Reinhart's Women

by Thomas Berger

  “This is none of my business. But do I gather you two have had a disagreement?”

  Winona produced a negative expression that, for the first time in Reinhart’s experience, suggested her blood-tie to her brother, whom ordinarily she resembled not at all. But then her own basic nature reasserted itself. She smiled the old generous Winona smile.

  “It’s just personal,” she said blithely, and hugged herself with crossed arms. “I’m sure the job offer still stands. She’s very reliable in her profession. I’ll say that for her.”

  Reinhart had no experience with quarrels between lovers of the same sex. It was a widespread assumption that male homophiles could be violent in their intramural disagreements, but who had ever known a certified les—That word had not grown easier to use throughout the day, and in fact he could not understand why the persons to whom it applied did not denounce it as abusive.

  “Look—” he began, but Winona suddenly flounced past him.

  “Maybe I will have something to eat!” she cried, and went towards the kitchen.

  He suspected that her energy was false, but Winona’s deceptions were invariably of kind intent.

  They went in tandem as far as the dining room, which, he had forgotten, was still set for the brunch that never took place. He had put away the food, but from the unrewarding task of dealing in cold china and cutlery he had been distracted by the claims of life.

  When he saw the table now, he enjoyed a momentary fantasy in which time was reversed and the entire afternoon lay virginally before him: Winona and Grace had never met, the latter was still his “date,” his eggs were hot from the simmer.

  Winona obviously had her own emotion on seeing three place-settings. She could no longer dissimulate.

  “So after making my decision, I called her up,” she said, in a voice so raspy with emotion that Reinhart would not have recognized it on the telephone. “And who answered?” She balled her fists. “Someone else was there already! So much for her friendship! I waited a little too long to come around, obviously, so she made other arrangements!” Winona’s face, contorted as it was, had returned to childhood. She had looked like that when given the slip by her friends at the movies: only yesterday to Reinhart. He had supposed the current era an improvement until now.

  She would have run from the room had he not seized her.

  “Do you know how many reasonable explanations there could be for that?” He pressed her hands in his. “Wrong number, for one.”

  But for the first time in her life Winona rejected his consoling. “Oh, Daddy,” she said, pulling away, “how could you possibly understand? The things are all so different. You’ve got to keep always ahead. You can’t be reasonable and find excuses: you can’t even just simply accept apologies. You either run things or are run by them. You can’t ever be in the wrong.”

  “And you think that’s different? You think you’re unique?” He dropped her hands. “Isn’t that the way everything works, for everybody?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Yes, you do,” Reinhart said. “Every living thing already knows everything it needs to know: how to succeed, how to fail, how to survive, and how to perish. Sometimes we pretend we don’t know, but we know all right. The older I get, the more I realize that nothing is a genuine surprise.” He squinted at her. “And what was the decision you had made about Grace? Were you going to move in with her or not?”

  “Not,” Winona said defiantly.

  “Well, there you are. Perhaps she anticipated that.”

  She raised her chin. “Oh, no. Nobody does that to me. They wait, you see. I decide what’s what.”

  Reinhart had done his best to postpone the recognition of a much more shocking discovery than that which merely pertained to Winona’s sexual character. But he could no longer cope in this situation without admitting that his gentle, sweet, and yielding daughter, the very model of passivity, could be a tyrant to others. It was of course she who had dominated Grace Greenwood, not the reverse. And why not? She was the beauty. He could even feel a fatherly pride! My daughter leads a powerful executive around by the nose—in fact, the same person’s my boss. Does it matter that she too is a woman?

  “Of course there’s no question now that I’ll take the job,” he said.

  She looked carefully at him. “Dad, I hope you know I wouldn’t say this if I thought it wouldn’t be good for you: I really want you to take it. And if you think she got the idea to please me or something, you’re wrong. She was already looking for somebody who would fill the bill. When she heard about you she was interested, but she was really sold by meeting you and seeing for herself that you have a marvelous personality. You’re just the kind of person who can charm the pants off those housewives.”

  Reinhart felt himself blush. The image was almost indecent for a man of his years—and also exciting, of course. But that his daughter should conjure it up was unsettling, even though she. ... He asked himself a wretched question: Was she now exempt from the usual rules that governed the association of daughter and father?

  “Yes,” he said sardonically, “I’m notorious for driving women wild. Your mother could tell you that.”

  “Oh,” said Winona, “by the way, Mother’s back in town.” She ran her fingers along the lapels of her terry-cloth robe, as if this were information which he could accept casually.

  There were days on which one was hit with everything at once.

  “Has she got in touch with you?”

  “Blaine told me.”

  “That’s more than he told me. I spent some of the afternoon with him. I understand you saw him earlier.” At her look he said quickly: “I think it’s great that you two have got closer!”

  “Huh?” The comment seemed to startle her. “Oh, yeah. Well, anyway, I thought I should warn you.”

  “Thanks,” Reinhart said, “it is helpful. But you know I can’t decently discuss your mother with either you or Blaine....” He went into the kitchen, but turned in the doorway. “If she’s ‘back in town,’ then it’s more than a visit?”

  “I don’t know. That’s all he said. We were talking about other subjects.”

  Reinhart said: “I really shouldn’t say much about your brother, either, Winona, but I hope you’re not too hurt if he isn’t always as sympathetic as he should be.”

  “Funny you say that now. He’s nicer these days than he has ever been in all my life! I don’t like to be cynical, but I do wonder if that’s because of his trouble.”

  “Trouble?”

  She raised her hands. “I shouldn’t have said that. He asked me not to. Gee.”

  “Better go the rest of the way, dear, as long as I know there’s something I’m not supposed to know.” Funny the way that sometimes works out: the precise details are often anticlimactic.

  “Mercer has left him.”

  Reinhart repeated this, again with a purpose to get past the worst moment. How much of life passes in this fashion!

  “So that’s what he meant, poor devil,” he said mostly to himself, with reference to Blaine’s cryptic remarks about women. “God, how rotten for him.” He pulled a chair from the dining-room table and sat down. “Did she take the children?”

  “No. She simply took off.” Winona shook her head. “He’d die if he thought I told you.”

  “Yes, and isn’t that awful?” Reinhart made a doleful sound. “I wish I knew some way to earn his trust, but this has been a lifelong thing—Your mother has come to look after the kids, then? I hope they get fed properly.” He was as scrupulous as he could be when speaking of Genevieve in front of Winona; therefore two truths went unuttered. One, Genevieve was responsible for Blaine’s distrust of him in the first place; the situation had no hope of being improved if she was nearby to feed her son more poison. Two, Genevieve was an even viler cook, when she deigned to prepare food at all, than his late mother, whose only culinary technique had been frying-to-ash. Indeed, it had been the combination of these two women, between whom he had s
pent more than four decades, that drove him into the kitchen. “So you saw her then?”

  “Mother—or Mercer?”

  “The former,” said Reinhart. “Had she already arrived at Blaine’s house?”

  “She was upstairs, I think. She didn’t come down. Maybe she didn’t know I was there.”

  “And you didn’t go up?”

  “No.”

  Winona had never enunciated her precise feeling towards her mother, but it was unlikely to have been excessively warm: ten years before, she had readily chosen to live with Reinhart.

  “I wonder how the shop will run without her.” Genevieve was manager of a dress shop in Chicago. Blaine kept him apprised of her career. She had started out, in the late Sixties, in a local boutique. She and Reinhart, Blaine and Winona, had all lived as a family at that time, and it was Genevieve who supported them, Reinhart having lately suffered the last of his failures in business. He also slept alone: Gen’s favors went to her boss, one Harlan Flan, a boutique-chain tycoon in his early thirties. When she divorced Reinhart, however, Flan not only failed to marry her: he coldly dumped her altogether. Reinhart had fitted this story together from various bits and surmises, but the pity was that he got no comfort from it—unless indeed the consolation was that he had thereby been proved to be not a spiteful man.

  Genevieve had subsequently emigrated to Chicago, where according to Blaine she had made a new and successful life for herself. Unfortunately, the last five years of their life together had been so bitter as to color Reinhart’s memory of that earlier time when he at least had been happily married.

  But “normal” life was long gone for him; Blaine’s was the case at hand.

  “You know,” he said to Winona, “for him Mercer has always been more than a wife: she’s the proof he has bettered himself socially. It gives him a lot of private satisfaction. And no doubt he is helped professionally. His in-laws are all in the financial world.”

  “I feel sorry for him,” Winona said. “When he gets to feeling bad enough to call me for sympathy—”

  “It was he who called you?”

  “This morning when you were showering, I guess—but as I say, he doesn’t want you to know anyhow.”

  It really was disgusting of Blaine, despite his anguish, to pretend that Winona had sought him out to reveal her sexual orientation.

  Reinhart decided to be candid about this. “He did say you had been to see him. I was wondering, Winona, why you decided at this time to tell him about your personal life.”

  She smiled. “I thought it might make him feel better about himself.”

  Reinhart rubbed his chin. “Better?”

  “I’ve known my brother all my life. It always makes him feel great to think he’s got something on you. Besides, what other help could I give him?”

  She really was one in a million. “Have I told you lately,” said Reinhart, “how much I love you?”

  She made a pshawing sort of wave and left the room.

  He was about to remove Grace Greenwood’s place-setting, at long last, when the telephone rang. There was a wall-mounted apparatus just inside the kitchen door. When Winona was home he never touched the phone unless she was bathing; all calls were for her.

  The bell now continued its spasmodic jangle. He came around the corner of the dining ell and shouted her name. No answer. Either she had slipped out or she was distracted in some fashion. He seized the instrument that was on the table near the front door.

  For a moment there was no response to his hello. Then the connection was broken without a word. That sort of thing always gave him the willies.

  He went to look for Winona. The door to her room was closed again.

  He spoke in the hallway. “I think I’ll make some fresh tomato soup, dear. Remember how you used to love Campbell’s when you were a child?” He had always made the canned version with milk. Winona’s practice had been heavily to butter a handful of saltines and press them one by one into the liquid, crushing them with the back of her spoon, until her bowl contained a thick pink mush. There had been more calories in that dish than she consumed in an entire day now.

  She made no answer to his announcement. She had probably gone to bed. It was not a simple matter for him to accept the simple explanation: that she had been unlucky in love.

  CHAPTER 5

  REINHART HAD BEEN OUTFITTED with a long two-tiered white enamel table on wheels. On one level or another were implements of the batterie de cuisine: copper chafing dish, virgin pots and pans in bright chrome, a two-ring hot plate, a food processor, a portable mixer, and various smaller tools including that manually operated essential, the long-handled wooden spoon, invented no doubt by the original cave-chef for the stirring of aurochs-tail soup.

  This unit was placed in the far northeast corner of the Top Shop supermarket in the Glenwood Mall, in a situation routinely occupied by the rack for day-old bakery products and the bin for damaged canned and boxed goods. The corner was the most remote in the store, the checkouts being diametrically in the ultimate southwest. But the manager, an elongated, even stringy sort of man with a chin that suggested inherent aggrievement, insisted that no other position was available: i.e., the cable that brought power to the electrical devices could here be deployed with least danger to the customers.

  But it was obvious that Mr. DePau cared little for the project, which he tolerated only because of Grace Greenwood’s arrangements with the higher authority in the headquarters of the Top Shop chain.

  “Frankly,” he said to Reinhart on the latter’s arrival that morning, before the store was open to the public, “the gourmet shelf does not move, and it is my contention that it won’t.”

  “That’s why Epicon is trying this angle,” said Reinhart. “There is a big interest in this country for fine cooking, and—”

  “Look here,” DePau said impatiently. He led Reinhart to the “gourmet” area, which happened to be nowhere near where the demonstration table was installed, but rather tucked away, all two short shelves of it, in the middle of a duke’s-mixture aisle displaying shoe polish, moth balls, clothesline, replacement mopheads, and beer-can openers of the type outmoded by the pull-ring.

  DePau pointed at the shelves. “So what do we have here that’s edible? Between you and me?” He pointed to a vial of spices. “‘Crab Boil’? And look at what we have to charge for this little can of patty doo faw: the markup’s not that much.”

  Reinhart had to assent. “Nor does that stuff contain any goose liver, though it’s called ‘Strasbourg.’ It’s pork liver, as you can read on the can, and it tastes mostly of tin, for my money. You know you can make a marvelous pork-liver pâté at home. The labor takes two minutes or so with a food processor or blender, and it’s dirt cheap.”

  DePau’s nostrils arched ever higher above his lip. “Sounds really awful!” It could have been predicted that he was one of those people. He was about to stride away, but checked himself. “You’re not going to make a bad smell, are you?”

  Reinhart gestured. “This is supposed to be ‘gourmet’ food.”

  “That’s why I asked the question,” said DePau. “I’ll tell you frankly.”

  Reinhart smiled. “I think I know what you mean, and you’re not wrong. For that matter, nobody’s ever wrong when it comes to speaking of their tastes in food. That’s private business if there ever was any. But life really can be enhanced if one expands one’s palate, and then there’s always the question of nourishment.”

  “Can’t be much of that in garlic salt,” said DePau. He was anxious to get away, and food was not the sort of subject that could be argued about. It was not simply that any strife, however mild, had a negative effect on the appetite. Food was a great positive, yea-saying force, the ultimate source of vitality—until a phase of the cycle was completed and oneself became food for the worms. It is only through food that we survive, and we die when we are fed on too heartily by microbes, or by the crab named cancer who eats us alive. In the emotional realm
there is no more eloquent metaphor, lovers feed on one another, and passion is devouring. A philosopher lives on food for thought. One is what one eats, and eats what one is. Jews and Muslims, old adversaries, are old comrades in abstaining from pork, and Christians are exhorted to eat the flesh and blood of their god. Everybody eats to live, but not everyone who lives to eat is a glutton or, still less, overweight. The world’s foremost gastronome, M. Robert Courtine, of Paris, France, who eats two multi-course meals per day, with the appropriate wines, is of a modest weight for his height and furthermore has not exceeded it in twenty years.

  DePau loped to the end of the aisle and disappeared. Reinhart had no great expectation of making an epicure of the man, but he would have liked to disabuse him of the opinion that the miserable products on these “gourmet” shelves were in any degree whatever gourmet sans inverted commas. But the word itself had long since become flabby and useless for any service: a hot dog became “gourmet” if treated with anything other than mustard, e.g., tartar sauce, and in fact the term was applied in general to the use of any condiment beyond salt, pepper, and the standard American ketchup. On the lowest levels of gastronomic journalism, that printed on the sides of boxes and cans, the addition of Worcestershire sauce was usually sufficient to gourmetize any dish.

  Reinhart returned to his portable kitchen. He had yet to don his apron and the billowing chef’s hat which Grace Greenwood had insisted he wear. In France a cook worked for years to earn the toque blanche. But Reinhart had not forgotten that the members of the American Expeditionary Force were qualified, by the mere fact of their arrival in Europe, to display more decorations than any of their allies who had been fighting for four years. Furthermore the white bonnet had been Grace’s only prima facie requirement. He had been on his own as to which of the “gourmet” products distributed by Epicon he would choose for demonstration, and he was not limited to the selection currently offered at the Glenwood Top Shop. There was a much more generous inventory from which he could choose, and supplies of the appropriate products were available from a local warehouse.