. To Reverend Watson, too, and Lloyd minded the reverend's disappointment more than he minded his own.

They were all trying to pull me in, even Mattie. I didn't blame her; I just thought she needed rescuing. One day Lloyd asked me
to work the Ouija board with him. He was so disheartened. He still couldn't fly and the spirits weren't talking to him, though they were quick enough to send messages to the rest of the congregation. I was sorry to see him so down, and fed up with things in general. I mean, my father was in the Masons and I was queen of Job's Daughters one year. We went to church. I sang in the choir. But I hadn't lost my mind over it.