Rich Friends (5 page)

Beverly shook her head.

“The last anyone knew of her was Buchenwald. Maybe I did find her. She could've been one of those corpses—no! Hell, how could she've lasted that long?” Dan's fingers cut harder into her flesh. “All those stacked bodies had one common denominator. Whether they called themselves Catholic, Lutheran, atheist, agnostic, they were Jews. Jews. The great assimilated along with the Hasidim. My father's family in Lodz. All Jews.” Dan released her shoulder. She didn't permit herself to move. “Nothing to do with religion.” Dan's normally ebullient voice was levelly cold. “That Frenchwoman. You. Me. They wanted to rid the earth of us.”

She felt his words more than heard them.

She became part of the vast, festering wound of their generation of Jews. The survivors who asked:
Why not me? If the others, then why not someday me
? She was, and would forever be, haunted by the skeletal wraiths. Her heart never could make the necessary adjustment. Never. Yet at that second she was mostly terrified by Dan's fury. She reacted in her own way. She withdrew. Shifting on new leather as far as possible from him, she said, “You don't need anything to make you remember.”

“So?”

“Then it's not the point. Giving up cigars on Saturday and wearing a cap to pray, I can't understand why you won't admit it's ritual.” Her voice came out too thin.

“You're a damn stupid broad,” he said, adding with careful viciousness. “What's the point of you?”

Tears came. She leaned her head against the icy window, ashamed her weakness could be seen by Dan, who must know her muffled sobs were only in small part for the tortured millions, the French lawyer and his family. She wept for herself. She wept like a prisoner thrust back into solitary confinement. She felt a handkerchief pushed into her hand. She blew her nose into smells of freshly ironed linen and tobacco, fine and happy odors of the living: she reached blindly. Dan's large, warm hand clasped hers. She slid across the seat. He buried his face in her neck.

“Who says you can't smell in your dreams?” His face was wet, too.

She stroked his hair, which was crisp and coarse. Many people are able to deny evil. Beverly couldn't. Evil is. Her mind wasn't neat, analytical, small. What Dan had told her she could never explain away in philosophical or psychological terms. Evil is. She held him, stroking his coarse brown hair.

3

She argued with Dan.

They argued whether to see the James Mason movie at the nearby art house or
The Big Sleep
—Dan considered Lauren Bacall hot stuff. They argued if Beverly would nurse their future babies, Dan said he didn't want her to, he didn't want her breasts sagging, he was crazy about her breasts, they were small but pretty and the nipples were gentle, know that? They argued about the formation of a Zionist state, a subject about which she knew nothing (beyond hearing her parents agree they were against such a country) and one where Dan had put his money where his mouth was, and they argued about
Guernica
, although he was ignorant of Picasso's intent. Dan never caught on they were arguing. His idea of good conversation happened to coincide with Beverly's idea of argument. Their longest, continuing battle: she wanted to go the limit. He wanted to wait.

They were sprawling, discomforted by the steering wheel, safe from police flashlights under the Grossblatts' stone porte cochere. Dan's fingers traced her quivering thigh. She made her suggestion for the fifth—or was it the sixth?—time that night. He removed his hand.

“Not here,” he said.

“Someplace?”

“We should find some flea-bitten dump and sign in as Mr. and Mrs. Smith?” He kissed her nose. “What've you done to me?” A pair more kisses. “I used to spend all my time selling girls they should register with me.”

“I'm sold.”

She had confessed to him that she'd petted above the waist and—on a few occasions—below, and he, amused, had asked how come she hadn't noticed a certain physiological fact about the male sex organ? Had she assumed a man normally kept it strapped down? Oh, in retrospect her ignorance was monumental. “I want it to be right,” he whispered, curving her fingers around himself. “Buzz, know how great we're going to be together?”

Three times Beverly ate in the Grossblatts' huge brick pile in New Rochelle. Next to the front door, nailed to the arched oaken jamb, was a blue enamel case with Hebrew lettering. Dan kissed his fingers to it as they went in. The mezuzah, he explained, contained a parchment inscribed with the
Shema
(passages from Deuteronomy) plus the visible name of God.
Shaddai
. The mezuzah blessed this house. Beverly thought the huge stone pile barren rather than blessed. Gloria, the youngest, was away at Ohio State. The middle child, Sgt. Victor M. Grossblatt, USMC, had been brought home from Iwo Jima under an American flag, and the Grossblatts in their bitter grief (Dan told Beverly) had blamed one another for letting Vic enlist underage. Now Mr. Grossblatt never spoke to his wife. To Beverly he spoke in his harsh gutturals as little as possible. He had come from Lodz at fourteen, a penniless cobbler's apprentice without family or a word of English. By the time he turned thirty the man was a millionaire, and today nobody knew how many millions he was worth, only himself and
Shaddai
.

“My mother,” Dan said, “has a diamond in the vault. Three and a bit.” Mrs. Grossblatt, short, with a wide, freckled nose, fussed over Beverly's appetite. Beverly liked her anyway.

“Want to look at settings?” Dan asked.

Beverly said nothing.

“Before we get it made up, I should introduce myself to your parents? Ask for your hand?”

Another cold, drizzly Sunday, they were heading for the park.

“Well?” he asked finally.

“Have you told your father?”

“Screw my father.” Dan put his arm around her shoulder. “Why nervous?”

“Who's nervous?”

“Any girl who doesn't want a three-carat ring.” His fingers squeezed through layers of fabric, wet and dry. “Buzz, listen, once he sees he can't have his own way, you'll be his idea. It's been very tough on them since Vic. A wedding'll cheer them up. A wedding is for families—hey! Watch it!”

She avoided the puddle, walking apart from Dan.

Families.

Her very problem. Families. Idiot, she told herself, cretin. Wasn't it incredible she never once had considered that marriage is no island? Marriage is a social contract. Marriage is the Grossblatts and the Lindes, marriage is Dan with Caroline and Em and Sheridan and the Omega Deltas. Dan never would accommodate himself to Glendale, and she would feel a nail go in for each shrug, each Yiddish expression, anything that might be construed as loud, including a three-carat ring on a nineteen-year-old girl. A fierce osteomyelitis of shame weakened her bones. Was this the measure of her love? (But how could anyone have her identity mercilessly imprisoned for nineteen years, then expect love, however deep, to throw open every jail door?)

Dan grabbed her elbow, halting her on the brink of a water-filled gutter. He gripped both her shoulders, turning her to face him. Drops caught in his hair. His heavy features were wet. They stared at one another, and she felt that warm, aching need quiver in the pit of her stomach. Her eyes grew moist. “You need a keeper,” he whispered. A car swished by, splattering their legs. Neither noticed. And in that minute her future seemed simple. She would have a difficult time, sure, but not for long. They would be married. They would be together always.

“Your folks have only one daughter, such as she is,” he said. His arm around her, he started to walk briskly. “We'll do this right, I'll come out to Los Angeles, right, right, oh, I did right by my wife and my seventeen kids and my peanut stand and my old gray mare.…” He marched faster and faster until they were both laughing breathless into the rain.

4

In Los Angeles Dan spent days with the local S&G rep. Dan had force and humor. He was a natural. Christmas, when wholesalers take off because nobody writes an order, he sold shoes by the gross. Nights he took out Beverly. The Lindes made no comment. But Beverly knew what they thought of him.

Breakfast. Mr. Linde had just left for work, Mrs. Linde, handsome in a cashmere sweater set and the smell of Yardley's, finished her first cup of coffee and Beverly scrubbed a cocoa stain from her pink robe—since the mumps, Mrs. Linde hadn't insisted she dress for breakfast. The previous night Dan had been to dinner, the first time he'd been invited, a jarringly awkward evening.

“Mother.” Beverly clenched her napkin to keep her hands from shaking, “I'm asking Dan to the Open House.”

“Oh?” Mrs. Linde, for once rattled, touched her springy gray-black hair. “Are you sure that's the correct thing?”
Behave correctly
was the motto blazoned on Mrs. Linde's firm beating heart.

Beverly said, lied, she was sure.

“I got the impression that Dan is, well, quite religious.”

“He is.”

“Then don't you think a Christmas party might offend him?”

No doubt about it.

“And he won't know anyone. He hasn't met Caroline or Em or Sheridan or Lloyd or—”

“I haven't asked Lloyd.”

“I see.” Mrs. Linde poured her second cup of coffee. “Well, you've always invited your own guests.”

“You don't want him.”

“Beverly! What on earth has gotten into you? I only asked if you thought it right to ask Dan to this particular party.”

“Mother.” From the kitchen came a deafening roar, the maid using the WasteKing. Beverly, under cover of grinding garbage, asked, “I was just wondering how you and Daddy would feel if he and I.…”

The disposal stopped. Beverly's words,
if he and I
, hung in the sunlit breakfast nook. To Beverly it seemed that she and her mother were like the red-jacketed hunters in the paired prints on the wall, forever suspended above an English hedgerow. They were trapped, unable to hurdle
if he and I.…

Mrs. Linde recovered. “He's quite a bit older.”

“Seven years.”

“I know this is difficult for you to believe,” Mrs. Linde said, smiling, “but you aren't the most mature nineteen.”

“I am nineteen, though.”

“You enjoy your painting, listening to music. Sensitive, quiet things. Dan, even knowing him as little as I do, is a dominating person. And aggressive.”

Beverly stared at her mother.

Mrs. Linde looked down at her coffee. “He comes from an entirely different background.”

“Orthodox.” Beverly was thrust back into childhood. She despised her sullen tone.

“That's not all. There're differences maybe you can't realize. Attitudes. For example, I wonder if Mr. Grossblatt respects his wife the way Daddy respects me.” (Here Mrs. Linde was playing a little dirty pool: her sister-in-law had written that the Grossblatts were estranged, something to do with the death of a younger son.) “We learn from what we see at home. Behavior patterns.”

“He's nothing like his father.”

“Dear, you haven't known Dan long enough to form judgments.”

“He's warm and kind and good and generous.”

“I'm sure he is.” Powder showed in Mrs. Linde's paper-fine wrinkles. “This is the reason your father and I always let you make your own decisions. So that when something important comes along, you'll know how to behave.” With a click, Wedgwood cup met saucer. “Go ahead and invite Dan. The Open House will be a nice way for him to meet your friends.”

Oh God, Beverly thought, again scrubbing cocoa. God.

The living-room drapes were drawn, the Atwater Kent blared “Adeste Fideles,” and a Douglas fir with blinking multicolored lights cast its spasmodic glow over some twenty guests. Glasses tinkled, men made jovial talk while their spouses covertly glanced at one another's legs to see who had succumbed to Dior's calf-covering New Look.

Beverly leaned against the Knabe spinet, hearing but not listening as Caroline's latest, Gene Matheny, discussed this column he wanted to write for
The Daily Bruin
. To Beverly, people appeared in sharp outline, a caricaturist's sketch, with one predominating feature. Gene Matheny was Tolerance. Tall, slightly built, he had a long face that resembled an intelligent hound dog's. Because of his fair, scrubbed-looking complexion as much as his unfailing sense of decency, Caroline often called him Clean Gene. He went to UCLA, he had a social conscience. When he spoke about his beliefs he would press his thumbnail down on his lower lip. Beverly, watching him, thought, If Mother wants a mismatched couple, she should get a load of Gene Matheny and Caroline Wynan.

Caroline, in her new crimson taffeta, picked one-handed along with “Adeste Fideles,” laughing as she hit a clinker.

Sheridan and Em sat side by side on bridge chairs. Em's solemn, small-chinned face, lifted toward Gene, was drawn. She was seven months pregnant. Caroline privately maintained this condition was caused solely by lack of adequate toilet facilities in Sequoia. Em never commented. Her bodily processes appeared focused on building the large, peaked stomach over which her hands clasped protectively. A few minutes earlier, Caroline had whispered to Beverly, “Dr. Porter suspects we have here twins, but mum's the
word
. You know how she is. Sheridan's in one foul mood, so ply him with bourbon.” Sheridan made no pretense of listening to Gene. His deep-set eyes were shadowed. Tired, Beverly thought. For a month, Sheridan had been delivering nights for Cambro's Drugs over on Colorado Boulevard. Who could live on a GI check?

Gene was saying, “… convinced him some people aren't hot for sorority and fraternity news … maybe do … column on world politics.…”

Draft sucked smoke. The front door had opened.

“I'm dying!” Caroline cried. “It must be
him
.”