Family Secrets (44 page)

Did that mean there was a chance? What did that mean? Basil decided to be hopeful. He invited Nicole up to Windflower the following weekend. She was totally unlike herself: sweet and smiling and complimenting everyone. Basil hardly recognized her. She hugged and kissed Richie and said how much she loved children. Basil had never heard her even mention children in all the time he had known her, except to say it was a good idea the Israelis had: to bring up their children in a separate dormitory on the kibbutz so the parents didn’t have to be bothered with them. She acted very interested in all Lavinia’s and Melissa’s clothes, asking them which were their favorite stores. When they told her they had their things made she wrote down the names of all the places. She complimented Etta on the meals, and went into the kitchen to compliment Henny after dinner. She never stopped raving over the beauty of the estate, the gardens, the trees, the waterfall, the woods. Basil thought how nice it would be if she were always this compliant. But then she wouldn’t be Nicole. Still, maybe she could change a little. He had changed for her, catering to her every wish. He could picture himself married to this new, nice Nicole. If he managed to be everything she wanted, then there would be nothing left for her to criticize, and then she would be nice. Look how nice she was already, trying to make the family like her.

“Do you think they liked me a little more?” she asked after the weekend was over. It was the first time Basil had ever seen her show doubt about anything.

“I don’t see how they could have resisted you,” he said.

“Oh, they’re polite. But they still don’t approve of me.”

“But you’ll see, they’ll learn to love you.”

“Yes? Perhaps.”

He asked them again what they thought of her. They all looked at him as if he were a simpleton. Who did she think she was fooling, they asked. What an act! No one could be that sweet.

“No one can ever please you!” Basil said angrily to the family. He told Nicole they had liked her. He didn’t see why everyone had to collaborate on trying to drive him crazy. All he wanted was for Nicole and his family to get along. If everyone got along, then he could ask her to marry him.

By fall nothing had changed. The family criticism was now stony silence. They were just biding their time, waiting for Basil to tire of her as he had of so many other women. Basil was depressed and worried. He would never give her up, but they had to like her. He couldn’t marry someone they didn’t like.

He took her to Papa’s for the dinner that broke the Yom Kippur fast. No one ever brought an outsider to these family religious things, only an announced fiancée. He told Papa it would be nice to give Nicole a real home Yom Kippur evening for a change, poor Nicole, so far from home and without family. It started out as a mistake and grew rapidly worse. Nicole was horrified that no one but herself had fasted all day, and then she was horrified that the family did not observe both the evening before and the night after. She told them they were bad Jews, heathens.

“This service is not to socialize, it’s to pray to God to forgive your sins,” she said.

“You’re not the only one who owns God,” Lavinia said.

“The family! The family! All you all ever think of is the family,” Nicole said. They had managed to struggle through dinner and now were in the living room, except for Paris and Everett, who were playing Chinese checkers in the bedroom the way they always had in the back room when they were children in Brooklyn.

“But what else is there but the family?” Papa said, amused. “What good is gelt, success, fame, if you don’t have the love of your good family?”

“Basil doesn’t need you,” Nicole said. “He needs me. I will be his family. Why can’t you let him be a man?”

Basil couldn’t look at any of them; he left the apartment. In the hall he could still hear Nicole’s strident voice berating his family, berating his
Papa
! He cringed, but at the same time he listened with a pounding heart, as if he were a child eavesdropping on his parents fighting over him.

“Let Basil marry me,” Nicole said. “I am the best thing that ever happened to him. He is unhappy all the time. If he married me he would be healthy and happy, and you would see no more sad, quiet little Basil in the corner. You would see a real man. Let him grow up!”

He heard them murmuring then, and after a few moments the sounds of their voices seemed unthreatening, pleasant. He ventured to come back into the apartment again. Nicole walked to his side and took his hand in hers.

“We are going to get married, Basil,” she said. “Your father wants to give you his blessing.”

Basil looked at Papa. He couldn’t tell what Papa was thinking, but at least he didn’t look angry.

“May I have your blessing, Papa?” he asked.

Papa nodded thoughtfully. Nicole kissed Basil on the mouth in front of everyone.

“Good yuntif!” she cried. “Happy New Year!”

The family was all murmuring good yuntif to each other and looking a little in shock still, as if none of this could possibly have happened to them in this safe, quiet place. Nicole went over to Papa and kissed him right on the mouth. One of the women gasped. Even Papa looked quite horrified at this imposition.

“I am your new daughter, Papa,” Nicole said happily. She went back to Basil and put her arm around him. “My husband,” she said.

“Future husband,” Basil said. He was surprised he had managed to get the words out because he was still in such a nervous state. Future husband. Husband. He was going to marry Nicole! He was very happy. He tried to remember when he had first proposed to her and he realized he never really had. They had simply understood each other. It was as if she had read his mind. That was what a husband and wife should be, one mind, one body. He was glad he had waited for her. She was quite a woman.

SEVEN

In the fall of 1947 Paris went off to college, decided to major in English literature since there was no creative writing major, and fell in love with four boys at once. For the first time in four years instead of being the new kid at school she was only one of many new kids, and therefore not an outsider at all. All the freshmen were as anxious to please and to make new friends as she was. But she discovered something very strange: a lot of the girls were not there to get an education; they were there to meet and marry Harvard men.

There were two girls down the hall in her dorm who roomed together and were both Jewish, Dottie and Selma. “You aren’t going to go out with him, are you?” Dottie asked, horrified.

“Sure. Why not?”

“He’s not Jewish.”

“So what?” Paris said.

“So it won’t last. You’ll be wasting your time. I’d never go out with a boy who isn’t Jewish.”

“Well, I’m only sixteen, I’m not worried,” Paris said.

“You’re wasting your youth,” Dottie said.

There were two other girls who roomed together and were Catholic, Agnes and Bernadette, and having already dated most of the football team they were planning to transfer to Holy Cross for their sophomore year. “There aren’t enough Catholic boys at Harvard,” Agnes said. “I don’t want to end up an old maid.”

One of the boys Paris was in love with lived in New York, and he asked her if she would go out with him during Christmas vacation. He would be her first real date in New York, imagine! He said he would take her to a night club. The only time she had been to a night club was in Miami Beach with her whole family, and that didn’t count. His name was Spencer Kimberly and her friends made fun of him and called him Kimberly Spencer because he had two last names instead of a first name and a last name. He looked a little like a mouse, and he hadn’t yet kissed her, but Paris loved him anyway. She had met him on a blind date. On their first date they both said they were never going to get married to anyone and decided that when they graduated they would live together in Europe.

“I’m listed in the Social Register,” said Spencer Kimberly Spencer.

“That’s nice,” Paris said. She didn’t have the faintest idea what the Social Register was but she thought she’d better not ask.

“What church do you go to in New York?” he asked her.

“I don’t go to church.”

“Oh. Well, I don’t go so often myself,” he said.

“You didn’t tell him you go to synagogue?” Dottie said later, aghast. “You’ll be sorry.”

“But I don’t go to synagogue either.”

“You should have told him you’re Jewish. You’ll be sorry.”

“I would if he’d asked,” Paris said. But she was glad he hadn’t asked. Already she was discovering that there were people who had never met a Jew and thought being Jewish was inferior. It was strange, because her own family thought
not
being Jewish was inferior. Here, however, she was in the minority, and she wondered if her parents were right and that was how the world was going to be when she emerged into it.

Some of the society girls were the worst. Selma had a friend who was a debutante and a High Church Episcopalian, which was apparently fancy, and since both she and Selma came from New York they planned to see each other during Christmas vacation. But the debutante said she had to meet Selma on the street corner because her mother wouldn’t let her be friends with Jews. Selma said she wouldn’t see her at all in that case.

“See!” Dottie said.

“Oh, it’s just her, she’s a nut,” Selma said.

“You’ll see,” Dottie said.

Paris could see it getting to some of the girls. It could be something as simple as someone asking your name and giving her just your first name because your last name would give you away. She saw other girls doing it, the gulp, the hesitation, and trapped at last, murmuring, “Bernstein.” Paris determined it would never get to her; those girls who were ashamed were crazy and the girls who looked down on them were crazy too.

But when she got to New York for the holidays her parents acted peculiar. Suddenly her father was using a lot of Yiddish expressions in front of her boyfriends when they came to see her, and her father never used to talk like that. It was as if he wanted to make it perfectly clear that his daughter came from a Jewish household, in case the boy had any other ideas. The boys, who had come from fancy prep schools and led sheltered lives with their social but provincial families didn’t seem to know what to make of it. It all went completely over their heads. The phone was always ringing, boys were crawling out of the woodwork, and then Paris’ mother began the attack.

“You shouldn’t waste your time on those boys,” she said. “They won’t be your lasting friends.”

Even her mother was planning her future … already! It was frightening.

“Why don’t you go to the Hillel Society when you go back to school? You’ll meet some nice Jewish boys for a change. It’s about time. Why don’t you go to the Blind Dance next week? The boys from the nicest families go there, and you’ll meet some boys who will take you out in the city.”

“I go out every night.”

“But with what?”

Six months ago she hadn’t even liked boys, there hadn’t been one boy she could stand. Now she liked them all and the world was closing in on her, picking and choosing for her, trying to match her up for life. Paris didn’t want anyone to pick a husband for her. She wanted to fall in love in her own time, meet a hundred boys, marry when she was ready. But she knew that Spencer and she would never live together in Europe. Spencer would go his way and she would go hers, and by the time they graduated they probably wouldn’t even be seeing each other at all. He was as much a dreamer as she was. His family would probably marry him off to some little mouse-faced debutante who looked just like him. He was too short for a horsy one. She would be blonde, of course. Everything had been preordained. Paris couldn’t stand the blind dates her mother and Aunt Melissa got for her, the sons of their friends. Those boys were as gauche and strange to her as if they came from the moon. She wanted to date the boys she met in school; then at least they had something to talk about. She couldn’t imagine kissing a boy whose mother was a friend of her mother’s. Would he go home and tell his mother? Ugh.

She was lying on the chaise longue in her mother’s room one day during Christmas vacation, talking to her mother through the open door of the bathroom, where her mother was taking a bath in her customary three inches of water so she wouldn’t drown, and suddenly Paris realized that she would never marry anyone. She was doomed to be an old maid. The realization was like a physical blow; it was as if someone had hit her in the pit of her stomach. No one she liked would ever like her. Her parents and the girls at school had made it abundantly clear. You couldn’t choose the boy you wanted, he was to be chosen for you, and she would never marry anyone who was chosen for her. So no one would ever marry her, and she would never marry anyone, and she would be alone all of her life. Thank God for college. There were so many boys there that she couldn’t be lonely. She would make the most of it. Afterward, when she had graduated, she would be doomed.

She was lucky she was going to be a writer. She had something to do with her life. All the girls at college had mapped out their lives already: go steady in your senior year, get engaged at graduation, get married afterward, have a lot of children. If they couldn’t find someone to marry at college then they would go to work after they graduated, but only to have something to do until they found a husband. If you had an interesting job you could attract a better class of men. Only Paris absolutely knew she didn’t want to get married for a long, long time, even if anyone ever wanted her, which she doubted. Oh, drips and jerks would want her—there were always those. Every girl she knew had a drip after her whom she rejected constantly with no success.

Her mother liked to tell her how brave she had been to marry her father, he who was so different from herself, so religious, so poor, with such a demanding, possessive family that they had never forgiven Lavinia to this day for stealing their Jonah away from them. But what was so brave about marrying a man like Jonah Mendes? A girl would have to be an idiot not to see his good qualities right away. No, the whole family had done their little dance, done what was expected of them. But she, poor Paris, wasn’t given any credit for having any sense or taste at all. They wanted to plan her life as if this was still the Middle Ages. Any unconventional thought she had was a threat to everyone, she could see that already. Why couldn’t she keep her mouth shut and keep her thoughts to herself? Then she wouldn’t always be fighting with her mother. It was just that she wanted her mother to agree with her for once, to approve of her. Her mother was stubborn and she was stubborn, and neither of them would ever give in. Paris supposed it would get worse as time went on. She was the trophy in a war.