An Inconvenient Woman (32 page)

She stared at his back. “Like what?” she asked.

He turned around to look at her. She had never seen his face look so haunted. He opened his mouth to speak. Then he looked at his watch. “I’d better go. It’s late. I have to meet Sims Lord for dinner.”

“I want to hear,” Flo persisted.

Jules was a keeper of secrets; he was not a person who confided in other people. Even Sims Lord, his trusted adviser, did not know everything there was to know about Jules. Sims
only knew everything there was to know about Jules’s business dealings. When Jules met with him later that evening, he planned to tell him about his extraordinary conversation with Arnie Zwillman, about the money-laundering proposition, but he would not be able to tell Sims the things that Arnie Zwillman knew about his life, about the girl who had gone off the balcony of the Roosevelt Hotel in Chicago in 1953. Or about Kippie. Sometimes he worried about his heart. It beat too fast when he thought about the things that were buried inside of him. He knew he should make an appointment to see Dr. Petrie, but he was always too busy, and he kept postponing it.

“Tell me,” insisted Flo.

When, finally, he started to talk, he spoke slowly in a low voice, almost as if he were talking to himself, and Flo had to lean forward to hear him. She knew that if she interrupted him to ask him to speak louder, he would change his mind and not go on with his story. “When I was a young man, something horrible happened to me in Chicago, for which I bear the responsibility,” he said.

In Northeast Harbor, Maine, it always amused Neville McAdoo when he heard himself described as Pauline Mendelson’s father. It amused him even more when he heard himself described as Jules Mendelson’s father-in-law. The previous summer he had celebrated his seventy-fifth birthday with a small dancing party under a green-and-white-striped marquee, given by his three daughters and their husbands. All his grandchildren came, even Kippie, who was known in the family as the California cousin. The men all wore blazers and white flannels, and the ladies, dressier than the men, were in silk prints or summer chiffons with a minimum amount of jewelry. No black tie for them. Among themselves, they chuckled at the pretensions and swank of Newport and Southampton social life, much preferring the simplicity of their own. “They have no denial of anything in those places,” said Neville McAdoo. “They have no Northeast discipline.” Northeast parties were never reported in the New York social column of Dolly De Longpre, who had been the recognized chronicler of society for three decades.

At that party Jules Mendelson had won the admiration of all the McAdoos when he made himself agreeable for several hours to Aunt Maud, who was known in the family as poor
Aunt Maud. It was the late husband of poor Aunt Maud, Uncle Harry, who had been found dead in bed in a seedy West Side hotel in New York, dressed in women’s clothing, and Aunt Maud had been a trial to everyone ever since. Kippie, who had been expelled from both St. Paul’s and St. George’s before going to finish up his preparatory years at Le Rosay in Switzerland, had a sort of mysterious glamour in the family. “So good-looking,” the older ladies said about him. Or, “Such charm.” His contemporaries had different opinions. It was at the party that Kippie had strangled a cat, as a prank, at the young people’s table, to the horror and fascination of his eastern cousins. “I’ll never speak to you again, Kippie Petworth,” said his Philadelphia cousin, Louise Ordano, who was nearly in tears. “Lucky for you it wasn’t one of Poppy’s Abyssinians, that’s all I can say.” Cosimo and Cosima were their grandfather’s Abyssinian cats, on whom he doted.

It was in keeping with Kippie’s usual good luck that there had been very little commotion over the strangled cat, as it was an unknown cat that had wandered into the party tent, and it was not missed. Kippie, along with Bozzie Manchester, his New York cousin, had buried the unfortunate cat in the woods beyond his grandfather’s property, and no more had been said about it.

“It’s so lovely here, Poppy,” said Pauline. “I always forget. I always mean to come back more often.”

“The Van Degans want you for lunch,” said Neville McAdoo.

“Oh, no, thanks, Poppy. I’ll stay here with you,” said Pauline. She dipped her napkin into a water glass and wiped away a stain on her father’s white linen jacket where he had dripped carrot soup, without interrupting the flow of her conversation. “Lean closer to the table, Poppy, so you won’t spill,” she said. “And let me bring your napkin up higher. There. Now finish your soup. That nice girl from town made it especially for you. She said it was your favorite. What a treasure she is.”

“Colleen,” said old Mr. McAdoo. “Her name is Colleen. She’s not a maid, you know, or a cook either. She comes in and takes care of me on vacations and weekends, when she’s not at the university.” Everything about Northeast Harbor fascinated her father. He took as much interest in the lives of the locals as he did in the summer people. “She’s going to
hotel school and wants to be the manager of the Asticou Inn one day.”

“Marvelous,” said Pauline. “The young today, they’re so filled with ambition and purpose.”

“How’s Kippie?” asked her father.

“Well, sadly, Kippie doesn’t fit into that pattern of ambition and purpose, but his charm continues unabated, I suppose. He’s still in that rehab in France, for drugs.”

Neville McAdoo patted his daughter’s hand. Always slim, he had played tennis every day until a few years before his stroke. To shade his face from the sun he was wearing a white tennis hat that had been laundered so often it was soft and floppy. They were sitting on the veranda of his large cedar-shingle house, turned gray by fifty Maine winters, looking out on Somes Sound. It had been a blessing in disguise when the original McAdoo house in Bar Harbor, next to Northeast Harbor, had burned to the ground in the great fire of 1947. The once proud McAdoo fortune had diminished by that time, and the family could not have afforded to keep the place going for many more summers. With the insurance money, Neville McAdoo’s father built a more practical house in Northeast Harbor, with only ten bedrooms rather than thirty, and it was there that Pauline and her sisters had spent all the summers of their lives until they were married.

“What’s the matter, Pauline?” he asked.

“You always knew when something was the matter, didn’t you, Poppy?” she said.

“You don’t just appear out of the blue in Northeast in the spring before the season starts without something very important on your mind,” he replied.

Pauline untied and then tied again the sleeves of a cashmere sweater that hung over her shoulders. She rose from her wicker chair and walked to the edge of the veranda and sat on the railing, facing her father. “I’m thinking of leaving Jules,” she said.

Jules never discussed the whereabouts of his wife with his mistress, but his mistress religiously followed his wife’s comings and goings in the society pages and gossip columns. Cyril Rathbone, in particular, continued to have an inordinate interest in the activities of Pauline Mendelson, although he had, fortunately, seemed not to have connected Jules Mendelson and Arnie Zwillman in his account of Casper Stieglitz’s party.
He simply named the Mendelsons as “surprise guests at a mixed-bag evening.”

“Where’s Northeast Harbor?” asked Flo.

“Maine,” replied Jules cautiously. “Why?”

“Is it like Malibu?”

“Good heavens, no.”

“Like Newport?”

“Are you referring to Newport, California, or Newport, Rhode Island?”

“I didn’t know there were two.”

“There are. It is not at all like Newport, California, and it is more understated than Newport, Rhode Island.”

“Understated. Does that mean classier?”

“To some, I suppose.”

“Like the quiet rich? That kind of thing?”

“I suppose. Why this great interest in Northeast Harbor?”

“I hear that Pauline is visiting her father there.”

Jules was silent for a moment. “And where did you hear that?” he asked.

“I didn’t exactly hear it. I read it.”

“Where?”

“In Cyril Rathbone’s column.”

“I should have guessed that. You seem to rely on that swine for so much of your information.”

“I’d die happy to have my name in Cyril Rathbone’s column.”

“Oh, please.”

“I really would, Jules. I like to read about all those people and places he writes about. It’s like another world to me. One day I’d like to go to all those places, like Newport and Southampton and Northeast Harbor,” said Flo.

“I wouldn’t mind another glass of wine,” said Jules.

“With Pauline out of town, you don’t have to go home tonight, do you?”

“Yes, I have to go home, but I don’t have to go home right away. I was supposed to go out to dinner, but I canceled that. I thought we might have dinner here.”

“How about taking me out to dinner, Jules?” asked Flo.

“Why not eat here?”

“Because I’m sick of eating here. Chinese takeout from Mr. Chow’s, or pizzas sent in from Spago. That’s what eating at home is for me. I know how to wait tables, but I don’t
know how to cook food. I want to go out.” She stood up to show her impatience.

“It’s not practical,” said Jules, dismissing the notion with a shake of his head.

“And why not?” persisted Flo. She placed the forefinger of her left hand on the small finger of her right hand and moved it from finger to finger as she reiterated the immediate facts of Jules’s life. “Pauline’s out of town in Northeast Harbor, Maine, visiting her old father. You don’t have to go to one of Rose Cliveden’s dinners because she’s laid up in bed with a broken leg and a bottle of vodka, and besides you never go to those fancy dinners when Pauline is away. And the guy from the museum in Hartford who was coming to look at your paintings and try to get you to leave them to the Wadsworth Atheneum had to postpone because his mother-in-law committed suicide. And Sims Lord is at the bankers’ convention in Chicago giving a speech in your place because you didn’t want to go to Chicago. And the guy from the Louvre Museum in Paris who mended the crack in the Degas ballerina that you accidentally knocked off its pedestal because some guy got you mad at lunch after Hector Paradiso’s funeral is not due in with the statue until tomorrow night. So you’re free, and you’re going to take me out to dinner.”

Jules laughed. “Good God. How do you know all those things?” he asked.

“Because I’m a good listener, Jules. You lie here on my bed with the telephone on your stomach and make all those calls, and I just listen and remember.”

He patted her hand. “Look, Flo, dear. It’s not a good idea to go out to dinner,” said Jules patiently. “Especially right now.”

“I’m not asking you to take me to the Bistro Garden, or Chasen’s. We don’t have to go to a fancy place, where you’re going to run into a lot of people you know.”

Jules shook his head. He did not want to go out in public with Flo, but he could not bring himself to say that.

“There’s even the goddamn Valley. You’ll certainly never see anyone in the
Valley
who crosses over with your kind of life. Let’s just have dinner together, like two normal people having an affair. Please, Jules.
Please
. I’m always all dressed up with no place to go. You don’t know how lonely I get.”

“Okay,” he said quietly. He reached over and put his hand on her thigh and started to move it back and forth.

“Oh, no, none of that,” she said, slapping his hand. “Don’t get horny again. I know that trick. We’ll start, and then you won’t take me out to dinner.
After
dinner, I’ll take care of your dick.” She hopped out of bed and ran toward her closet. “A new Chanel suit came today. Black. Gold buttons. And a
very
short skirt, up to here.”

“Where can we go where we aren’t likely to see anyone?” asked Jules.

Twenty-two years earlier her father had advised Pauline not to marry Jules Mendelson. Neville McAdoo, who admired physical fitness and athletic prowess, had minded that Jules was overweight and never exercised almost as much as he minded that Jules was not eligible for any of the clubs that members of the McAdoo family had belonged to for generations. Clubs played a great part in their lives. But even Neville McAdoo could not ignore Jules’s importance in the world of finance, and over the years he had come to like and respect his son-in-law.

And Jules, although he never would have admitted such a thing, was impressed with the lineage of his wife’s family. He wondered in the beginning how a family that had received so much publicity through the brilliant marriages of the three sisters could have so little money. In the era of vast fortunes in which they were living, the McAdoo millions, which numbered less than five, were considered insignificant, at least in the circles in which Jules moved. It was Jules, the rich outsider, who had paid to put Poppy’s old house in order again after his stroke, winterizing it, reroofing it, and adding on to the already ample veranda so that a ramp could more easily facilitate the wheelchair that had become a part of Poppy’s life. Inside, the library, which Poppy always called the book room, had been made over into his bedroom, and the lavatory off the library had been enlarged to a full bathroom, with railings on the wall of his shower and tub. His greatest fear was falling and breaking a hip.

The telling of her tale was painful and difficult for Pauline. Normally so articulate and descriptive in her accounts of her life, she spoke now in a halting and disjointed fashion, looking away from her father so that he could not see the shame and pain that showed in her face. Jules was having an affair, she began. She had found out about it in the most shaming manner. “So hurtful, Poppy. No, no, I won’t tell you
how I found out. He has a mistress. He is keeping this woman. He is besotted with her.”

“Did he tell you he was besotted with her?”

“Several times I have awakened in the middle of the night, and he is lying there next to me, wide awake, staring at the ceiling.”

If Pauline had expected her father to react with ungentlemanly glee, she was mistaken. And he would not indulge in any I-told-you-so type of conversation, for he loved his daughter and could see that she was deeply unhappy.