Girl on the Best Seller List (6 page)

Gloria Wealdon walked warily into the kitchen.

Fern, all smiles, said, “Now tell me about my New York! How’d you like it, hmm? Bygones be bygones, ah?” She poked Gloria’s waist playfully with her long finger. “Who’d ever have thought our little Glo-worm would write herself a best seller!”

V
IRGINIA FULTON
yanked a clump of weeds from between the two shrubs and demanded to know why she shouldn’t say such a thing.

“Because,” her father answered, “threats are vulgar when there is no way of carrying them out.”

He squatted beside his daughter. He remembered two days back when Milo Wealdon had dropped by to help him prune the hydrangea. Milo hadn’t seemed any different at all, except during one brief interval when they were examining these very shrubs he and his daughter were working on this morning. Milo had looked at them thoughtfully for a few seconds, running his tongue along the lower lip inside his mouth, the way he did sometimes. Then he had remarked: “I’d get rid of these shrubs if I were you, Freddy.”

“Are you serious? They were here when I bought this place.”

“I don’t care. You have to get rid of them. They’re lycium halimifoliums. I suppose that doesn’t mean anything to you.”

“What’s wrong with them?”

“The popular name for them is Matrimony Vine. They have an unquenchable desire for conquest. They have these underground suckers that can just take over the whole place! You can’t eradicate them by cutting them down or grubbing them out! Matrimony Vine — that’s the right name for them, all right!”

“And I should get rid of them?”

“You have to kill them, Freddy.”

Milo spoke those words with such emphasis that he broke the stubby black pencil he held in his hands. It was hard for Freddy to keep his mind on the rest of their conversation. All the while Milo discussed the effectiveness of Trichlorophenoxyacetic Acid sprays and Dichorophenoxyacetic Acid sprays, Freddy thought of the way Milo’s big hands had snapped the piece of short lead pencil, of the way Milo had said, “Matrimony Vine — that’s the right name for them!” Maybe Freddy was just projecting; maybe he was just trying to imagine how he would feel if his wife had published that best seller.

Virginia Fulton was sixteen, medium height, plump, with muscular legs, frizzy brown hair, a freckled nose and corrective glasses. She squinted at the sun from behind the thick black frames and said, “Just the same I feel like feeding her some of this stuff!” She shook the small can which she held in her hand.

“Well, I’m afraid we’ll have to settle for killing mere weeds this morning, Ginny. Unless you can come up with a better idea for murdering Mrs. Wealdon. Herbicides aren’t dependable. She’d probably suffer little more than a belly ache.”

Freddy Fulton stood and stretched. He had been a very handsome man once. There were still traces of this in his height, his broad shoulders, the thick crop of coal-colored hair, the piercing dark eyes and the good rugged profile. But at thirty-eight he had developed a paunch, the sort that made his stance sag, and his jowls were heavy now and flaccid. He was still impressive, partly because he was so well-tailored, mostly because he had such an air of self-confidence.

Fulton was not at all displeased with the figure he cut, and when he had read Gloria Wealdon’s portrayal of him as the anxious father of a lisping daughter and the fanatically devoted husband of a wife who was busy debauching her psychoanalyst, he had guffawed aloud. He remembered that he had been sitting up in bed reading the book, and that Fern, opposite him in her bed, had demanded: “What’s so funny, Freddy?”

He really pitied Fern. He wondered if that was what his whole attitude toward her had evolved into.

“Oh, I don’t know,” he had answered. “Poor old Milo.” He had closed the novel abruptly, so that she would not know he was reading the seduction scene between Fernanda and her analyst.

“Not poor Virginia?” Fern had snapped. “Not poor Min Stewart?” she had added. Freddy knew she meant —
not poor me?
Fern had slapped cold cream across her face with an angry gesture, and continued, “After all, your own daughter was maligned in that book.
And
your best friend. Where would you be without Min? Who put up the money for your loan when all the banks refused credit?”

“All right,” he had said. “Poor Virginia. Poor Min.”

“But you don’t really mean it, do you?”

“No,” Freddy had admitted, “I don’t. Ginny can do circles around Gloria Wealdon any day; so can Min Stewart. Neither one of them gives a damn what that idiot wrote about them.”

Fern had shouted, “Sometimes I think you know less about the human mechanism than anyone I’ve ever encountered!”

The storm warnings were posted. Whenever Fern began talking about “the human mechanism” at the top of her lungs, the first rag of civility was about to be ripped away.

“I don’t want to argue, Fern,” Freddy had answered in a mild tone.

“Don’t
I
know it!” Fern laughed sarcastically. “You want to keep your hostility all bottled up inside of you. You’ll find other ways to punish me, won’t you, Fred?”

“The idea of punishing you,” Freddy replied truthfully, “bores me.” He felt like adding: “As does your new vocabulary,” but he checked himself.

At the last Rotary Club meeting, he had made the same complaint to Jay Mannerheim. Jay had answered that all patients tossed around psychological words in the beginning.

“In the
beginning!”
Freddy had laughed. “Fern’s been laid out on your couch for two and a half years now!”

Jay had nodded sadly. “I know it seems like a long time to the layman, but it’s really a relatively short time.

It’s a big job unraveling thirty-three years.”

Freddy grimaced. “Fern’s thirty-seven, not thirty-three. I can’t see what good you can do if she won’t even tell you the truth!”

“She will … in time,” said Jay. He had knocked the dottle from his pipe and continued in a confidential tone. “Freddy — about Virginia. You know crossed eyes, in many cases, are due to some hereditary anatomical weakness, but I don’t think that’s so in Ginny’s case. I mean there’s no history of it in either Fern’s background
or
yours.”

“I agree,” Freddy had said.

“No one is responsible for her condition,” Jay had added, “and no one should
feel
responsible.” “Does anyone?”

“Fulton, do you know what I’m trying to get across?” “What?”

Momentarily Jay had studied Freddy’s bland face. Then stuffing his pipe in his pocket, he had said: “You must be punishing Fern for something, Freddy.”

“You’ve been reading Gloria Wealdon’s version of Fern’s version of life at the Fultons’,” Freddy’d laughed.

“Except that Gloria Wealdon’s version includes one devoted husband.”

“And one debauched psychoanalyst.”

Jay had shaken his head. “That part
was
rather pathetic. Patients, particularly women, enjoy imagining that they have the ability to seduce their analysts. It’s a little private daydream. It was sad that it had to be brought out in the open.”

“Even sadder,” Freddy had said, “that they
don’t
have the ability.”

“I suppose that wouldn’t bother you.”

Freddy had told him honestly, “I’d feel as though Fern’s analysis was a better investment under those circumstances. At least she’d be getting
something
for my money, besides a lot of psychological jargon she’s not mentally equipped to grasp.”

Standing abruptly, Jay Mannerheim had looked down at Freddy Fulton with a serious expression to his countenance. “I’m not out selling my wares, Fulton, but a remark such as that makes me feel obliged to suggest that
you
could use a little therapy yourself. Have you ever considered analysis?”

Freddy had told him that he already knew the art of being unhappy intelligently.

Freddy Fulton liked Jay Mannerheim. Of course he was terribly pompous and something of an ass, but Freddy felt he meant well, and in some instances he probably actually
did
help people. If he was getting nowhere with Fern, it was because Fern would never admit the truth. She had long ago stopped admitting it to herself, so why should she tell Jay Mannerheim about it.

If Freddy were as prone to label things as Fern was, he would label the matter “Fern’s mental block.” For even to Freddy, Fern had never made reference to the year 1953, except to berate Hollywood on occasion for giving Audrey Hepburn an Oscar that year.

In the year 1953 Freddy Fulton fell in love. Freddy was like a lot of people who had married very young and outgrown their mates. Like the others, Freddy, after he had met Edwina Dare, began to distinguish between the act of loving someone and the experience of being
in
love with someone. He had loved Fern; he supposed in some crazy way he would always love Fern — such was the complexity of marital love; but he was
in
love with Edwina Dare. Wouldn’t he always be.

Still, in 1953 he had let her move away from Cayuta; he had not tried to stop her.

He could still remember the painful night when he had made his decision. Fern had gone to the bedroom, while Freddy sat in the dark in their cream-colored living room. He sat there for hours, debating, reasoning, weeping; he sat there like a man in a dream, who knew how beautiful the dream was, but also knew, the way sometimes a man does on the thin edge of sleep, that soon he would have to wake up. When finally he decided he could not bring himself to abandon Fern and Ginny and go off blissfully with his Edwina, he got up and went into the bedroom to tell Fern. He expected to find her waiting there, tortured, the same way he had been, by the thought that their marriage hung by a hair. When he opened the door, he saw her sitting by the radio, in tears, and for the first time since their trouble had started he had felt compassion for her, he had felt he had made the right decision. Crossing the room, he held out his arms to her, intending to say something comforting, something like
there, there, now; it’s going to be all right between us, Fern.
He had been prevented from speaking immediately by Fern’s sudden wailing.

• • •

“Audrey Hepburn is no actress!” she had cried. “Gawd, Freddy, remember the old pictures? Remember Ida Lupino in ‘The Hard Way’? We saw it in New York City that Easter, remember? Ida Lupino could act; still can! She deserves an Oscar, but
this one!”

It was Ginny he had put his arms around that night, holding her sleepy-eyed in her pajamas. It was Ginny he murmured to: “It’s going to be all right.”

Now, six years later, Freddy Fulton was grateful for the fact Fern was seeing Jay Mannerheim three afternoons a week. Ever since Gloria Wealdon’s book was published, Fern had been carrying on in an astonishing way — praising Gloria one moment, damning her the next. Her moods, lately, were never predictable.

Freddy would be buckling his galoshes in the kitchen in the morning, on his way to the plant, when suddenly Fern would walk in and announce: “I never told Gloria Wealdon you idolized me! She made that up! I don’t need anyone idolizing me! Believe you me, I had all of
that
I could use when I was a girl. Why, the boys at Miss Bryan’s Dancing School used to break their necks racing across that waxed ballroom floor to get me for the opening waltz. I think I told you that Jack Fowler — he’s a big man in stocks and bonds now, lives up in Fairfield County — Jack Fowler broke his collarbone right there on Miss Bryan’s waxed floor, racing across to get me for the opener!”

“I’m glad to hear it,” Freddy would answer.

That would be all there was to it, until the next time.

The next time, Freddy and Fern and Ginny might be watching television, and Freddy and Ginny would laugh at something they thought was corny on the screen. Then again it would happen; a
different
version. Fern would say: “It isn’t good to be smug about what you
may
think is corny, Virginia. Some people can’t afford to be smug. Your father is a little over-protective. He’ll sit there and laugh with you at the pretty girls who can’t act on the television, without ever explaining that pretty girls have the upper hand in the world, whether they’re talented or not! Your father won’t tell you the simple facts of life, Virginia. Even Gloria Wealdon can figure out the simple facts of life. She told the truth in that novel. That’s why people are so indignant!”

Freddy — and Virginia, too — became gradually accustomed to Fern’s irrational outbursts, so both were prepared for this morning’s incident.

After breakfast, Fern had said, “Listen, Gloria Wealdon is coming down here to have coffee with me. So
she
thinks! I think I’ll slam the door in her face! And if either of you speak to her, I’m not going to speak to you!”

Freddy had sighed tiredly. “I mean it, Freddy!”

He had said to his daughter, “C’mon, Ginny, let’s get those Matrimonial Vines.”

“I’m with you, Dad,” his daughter had grinned.

As they were leaving the back door, they had nearly collided with Gloria Wealdon. Freddy had held Ginny’s arm tightly and whispered, “Try to please your mother, Ginny, and don’t speak to her.”

“Don’t worry,” Ginny had answered. “I don’t have anything to say to Gloria Wealdon.”

Freddy had been slightly surprised at Virginia’s bitter tone. He and Ginny had laughed so much over
Population 12,360
that he had not anticipated that kind of reaction. He was pondering this when Gloria Wealdon nearly knocked them over, waving and calling “Hi” on her way into their house. He was beginning to wonder, for the first time, if his daughter actually had taken the novel seriously.

His wife’s voice had interrupted his musing: “Well, hi, Glo!” she called from the steps. “Gee, I’m glad you could come!”

Maybe, Freddy had thought, Fern is really and truly cracking up.