The Other Side of Love (4 page)

“I don’t believe it. Uncle Humphrey never would have seduced her; he thinks the world of her. And, besides, in those days people didn’t go to bed before they were married.”

Araminta gave a throaty chuckle.

“That’s why there’s no such word as bastard.”

“

“Minta … Say she was going to have a baby - he’d have married her right off, wouldn’t he?”

“Darling, I’ve given you my all. The family mystery unveiled at long last only to reveal yet more tantalizing intrigues.”

Kathe said nothing. Clasping her arms around herself, she was swept by inexplicable sympathy for the tall, defiantly caustic American cousin.

24

IV

When the two girls returned to the drawingroom, Aubrey pushed up from the piano-stool. Moving towards them, he asked Kathe in his diffident way:

“What about a drive back to the dormitory?”

Forcing the dark garden conversation from her mind, Kathe smiled.

“Wonderful.”

Til get the keys from your man,”

Aubrey said.

She searched out her family to kiss them goodbye. Everyone wished her good luck, assuring her in various accents and languages that she would win both of her races.

Til tell Wyatt to be sure to look you up and give you some pointers,”

Humphrey added.

“What a magnificent sprinter, that boy!”

As they started for the front door, Euan planted himself squarely in front of his son.

“Aubrey, you’re not to take the wheel.”

“The chauffeur’s turned in,”

Aubrey said.

“Then, you better keep a sharp eye on yourself, you hear? I don’t want you crashing your Uncle Alfred’s motor up, too.”

Euan’s eyes were piercing, and his rather high-pitched voice had taken on volume.

Aubrey helped Kathe into the car, stammering an explanation that he had dented the bonnet of his Morris Minor up at Oxford.

“Since then Father’s positive that I’m a menace on the road.”

Euan had always demanded perfection from his only son. Just as he had felt obligated to punish Aubrey’s childhood misdeeds with a caning, so now his son’s occasional ineptitudes spurred him to tongue-lashings. And Aubrey on his side, despite his stammering and mildness, possessed an inner courage that \*uld not permit him to back down from his bellicose sire. The two we* forever at loggerheads.

“Parents,”

Kathe said sympathetically.

Aubrey drove slowly.

“After the end of the Games, would it be all right if I get some tickets for the Philharmonic?”

Td love it, but what about Araminta?”

Araminta made no bones that classical music bored her silly.

“By then she’ll have any number of boyfriends begging to take her around to parties and nightclubs.”

“Then, do let’s.”

“If Aunt Clothilde doesn’t object.”

“Why would Mother say anything?”

“Just the two of us.”

Aubrey mumbled the explanation.

“No chaperon.”

Even though nineteenth-century decorum was bred in Clothilde’s rather-too-large bones, she would never kick up a fuss about her daughter going to an evening concert with Aubrey.

“That rule doesn’t apply to brothers and cousins,”

Kathe laughed.

It was too dark for her to see Aubrey’s hurt little grimace.

25

The first round of the basketball tournament would start in ten minutes.

Wyatt hunkered on low benches with the other tall men wearing grey sweatsuits stencilled USA. The shack smelt of woodrot and fresh paint: the German Olympic Committee, who considered the sport negligible, had painted basketball markings on an old clay tennis-court, converting the two sheds where the nets were stored into locker rooms. The players, trapped in pre-game tension, watched the coach diagramming a play on the blackboard. Wyatt stirred restlessly, scratching between his shoulders. Ever since he’d arrived in Deutschland his sense of being persona non grata had physically manifested itself as a skin irritation. Even here, among other Americans, he felt distinctly itchy.

What the hell am I doing in Berlin anyway1?

Wyatt never would have asked himself such a question before this

July—

The coach was repeating the strategy of the play. Wyatt didn’t hear the earnest voice. He was remembering a hot July night a bit over a month earlier, a muggy night on the island of Manhattan when his vision of Wyatt Kingsmith had been irrevocably shattered.

II

He had come home to the commodious apartment on 72nd Street and Madison at a little before ten. The corner windows were open,

26

and the hum of Madison Avenue traffic had covered the sound of the front door opening and closing. Buoyed with elation, he had paused in the foyer, smiling fondly at his parents”

predictability. They had been in the brightly lit L of the big living-room, facing each other across the cabriolet-legged games-table. Though they worked together, they seemed more than content to spend most of their evenings at the games-table, fitting together thousand-piece jigsaw puzzles, playing honeymoon bridge or rummy.

His mother had fanned her cards on the tooled green leather.

“Gin,”

she’d said, her tone pleased yet not triumphant. Rossie Wyatt Kingsmith was a great one for driving a hard bargain with wholesalers, yet with her spouse she was non-competitive, nurturing, protective. She never snowed him up when he struck a bad business deal or nagged him to stop his harmless boasting.

“The card shark strikes again,”

Wyatt said.

They both turned.

“Wyatt.”

Humphrey beamed.

“You’re home early.”

“We were just about to have ice-cream,”

Rossie said.

“Thanks, Mom, but none for me. On the way home I grabbed a steak and some cheesecake.”

This was the cook’s night off, so Rossie went to the kitchen. Wyatt waited until she’d set down the crystal bowls before springing his news.

“Well, it looks as if I’ll bump into you two in Berlin,”

he said in a casual tone.

“What?”

Humphrey’s spoon halted halfway to his mouth. He had worked endlessly to convince Wyatt to join in the Kingsmith reunion at the Games.

“You’re spending Jkigust in Newport, aren’t you?”

w

“Well, it’s like this, Dad,”

Wyatt said.

“That was arranged before I promised to represent my country on the basketball squad.”

“You’ll be playing in the Olympics? How absolutely ripping!”

Humphrey lapsed into the slang of his English schooldays as he hugged Wyatt.

“They must have heard how good you are.”

“I wouldn’t put it quite like that.”

Wyatt was grinning. His friends”

big complaint was that they never satisfied their fathers, but Humphrey formed a one-man fan club.

“The team all work at Universal Studios. Because of this Jewish thing in Germany, the studio refused to support them financially. Some of the guys couldn’t afford passage or to take the time off. They needed players. I applied. The coach, it seems, was at the Columbia-Yale basketball game.”

“So he saw for himself how good you are!”

Humphrey chortled.

“I can’t wait to cable everybody!”

Rossie had been staring down at her ice-cream, which, being homemade, was melting rapidly. Her hair was neat, her face perfectly

27

made up, yet she looked vaguely dishevelled.

“What about your friend in Newport?”

she asked.

“St John’ll understand.”

“You promised to spend the month with him.”

“What’s come over you, Rossie?”

Humphrey asked.

“Wyatt’s received a great honour.”

“Berlin …

“

Rossie spoke softly, as if to herself, then added firmly:

“You shouldn’t break a commitment.”

“Hey, it’s great the way you’re cheering me on,”

Wyatt snapped. He finger-combed his hair.

“Sorry, Mom,”

he said quietly.

“I’m bushed, is all.”

“Go on to bed, dear.”

He was too keyed up to sleep. He sat at his sleek modern desk, writing to St John, explaining why he wouldn’t be able to make it this summer. He paid a couple of bills, balanced his ten-plan chequebook. He showered. He was in bed reading a Dashiell Hammett mystery when a single tap sounded on the door.

“It’s me,”

Rossie called softly.

“Come on in,”

he said, splaying the book.

Her tailored navy-blue silk robe was neatly tied, her brown hair smooth, yet once again Wyatt had a sense that his trim mother wasn’t well groomed. Maybe it was because her fists were clenched. She sat on the foot of the bed.

He nodded towards the envelope propped on his desk.

“That’s to St John. Mom, he’ll get a kick out of my being on the team.”

The alarm-clock ticked, a car racketed up 72nd Street. Then Rossie opened her hand. The large gold pocket-watch was misted by the heat of her palm.

“This belonged to my first husband,”

she said.

He could feel his jaw come unhinged.

“What?”

“I was married before.”

“You were? That’s a closely guarded secret.”

“I should have told you years ago. But it never seemed fair to Humphrey. He’s so proud of you.”

“Are you saying Dad’s not my real father?”

He detested his croaking voice.

“He isn’t. But he’s forgotten he isn’t. Wyatt, so help me God, I often think facing up to it would kill him.”

A straightforward businesswoman, Rossie avoided the least hyperbole.

“He loves you so much.”

Wyatt leaned back against the wooden headboard. Three years ago he had used part of his inheritance from his Wyatt grandparents to buy the sleek Danish modern bookcases, the pinch-pleated linen curtains, the desk. Suddenly the familiar room seemed alien. Though he had often inwardly wondered why the nuptials hadn’t taken place until a month before he made his arrival, he’d never questioned his

28

siring. Why should he? Humphrey was forever pointing out that he, Wyatt, had the Kingsmith height, that he had inherited dark eyes and sandy hair from his long-dead Kingsmith grandmother, that he had Porteous’s high IQ.

Wyatt’s hand hovered above the round gold watch, but his muscles refused to grasp it.

“What happened? Did he leave you in the lurch?”

“Wyatt, I said he was my husband.”

She paused.

“I met him my first year up north at Radcliffe.”

Rossie Wyatt Kingsmith came from Wyattville in Rossie County, Georgia. Prior to the War Between the States, as the Rossies and the Wyatts referred to the Civil War, the two interlocking families had accumulated more than three thousand slaves, a cotton gin, warehouses and a railroad spur. Now his maternal kin, attended by what they still called

“their darkies’, descendants of their property, nursed their superiority and talked in softly slurred voices of genealogies. Whenever he’d visited Wyattville he’d been filled with gratitude that his mother had been smart enough to leave the first woman in the intertwined families to head north to college.

Rossie was watching him.

“Both our families disapproved,”

she said.

“Because you were too young?”

His mother hadn’t been twenty when she’d married his father - Humphrey Kingsmith.

“Oh, you know what unreconstructed Southerners my folks are. And he was a damn Yankee.”

She paused as a car racketed up 72nd Street.

“His name was Myron Leventhal. He was in his second year at the Harvard medical school. His parents were beside themselves that he was going around with a gentilejirl.”

“Jewish …

“

Wyatt whispered. W

His spine was stiff against the headboard. Though he had no close Jewish friends and had never taken out a Jewish girl, he’d also never guffawed at casually told anti-Semitic jokes and had preferred not to go through rushing because fraternities were discriminatory. He was therefore shamed by the images of Jews tumbling through his brain. A fat woman who smelt of sweat and garlic grabbing the taxi he’d hailed. A pair of bearded, hatted men talking a guttural language. The short belligerent commie called Goldberg arguing Marxism in the Poli Sci class. Wyatt wore only his pyjama bottoms. Looking down, he had a certifiably insane thought. The upper half was familiar and Episcopal, the lower half, hidden by his striped Pima cotton pyjamas, belonged to a stranger. Shouldn’t I have been circumcised?

Rossie tilted her head.

“I realize this is all coming as a shock.”

“I’m an adult.”

He managed a wry smile.

“So you were married because I was on the way?”

29

‘Good heavens, no. It wasn’t like that at all. We just wanted to spend our lives together. We were married by a Justice of the Peace, and the next day we took the train to New York to see his parents. They lived not far from Columbia, in one of those big old houses. His father was a judge, humourless and stiff. When we refused to get an annulment, he said that Myron was dead to them. They would sit shiva for him - that’s a week-long mourning rite the Jews have. Now that I’m older, I can see how hurt they were - he was their only child. But back then I hated them for what they did to Myron.”