Three Short Novels. Gina Berriault

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      They moved into a home he owned near Twin Peaks, on a wide avenue of white stucco homes of early California architecture. The lawn was perfect and so was the patio with its pink hydrangea bushes and granite birdbaths. The three of them, Russell and herself and David, each contributed, she felt, an admirable self to the pleasure of the marriage. At the beginning there appeared to be an easy compatibility between David and his stepfather, and their evenings together were always pleasant, with cocktails before supper and a special grenadine cocktail for David, and the gourmet suppers she cooked for them and for their frequent guests, Russell’s friends, who were loan-company executives and bank officials, and their wives. They went on trips together in their red convertible to Lake Tahoe and to the mountains to fish and up into Sun Valley to ski, and always she was aware of the picture they made of the elegant family, climbing into or springing from their car and entering the lobby of the hotel, the father or the mother resting an arm on the boy’s shoulder.

      Neither she nor Russell had any desire to bring his daughter, Maria, to live with them, and, even had they wanted to, the girl would have chosen to remain with her maternal grandmother, a vigorous women with a daughter of seventeen, whom Maria idolized. They sometimes, however, took her along on their trips, and they sometimes had her over for a weekend, but her presence among them was, to Vivian, like a flaw in the picture. She was a year younger than David, a slight, colorless girl with enormous smoky blue eyes that seldom lifted. She was a reminder of the tragedy because it seemed to have shocked her from her normal pace of growth. When Russell brought the girl from her grandmother’s, he hustled and bustled around to entertain her, to entertain them all. His eyes were tired when he came in the door with her, tired of the visit before it began, and afraid of the child he performed for. Around the girl he was a man making extravagant amends, a weary buffoon. In the last minutes of the girl’s visits, with everybody collecting her possessions, gifts and hats and gloves and candy, Maria joined in with them, gave up sitting and being done unto, and, with her participation in the search, implied that she was both gratified and sorry her visit had roused them all to such a pitch of expiation.

      After the girl’s visits, when Vivian was left alone in the house with her son, there was always a time of relief, in which she felt the bond between herself and David, the bond of mother and son, to be stronger than that between herself and Russell. If Russell remained away, visiting with Marie’s grandmother and, afterward, drinking at the nightclub, and David was asleep, she would go in and watch the boy while he slept.

      In the light of lamp he lay on his back as if flung there, sometimes clear of the blankets from the waist up, his pajama top twisted upward, exposing his pale, tender stomach. He was, at these times, like an old friend. If her husband was not that, then her son was that. If marriage was not a resolving, then some compensation, or more than that, some answer, was to be found in the existence of her son. One night she bent and kissed him above the navel, pleased by the warm, resilient flesh, knowing that he would not wake up from the kiss because he slept so soundly and in the morning always came up fathoms out of sleep.

       12

      Some land that Russell had inherited south of the city, near the ocean, sold to a tract developer, and almost every week, or so it seemed to her, he sold at a great profit an old apartment building or a small hotel that he had bought only a few months before with a loan and had remodeled with another loan. And everything that she did with this prosperity brought words of praise, whether it was the accumulation of exquisite clothes or of oil paintings from the Museum of Art exhibits, the selection of silver and crystal and antiques, or the artistry of her suppers for a few guests. After two years in the house near Twin Peaks, they moved to a modern house surrounded by a Japanese garden, and the combining of her antiques with the modern architecture, all the harmonious combining was like a confirmation of the happiness of the family. It was further confirmed by color photographs in a magazine of interior decoration and by the article written by one of the editors who stressed the wonderful compatibility of antique and modern that had, as its source, the compatibility of the family with everything beautiful. No member of the family, however, appeared in the pictures—only Vivian at a far distance, her back turned, a very small figure in lemon-yellow slacks way out among the etching-like trees of the garden, glimpsed through the open glass doors of the living room. It was in bad taste to show the family, she understood; they would appear to be like the nouveaux riches, wanting to be seen among their possessions. Not to show the family gave more seclusion to the home and a touch of the sacred to the family.

      In the second spring after their move to the new house, it was included in a tour of several beautiful homes in the city, the tour a charitable endeavor by the young matrons’ league to which she belonged. While the woman who came once a week to the house was cleaning it the day before the tour, Vivian locked up in cabinets and closets small valuables that could be pocketed, although there was to be a leaguer in almost every room to act as hostess. It was customary for the owners of the houses in the tour to be away all day, and she had planned to spend the day with her mother, shopping for summer clothes. But the night before, carefully wiping out with a tissue the ashtrays she and Russell had been using and rinsing their liquor glasses, she knew she would remain in the house—not to hear words of praise and not to prevent any thefts, but to stand anonymously by and watch the flow of strangers who had paid their tour-ticket price in order to enter into the privacy of her home.

      With the other women who were acting as hostesses, she awaited the invasion. Wearing a pink spring suit and white gloves, a white purse under her arm, she was, she felt, sure to be mistaken by the crowd for one of them. The early ones, at ten o’clock, entered with a reverent step because it was their first house of the day; but the later ones entered with less reverence, commenting loudly on plants and garden lamps as they came up the front path, taking in the living room with gazes already somewhat jaded by their acquaintance with other homes of secluded beauty. She watched them as she sat on the arm of a chair, chatting with a hostess, or wandered with them through the house. They were chic women, young and old, and they were impeccably dressed men with oblique faces as if seen in attendance upon her in a mirror of a beauty salon and never in direct confrontation; they were eccentrics, one a young woman in a garishly green outfit, with a pheasant feather a foot long attached to her beret and switching the space behind her as she stopped frequently, her feet in a dancer’s pose, to glance around with large, transfixed eyes and a saintly smile; and there were two seedy brothers, shuffling and gray, who had the look of small-time realtors from the Mission district. For brief moments Vivian met eyes with the invaders, their roundly open eyes, their shifting eyes, their eyes ashamed of their curiosity, their envious eyes, and their eyes desiring ruin. She caught sight of a hole in the sock of one of the seedy brothers and of their run-down, polished shoes. She mingled with them up and down the hallways, on the flight of stairs between the two floors, and in and out of rooms, following a group into the serenity of the bedroom of herself and her husband and observing with them the wide, high-swelling bed, the ornately carved bedstead and the plum silk spread, the highboy with its shining brass hardware; the lamps, one on each side of the bed, a yard high with cylindrical shades of white silk; the black marble ashtrays; and the sand-color, thick carpeting that hushed everyone’s step. They were fascinated by the small photos of Russell and David in pewter frames on her dressing table, and by a snapshot of the three of them in ski clothes. They bent to see the three faces closer, and after the others had done this, she, too, leaned closer to see for herself.

       13

      In the summer of the third year of their marriage they bought an old, large house near Clearlake on four acres planted with fruit trees. They invited two and three couples for weekends and spent the time in boats on the lake, over elaborate breakfasts and buffet suppers, drinking at the bars to survey the patrons and reclining at home in the sun or under the trees if the sun was too hot.

      David was off on his own all day. He was twelve, that year, and although she knew that his distance from them all was due, in part, to a dislike of their friends, it was also, she felt, a sullen and almost violent resistance to any tracing of him, either the tracing of him СКАЧАТЬ