Rich Rewards (7 page)

Another thing friends had said was that you could not be sure what was missing for several days; things from time to time would turn up gone, and so it was with me. In the meantime I telephoned Agatha.

Afternoons are when she sees patients, of course; she is apt to be extremely busy. But for once she seemed not to be. She listened, and she said she would call her insurance person, which I hadn’t even thought of. She would call me back.

Ten minutes later she did call, and she was chuckling to herself. “It’s kind of unbelievable,” she said. “I took out a
policy on that house, and sort of without my knowing it they added a rider that covers you completely. It’s really funny: usually people think they’re covered and they’re not.”

“God must love you.”

“I should hope so, all the time I give Him.” And then she told me what I already knew, to make a list of what I had lost, but not for several days. To call the police and make a report.

Of course I felt considerably better; for a manic moment I even considered pretending to losses that I had not sustained, claiming jewelry and furs that I had never owned. And maybe if Agatha had not been involved I would have. Agatha is the most moral living Episcopalian; she does not believe in cheating anyone at all, whereas if I could get away with it I would love to cheat an insurance company, an oil company—or the I.R.S., for that matter.

But it was still depressing, the idea of someone’s having come in and poked about among my things. I still felt it as a sort of personal attack. Why me, I thought. I wondered if someone had been watching me, checking my habits of arrival and departure, maybe deciding that he or she—I had to admit, it could have been a woman—did not like me, that I deserved to be ripped off. The only clear fact about the breaker-in was that it was a person of taste, with a good eye for quality. But maybe these days all robbers are discriminating.

Discouraged, and a little scared, I went back upstairs, and it was then that I discovered my favorite earrings gone, big very plain wide silver hoops. Real silver, by some standards not expensive, but much more than I usually pay for earrings. And they were certainly not unique; I was sure that I could find their duplicates in some good San Francisco store. But the thought of buying them again was deeply, if
irrationally depressing. Emblematic, I guess those earrings were.

That night, as I was making my dietetic dinner for one, steak tartare, which I had planned to season with some imported soy sauce from Cost Plus, I saw that the soy sauce was missing from its shelf. At that point all the emotions that I had felt about being robbed united in a single flare of rage. Chopping onions, crying over them, I muttered all the obscene words I could think of. Which didn’t make me feel much better either.

The next day I dutifully called the police and made my report, and a week later I made an honest list of my losses and handed it to Agatha.

I did not exactly keep to my resolution involving not brooding about old love affairs; in fact, as usual I thought of little else—after all, to what else, so far, had my life been dedicated? And I wondered, sometimes, just how it had all begun, this nutty obsessiveness with love and men. A shrink would tie it to my father’s early death, I guess, but I rather thought that my mania began with my Uncle Don, with whom I fell in love when I was five, the year my father died.

My mother went down to Palm Beach to recover—at that time a quiet, cheap resort—and I was sent from Madison, where we lived, to Frederick, a small town in Iowa, where actually I had been born, but I hardly knew the town. And, staying there with my stately grandparents, I fell in love with my Uncle Don, the husband of my father’s sister Margaret. Don was a perfectly nice, rather ordinary young man in his middle twenties, with a round, prematurely bald head, wide flaring ears and small irregular teeth. Toward him I behaved so terribly, with such consistent brattiness, that he could not have suspected love to be its cause. Besides, whoever heard of a five-year-old in love? Certainly not Don.

About my father’s death I understood very little, and it is possible that no one tried to explain; how could they? In any
case, I was sad and shy and embarrassed, and deeply puzzled. Dead? No one else’s father had died, why mine? What was pneumonia? I am sure that my grandparents were saddened by their inability to communicate anything of what they felt to me, along with their natural grief at the death of a much-loved son.

Their household seems eccentric now; not so to any right-thinking person of that time. Simply, my grandfather had married a woman with three unmarried sisters, all of whom he supported in a small house attached to the rear of his own. From this distance it is hard to work out their ages, but since my parents were in their thirties when I was born, all those people would have been somewhere in their sixties. To me they seemed simply old—Old People, like those encountered in myths and fairy stories, and in the Bible.

And then there were Margaret and Don, younger than my parents; but they were still grown-ups, much older than I was. And their baby, Peggy, who was too young for me to think about.

My grandfather was my favorite of that aged group; to me he seemed both kind and reliable. He was the one who taught me to roller-skate, having decided that the old ladies of the house were much too frail for that task, and Margaret was too busy with her baby. In fact the grandmother and her sisters were all rather nervous and subject to headaches, fits of irritation.

Across a tidy space of lawn from my grandfather’s decorous and shiningly white house, and sharing the boxwood that separated it from the sidewalk, was a smaller, narrower, yellow house; Aunt Margaret and Uncle Don lived there, with baby Peggy. Margaret, in her twenties, was a beautiful dark young woman, warmly and sensuously in love with her husband, who was truly in love with her. Bald Don. Margaret was thin, heavy-breasted.

Don was an engineer, out of work in his profession—this was in 1940, just before the booming years of war. He had taken a job in a nearby cellophane factory. That winter we all, every evening just at four-thirty, ceremoniously went out to fetch him from the factory, in my grandfather’s dignified Chevrolet. I can still recall the smell of that factory, which was horrible but was mingled with my wild emotion at the prospect of seeing Don.

Every morning all of us assembled in the parlor for morning prayers, the grandparents and the great-aunts, and me. Don and Margaret were excused from this ritual, probably because of his job, which everyone respected, and Margaret’s baby, whom they all foolishly—to my jealous mind—adored.

On weekdays I was driven to school after breakfast by Stuart, the black chauffeur, who also drove Uncle Don out to the factory. The school was private, a few children in a house in a not very good part of town. I did not exactly make friends there. We were all rather young for real friendships, and also I was very aware of my temporary status: Frederick was not where I lived, and those children’s accents were strange, whereas at home in Madison there were people I had always known; I imagined that I always would.

And, more important, my attention was so passionately focused on my surrounding world of adults that I had little emotional energy left for other children, perhaps even interest in them. School was simply a filler for my days, and bridged the hours until it was time to go and get Uncle Don.

But why, each evening that winter in Frederick, did all of us arrange ourselves in my grandfather’s car and drive out
to the cellophane factory to fetch Uncle Don from work? Stuart could perfectly well have gone by himself, or Stuart and my grandfather. But no, we all went—all except the great-aunts, who stayed at home to take care of adorable little Peggy—every workday at four-thirty, in order to be there when the factory whistle blew at five. Quite possibly my grandfather thought our massed and dignified presence would somehow compensate for the indignity of Don’s job; I now think that must have been it.

Grandfather sat beside Stuart, up in the front seat; my grandmother and Margaret and I sat in the back.

When Don came out of the factory and walked over to where we were, and got in the back seat, I would move over to my grandmother’s lap, or Margaret’s.

EXCEPT
: one night Don got into the car, and kissed Margaret, as he always did, and then he said, “Gosh, honey, you look tired. Here, let me take Daphne.”

And so that night we drove home through an exceptionally vivid scarlet sunset, with me perched dizzyingly on Don’s strong hard knees. Once he said, with a small indulgent chuckle, “Just relax, Daphne. Try to take it easy.” Words that I was to hear quite often, later in life. Wanting badly to lean back against him, to relax, instead I bounced as hard as I could, up and down, until he cried out, “That’s enough! Daphne, cut it out!”

Did that circumstance ever recur? I cannot remember, but I do recall my wild hopes that it might; on any evening Don might say to Margaret, “Honey, you look tired. I’ll take Daphne.”

And toward that small hope, involving that little possibility of pleasure, I directed all my days, my waking hours.

*

Many years later, as a just-divorced young woman, I was involved with a man who was married, who was rarely free to see me. And it came to me at last, without my consciously thinking of Don and of those meager old hopes, that those few enchanted hours were not really worth the weeks and months of waiting, of waste.

Without exactly knowing how, I was aware of being considered “difficult” that year. The problem may have been that I was living with people who were more than half a century older than I was. In any case, at some point generous Margaret must have said to her mother and father, “You all look just plain exhausted. You let us take Daphne over here for a while.… Why, no, it won’t be the least bit of trouble.”

And that is when I began to be truly terrible.

At dinner I played with my food, staring at Uncle Don, and sometimes, if no one noticed that I wasn’t eating, I would make distorted, ludicrous faces, until helplessly Don would shout, “Daphne, for God’s sake, eat your dinner! We’re almost ready for dessert.”

Or, I wouldn’t be ready when Stuart came to take Don to the factory and me to school.

Once, at dinner, when Don had been urging me somewhat more strongly than usual to finish my chicken and rice, whatever, so that dessert could be served, I said to him, on an uncontrollable sudden impulse, in a loud cold voice, “You shut up, you damn fool.”

Well.

After a literally stunned silence, mild-mannered Don began to shout: “You little brat, you go upstairs this minute!” How often, before, he must have longed to shout exactly that.

And so, terrified of what I had done, and giddily excited by his aroused attention, I went upstairs alone to bed, and quite probably I cried, my melodramatic self-pity at last justified. And later Aunt Margaret came up with a plate of dessert and comforting words, and an admonition that Don worked hard and got very tired. We must all be considerate.

Did Don and Margaret worry that their darling little Peggy would turn out to be like me? Unlikely that they did; such a thing would not have seemed possible to them, and they probably all blamed my bad character on my mother, whose intelligence provoked suspicion among them.

And about Peggy they were quite right, of course: the last time I saw her, in New York, she had made a superb dinner for a dozen people, a Thanksgiving dinner (and how like her to invite me, a stray and disreputable cousin, known for too many love affairs), despite having one arm in a cast from a skiing accident. Despite the demands of three very small children. Even her husband is nice. Needless to say, I rarely see them.

Don found his tiny daughter perfect and beautiful, even when she screamed and spit and made those appalling smells—those were the things that I noticed exclusively: how could he love little Peggy?

And he lovingly helped Margaret with the baby’s care. I used to watch, astounded and deeply agitated, as Don bathed Peggy in her canvas Bathinette, holding her so gently, soaping her everywhere, then rinsing, lifting her from the water and patting the pink flesh dry, powdering her chubby buttocks and between her legs—
how could he
?

Surprising, I think, that more children are not murdered by other children.

On one bright winter afternoon, Don decided to take us sledding—all of us, Margaret, Peggy and me—out near the Union Cemetery. An endless hill; we left Margaret at the top, with little Peggy in her wicker basket. We sailed down, down, down—I was stretched out on top of Don’s large sturdy back, holding on. Sailing down.

He remarked with some surprise that I was really a good little sport.

How could he have known that it was the best day of my life, so far?

Strangely, perhaps, I do not remember the arrival of my mother, come to take me home, nor what must have been a somewhat strained family reunion. What I do remember is that the night she arrived one of my front teeth, baby teeth, came out—for me a wonderful, significant event. I thought I looked terrific; I looked like Uncle Don.

I spent the whole trip up to Madison giggling at my reflection in the dashboard, a reflection that distorted the oval shape of my head, making it round. I kept saying, “Look at my teeth! Don’t I look like Uncle Don?”

At last my mother could not stand it, my coldhearted, unwelcoming silliness, and she cried out, “No! Of course you don’t look like Don, you little fool. What’s the matter with you, anyway?”

How could I have told her, even had I known, that I was in love?

One morning, out shopping for fish on Clement Street, in a Chinese market, I recognized an almost familiar sweater: crude wool, variegated colors. I then saw that it was Caroline Houston, in the sweater that she had worn to her parents’ party, that crazy Sunday. She greeted me pleasantly enough, though without effusion, real or otherwise. I was a little surprised when she said, “I live just a block from here. Would you want to come by? I could make some tea.”