Secret Ingredients (69 page)

“You know,” her mother said, “there’s something terribly wrong with the guest-room shower.”

“Damn it, Marcia,” he said, “I wish you wouldn’t always greet me with bad news!”

His grating voice oppressed Amy, and she began to fiddle with the button that raised and lowered the window.

“Stop that, Amy!” he said.

“Oh, well, the shower isn’t important,” her mother said. She laughed weakly.

“When I got back from San Francisco last week,” he said, “you couldn’t wait to tell me that we need a new oil-burner.”

“Well, I’ve got a part-time cook. That’s good news.”

“Is she a lush?” her father asked.

“Don’t be disagreeable, dear. She’ll get us some dinner and wash the dishes and take the bus home. We’re going to the Farquarsons’.”

“I’m really too tired to go anywhere,” he said.

“Who’s going to take care of me?” Amy asked.

“You always have a good time at the Farquarsons’,” her mother said.

“Well, let’s leave early,” he said.

“Who’s going to take care of me?” Amy asked.

“Mrs. Henlein,” her mother said.

When they got home, Amy went over to the piano.

Her father washed his hands in the bathroom off the hall and then went to the bar. He came into the living room holding the empty gin bottle. “What’s her name?” he asked.

“Ruby,” her mother said.

“She’s exceptional. She’s drunk a quart of gin on her first day.”

“Oh dear!” her mother said. “Well, let’s not make any trouble now.”

“Everybody is drinking my liquor,” her father shouted, “and I am Goddamned sick and tired of it!”

“There’s plenty of gin in the closet,” her mother said. “Open another bottle.”

“We paid that gardener three dollars an hour and all he did was sneak in here and drink up my Scotch. The sitter we had before we got Mrs. Henlein used to water my bourbon, and I don’t have to remind you about Rosemary. The cook before Rosemary not only drank everything in my liquor cabinet but she drank all the rum, kirsch, sherry, and wine that we had in the kitchen for cooking. Then, there’s that Polish woman we had last summer. Even that old laundress.
And
the painters. I think they must put some kind of a mark on my door. I think the agency must have checked me off as an easy touch.”

“Well, let’s get through dinner, and then you can speak to her.”

“The hell with that!” he said. “I’m not going to encourage people to rob me.
Ruby!
” He shouted her name several times, but she didn’t answer. Then she appeared in the dining-room doorway, wearing her hat and coat.

“I’m sick,” she said. Amy could see that she was frightened.

“I should think you would be,” her father said.

“I’m sick,” the cook mumbled, “and I can’t find anything around here, and I’m going home.”

“Good,” he said. “Good! I’m through with paying people to come in here and drink my liquor.”

The cook started out the front way, and Marcia Lawton followed her into the front hall to pay her something. Amy had watched this scene from the piano bench, a position that was withdrawn but that still gave her a good view. She saw her father get a fresh bottle of gin and make a shaker of martinis. He looked very unhappy.

“Well,” her mother said when she came back into the room. “You know, she didn’t look drunk.”

“Please don’t argue with me, Marcia,” her father said. He poured two cocktails, said “Cheers,” and drank a little. “We can get some dinner at Orfeo’s,” he said.

“I suppose so,” her mother said. “I’ll rustle up something for Amy.” She went into the kitchen, and Amy opened her music to “Reflets d’Automne.” “COUNT,” her music teacher had written. “COUNT and lightly, lightly…” Amy began to play. Whenever she made a mistake, she said “Darn it!” and started at the beginning again. In the middle of “Reflets d’Automne” it struck her that
she
was the one who had emptied the gin bottle. Her perplexity was so intense that she stopped playing, but her feelings did not go beyond perplexity, although she did not have the strength to continue playing the piano. Her mother relieved her. “Your supper’s in the kitchen, dear,” she said. “And you can take a popsicle out of the deep freeze for dessert. Just one.”

Marcia Lawton held her empty glass toward her husband, who filled it from the shaker. Then she went upstairs. Mr. Lawton remained in the room, and, studying her father closely, Amy saw that his tense look had begun to soften. He did not seem so unhappy any more, and as she passed him on her way to the kitchen, he smiled at her tenderly and patted her on the top of the head.

When Amy had finished her supper, eaten her popsicle, and exploded the bag it came in, she returned to the piano and played “Chopsticks” for a while. Her father came downstairs in his evening clothes, put his drink on the mantelpiece, and went to the French doors to look at his terrace and his garden. Amy noticed that the transformation that had begun with a softening of his features was even more advanced. At last, he seemed happy. Amy wondered if he was drunk, although his walk was not unsteady. If anything, it was more steady.

Her parents never achieved the kind of rolling, swinging gait that she saw impersonated by a tightrope walker in the circus each year while the band struck up “Show Me the Way to Go Home” and that she liked to imitate herself sometimes. She liked to turn round and round and round on the lawn, until, staggering and a little sick, she would whoop “I’m drunk! I’m a drunken man!” and reel over the grass, righting herself as she was about to fall and finding herself not unhappy at having lost for a second her ability to see the world. But she had never seen her parents like that. She had never seen them hanging on to a lamppost and singing and reeling, but she had seen them fall down. They were never indecorous—they seemed to get more decorous and formal the more they drank—but sometimes her father would get up to fill everybody’s glass and he would walk straight enough but his shoes would seem to stick to the carpet. And sometimes, when he got to the dining-room door, he would miss it by a foot or more. Once, she had seen him walk into the wall with such force that he collapsed onto the floor and broke most of the glasses he was carrying. One or two people laughed, but the laughter was not general or hearty, and most of them pretended that he had not fallen down at all. When her father got to his feet, he went right on to the bar as if nothing had happened. Amy had once seen Mrs. Farquarson miss the chair she was about to sit in, by a foot, and thump down onto the floor, but nobody laughed then, and they pretended that Mrs. Farquarson hadn’t fallen down at all. They seemed like actors in a play. In the school play, when you knocked over a paper tree you were supposed to pick it up without showing what you were doing, so that you would not spoil the illusion of being in a deep forest, and that was the way
they
were when somebody fell down.

Now her father had that stiff, funny walk that was so different from the way he tramped up and down the station platform in the morning, and she could see that he was looking for something. He was looking for his drink. It was right on the mantelpiece, but he didn’t look there. He looked on all the tables in the living room. Then he went out onto the terrace and looked there, and then he came back into the living room and looked on all the tables again. Then he went back onto the terrace, and then back over the living-room tables, looking three times in the same place, although he was always telling her to look intelligently when she lost her sneakers or her raincoat. “Look for it, Amy,” he was always saying. “Try and remember where you left it. I can’t buy you a new raincoat every time it rains.” Finally he gave up and poured himself a cocktail in another glass. “I’m going to get Mrs. Henlein,” he told Amy, as if this were an important piece of information.

Amy’s only feeling for Mrs. Henlein was indifference, and when her father returned with the sitter, Amy thought of the nights, stretching into weeks—the years, almost—when she had been cooped up with Mrs. Henlein. Mrs. Henlein was very polite and was always telling Amy what was ladylike and what was not. Mrs. Henlein also always wanted to know where Amy’s parents were going and what kind of a party it was, although it was none of her business. She always sat down on the sofa as if she owned the place, and talked about people she had never even been introduced to, and asked Amy to bring her the newspaper, although she had no authority at all.

When Marcia Lawton came down, Mrs. Henlein wished her good evening. “Have a lovely party,” she called after the Lawtons as they went out the door. Then she turned to Amy. “Where are your parents going, sweetheart?”

“I don’t know,” Amy said.

“But you must know, sweetheart. Put on your thinking cap and try and remember. Are they going to the club?”

“No,” Amy said.

“I wonder if they could be going to the Trenchers’,” Mrs. Henlein said. “The Trenchers’ house was lighted up when we came by.”

“They’re not going to the Trenchers’,” Amy said. “They hate the Trenchers.”

“Well, where are they going, sweetheart?” Mrs. Henlein asked.

“They’re going to the Farquarsons’,” Amy said.

“Well, that’s all I wanted to know, sweetheart,” Mrs. Henlein said. “Now get me the newspaper and hand it to me politely.
Politely,
” she said, as Amy approached her with the paper. “It don’t mean anything when you do things for your elders unless you do them politely.” She put on her glasses and began to read the paper.

Amy went upstairs to her room. In a glass on her table were the Japanese flowers that Rosemary had brought her, blooming stalely in water that was colored pink from the dyes. Amy went down the back stairs and through the kitchen into the dining room. Her father’s cocktail things were spread over the bar. She emptied the gin bottle into the pantry sink and then put it back where she had found it. It was too late to ride her bicycle and too early to go to bed, and she knew that if she got anything interesting on the television, like a murder, Mrs. Henlein would make her turn it off. Then she remembered that her father had brought her home from his trip west a book about horses, and she ran cheerfully up the back stairs to read her new book.

It was after two when the Lawtons returned. Mrs. Henlein, asleep on the living-room sofa dreaming about a dusty attic, was awakened by their voices in the hall. Marcia Lawton paid her, and thanked her, and asked if anyone had called, and then went upstairs. Mr. Lawton was in the dining room, rattling the bottles around. Mrs. Henlein, anxious to get into her own bed and back to sleep, prayed that he wasn’t going to pour himself another drink, as they so often did. She was driven home night after night by drunken gentlemen. He stood in the door of the dining room, holding an empty bottle in his hand. “You must be stinking, Mrs. Henlein,” he said.

“Hmm,” she said. She didn’t understand.

“You drank a full quart of gin,” he said.

The lackluster old woman—half between wakefulness and sleep—gathered together her bones and groped for her gray hair. It was in her nature to collect stray cats, pile the bathroom up to the ceiling with interesting and valuable newspapers, rouge, talk to herself, sleep in her underwear in case of fire, quarrel over the price of soup bones, and have it circulated around the neighborhood that when she finally died in her dusty junk heap, the mattress would be full of bankbooks and the pillow stuffed with hundred-dollar bills. She had resisted all these rich temptations in order to appear a lady, and she was repaid by being called a common thief. She began to scream at him.

“You take that back, Mr. Lawton! You take back every one of those words you just said! I never stole anything in my whole life, and nobody in my family ever stole anything, and I don’t have to stand here and be insulted by a drunk man. Why, as for drinking, I haven’t drunk enough to fill an eyeglass for twenty-five years. Mr. Henlein took me to a place of refreshment twenty-five years ago, and I drank two Manhattan cocktails that made me so sick and dizzy that I’ve never liked the stuff ever since. How dare you speak to me like this! Calling me a thief and a drunken woman! Oh, you disgust me—you disgust me in your ignorance of all the trouble I’ve had. Do you know what I had for Christmas dinner last year? I had a bacon sandwich. Son of a bitch!” She began to weep. “I’m glad I said it!” she screamed. “It’s the first time I’ve used a dirty word in my whole life and I’m glad I said it. Son of a bitch!” A sense of liberation, as if she stood at the bow of a great ship, came over her. “I lived in this neighborhood my whole life. I can remember when it was full of good farming people and there was fish in the rivers. My father had four acres of sweet meadowland and a name that was known far and wide, and on my mother’s side I’m descended from patroons, Dutch nobility. My mother was the spit and image of Queen Wilhelmina. You think you can get away with insulting me, but you’re very, very, very much mistaken.” She went to the telephone and, picking up the receiver, screamed, “Police! Police! Police! This is Mrs. Henlein, and I’m over at the Lawtons’. He’s drunk, and he’s calling me insulting names, and I want you to come over here and arrest him!”

The voices woke Amy, and, lying in her bed, she perceived vaguely the pitiful corruption of the adult world; how crude and frail it was, like a piece of worn burlap, patched with stupidities and mistakes, useless and ugly, and yet they never saw its worthlessness, and when you pointed it out to them, they were indignant. But as the voices went on and she heard the cry “Police! Police!” she was frightened. She did not see how they could arrest her, although they could find her fingerprints on the empty bottle, but it was not her own danger that frightened her but the collapse, in the middle of the night, of her father’s house. It was all her fault, and when she heard her father speaking into the extension telephone in the library, she felt sunk in guilt. Her father tried to be good and kind—oh, she knew he never meant to be anything else—and, remembering the expensive illustrated book about horses that he had brought her from the West, she had to set her teeth to keep from crying. She covered her head with a pillow and realized miserably that she would have to go away. She had plenty of friends from the time when they used to live in New York, or she could spend the night in the park or hide in a museum. She would have to go away.