Family Secrets (43 page)

She knew the family thought it was nothing. Her part was nothing. They weren’t in the least impressed although they were polite. Foo on them.

The next day the producer spoke to her for the first time. “I think I might have another part for you,” he said. “I’m trying to get the rights to a musical, if it’s not too expensive. I’m going to let you audition for a speaking part. You have a flair for comedy. I’ll let you know when in a week or so.”

Paris told her mother, who didn’t seem at all impressed. It was strange how they seemed to think this summer theater was absolutely nothing. They thought she was crazy to want to work during the summer when she could be at a nice place like Windflower enjoying herself.

“Why do you want to work when you don’t have to?” her father said. “You don’t need the money.”

“They don’t pay me anyway.”

“Why should you work? You can work later on when you grow up.”

“I
like
this, it’s fun.”

They had changed the bill after the one night of Paris’ professional theatrical debut, and now they were doing a murder mystery. There wasn’t much to do and the apprentices were hanging around the lobby in the afternoon when Aunt Rosemary came to drive Paris home. She was the only one who didn’t live at the theater. She said goodbye to her friends and trotted off after Aunt Rosemary.

“Who was that boy?”

“Which boy?” Paris asked.

“The one who had his arm around you.”

Which one was that? Oh, yes, him. “None of them are famous,” Paris said. “They’re just the other apprentices.”

“Is he your boyfriend?”

“No.”

When they got back to the house Aunt Rosemary told Paris’ mother that there was a boy with his arm around Paris. He was an older boy, Rosemary said, at least eighteen, and you never knew what was going on in that place when a boy put his arm right around her shoulders.

After that no one would ever drive Paris to the playhouse again. They said they were too busy, even Everett. Her father tried to make it up to her by playing tennis with her, but Paris didn’t want to play tennis. She wanted to be at the playhouse. She was very lonely.

“Ha! I heard about that place, all the sex going on,” Everett said to her.

“What sex?”

“Rosemary saw.”

“She saw nothing,” Paris said, indignant.

“You don’t need to know those people,” her mother said. “They’re not for you.”

Now she would never audition for the musical, never get the part. She would sit here and rot, they would have their way. There was no sex at the playhouse. What did the family know about anything anyway? Everett lured her down to the lake when no one was there and said he would show her what the college boys would try to do to her when she got to college. She had to fight him off. He kept trying to show her and she kept telling him she would find out when she got there. Him with his flying hands and long bony fingers, mean fox mouth, and sneaky ways. But the family was afraid a boy at the playhouse had put his arm around her and would try to get her into trouble. They should only know.

SIX

Adam had always been a Republican, in fact he was the only one in the family who had actually voted for Alf Landon instead of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Lazarus and Jonah were Republicans because they both believed the Republican Party was for business. Andrew and Basil were Democrats and liberals, although neither of them had to mingle with the underprivileged people they were so outspoken about helping. Herman was a Southern Democrat and a conservative. Jack, reluctantly, was a Democrat because it seemed to him the lesser of two evils. In point of fact, he hated everybody and thought they were all out to do him no good. Everett, who had voted for the first time, was a conservative Southern Democrat and an outspoken bigot. No party was really conservative enough for him, but he did the best he could. The wives voted with their husbands.

They all read different newspapers, and whenever they had an argument on issues of the day each one quoted the newspaper he read, which always elicited the same comment from his opponent: “What do you expect, reading that propaganda?” The only one whose taste in newspapers was eclectic was Lazarus, who read whatever he could pick up free on the seat of the subway or the commuter train, left behind by the previous occupant.
Wall Street Journal
or
Daily Worker
, it didn’t matter if it was free.

But of all the family, Basil was the most involved in issues of the day. At forty he had aged well, his body trim, his hair still sleek and black. His face was no longer pretty, it had “character.” Basil always had the luck to look like whatever was the ideal for the decade. Israel had become a nation, and Basil was a Zionist. He spent a good deal of time helping to raise funds for Israel and the Jewish refugees who emigrated there. Other people gave money to plant trees, but Basil wanted to build hospitals and schools. He had made quite a name for himself among the other fund raisers as a generous and rich man, as well as an enthusiastic worker. It was rather unusual to see a bachelor of his age working for the cause. Most of them were younger, or else were married men. The married women thought it was a shame that Basil was not interested in meeting their daughters. Some of them would even have foisted their granddaughters on him if they could. Such a catch! Such a good family, so handsome and well educated, so dedicated to the cause! He’s Adam Saffron’s son, you know. The bachelor son. Such a waste!

There was one woman co-worker who interested Basil. She was French, a Jewish refugee herself, and her name was Nicole Wolfe. She was a blonde giantess in her early thirties, an inch taller than he was, with broad shoulders and craggy cheekbones. Her fingernails, covered with dark polish, looked like ten plums. She had straight posture and a loud, authoritative voice. She was an authority on everything. Her strong French accent only seemed to make her sound more authoritative to Basil.

“Art?” Nicole would say disdainfully. “You call American art Art? It’s illustration. French artists are the only real artists. You compare a Norman Rockwell with a Marc Chagall? An Andrew Wyeth with a Picasso? Ridiculous!”

“But Chagall is Russian,” Basil would say lamely. “And Picasso is Spanish.”

“They live in France; they are French. Besides Chagall is a Jew, and all Jews are one. What American Jew has become famous in art, tell me that, eh? In France the Jewish artist is respected.”

Basil, whose knowledge of the arts was rather limited, would always end up losing any discussion to her.

“Do you tell me this slop is food?” Nicole would say. “If you want to eat real food, you go to Lyons, you go to Paris. There you eat well. Here the food is a joke.”

“There are some good French restaurants in New York,” Basil said.

“Oh, I don’t believe it.”

“Yes, Nicole, really.”

So he ended up taking her to one, where she ordered the food and the wine, complained about the quality, told Basil she would take him to an art gallery and show him a “real” painter, and accepted his invitation to go to another French restaurant the following night. He took her to the symphony, where she lectured him on music, to the ballet, where she reeled off names of dancers she preferred to the “klutzes” on the stage there, to the theater, where she told him if he had not seen French theater in the original French (which he did not understand) he had not really seen theater at all. She made him take a French course at Berlitz. She laughed at his accent. She took an English course, but Basil did not laugh at her accent, he complimented her. He was quite in awe of her. He had never met a woman like her before. They were always trying to please him, so servile and obvious in their efforts to prove what good companions and eventually good wives they could be, but Nicole lived only to “improve” him. She had fled the Germans without a sou, but she didn’t ask him for anything. When he tried to give her gifts she had to be persuaded to take them. She in turn gave him lists of books he had to buy and read and a list of wines he had to buy for his closet “wine cellar,” and made him change his barber.

Basil ordinarily did not spend much money on women, and he was surprised to discover that when he had known Nicole for six months he had managed to redecorate her one-room apartment, buy her six prints and one piece of sculpture (all French), and given her a gold wristwatch, a string of pearls, and a fur jacket. It was the only thing she was willing to accept that was not French; it was Russian broadtail.

She made him take her skiing. She was an excellent skiier. Basil fell down and sprained his ankle on the way from the ski lodge to the chair lift. He was sure he had done it subconsciously on purpose because he had never skied in his life and was terrified, and when Nicole accused him of just that he cringed. The only place she did not criticize him was in bed; there she only criticized the other women he had been with and said they had all lacked the soul and heart and fire of a Frenchwoman.

Finally, in desperation to find something she would not criticize, Basil took Nicole to Windflower that summer for a day. She was the first date he had ever taken there. She put on her bathing cap, and in her regulation Olympic swimsuit she made a perfect swan dive into the lake, swam to the float and back, and climbed out, not even breathing hard.

“A beautiful place, Basil,” she said. Triumph!

The family did not like Nicole. She didn’t like them either. They all had dinner at Papa’s house that night, and then Basil drove Nicole back to New York because he was ashamed to make her sleep in the guest room. She would have laughed at him and said that Americans were prudes and hypocrites, as she had told him many times before.

“They are all manipulating you, your family,” Nicole said on the way back to the city. “No wonder you’ve never married. They want to control you.”

“They’d love for me to get married,” Basil protested.

“Zut! You’re so naïve.”

“But why would they want to keep me single?”

“No one is good enough for them. They wouldn’t like any woman you brought into their world. They’re provincial. They need a good breath of fresh air.”

Basil frowned. He didn’t like it when anyone dared to criticize his family. Nicole gave him a sharp look and lit a cigarette. He had given her a gold lighter from Cartier, because Cartier was French. “I like your father though,” she said. “That man is a genius.”

Basil felt the tightened muscles at the back of his neck and shoulders begin to relax. Even Nicole realized how special his father was.

“You
should
get married, you know,” Nicole said thoughtfully.

“Why?”

“You need your independence from them. You’re not a child any more. You should get away, lead your own life, and the only way you can do that is with a strong woman on your side.”

“But I don’t want to get away from them. I love them.”

“I don’t mean tear the roots,” she said. “I mean you should travel, see the world, be a mensch. Ah, comment peut-on parler avec un idiot?”

“Were you calling me an idiot?”

“Sartre was. He and Simone de Beauvoir have a perfect relationship. They are together but they live separately.”

“Well, so are we,” Basil said.

“That doesn’t work in America. Here it’s all two by two like Noah’s ark. For me, I’d rather be free. But I think you should marry.”

“Why should I get married if you don’t want to?” Basil said. “You’re a woman, you’re supposed to get married. Why haven’t you ever married anyway?”

She shrugged. “No man was ever good enough for me.”

“Then why do you waste your time with me?”

“I don’t know. I suppose because I love you.”

She had never said she loved him before. She had said she was fond of him, that they got along well together, that she had tender feelings toward his little stupidities, but never that she loved him. Basil waited for the familiar thrill and letdown of conquest, but it didn’t come. He had not conquered, she had. He was waiting around for her approval, but whenever she gave him a scrap of it he felt only relieved, not triumphant. Who was Nicole Wolfe anyway? An education gotten on the run, a life of peril, no money, no background, who even knew if she would be as chic in Paris as she claimed to be here in New York among the barbarians. Perhaps on her own ground she would be merely another pushy bourgeoise. How did he know her clothes were chic? Because she said so. How did he know she was even quoting Sartre or anyone else for that matter? He hadn’t read them. But she fascinated him, she could make him do whatever she wanted him to, and Basil realized he was in love with her.

That weekend he went to Windflower alone. No one mentioned Nicole. Finally he couldn’t stand the suspense. They were all sitting in Papa’s living room after dinner.

“Well, I’m glad you met Nicole,” Basil said to the room at large. “She’s a fascinating woman.”

“You’re serious about that one?” Papa asked casually.

“I could be.”

“I hope you know better.”

Permission having been given, the dam broke. They all had something to contribute. Nicole was obviously a fortune hunter. The way she looked around the houses, practically taking inventory. Those clothes, atrocious. Those manners, so loud, so conceited. Such a know-it-all! Nothing was good enough for her. Such an accent, who could understand her? Didn’t she know she was in America now? It was French this, French that, and everything American was no good according to her. Let her go back and live in France if everything was so perfect there. Always criticizing Basil, right in front of his own family! Wasn’t he insulted? They were certainly insulted. What did he know about her anyway? Who was she? Where was she from? What made her think she was so much better than any of them? The way she went prancing around in that bathing suit, you’d think she was a movie star. She was a giantess. She looked like a man. She thought she was gorgeous. What was the matter with Basil anyway, had she hypnotized him?

“She’s good for me,” Basil said.

“Then you don’t need our opinion, do you?” Papa said.

“I want your approval.”

“For that I have to wait and see,” Papa said.