Too Much Too Soon

by Jacqueline Briskin

  “For once Crystal’s dead right,” Joscelyn said. “In this family it’s all for one and one for all.”

  “Now, chickens, no more arguments. Not one. My mind is made up.” Langley’s voice broke miserably.

  After a brief silence, Crystal asked, “How long until this publishing deal is on the way?”

  Joscelyn pressed her homely little face against his cardigan. “Yes, Daddy, give us an idea of the time we’ll be staying at Gideon’s.”

  “A couple of months at the most,” Langley said.

  “Then what’re we arguing about?” Crystal asked. The separation would run its course, and each of the Sylvanders would be incalculably better off. “By autumn we’ll be together.”

  “Precisely. Think of it as an extended summer holiday,” Langley said. “Now come here, all of you.”

  A family ritual. They put their arms around one another’s shoulders and the gray head, the glossy black, the vivid gold and the mouse-brown touched.

  10

  Life in the big ugly house on Clay Street did not remotely resemble Crystal’s brightly colored anticipations.

  Her vision of Gideon being an open sesame to the freewheeling excitement of San Francisco’s jeunesse dorée had proved utterly false. Langley, in his feckless need for love, had overlooked his children’s disciplinary breaches, allowing them an inordinate amount of freedom. Gideon, however, was made of sterner stuff. With executive precision he wrote out rules for his charges, giving the list to Mrs. Ekberg. (It turned out that Mrs. Ekberg, a nervous, thin little widow who chewed Tums continuously, had not facilitated Imogene’s debut but had served as Mrs. Burdetts’ temporary social secretary.) Needing this job desperately, the widow enforced her employer’s regulations to her utmost. And as for Crystal’s hopes of rich young men, Gideon did not introduce her to any. When he met Crystal’s dates he narrowed his small brown eyes, inquiring how they were planning to transport and entertain his aristocratic charge. The City College boys, already overextended by Crystal’s beauty and the gloomy, anachronistic mansion, crumpled under the strain. The phone rang fewer and fewer times for Cyrstal.

  On the other hand, Gideon was boundlessly generous. He gave Crystal carte blanche to refurnish her spacious bedroom, which had been Aunt Matilda’s, and she turned it into a girl’s dream room, ordering the reluctant painter to quadruple-coat powder-blue paint over the original walnut paneling, covering the hand-etched parquet with shaggy blue carpet, replacing the thick-legged, turn-of-the-century bedroom suite with a bed canopied with dotted Swiss, a huge, beruffled, kidney-shaped vanity, a flock of little blue velvet slipper chairs.

  He allowed all three sisters to use his Chargaplate to buy new wardrobes, he splurged on a spiffy new car, he installed one of those new televisions in the music room.

  On the second Saturday night in a row that Crystal stayed home dateless he surprised her with genuine cultured pearls. As she excitedly fastened the graduated strand around her smooth white throat, she wondered briefly whether Gideon, like a doting, elderly father, nursed a subconscious jealousy of her boyfriends.

  But wasn’t that silly?

  He was just as strict with Honora.

  * * *

  On a hot Friday afternoon in early September, Curt and Honora drove along the broad, unpaved swathe that topped a wall of dirt. In theory, Curt was taking the day off: in actuality he had been going over a revision of the plans for the East Oakland freeway project and now was delivering them to the resident engineer. Distance turned workers into pins with red tops while a line of earthmovers became double-bodied toys—Honora could just make out the tiny lettering, G.D. TALBOTT’S. Headquarters was the one remaining structure on the cleared site, an old frame bungalow surrounded by a survey truck, a Jeep and several dust-thick cars parked higgledy-piggledy.

  Curt pulled up next to a battered Onyx. “We’re here,” he said. “Come on in.”

  “I’ll wait,” Honora said.

  “In this heat?”

  “I’m working on a tan.”

  In reality she was prickling with anxiety. Gideon was away for a few days, but if he heard that she had come here with Curt it might be the final straw. When she had moved to Clay Street, her uncle had clearly stated his objections to Curt—too sophisticated, meaning too sexy—then glared his disapproval each time Curt picked her up. If Curt was concerned, he never showed it: he always popped into his employer’s downstairs office or the drawing room to say a few words, seemingly oblivious to the stern wrinkling and blue veins standing out at the bald temples. Whenever plausible, she arranged that they meet elsewhere.

  “Tan?” Curt was laughing. “Sunstroke, more like it.”

  “Are you going to be that long?”

  “Just a couple of minutes,” he said, reaching in the back seat for two thick scrolls, then jogging onto the narrow porch. In homage to the day-off theory, he wore madras Bermudas. She watched the muscles work in the tanned calves with the thick, curling pale hairs, then flushed and turned away.

  The house-studded hills nestled at the foot of the long, maternal mountains. Afternoon sun ruddied the tall downtown buildings of Oakland, glinting a window here and there into a faceted ruby. She gazed at the sunstruck vista, her eyes growing rapt as her thoughts turned to Curt.

  He often told her he loved her, playing with a strand of her blue-black hair as he said the words, or breathing endearments into her ear when they were “involved,” and although in rational moments she warned herself that a man nearing thirty with his experience possessed a well-thumbed lexicon of amatory phrases, intuitively she divined he meant what he said—at the time, anyway. He had never mentioned marriage—or even going steady. Last month he had escorted Imogene to the Burdetts Company’s annual picnic, and a couple of weeks ago they had attended a charity gala together. For all Honora knew, he saw her far more frequently. Curt, being Curt, never offered explanation of how he spent his time. Is he making love to that skinny clotheshorse? Honora thought, and shivered with despair.

  Yet in a perverse way his independence pleased her: her love was no tamed, domestic creature.

  “Honora?”

  Jerking, she blinked up at the object of her reverie.

  “I brought out a friend to meet you,” Curt said.

  For a moment the figure behind Curt was a blob, then he took form, a stout man in his late thirties wearing dark trousers and a short-sleeved shirt that was loudly patterned. His ample nose—bent toward the right as if once broken—presided over a thick black mustache and a big smile. Sweat burnished his skin, which had a rich, dark tan, as if the pigmentation were genetically adapted for too strong sun. Jewish, Honora thought with a trace of envious admiration. Having been reared amid Church of England pallor in a country where there were few Jews, no Negroes or Chinese, and therefore correspondingly little prejudice, she saw members of these groups as emissaries of exotic and superior cultures.

  Curt said, “Honora, this is an old school buddy of mine—”

  “I guided him through Math One in Durant Hall,” said the stranger in an unplaceably soft, gutteral accent.

  “You helped me? As I recall, you were flunking until I came along,” Curt said. “Honora Sylvander, this is Fuad Abdulrahman.”

  Honora hastily converted her new acquaintance’s religion to Islam. But how could he have been at Berkeley with Curt? He was at least a decade older. “How do you do, Mr. Abdulrahman,” she said.

  “So you’re one of the gorgeous Talbott nieces we’ve heard so much of,” said Fuad. “You really are an exquisite creature. Could I convince you to become part of a well-ordered harem in Lalarhein?”

  “Lalarhein?”

  “You have to clear your throat as you say the r,” Fuad said. “Lala chrain.”

  “It’s a barren patch of desert near the Persian Gulf,” Curt said.

  “Curt speaks from envy and ignorance—he’s never been to our paradise.” Fuad wiped his forehead, scattering a few iridescent drops into the car. “I can see
by your eyes, so dark and soulful, that you would respond well to our roses and fountains.”

  “It does sound lovely.”

  “I promise you a thousand and one nights of fleshly delights.”

  “Do you always make this offer when you meet a girl?” Honora asked smiling.

  “Only when he’s positive he won’t be taken up,” Curt said.

  “Ahh, so there’s a Mrs. Abdulrahman,” Honora said.

  Fuad gestured expansively, indicated numerous wives. “But you would be the favorite,” he said, leaning his arms on her window. “Miss Sylvander, this is a serious offer.”

  “And I assure you I’m giving it serious consideration.”

  Dust clouded around the convertible as they drove away. Curt lapsed into silence. Occasionally and unaccountably he sank into moods that excluded her.

  She didn’t say anything until they had halted to pay at one of the tollbooths of the Oakland Bay Bridge and joined the traffic flowing toward San Francisco. (In October, when the Berkeley semester began, she would make the round trip on this bridge every weekday.)

  “Did you and Fuad start out on a sweat gang?” she asked in a low, tentative voice. She knew from Gideon that a college engineering student’s first job was generally chopping weeds and digging ditches with a sweat gang.

  “Nope. As a matter of fact my first job is right under us,” he said. “I was a Talbott’s messenger boy on the bridge project.”

  “How old were you?”

  “Twelve.”

  What about that privileged American boyhood? “Isn’t that very young?”

  He shrugged. The wind blew his tawny hair back.

  She shifted her legs, which were sweating lightly. “Gideon’s proud that he was on both the Bay Bridge projects, but he’s never explained how they were built.”

  “They’re entirely different. Golden Gate’s a single span, and this bridge has a permanent pier structure under water.” They were nearing Yerba Buena Island, and he pointed downward. “Right here, Pier E4, is the world’s deepest pier. It goes down to minus 247 feet.” He explained how they had floated the caissons from the Oakland docks and then sunk them at the piers. His pitch was lower, and she could swear he was grateful she had roused him from his brooding.

  The car bounced with small, hollow clicks as they drove over the bridge sections.

  “Fuad’s very nice,” she said. “He’s a bit corny, but I did like him tremendously.”

  “He’s a terrific, warm guy.”

  “Isn’t he a bit old to have been at university with you?”

  “When he came to Berkeley he was married with two kids.”

  “Does he live here and work for Talbott’s?”

  “Neither. He’s here to observe the job. In Lalarhein they’re planning to build a road system. Incidentally, it’s not just plain Fuad, it’s Prince Fuad.”

  She bit her lip in embarrassment. “And I called him Mr. Abdulrahman—and his wife Mrs. Abdulrahman.”

  “He’s used to that. In Lalarhein, or so he says, being a prince means you’re middle class. The country’s got a population of under two million.” They were coming off the bridge. “Listen, are you really dying to see the Palace of Fine Arts?” He had planned to show her the small park with the classical remnants of the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition.

  “No,” she whispered.

  “My place, then,” he said.

  11

  There was a parking space on Telegraph Hill outside the tall stucco apartment building. When Curt opened the car door for Honora, she tilted her head up at him.

  “When you look at me like this,” he said, “all’s right with the world. Did I ever tell you what unusual eyes you have?”

  “Often,” she said.

  “I never saw irises so deep and dark—or whites so clear that they have an almost bluish tinge, like a baby’s.”

  Just at that moment the Talbott Cadillac was moving down the hill. Both Juan and Mrs. Ekberg saw them go inside.

  The first time Honora had come here with Curt was on their third date. Her crimson-faced awkwardness as she’d passed the doorman had been so intense that she’d stumbled, and even now it was difficult for her to smile at the wizened man who tipped his dark green cap to them as he pushed open the etched glass door.

  Curt’s apartment was on the tenth floor.

  The furnishings, though obviously expensive, were agreeably sparse. A long, sleek, gray tweed couch took full advantage of the magnificent view of the Bay. A handsome birch drafting table was neatly arranged with graph paper, T-square, triangle, compass, a bottle of Higgins India ink. The built-in modern bookcase held college texts, stacked copies of American Engineering, and fat volumes on structural problems—the lack of a single novel had initially caused Honora a serious pang.

  Curt closed the door and reached his arms around her, resting his cheek against hers as if their embrace had nothing to do with carnality but was consolation for some unbearable loss.

  Her eyes squeezed shut, and she encircled his waist, drawing his warmth yet closer. The same ungovernable reactions she always experienced flooded over her, the trembling, the racing of her heart, the weakness, the mysterious epidermal receptiveness—she was all tactile sensation. Her lips traced the moist, shaven skin and fine bones of his Adam’s apple.

  “Sweet, look at me,” he said in her ear.

  She blinked, pulling her head back, so that all she saw was his eyes, eyes which she always thought of as lion-colored, lion-sure. They were moist, vulnerable.

  “What is it, darling?”

  He shook his head, searching her face.

  It flashed through her mind that he was questioning whether she wanted to go into his bedroom—but why would he question that? He hadn’t asked her the first time.

  “I love you.” Her whisper was breathy.

  “You are love,” he said, and, arms wound around one another, they went into the rear room which held only the huge, custom covered bed.

  He pushed back the box-cornered spread and the blanket while she threw off her sundress and underwear. When they were lying naked on the bottom sheet, he kissed her sensitive breasts, his hands tenderly caressing her hips, her slender, tremulous thighs. The sumptuous melting physical desire that he invoked was tied to her profoundest emotions, her strivings toward beauty, her sense of honor, her need to nurture and cherish and love. At his entry, she floated in a miraculous stillness, then great spasms of ecstasy bucked through her body uncontrollably and she gasped out rhythmic cries of his name. After this initial craziness, her orgasms would be gentler, and she would caress him in the ways that gave him joy until he could no longer control his climax.

  * * *

  They lay entwined, her heart calming, her fingers and ears still tingling.

  He pulled the sheet and blanket over them, taking an ashtray onto his chest and lighting a cigarette. He inhaled deeply. “I was born in Austria.”

  She raised her head, looking at him. “You’re American,” she denied.

  “Sure, but not native born. Like you, an immigrant.”

  “Austria?”

  “Maybe, but I’m not even sure of that. Maybe Germany. It’s the same language. The truth is, I have remarkably few facts about myself.” His sigh shook the ashtray.

  She kissed his shoulder, inhaling the acrid odors of his coital sweat.

  “My earliest memory is of a soft-armed, pale-haired woman feeding me a rusk soaked in something sweet. I can’t remember another thing about her, but it pleases me to suppose the soft, pale lady my mama. Then I’m living with an old woman. She told me she and I were no kin—she was a loathsome old crone, so it didn’t exactly destroy me. Vaguely—and again I’m not at all sure—I think she’d been some kind of servant in my family’s home. She and I shared a root cellar near an outhouse. Not an esthetic or hygienic location, but then we weren’t exactly royalty. The old woman had hard, pinching fingers and she coughed all night loud enough to wake the dead. But she was al
l I had, so when I came up with anything edible I brought it home to share with her. I worked the garbage cans behind the Ringstrasse restaurants, where the rich ate. Sometimes I unearthed treasures, a fragment of whipped cream pastry, the carcass of a game bird. I learned to move fast, to scratch and hit—the competition was keen. The reparations that the allies had wreaked on the Austro-Hungarian Empire had spawned an entire class privileged to scrounge in garbage cans.”

  Her flesh had gone cold. She kept wiping her eyes, aching to comfort him, yet knowing she mustn’t halt his purgative flow of words. The sky outside grew dark, and the only light in the room was the glowing red circle from Curt’s cigarette. Chain-smoking, he dredged up incidents. A tiny girl he had seen sucking off a fat-bellied old man for one chocolate, boys his age who did the same thing, the “adult” whores, who in retrospect must have been eleven or twelve. “No, I never peddled my bony little ass,” he said. “Don’t ask why not, I just never did. To get my food I scavenged or went in for juvenile assault and battery.”

  The old woman’s coughing and blood-spitting worsened. One morning he dreamed of snow and awakening to feel her icy rigid body curled around his. After her death he had deserted the root cellar and taken shelter under a bridge.

  “Weren’t there orphanages?” Honora asked.

  “Too overcrowded to seek recruits. But don’t think we received no benefits under our bridge. Every night a municipal trolley came around and the sanitation department lugged away the corpses. The old woman had told me I was born in 1921, three years after the final shot. This was 1927, nine years after the war, and the dying hadn’t ended.”

  One winter day he had heard a rumor of bread being given out by the Quakers, who were always engaged in such ridiculous enterprises. “I would have set out to China for a crust, so the miles to the Gürtel were nothing. It was dark, and as I charged around a corner, I butted into this solid, well-dressed American.”

  “Gideon?” Honora whispered incredulously.

  “Mr. Talbott, yes. He asked where I was rushing, and when I told him he took me into a bakery. Since I had no last name, he gave me one—he said after a good scrub I’d be white as ivory. So Curt Ivory I became. A meal, a bath and one thing led to another. He arranged to bring me to California. He found a couple in Oakland, the Howells, to take care of me. They were cold, joyless people, but respectable. They must have figured they were sheltering some crazy sort of animal. The old woman had taught me to bow and click my heels like a little gentleman, so I bowed and clicked while I stole from their ice box. It was months before I left the table without a roll or a hunk of meat hidden in my pocket. I lived for the times Mr. Talbott dropped by to visit. He inspired me to become an engineer; he lent me the money for college. Honora, I know he has faults. He’s self-righteous, a puritanical dictator, but he’s also generous, kind, decent. And if you sometimes think I have too much of a soft spot for him, remember he not only saved my life, he gave me a new country, my name. He gave me my identity. I owe everything to him.”