The War of the Roses Read online

  ‘H?’ Eve asked, squinting in bemusement.

  ‘H for Honda,’ Oliver said.

  ‘Honda?’ Eve looked at the faces around the table in confusion. Oliver raised his glass higher and from his pocket drew out a set of keys and his electronic remote-control garage door opener.

  ‘Just don’t hit the Ferrari on your way out.’

  ‘Not if you value your life,’ Barbara joked.

  Eve squealed with hysterical joy, grabbing her father around the neck, kissing him with passionate gratefulness. She repeated the ritual with Barbara, then with Josh and Ann, finally picking up the keys and garage door-opener and dashing out toward the rear of the house.

  ‘We’re spoiling her rotten,’ Oliver said when she had gone, bringing the rim of the wineglass to his lips. Everyone followed suit ‘But it feels so damned good.’

  ‘We didn’t get our first car until three years after we were married,’ Barbara said.

  ‘Different times,’ Oliver shrugged. ‘Why all the hard work if not for this?’ He moved his free arm through the air, the gesture taking in all the visible surroundings, including the people.

  ‘I made the team,’ Josh said suddenly, as if a bubble had suddenly burst inside him.

  ‘Damn,’ Oliver said, putting down his glass and slapping hands in black-jock fashion. ‘Bad. Man.’ He had picked up some of the jargon from Josh.

  ‘I’ll drink to that,’ Josh said, lifting his glass and swilling down the expensive wine as if it were Coca-Cola.

  They heard the horn blasts of Eve’s new Honda, which she had driven around to the front of the house. Gathering at the window, the family waved and Eve sped off in a cloud of carbon monoxide.

  ‘Lucky bitch,’ Josh said.

  ‘Well, now it makes it obligatory for you when you hit sixteen,’ Oliver said. ‘You now have a standard. That’s what fatherhood means. Setting standards.’ He laughed at his own little joke, then the family regathered around the table.

  ‘There are other family victories to announce,’ Barbara said quietly, her eyes smiling in their deep sockets, her full lips curling tremulously over her white teeth. She made her announcement in a flat, somewhat restrained tone, but with a determined flourish. There seemed a disturbing note of bravado in it as well, although Ann felt she was the only one who appeared to notice. Oliver moved closer to Barbara and kissed her on the lips.

  ‘Fantastic,’ he said as Ann quickly turned away, annoyed at her sudden burst of jealousy.

  ‘I guess what I have to say is anticlimactic,’ Oliver said just as Eve burst through the front door, flushed with joy.

  ‘It runs like a dream. Like a dream,’ she cried, squatting beside Ann and squeezing her hand. ‘I’m so happy.’

  Ann lifted a finger to Eve, in mock rebuke, as Oliver continued.

  ‘Just a new client. More lucre for the family coffers. A huge retainer. My colleagues are quite pleased with my resourcefulness. I’m off to New York tomorrow to seal the deal.’

  They exchanged more kisses and soon everybody was digging into the feast, mumbling ecstatically, with full mouths, over Barbara’s wonderful cookery, embellished, they all agreed, by the rich taste and bouquet of the ’59 Lafite-Rothschild.

  Watching them in what she could only characterize as their splendor, Ann could not escape the comparison with her own shabby family, locked in the prison of their tiny wood-frame house in Johnstown. More like Dogpatch, she thought, where the big treat was snaring Polish sausages with a bent fork from a big jug and swilling down six-packs.

  The rich cassoulet melted in her mouth as the movie in her mind froze into a single ghastly frame. In it, her mother’s swollen body squirmed like jelly in a torn, flowered housecoat as she reclined on a sprung, worn couch in front of the television set, gun-muzzle curlers poised to shoot out Laverne and Shirley, while her father, his beer belly hanging over his belt like jelly mold, added cigar-ash dust to the frayed carpet from which sprouted his Archie Bunker chair.

  Suddenly, as if to start the reel moving again, she tapped her wineglass with a silver spoon, the tinkling crystal forcing the silence.

  ‘I can’t tell you how much…’ The words stuck in her throat and she had to clear it and begin again. ‘I can’t tell you how much it has meant to me to be here with you. You cannot imagine…’ She stumbled again, the images of her past life too vivid for the rush of words. Her gaze washed over each face, even Oliver’s, which, surprisingly, she viewed without the earlier shame. ‘It’s been the most wonderful time of my life. The way you’ve taken me in and become, for me, my family.’ She swallowed hard to hold down a ball of phlegm. ‘Such a happy family…’ She shook her head, too overcome to continue, then searched with her lips to find the rim of the glass, which she tipped, sipping the wine.

  What a happy house, she thought, wondering how she had had the good luck to find them.

  3

  Oliver felt the first stab of pain just as Mr. Larabee finished talking, a familiarization lecture, really, outlining the company’s special problem with the Federal Trade Commission. He had been taking notes on a lined yellow legal pad and now the pencil made jiggling swirls as if it were writing independently. They were sitting around a conference table in the chairman’s office in Manhattan and he’d already had more cups of coffee before lunch than was his custom.

  At first he tried to dismiss the pain, but when he began to break into a cold sweat, a charge of panic gripped him and he put down his pencil and tried to cover up his discomfort with a cough. Then the chairman began to direct his remarks to Oliver, and the words sounded muffled, incoherent, and far away. He tried to humor the pain away, hoping to extract a laugh from the abysmal predicament. It was everybody’s dread to be struck down suddenly in the middle of some important event. Bladder and bowels would void. There would be vomiting and, worst of all, he would be inconveniencing everybody around him, all of whom couldn’t care less. And there was the perennial joke about clean underwear just in case, but that usually applied to women.

  ‘You feel all right, Rose?’ the chairman asked.

  Oliver managed a nod but knew it was unconvincing. Someone poured him a glass of water from a silver pitcher, but he couldn’t get it down.

  ‘This is ridiculous,’ he whispered.

  He was led to a leather couch, and he lay down and managed to open his collar and loosen his tie.

  ‘I’m sure it will pass,’ he croaked. That, too, seemed unconvincing. The stabs of pain were becoming an onslaught behind his breastbone.

  ‘His color stinks,’ someone said. He felt a hand on his forehead.

  ‘Cold as ice.’

  He heard someone say ‘ambulance,’ and realized suddenly that his sensory powers were becoming numb. His heart seemed ready to break out of his rib cage. His mind raced back and forth in time and memory and he wondered if he was the proverbial drowning man watching his life pass across his mind like a film in quadruple time.

  ‘This is stupid,’ he heard himself say, knowing that the words had not been spoken.

  ‘You’ll be fine,’ Larabee said unctuously. Oliver had detested the man immediately and resented his concern.

  I’m only forty, he thought as panic turned to pity, directed inward. He prayed he wouldn’t soil his pants, remembering old admonitions from his childhood. There they were, the first signs. What galled him, too, was the lack of planning, and he wondered if he had paid all his insurance premiums. If you died at forty, your family would get a million, the insurance man had assured him, and Oliver had snickered at that, choosing term instead of whole life.

  How can I die? he thought. My parents are still living. My grandparents on both sides died in their eighties. Then he counted all the people he would be letting down and that only increased his panic and he wondered if he would soon lose consciousness.

  He lost track of time as he lay there. Someone covered him with a blanket but he still felt icy.

  ‘You’ll be fine,’ the chairman said, his jowly fa
ce flushed with either concern or annoyance.

  I’ve blown the first big interview with a new law client, Oliver thought, imagining the reaction of his colleagues in the firm. Poor old Oliver. Sorry son of a bitch. Two antiseptic-smelling, white-jacketed attendants lifted him to a wheeled stretcher, and he saw the oxygen mask coming quickly toward him. He also saw his own finger crooking in front of his eyes, beckoning. Larabee’s face came closer.

  ‘Call my wife,’ Oliver croaked. The oxygen mask was clapped over his face, and he felt the motion of moving wheels, then the swirl of outdoor sounds and the ear-splitting siren as the ambulance shot forward. An icy stethoscope startled his suddenly bared chest.

  ‘Who knows?’ a voice said as the stethoscope was lifted.

  ‘Am I going to die?’ he whispered futilely into his mask. He burped and for a moment felt incredibly relieved until the pain started again. His mind had momentarily cleared, then he felt insular again as he pictured Barbara’s tearstained face, and Eve’s and Josh’s, hovering over him, waiting for the exact moment of demise, a death-watch. I’ve let them down, he rebuked himself.

  A flood of letdowns careened down the spillway of his anxiety-ridden mind. Who would feed Benny? Who would turn the wine, care for the orchids, wind the tall mahogany clock? Who would repair the broken appliances, watch over the antiques, the paintings, the Staffordshire figures? And who would tune up the Ferrari? How dare they separate him from his chores, his possessions? The idea was almost as unbearable as the pain.

  He felt a pinprick in his arm and soon the pain eased somewhat, and he was floating in space, like an astronaut in a space capsule. Some horrible nightmare nudged at his consciousness. But he couldn’t remember it, only that it was horrible. Then he sensed the ground moving under him as the wheels bumped along a corridor. Above him, the ceiling was lined with fluorescent white lights. The glare hurt his eyes.

  When they removed the oxygen mask, he whispered again.

  ‘Call my wife. Call Barbara.’

  Vaguely, he could feel them hooking him up to something and, in the distance, he heard a rhythmical blip* ping and unfamiliar sounds. Nearby, he could make out whispered voices hovering somewhere in space. If they could get Barbara in time, he knew that everything would be fine. His life depended on Barbara. He would not die if Barbara came.

  4

  When he remembered again, the room had darkened; he heard the steady blip and ping of odd sounds, as if he were inside some huge clock, perhaps in the tall mahogany case in his foyer, the pendulum banging in his ears, the complicated works clanking in his head. Memory came and faded. They were on their honeymoon at the Groton Inn, an old, rickety colonial left-over. The dining room always seemed set for tea.

  It was too hot for June. The sun baked through the roof and making love was a gritty, unsatisfactory business. She hadn’t turned on, not the way she had before they were married, but he had attributed that to the tensions of the wedding, which had been opposed by both sets of parents. He still had two years to go at Harvard Law and she was two years from a degree at Boston University.

  ‘I’ll work my way through,’ he had told his parents on that nasty spring day on which he had made the dreaded announcement. It wasn’t that they were opposed specifically to Barbara, but they couldn’t imagine him inhibiting his career by marrying a poor nineteen-year-old girl, saddling himself with responsibility.

  ‘But I love her,’ he had protested with surety, as if the words were all that was needed to explain such a radical change of life. He supposed it was their humdrum married life and their exaggerated dreams for him that prompted their opposition and he was gentle with them. A state employee’s ambition for his only son was no fragile thing.

  ‘I won’t let you down,’ he had promised, knowing how hard the money for his education had come. ‘But I can’t live a single minute more without her.’ It was 1961, before all the revolutions, and living together without benefit of legal marriage was still a few years away.

  ‘You’re crazy,’ his father had said. His mother had simply sat at the kitchen table, hands folded, head bent, and cried.

  ‘And I don’t expect you to pay my tuition,’ he told them. ‘I’m on my own now.’ he hesitated. ‘With Barbara.’

  ‘Between us, we can make it,’ Barbara had assured him.

  It had struck her parents even harder, since they were both high-school teachers, and the prospect of her dropping her education appalled them.

  ‘I love him,’ she told them. It was still a time when those three little words were glorified as the highest of attainments. To be in love was all. They were, as the saying goes, moonstruck. All he wanted, he remembered, was to touch her, to smell her, to hear her voice.

  ‘I love you more than anything else in the world,’ he told her, repetitively, holding her. He was always holding her.

  ‘I would die for you, Oliver,’ she had sworn.

  Die? His mind cleared with an explosive start.

  He could not understand why he was thinking about this, lying there in the darkened room, surprised suddenly by an erection that pressed against the tight cover sheet, showing its outline. Well, I’m not dead yet, he thought, discovering also that the pain was gone. The sedatives or whatever he had been given had made him headachy and drowsy and he hovered in a kind of half-sleep, hearing the voices of professionals exchanging bits of medical information, which, he assumed, were about his own mysterious carcass. At any moment he expected to hear Barbara’s heels clicking down the corridor and to feel her cool, soothing touch.

  For some reason he began thinking about the Louis XV vitrine cabinet of inlaid tulipwood with its original beveled glass and ornate mounts, signed by Linke, which he had been tempted to buy. It was Barbara who had restrained him and he had argued with her. All the logic was on her side.

  ‘We haven’t the room,’ she had protested, holding his arm, which twitched as the auctioneer watched his face.

  ‘But it’s gorgeous.’

  ‘The house is finished, Oliver.’

  She was right, of course, he remembered that the idea of that disturbed him for weeks. Finished? They had been fooling with it for more than ten years, ever since they fell in love with its somewhat seedy facade on its high vantage point overlooking Rock Creek Park, with a magnificent view of the tall, graceful arches of the Calvert Street Bridge. Besides, it was the best neighborhood in town, and in Washington a man was known by his neighborhood.

  For years the house had, like quicksand, sucked up every spare sou as they redid its ramshackle interior, room by room.

  He dozed fitfully, sensing a moving stretcher, and an endless line of fluorescent lights marching along the ceiling.

  ‘We’re going to X-ray,’ a black attendant explained. Oliver heard him talking about a ball game in the elevator. Perhaps, he thought, visitors were deliberately being kept from him, and Barbara, nervous and tear-stained, was sitting in some lounge, waiting for the results of the tests. He wanted to ask, ‘Am I really dying?’ Fearful of the answer, he didn’t ask.

  He started worrying about his cymbidium orchids, which he had proudly coaxed from their indoor pot beds with loving care and which were now on their way to maturity beside Barbara’s hanging forest and clusters of potted African violets and Boston ferns in the sunroom. It had been a challenge to try his hand at such delicate plants.

  He also began to worry about Benny, the schnauzer to which he was a deity, proving his obeisance with great delight. Neither Barbara nor the kids could handle him. The tools, too, required maintenance, and the garden. Then there was Barbara’s kitchen.…

  God, don’t kill me off yet, he cried within himself.

  He was lifted onto a cold, metal, X-ray table and rotated like a chicken on a spit. A white-smocked technician poked at him in a businesslike way, and he heard an intermittent buzz, which, in his clearing mind, he assumed was the sound of the picture-taking process. Why don’t I feel pain? he wondered, noting that a clock on die wall read twel
ve.

  ‘What day is it?’

  ‘Wednesday,’ the technician answered.

  Later they brought him back to another room, where he was isolated by a screen. They did not hook him up to any mechanical devices, and he noted that his arms and buttocks tingled, apparently from the needle pricks. He slept some more, then was awakened gently by the touch of a cool hand. Blinking his eyes open, he peered into a bespectacled pinkish face.

  ‘You’re a lucky bastard, Mr. Rose.’

  ‘I’m not dying?’ he whispered.

  ‘Hardly. It’s your hiatus hernia. Quite common, really. We thought it was a heart attack and took all the precautionary measures. You had one hell of a gas pain. It sometimes simulates an attack.’

  He pushed himself up, feeling a sense of renewed life.

  ‘So I’m born again,’ he snapped, feeling the residual aches of the medication and intravenous devices, and a lingering hurt in his chest.

  ‘You never died.’

  ‘Yeah. A lot of people will be disappointed. I’ll be the laughingstock of the firm.’ He swung his legs over the bed. ‘Tell my wife to come in and get me the hell out of here.’ He looked at the doctor. ‘No offense, but if all you do is come up with a gas pain, you should close up shop.’

  The doctor laughed.

  ‘I just talked to your wife and gave her the good news.’

  ‘She’s not here?’

  ‘It would have been for naught,’ the doctor said.

  ‘I suppose…’ Oliver said, checking himself. He was entitled to feel insecure.

  They brought him his clothes, wallet, keys, money, and briefcase, and he dressed, still feeling shaky. In the hospital lobby he went into a phone booth and called home.

  ‘Oh, Oliver. We’re so happy.’ It was Ann’s voice.

  He formed a quick mental picture of her, wheatish hair, light freckles, round face, with a smile that set off deep dimples. He realized suddenly that she was always surreptitiously observing him. Why was she on the phone? he wondered. Where was Barbara?