Читать книгу Blue Money - Janet Capron - Страница 14

Waiting

When I was almost seven, my father, Rayfield, called. This was the first time I’d heard his voice in two years. He had come home from Korea with the Bronze Star. He wanted to see me. I couldn’t believe it. My father wanted to see me. It was like the president, or a famous actor, suddenly calling up and saying that he wanted to see me, so out-sized had my fantasy of him become. In the two years that he had been away, I had received one unsigned valentine. My mother had to tell me it was from him. The fact that he hadn’t bothered to sign it even, this drawing of a cavalier monkey in his funny, tilted cap, with only the printed words “Be My Funny Valentine” inside, broke my heart. Maggie patiently, emphatically explained that it was a Valentine’s Day custom, that my father was pretending to be a secret admirer.

“Couldn’t he have at least put ‘Love, Dad’ on it?” I kept asking. “Just ‘Love, Dad’?”

Anything would have been better than nothing. I was convinced that he was in a hurry, popped the card in the mailbox, and that was it. I figured he had forgotten about me, and I pined for him. I became seriously depressed. How I did that, I remember, at the fickle age of five, was by vowing to be unhappy all the time. Not just some of the time when I felt like it. That was not serious enough. Grown-ups think you’re simply in a bad mood if you look sad, then ten minutes later start to laugh at something someone says. No, the trick was to stick with it, make them see you’re not just being a kid. It had to be full-time. I was going to be unhappy every waking minute if I could help it.

When I entered the first grade at an enchanted, strange little European school, where they cosseted neglected uptown kids like me, the depression gradually started to lift. I didn’t want it to, because I was afraid that I would forget my father, just as he had forgotten me, and then it would be as if we as a duo had never existed. To prevent this from happening, I turned my absent father into a love object and began to revel in the attenuated refinements of unrequited affection. I was determined that I would not forget. Singlehandedly, I would keep this thing we had alive. Before he left, he said to me, “Remember, darling, true love is like this rubber-band. You can stretch it, but it never breaks.”

So there. So it was true.

But then, after the initial call in September, we didn’t hear from him. I went into second grade. Thanksgiving passed with no word. Finally, he phoned again. He was settled now, with a job at the copy desk of the Tribune and a room somewhere I never had heard of, White Plains I think it was.

It was on a Saturday in early December at my grandparents’ penthouse on Fifth Avenue, and my father was coming. I see myself sitting on the window seat, my knees tucked up to my chin, the blue velvet skirt pulled taut over them, staring out the living room picture window at Central Park, twenty-two stories below. I liked to search out an empty space in the rambling apartment where I could pretend that I was living alone. The best way to do this was to enter a room after Bridget had finished cleaning it, preferably when Josephine had slipped off to an afternoon Mass (poor people were Catholics; rich people like my grandparents were nothing at all). Today Grandpa had gone out to his club, but he often took his nap then. My grandmother might try to get me to take a walk in the Park, but the old woman shuffled along on the sidewalk, going nowhere, until she hit a bench. I needed a destination, and I hated the pavement. Instead, I ran for the fields, the big rocks, the densest part of the woods, where you couldn’t even see the buildings.

Sometimes my grandfather took me there, the Ramble it’s called, deep inside the Park. That morning, the two of us—my round, bald grandfather and I—had skipped down the hill as far as the miniature boat pond. Grandpa bought a small plastic bag of salty peanuts, which he said were for the squirrels. Then, according to ritual, I ate them. At this point, the old man shook his head like his granddaughter was beyond hope and called me a “squirglar,” a thief who stole from the squirrels. I giggled. He had made that word up himself. Grandpa liked me wicked. Good children, he said, were hiding something. And they were dull.

Now that I was seven, he undertook to lecture me on a variety of subjects from literature to politics. On this particular morning, he had decided it was time to warn me about two phony writers from my father’s neck of the woods called Emerson and Thoreau. These men were muddled thinkers. It was self-evident in their prose, which was filled with parentheses inside of parentheses. Obviously confused. “Never use a ten-cent word when a two-cent word will do,” he told me.

I was thinking about Emerson and Thoreau and that word I couldn’t pronounce, “transcendentalism”—“a lot of hooey” was how my grandfather explained it to me. The two guys lived on a pond, or one of them did. Well, why not? But if I knew anything, it was that Grandfather was right. His warning tone implied the world was full of fools.

I was looking out the window at the far side of the big boat pond in the middle of the Park, where the woods grew thick, imagining those two men perched at the edge there rubbing sticks together to make a fire. I pretended I could see them under the trees. I also granted a short audience to Horatio (a clown of a sidekick I had been trying to banish, since everybody except Horatio himself knew and accepted that he did not exist).

Josephine came out from the back of the apartment, through the dining room, stopping at the staircase adjacent to the front door in the hallway. She looked at me across the wide-open space of connecting rooms and then looked at the door. Then my nurse sighed and started up the stairs. From where I sat, I could see her nylon uniform pull at the seams across her wide, rolling back. She stopped on the landing to breathe, a great demonstration of heaving in and out.

“C’mon, Janet, I’ll brush your hair again,” she called out to me.

I got up slowly and walked to the stairs. Josephine had already brushed and brushed my straight ash-blond hair that morning, and still it fell in strings around my head. I wished I had curly black hair like the second grade class leader, Betty. My ears poked out. My white nylon socks were slipping into my black patent leather shoes. I began climbing the stairs, grabbing the polished banister directly above me and pulling myself up one step at a time.

“Stop that,” Josephine said from the landing. “You’re not an old lady.”

We went into the big guest room, where we sometimes spent the night. It was furnished, draped, and carpeted in tones of beige. A few of my stuffed animals sat bright and incongruous on a pillow. Usually chatterboxes, always arguing among themselves, even they got quiet here.

“I see Bridget cleaned the room this morning. Isn’t that nice?” Josephine said.

“Bridget always cleans the room, every day,” I said.

The nurse sat down on a taut coverlet. “Not everyone has someone to clean up after them,” she said.

“Mother says when she was growing up everybody had a maid,” I said.

“If everybody had a maid, who were the maids then, I’d like to know?” Josephine asked, taking the hairbrush in one hand and my arm in the other. She pulled me between her legs and started to brush, first the left, then working her way around.

Outside the penthouse window, one tall fir tree, standing in its own tub, fought back the sun. Along the glass fence, holly bushes and mistletoe had been planted that week. The earth was still moist and turned. The winter light splashed the roofs of the other apartment buildings, which stretched as far as the East River in this direction, each one of them studded with evergreens growing out of miniature walled gardens, high up in private communion with the sky.

A little later, Josephine and I sat on the light blue linen sofa in the living room, sinking deeper into its wide cushions, watching The Big Top, a live circus show for kids. I was glaring at the set. The front door slammed and Grandpa swooped in, still wearing his hat and coat, trailing cold air. His delicate hooked nose was red, and behind his bifocals, his blue eyes watered.

“Hello, girls,” he said, meaning Josephine and me. “Where’s your pa? I was going to steal Ray away from his daughter for a chess game.”

“Good afternoon, Mr. Abram,” Josephine said. “Mr. Chace hasn’t arrived. He hasn’t called either. I can’t imagine.”

“Well, I’m going to my study. Let me know when he shows up,” he said.

I tried not to look at him when he kissed me before he went away.

Grandma was still at Elizabeth Arden, getting made over. My mother had gone out for a long lunch with some writer friends. The phone had not rung since after breakfast, so when it did, Josephine patted my arm and said, “That’ll be him, to say he’s on his way.”

A second or two later, Bridget appeared in the doorway and nodded. Josephine went to the phone in the hall, followed by me.

“Yes, yes, I understand. Circumstances,” she was saying into the phone. “We were expecting you at one for lunch, but that’s all right. Just hop into a cab. Janet is so anxious to see you.”

I tugged Josephine’s elbow. “Does he want to talk to me?”

“No, no. He just called to tell us he’s on his way.”

“Where is he, in New York?”

“He’s in New York, right outside Grand Central. He was detained, but now he’s coming,” Josephine said as she hung up.

“Didn’t he want to say hello to me?”

“He’s on his way,” she said. “You’ll see him in person in a few minutes.”

“How many minutes?”

She hesitated. “Fifteen.”

I pulled my nurse’s wrist down and read her watch. “It’s exactly two twenty-one.” I began counting with my fingers. “Two twenty-one plus ten plus five, two thirty-six. He’ll be here by two thirty-six.”

“If not before,” Josephine said, and we went back to take our places on the sofa.

At three o’clock I got up and changed the channel. A still shot of the city at night flashed on the screen. The theme from Gone with the Wind played behind the familiar voice of the announcer introducing this afternoon’s “Million Dollar Movie,” Mr. Peabody and the Mermaid. I had seen the last half of it three times that week after school. I loved the part, without knowing exactly why, where the mermaid lay close to Mr. Peabody, drinking out of a glass, a helpless creature, locked in a fish’s tail, rolling around on his patio. I didn’t know whether it was funny or sad. The mermaid wore bright red lipstick; even when she popped out of the sea she was wearing lipstick.

After the movie ended, with Mr. Peabody looking out his New York window at the falling snow, Josephine put her arm around me, patting my shoulder. “There, there,” she said. That made it worse. I shook off my nurse and went to the picture window. Directly across from me, the deep orange sun began to slip behind the left tower of the Majestic. Suddenly, in between bare trees, the streetlights in the Park came on. An occasional car wound along the drive inside the Park. It was that time of day on a weekend in winter when people find themselves alone and caught off guard by the early darkness.

The doorbell rang. Josephine leapt to her feet like a fat girl jumping rope and went to the door. Maggie rushed in, the cold air surrounding her like a strong perfume. She threw her dark, sheared beaver coat over the banister. She looked like her father, short and compact, the same periwinkle-blue eyes set in a heart-shaped face. She was wearing a fitted gray flannel suit with a deep red fox collar. A little gray suede hat perched itself at an angle on her head from which flew a gray veil, covering her forehead like a gossamer flag. Her fine hair shot out in loose waves from underneath her hat, suggesting angles in her plump cheeks. She was grinning, as if someone had just told her a joke and she was still laughing. Clutching her purse, she walked deliberately on her high heels, as if she were following chalk marks on a stage floor, and stood at the wide entrance to the living room. Then she was no longer smiling.

“Where’s your daddy?”

I turned back to the window.

“He called, missus,” Josephine said. “He’s running behind.”

Maggie looked at her slim gold watch. She tossed her head. “Well, that figures,” she said.

She went over to me, reached out to touch my face. I pulled away as if I had been stung and moved closer to the window.

“I’m sorry, honey,” my mother said. “You know he means well. He just can’t help it.”

The doorbell rang. Everyone turned to face the sound as if they were expecting the enemy. The bell rang again, three rapid sets of ding-dongs. The two women and I sank back. It was Grandma then. Bridget ran out from the kitchen, taking mincing steps as if she were hobbled, and pulled open the door. She half curtsied in an eager dumb show of fear. A tiny woman wearing long blond hair swept up in combs shuffled through the door. She was bowed under the weight of a silver fur. Bridget stood with her arms outstretched at the old woman’s back, ready to receive the coat.

“Good evening,” Grandmother said.

“Good evening,” Bridget said, as she scooped up Maggie’s abandoned sheared beaver from where it had fallen on the stairs and threw it on top of the undulating mink.

My grandmother’s eyes were the color of ice on a lake. She turned and peered into the living room. “Don’t you people believe in electricity?”

The room was dark. Josephine hurried around it, first turning on the running lights along the bookshelves and then a three-way standing lamp in one corner. The old woman smiled without showing her teeth.

“Good, I’m glad everyone is here. We won’t be late for dinner. Mr. Abram is in his study, I take it?”

“Yes, madame,” Josephine said.

“Well, I’m sorry that I missed Rayfield. Such an attractive man. You will tell him how sorry I am, won’t you, Maggie, the next time you speak to him?”

“He hasn’t been here, Mother,” Maggie said.

“Oh?” the old lady asked without surprise. “I had understood that he was visiting Janet today.”

“Well, he stood her up,” Maggie said. She went to put her arm around me and I pulled away.

“Perhaps he will turn up yet. Bridget, kindly tell Anna that there will be one more for dinner and set another place.”

“No, Bridget,” Maggie said, walking over to the maid and retrieving her coat, which she hung in the closet behind them. “That won’t be necessary. I don’t want him here drunk.”

“Maggie, must you continually contradict me and confuse the servants? Set another place, Bridget. That will be all. I don’t want to be disturbed until dinner.” The old woman disappeared into her room. They heard her door slam.

Bridget pulled a large, polished oak hanger from out of the hall closet and very gingerly folded the big coat around it. “Will you need anything, Mrs. Margaret?” she asked my mother.

“Yes, Bridget, some ice. I need a drink.”

Bridget nodded and left for the kitchen.

Maggie turned back to the living room, where she went over to the television and switched it off. “Josephine, what did you do all afternoon, just hang around waiting for the bastard?”

“Hush, hush, missus. Don’t talk like that in front of the child, even if it is the God’s truth.”

Maggie pulled off the little hat with one hand as she rubbed her hair around impatiently with the other. “It was better when he was in Korea. Janet shouldn’t be subjected to this,” she said, sitting down abruptly on a white loveseat against the wall, which ordinarily was never used, and patting an empty space next her.

“Come here, Janet, come sit,” she said.

I shook my head. I couldn’t bear to let anyone see me like this. Everybody’s parents in my second grade class were divorced—well, practically everybody—but the other kids’ fathers made a big fuss about their visitation rights. Sometimes, someone might not even be able to attend a birthday party because that was the father’s day. I knew how it was supposed to go.

Bridget appeared again, framed in the large entrance to the living room. She was carrying an ice bucket in both hands. “They’ve announced Mr. Rayfield on the house phone. They want to know if he’s expected.”

Maggie looked at her watch again. “It’s after five. He’s got a hell of a nerve.”

“What should I say?” Bridget asked.

Josephine took the ice bucket and set it on a shelf with interior running lights, next to the empty fireplace. “Tell him to send him up. Better late than never.”

“But, Josie,” Maggie said, sounding very young to me then, “do you think it’s wise?”

“Janet has been waiting all day. Better she see it than blame you,” Josephine spoke matter-of-factly.

“But I don’t care!” I said. “I don’t really.” Tears flew out of my eyes like flecks of spit from an angry mouth. “Tell him to go to hell.”

“Shame on you. He’ll hear you all the way in the elevator,” my nurse said.

The bell rang. Josephine was there before Bridget could arrive.

“At last,” she said as she pulled it open, “at last. Come in.”

But the tall young man, still in his thirties, stood outside, his wrinkled raincoat hanging off him as if he had not been able to make up his mind whether or not to wear it.

“Are you sure, Josie?” His mouth dropped in that self-deprecating smile. “I thought I might be too late to be welcome.”

“You’re always welcome, Mr. Ray,” Josephine said. “Now in, in.” She shooed him past her as if she were corralling a truant rooster back into the yard.

“Hello, Daddy,” I said, and went over to meet him.

He scooped me up and began to stagger. Together we fell onto the carpeted stairs, adjacent to the door, where he continued to hold me, burying his head in my hair. “Oh, baby, baby, you OK?”

I ran my hand across his chin.

He pulled his face. “Seems like it’s growing,” he said. His skin was pale and fine underneath the stubble. His green eyes were dull and misted over as if his mind were traveling great distances without him, hovering over the refracted lights of the city outside the living room window. He had a high forehead framed by a mass of dark hair, which he combed straight back, but which now fell forward in looping waves over his heavy eyebrows. He began to run his hand through it, but then abandoned the gesture, as if he had been distracted, this time by the front door that Josephine had just closed behind him. Something or someone on the other side of it grabbed his attention. The white turtleneck (the kind he always wore; he had an aversion to ties), which was still tucked into his pleated pants, may have been clean earlier that day. Now it advertised his afternoon. Vague brown spots, possibly spilled coffee, covered the front of it. I watched my mother screw her face up in disgust.

She got up from the white sofa and marched over on her high heels to where my father sat on the stairs. “Why did you have to do this today? Why? Just one day you could’ve laid off it. For Janet’s sake. You know the problems I’ve been having with her. She’s totally withdrawn. The teachers say she won’t respond. She mopes around the apartment. Is it always going to be like this with you, Rayfield? Is this what I have to look forward to? What gives you the right to turn your back on her when she needs you?”

I broke in, yelling, “Stop it, stop it!”

I stood up in front of him, facing my mother, to protect him.

Then he reached up and took my hand and turned me around. Our eyes, the same slanted green ones, met. “Maybe I should leave, princess. I’m a mess. I’m sorry.” He put his elbows on his knees and covered his face.

I continued to look at him, memorizing his hairline, the grooves on the sides of his square mouth, the way his eyebrows arched, the Adam’s apple. He was the handsomest man that I had ever seen and I did not know when I would see him again.

“OK, go,” I said, without moving, the hot penthouse air ringing in my ears.

“That’s not very kind,” Josephine said. The big nurse took my father by his other hand, pulling him to his feet. “Have some black coffee first.”

Maggie pushed past her ex-husband. “Well, I can’t stand it. I’m going upstairs. Josie, don’t leave Janet alone with him.”

“Not to worry, missus,” Josephine said. “We’ll have a little black coffee. Janet, kiss your father. Tell him how much you love him, how much you missed him. Go on, now.”

I shook my head. Pride, the price we sometimes pay for survival, had suddenly taken over. ‘It’s not my turn anymore, it’s his,’ was all I could think about. ‘I held my end up for a long time, but now it’s his turn.’ He moved a few steps until he could just reach out and touch my small shoulders covered in velvet. Cautiously at first, he began to massage them with his palms. I could smell his stale whiskey breath as he leaned over and kissed me gently on the cheek.

“Janet, darling Janet. You’re all grown up. Did you miss me?”

What I wanted to know was: Did he miss me? He had to say so first. I kept my mouth shut. My father dropped his arms and shrugged. “Josie, I’m sorry. I tried, but the kid’s too smart for her old dad. She’s through with me, too, fed up. And she’s right, she’s right. I’m going.”

He pulled me to him, clutching me like a small belonging that someone else had tried to steal away. Frightened by the abruptness of it, I let out a little scream. Grandpa Abram came to the door of his study at the far end of the apartment wearing a silk smoking jacket, his black eyeshade pushed over his forehead.

“What’s going on here?” he asked, his watery blue eyes raw and blinking without his glasses.

“Hello, Sam. It’s Rayfield here. Sorry to have missed you, just leaving.” My father pulled his dirty raincoat around him. “Janet,” he said, his hand on the brass doorknob, “I know I’m a no-good bum of an old man, but I’ll always love you. No matter what. Remember, darling, love is just like a rubber band. You can stretch it, but it never breaks.”

Then he was gone, the thick metal door thudding shut behind him. I ran, pulling it open with both hands. “Daddy, I’ll wait. I’ll wait.”

He looked at me as if I were a stranger, or as if he had forgotten why he was there.

“That’s my pet, that’s my Janet,” he finally said, just as the elevator arrived. He slipped past me behind Jake, the operator, turning inside where he continued to wave and smile that doleful smile until Jake heaved the car door shut.