She brought grapes and a plate of biscotti back to the table for dessert, and Grady pulled some photographs out of his wallet. “You still haven’t seen my new house,” he said. “It’s near the one I used to have, which you also didn’t see, but bigger.” He laid the pictures out on the table.
The house looked like it belonged in an architectural magazine, with high beamed ceilings, fireplaces, a rustic motif and a look of tasteful if slightly fussy luxury, set in a thickly treed area. “It’s beautiful,” Olivia said.
“There are a few things from Grandma,” he said. “See?”
“I never understood why you and Taylor wanted to go back to live in Topanga after your horrible childhood,” Olivia said.
“It’s our home. We like it there.” He dipped his biscotto into his champagne. “You know, it hurt me a lot when Earlene gave my room away.”
“I guess it was because she needed the money, and you were at boarding school. That’s how she’d think.”
“Mm. But this house is giving me a lot of trouble. I’m suing the people who sold it to me because they lied and said I could get a variance to build my deck out over the side of the mountain and it turned out I can’t. The deck was half finished and then I found out. I’m not allowed to complete it and I refuse to tear it down so it sits there like an eyesore and every time I look at it I feel sick. I’ve spent a fortune in legal fees already.” To her surprise he was shaking with emotion. Olivia remembered how Aunt Julia used to say that Grady was a perfectionist where his living quarters were concerned.
“These things take time.”
“I won’t give up.” He put the photos back into his wallet carefully, as if they were of his loved ones. The sun was going down and the room was getting dark. She wondered where Roger was. “I took a camping trip to Yosemite last month,” Grady said. “It’s very beautiful there.”
“By yourself?”
His eyes glittered. “I always find someone to amuse me.” He smiled. “I met this young guy and we were hanging out, and we went to the bar to drink. We ordered drinks and all of a sudden it turns out he’s under twenty-one, which is drinking age in California, and they wouldn’t serve him. It had never occurred to me. So I had to keep ordering the drinks and sneaking them to him. It was pretty funny.”
What’s so funny about it? Olivia thought. Why are you telling me this story?
“So we finally had to go back to my tent to drink.”
Oh sure, back to your tent to drink. Is this a drinking story or a gay story, she wondered, but she was sure it was both. She didn’t want to ask him again if he was gay because he had already denied it, but she also felt he was trying to tell her something else in this afternoon of confessions, so she would know him better. Except for his brief prank with the burning sleeve, there was such a heavy sadness about him, such an air of isolation. She thought back over the things he’d said all afternoon and not one of them was optimistic. They were filled with anger and grief. A wave of tenderness washed over her for him.
He held up his empty glass. “I remember these glasses,” he said. “Mandelay.”
“Yes,” Olivia said.
“The big family parties. Kenny used to hide in the kitchen he was so shy, and we had to drag him out.”
“I remember,” Olivia said, and smiled.
“We had fun then,” Grady said. “I loved Mandelay.”
“You all did.”
“Didn’t you?”
“I was unhappy a great deal of the time, but there are things about it I realize I miss,” Olivia said.
“Grandma took the dishes when they sold the place and divided everything up,” Grady said. “Now Taylor and I have them. They mean a lot to me. I actually use them.”
“I’m glad.” Still filled with that tenderness, she wanted to reach out and connect him somehow with herself. “I’ll give you something of my mother’s,” she said. “Do you have any idea what you’d want?”
“I’d like something from Mandelay.”
Suddenly unexpectedly proprietary about her dead family, she thought about what she could bear to part with. Everything had a memory attached to it, and not all were bad. Some were unexpectedly poignant. She remembered the happy faces around the long table when there was a birthday to celebrate. She would share some of the glasses.
“Would you like to have a pair of champagne glasses?” she asked.
His face lit up. “Don’t you need them?”
“I have the rest.”
“Thank you. I’d like to have something of Aunt Lila’s,” Grady said. “She was good to me.”
She went to the cabinet where she kept the cut crystal glasses and took out two. They sparkled in the kitchen light. A rush of memories poured through her of those beautiful dinners. She imagined Lila, still young, buying the glasses, looking forward to the summers with almost the whole family at Mandelay, maybe even looking forward to her life. There were so few things that had made Lila happy.
“They’re your early Christmas present,” Olivia said, and wrapped them gently in a kitchen towel and put them into a shopping bag and gave them to him.
Roger came home then, and dumped his gym bag and packages in the bedroom. It was six o’clock. “Hi, Grady,” he said cheerfully, coming into the dining room. “Are you two still having lunch?”
“Yes,” Grady said. “It’s become the cocktail hour.”
“We saved one glass of champagne for you, Roger,” Olivia said. When he leaned down to kiss her cheek she could smell that he’d already had a drink. He took an ordinary champagne flute from the kitchen and poured himself the rest of the champagne. “How was your day?” she asked.
“Good. And yours?”
“Good.”
“I didn’t know it was so late,” Grady said, glancing at his watch. “I have to meet a friend.”
“Things going okay, Grady?” Roger asked.
“Fine, thanks.”
Olivia brought Grady his coat and hugged him goodbye. “You should call when you’re in New York,” she said. “I want to see more of you.”
“I will.” She wondered if he would. “Thanks for lunch.”
Grady left, carrying the shopping bag with Lila’s two glasses in it. Olivia was so glad she had given them to him. “What are you and I going to do about dinner?” Roger asked.
“What? Oh. Let’s just go out. I’ve been in all day.”
She cleared the table and put the place mats into the washing machine. “Give me your gym clothes,” she said. “I’ll have Peggy do this load in the morning.”
“Oh,” he said. There was the barest pause. “I didn’t work out today. When I got to the gym it was too crowded, so I left.”
“That’s too bad. So what did you do?”
“A little shopping.”
“Did you have lunch with anybody?”
“With myself.”
She thought of the wine on his breath. Well, Roger had always been self-sufficient, and it was the holiday season and a Sunday: why shouldn’t he have a decent lunch? She didn’t want to ask too many questions and be like her mother. He seemed in such a good mood that having been alone all afternoon to wander around obviously agreed with him. That was all that mattered.
“When we have dinner I’ll tell you about my lunch with Grady,” Olivia said. “It was really very disturbing.”
9
F
ROM TIME TO TIME
, and especially around the holidays, Olivia thought about Jenny and Melissa, and missed them. They were somehow mysterious to her, living their distant lives, and she wondered what they were doing. She thought how their children were growing older, and how she was not there to see it. Her little cousins were like her nieces and nephews, since she didn’t have any, but their mothers never called her because they were so busy, and out of consideration for this, and because she was so busy herself, she didn’t call them either. She thought of Jenny and Paul and their kids most often, because it was Jenny whose baby picture she had carried in her wallet when she was young, as if Jenny were her child or her baby sister, and it was she who Jenny had come to with her teenage complaints so long ago. So a week before Christmas Olivia made one of her infrequent calls to Jenny in Cambridge.
“We’re all leaving tomorrow to go skiing,” Jenny said.
“I’m glad I caught you. How is everything?”
“Crazy. You know sometimes when I come home from work I sneak upstairs and get into my bathtub and just stay there for half an hour before anybody knows I’m home, and then I can face them.”
“I don’t wonder, with five kids,” Olivia said. “And that job of yours.” She thought how as a domestic relations lawyer Jenny dealt all day with battered women, deadbeat husbands and damaged children, but never seemed to bring her day home with her and never talked about it. Jenny had a helpful husband and a good baby-sitter, but Olivia had still always been amazed at how she could manage to juggle her job and her family so well. She was successful in her career, and her children were thriving.
“Do you know how much money ski lift tickets
cost
for seven people?” Jenny said.
Actually, Olivia had never thought about it, because she had never had any interest in skiing in her entire life. To her—and to her mother, of course, who was afraid of everything—it had seemed like a sport in which you were sure to be seriously hurt. Her token sports had been tennis and swimming (but she didn’t dive), and now she just went to the gym. “They all ski?”
“Sure. Kara and Belinda are still beginners, but they’ve all been on the slopes since they could walk. It’s a good thing for the family to do together.”
“I envy you.”
“You and Roger could do it. Or you could ice-skate. They have that at those places, too.”
“Maybe.” But what she meant she envied was the happy family, not the winter sports. She and Roger had always preferred to go to the movies on winter afternoons.
“I love everything about skiing,” Jenny said. “The ritual of putting on the clothes, the air, coming back for lunch . . .”
“Being able to eat as much as you want because you’ve burned up so many calories,” Olivia said.
“That too.”
“What else is new?”
“Didi wants singing lessons. But I don’t know. She had piano and violin and guitar, and none of them worked out. I don’t want to throw good money after bad.”
“Maybe she hasn’t found herself.”
“She looked up singing teachers in the Yellow Pages,” Jenny said admiringly. “Can you imagine a nine-year-old doing that?”
“I think you should let her have them.”
“We’ll see.”
“I hope to see you all sometime,” Olivia said.
“You will. Don’t forget Sam’s bar mitzah in the spring. Can you believe we’re going to be parents of a teenager?”
“No,” Olivia said. She still thought of Sam as a little boy.
“I have to go,” Jenny said. “There’s yelling and crashing around in the other room. I’d better see what they’re up to. Have a nice holiday.”
“You too. Love to everybody.”
“Same.”
While she was still in the mood Olivia called Melissa in Houston.
“Hiii!” Melissa said. Olivia had forgotten how sweet her voice was, and how glad Melissa always sounded to hear her.
“Hi. I called to wish you Merry Christmas, or whatever.”
“I hate Christmas,” Melissa said. “It’s not
my
holiday. I wish they’d stop playing Christmas carols all the time in public places.”
“Freedom of speech,” Olivia said. She hadn’t been aware that Melissa had become so religious, or perhaps Melissa always had been but she hadn’t noticed.
“Why do
I
have to listen to them?”
“Are you going anywhere for the holidays?” she asked to change the subject before they got into an argument. She had always liked Christmas carols.
“Yes, Hawaii. We’ve never been, and it’ll be nice for the kids.”
“I’ve never been there either,” Olivia said.
“Have Roger take you. Or you take him.”
“It’s one of the places on my list.”
“Don’t make lists—do it. Life goes by too fast. You see that when you have children. One day they can’t bear to be away from mommy, and the next they want to go away on their own, and you cry and miss them so much, but you know you have to let them go.”
“Yours are still young.”
“Abe and Jake have been going to sleep-away camp.”
“That’s hardly college.”
“Don’t even say college,” Melissa said with a nervous little laugh.
It reassured Olivia somehow to hear Jenny and Melissa talk about their busy, ordinary lives. But she wished they could all be together more. Nobody had mentioned the idea of a cousins club since Santa Barbara.
She thought about Grady. He hadn’t called her again since she had seen him, nor had she called him. She imagined him showing up at Uncle Seymour’s office and asking questions about business and wondered how he had the nerve. Grady had probably been charming, and Uncle Seymour had doubtlessly enjoyed explaining things to him, but on the other hand, if Grady had done anything to upset Uncle Seymour’s sense of absolute control it would have gone badly for him.
The memory rose up before her of the dinner Uncle Seymour and Aunt Iris had given to celebrate her father’s engagement to Grace. Actually, it hadn’t been an engagement party but their polite way of acknowledging Grace’s arrival in their lives. Her father, after all, had been married to Uncle Seymour’s recently dead sister.
It had been at a very expensive, very cholesterol-laden French restaurant, where none of the patrons looked to be under sixty-five. The only other guests were herself and Roger. Grace was wearing a beautiful designer dress Olivia’s father had bought her to look nice for the family, and she and Olivia’s father were glowing. Olivia was seated next to Uncle Seymour, who was not glowing. He morosely spooned the last of his vichyssoise into his mouth and then he turned to Olivia.
“I have a bone to pick with you,” he said quietly, so the others wouldn’t hear him. “I’m not going to discuss it here, but I want to talk to you later.”
“What about?” Olivia asked. She was already cold with anxiety. He always managed to do this to her, and knowing he did it on purpose didn’t make it any less frightening.
“I’m upset about what you did,” Uncle Seymour said. “I’ll discuss it later.”
“I think you should tell me now.”
“No.”
“Please?” She knew she would not be able to eat a bite and wished this dinner were over so she could flee.
“Later.”
“You’re making me too nervous,” Olivia said. She glanced across the table at Aunt Iris chatting graciously with the betrothed couple and knew that even though she was staying out of it as usual, Aunt Iris was aware of everything that was going on. She cast a desperate glance at Roger, who was oblivious.
Uncle Seymour took a sip of his water and patted his lips with the damask napkin. “I understand you used your own lawyer for your new will,” he said.
She nodded. How did he find out these things anyway?
“We all used Barney Pashkin and then you went and got someone else to redo yours. Who is this guy anyway? I never heard of him.”
“He’s good,” Olivia said. She was beginning to get a tension headache, but at least she now knew what he disapproved of.
“You don’t know anything about business,” Uncle Seymour said. “Why do you always do everything on your own? Why can’t you be a member of the family?”
“I am one.”
“That other lawyer you used before I got you to use Barney Pashkin—Price English,” Uncle Seymour said, his voice rich with contempt. “I knew Price English when we were all growing up in Brooklyn. His family changed their name. Of course he was a good deal older than I was. But he was always an idiot.”
If he was older than you were he’d be retired, Olivia thought. The idiot part she ignored. “I’m sure he wasn’t older,” she said. “He’s in his sixties.”
“That’s what he says. So now you have this new one you found by yourself.”
She didn’t say anything.
“Who is your executor?”
“Charlie,” she said. She and Roger at that time didn’t know if their relationship would last long enough to get involved in each other’s wills. At the mention of his son, Charlie the Perfect, Uncle Seymour nodded. “Does he know that?” he asked sternly.
“I’ll tell him.”
“You’d better.”
“Okay.”
He turned then and dismissed her, focusing on his roast lamb and his guests, leaving her shaken and gulping down her wine.
Afterward she tried to figure out what was bothering him. The only thing she could think of was that Uncle Seymour, the eldest son of a powerful man, was still trying to run all their lives the way his father, her grandfather, had run his children’s. The fact that her elderly father, always something of an outsider because he had only been married to a Miller, had brought in a new wife, definitely an outsider, might have set Uncle Seymour off. Perhaps he was afraid that Olivia, who had not done so well with men, would leave her shares of stock in Julia’s to some stranger they might have problems with. Maybe even to Roger. But she couldn’t, not the way her grandfather had set Julia’s up.
Many, many years ago, old Abe Miller, who wasn’t old when he did it, had created the family business with the legal stipulation that no one could give or leave a piece of it to anyone outside the Miller family, which of course included their spouses and children. They couldn’t even leave their stock in Julia’s to charity, because nonprofit institutions were run by people they didn’t know, who might butt in. If she married Roger she could leave him her share, but if they continued to live together until they were very old and she died first, she could leave him no part of Julia’s, only what money she had made herself and of course what income had come to her from Julia’s in her lifetime. She could specify one of her cousins as the recipient, or else it would all go back and be divided among the family, making the rich richer. It made no difference whom she used to draw up her will—no one could change that.
She remembered her mother, years ago, telling her: “Stay close to the family; we’re all tied together in business.” At the time it had seemed heartless. Surely a family stayed together because they loved each other. What did she know about those other things? She was a veterinarian.
Uncle Seymour gathered them into the fold when they were loving and good, and pushed them away when they misbehaved. She remembered how pleased he was when Kenny, the bon vivant good catch of Santa Barbara, had started flying in to New York more often, and coming to see him. “I think Kenny wants to get closer to the family,” Uncle Seymour had announced, and suddenly they all felt sorry for orphaned, divorced Kenny and tried to be nice to him.
As for herself, she had apparently misbehaved. A year later, at Passover at Uncle Seymour’s apartment, he had drawn her aside almost immediately and said, “I understand you want to sell your piece of Julia’s.”
“Where did you ever get that idea?” she had asked, astonished.
“Your accountant called me and wanted to know some figures.”
“Because he’s doing my income taxes,” Olivia said.
“If you want to sell your piece,” Uncle Seymour went on, “we’ll buy it from you.”
“I don’t want to sell it.”
“I thought you did.”
“I don’t.”
“We’ll be glad to buy it.”
“I don’t want to sell it. It’s a good investment. I’d only have to look for another.”
“Let me know if you want to sell it back to us. Any time.”
She had walked away. She felt as if he was trying to get rid of her, and it hurt.
“Why am I so afraid of him?” she had asked Roger later.
“I don’t know. You shouldn’t be.”
“I’m afraid he won’t love me.”
“He’s probably afraid you don’t love him,” Roger said.
* * *
On Christmas Eve she and Roger lit a fire in the fireplace, opened a bottle of champagne and gave each other presents. She had bought him a very expensive Ralph Lauren bathrobe and he gave her an even more expensive gold bracelet from Cartier. It was indulgent, but they didn’t have anyone else in their immediate family to give nice things to, except his mother and the dogs, the former unaware two minutes later, the latter satisfied with anything they could chew. She and Roger had written loving cards to each other, and she put the one from him into a scrapbook she kept with everything he had ever written to her.
On Christmas Day they stood on line to see a movie, with what seemed like the rest of the world, and then they went to a friend’s party. On New Year’s Eve they stayed at home, as they always preferred to do, with smoked salmon and champagne by the fire, and watched the ball fall down the tower on television from their bed. Roger was asleep five minutes later. Olivia was a little disappointed, because she was aroused from his closeness and the champagne, and watching him snoring was not what she’d had in mind. But she was also glad she didn’t ever have to go to another New Year’s Eve party again with its frantic pretense of joy. She decided that her New Year’s resolution would be to get Roger to be interested in sex more often.
After the holidays were over, winter pulled its bleak and dismal curtain over the city. The wind cut, and dark came early. Aunt Myra called to say she was going to Florida to spend February with her brother, Uncle David. Aunt Myra and Uncle David had both married late, and before they settled down to have families of their own they had often taken trips together and were very close. Uncle David had been much more sweet-natured and fun-loving than his older brother, Uncle Seymour, with whom he worked side by side, and who always wanted to make all the business decisions himself. After decades of arguing and trying unsuccessfully to be listened to, Uncle David had decided to abdicate to a more congenial climate and have a pleasant old age.