Too Much Too Soon

by Jacqueline Briskin

  “My heart was pounding terribly last night. Thump, thump, thump. I would have called, but I don’t like worrying you. And I had that cold again, but I took several glasses of hot lemon and cured myself.”

  “Did you go out?”

  “With my cold? In this terrible weather? But it’s much worse abroad. There were dreadful rainstorms all across Europe.” He paused, peering at her hands. “Honora, your nails.”

  She curled her fingers, hiding the black rims. “Daddy, tell me what was in this morning’s Times?”

  “You’d have a chance to read it yourself if you weren’t a gardener.”

  “Landscape designer,” she murmured.

  “I don’t understand people anymore. Maybe Curt had no proper background, and I never liked the way he swanked any more than you did, but in my day we stayed married.”

  Langley’s persistence that the Ivorys had split because Curt’s riches were too nouveau for a Sylvander irritated and stung Honora, but she had long given up correcting him. Clutching her elbows, she sank deeper into the wing chair.

  Langley’s lips assumed a vestigal hint of his old, whimsical smile. “My poor Portuguese, I always say that you’re doing quite your best.” And with this he launched into the daily disasters: a hearing into international bribery to be conducted by the United States Congress, an earthquake ravaging Guatemala, crime in Italy, unemployment in the Midlands.

  When the buhlwork clock on the mantel chimed seven, she said, “Daddy, I really must be going home.”

  “When will I see you again?” he asked anxiously.

  “Tomorrow at the same time.”

  He strung out her departure with further tidbits about his ossifying blood vessels, his migratory cold symptoms, the unfolding of a letter from Joscelyn that he’d already read to her twice.

  Defeated and guilty, she trudged back to the tube station.

  Vi had found them a much larger, nicer flat in a tree-filled, sequestered square in Fulham—oh, how Langley’s aristocratic nostrils had curled. Fulham, indeed!

  As Honora climbed the stairs, Lissie, waiting for the vibrations of her footsteps, flung open the door.

  Even now, with the bulges and distortions of pre-adolescence, the child remained beautiful. Alas, though, the lively abandon and lack of self-consciousness of her early childhood was gone. Though her oral skills had improved tremendously with the school’s elaborate auditory trainers, in the presence of outsiders she held her shoulders tensed as if warding off a question she might have to answer. When she went out she left off her aids and had developed a sad little repertoire of means to avoid conversation with strangers. Telling Honora, who sat carefully in a ponderous straight-back chair, about her day, however, she chattered vivaciously.

  The large, squarish room was friendly and pleasant, the heaviness of the department store furniture that Vi had shipped from San Diego having been vanquished by Honora’s large, lush houseplants and ferns, her collection of books, the bright posters for art openings that she’d had framed.

  Vi padded in from the kitchen. Her orange dye-job was frizzed into an Afro and she had gained eighteen pounds. “Welcome home, stranger,” she said cheerfully. “What kept you?”

  “I tried to finish the job.”

  “And then, of course, you dropped in on your pop, right? Kid, some nights why don’t you give yourself a break?”

  “What smells so wonderful? Fried chicken?”

  “Yep, good old Colonel Vi’s best. It’s in the oven. And you’re right to change the subject; when you’re beat’s not the best time for advice. I’ll keep my big mouth shut.”

  Vi and Lissie, who had already eaten, sat at the table with Honora and soon she forgot her filial guilts, her weariness, her lower back, her loneliness and inadequacies.

  She shared the front bedroom with Lissie, and planned to hit bed at the same time as her child. But when Lissie went to brush her teeth, Vi whispered, “I got something to tell you. Private.”

  Though Lissie couldn’t eavesdrop, the child had another sense that telegraphed when they were hiding something. Honora nodded, opening her library copy of Far Tortuga.

  Vi waited ten minutes after the bedroom door had closed on Lissie. “Today I picked up the American Time,” she said. To assuage an occasional bout of homesickness, she patronized a news stall that stocked a wide spectrum of American papers and magazines. “Your ex’s in it.”

  “What’s he building now?” Honora tried to sound breezy, but to her own ears every remark she made about her estranged husband was tempered by a vague fraudulence.

  “Nothing like that. There’s going to be another round of them Congressional hearings. He’s been called.”

  “Oh yes, Daddy mentioned something about it. But he didn’t say a word about Curt.”

  “The papers here ain’t so hot on our news.” Glancing toward the closed bedroom door, Vi extracted the magazine from her large, navy plastic bag. “Page fifty-six.”

  Honora rustled the slick paper, halting at a column headed “Scandals.”

  The unmasking of corporate international misbehavior will continue in two weeks, on May 13, when a House subcommittee headed by Oregon Democrat Jason Morrell reconvenes to hear further testimony about American businesses involved in payoffs in the Mideast.

  Curt Ivory, who heads the giant Ivory Engineering Company, is among those who have been subpoenaed. There have been rumors that the Morrell committee might question his close friendship with Prince Fuad Abdulrahman, a member of the Lalarheini royal family. Prince Fuad was the minister of finance when Ivory was awarded contracts to build the Lalarheins’ Daralam airport, the most grandiose in the Arab world, and the most sophisticated, with its up-to-the-minute American military equipment. Curt Ivory told the Associated Press that he was guilty of no wrongdoing, and welcomed the investigation.

  The multimillionaire Ivory lives aboard the Odyssey, a 282-foot, 1800-ton yacht, one of the largest, most luxurious private boats afloat. Long separated but not divorced from his wife, who resides with their ten-year-old adopted daughter, Rosalynd, in London, Ivory is a favored escort of young Hollywood beauties.

  “Well?” Vi asked.

  “It was good of you not to let Lissie see this,” Honora said in a stilted voice. “May I?”

  “Help yourself.”

  Paper rasped as Honora tore out the page.

  “What do you figure’ll happen when he goes to Washington?”

  “Nothing.”

  “What do you mean, nothing?” Vi bristled. “This ain’t a picnic. They’re gunning for him.”

  “He’s always refused to do business where payoffs were involved, so there’s nothing they can find out.”

  “But this Arab joker—”

  “Fuad and Curt have been friends since Berkeley. Vi, my back is killing me. A good long soak is what I need.”

  “Try Epsom salts, hon,” Vi said sympathetically, lumbering across the room to turn on the television.

  Ripping the page lengthwise several times, Honora watched the ribbons of print swirl down the toilet. Supine in a scalding bath, she was bludgeoned by envious loathing for those young Hollywood beauties.

  God, how those quiet evenings alone with her must have bored him!

  58

  In 1975, Curt had formed a separate corporation to handle the venture capital, naming the new company Ivory Investments, putting Joscelyn on the board as the only director minus an MBA. The nine members gathered every other month at the Los Angeles headquarters. The other eight, glowing with an excitement that seemed indecently sexual, discussed shelters—oil, cattle, real estate, airplanes. Ignorant of evasive tax action, Joscelyn remained silent. She had an unpleasant sensation of weightlessness. In her social life she had forever formed a large zero, but being a nonperson at work was new to her: she concealed herself behind a yellow legal pad on which she scratched an occasional memo to herself, and had no inkling that the smart money, her confreres, assumed her on the board as a spy for her broth
er-in-law.

  An Ivory Investment board meeting fell ten days before Curt was scheduled to appear before the Morrell Subcommittee. Nobody mentioned it, and this struck Joscelyn as typical of the cautious, money-oriented group—everyone else at Ivory was circulating jokes about the upcoming hearing, and the Conrad cartoon of a thousand-dollar-bill folded like a tusk into an Arabian headgear was pinned to half the office bulletin boards.

  The meeting ritually concluded with lunch at the Windsor, whose flawless, high-protein cuisine and generous drinks attracted the expense account crowd. The men drove over in their air-conditioned cars, but Joscelyn always showed her stuff as a hearty outdoor engineer by walking the dozen or so level city blocks to the restaurant. Today Martin Sterret did not continue on the elevator with the others to Ivory’s subterranean garage but got off with her, accompanying her down the main steps to the sculpture garden that Honora had planned in happier days.

  “My internist,” Sterret said, “has ordered more exercise. Mind a little company?”

  “If you want,” Joscelyn said ungraciously.

  “What did you think of that bit in Time?” he asked.

  “A hatchet job.”

  “Newsweek was worse. They just about called Mr. Ivory a combination of underworld godfather and manipulator of foreign governments.”

  “I saw it,” she said acidly. “Imaginative reporting.”

  The two deep lines running down Sterret’s cheeks were like strings wiggling his jowls. “Joscelyn, this kind of publicity is disaster for a company.”

  “This isn’t a financial corporation,” she said pointedly. “In engineering it’s strictly a matter of cost and ability.”

  “We’re talking politics here. I don’t need mention to you how much of Ivory’s backlog is in government contracts.”

  She nodded glumly. “Nearly ten billion, and revenues of over a billion.”

  “I’ve denied this until I’m blue in the face, but there’s a rumor going around that it’s more than smoke that Ivory has paid large sums to the Abdulrahman family.”

  “I told Curt he ought to sue Time—how dare they print that kind of crap! Fuad would no more take a bribe than Curt would offer one.”

  “We know that.” They had halted for a red light at Wilshire, and Sterret leaned toward her so close that she could smell the sourness of his breath. He’s frightened, she thought. “But, Joscelyn, if Mr. Ivory gets the press’s full treatment, it won’t matter whether he’s innocent or not. Whatever comes out at the hearing, he’ll be guilty.”

  “Terrific.”

  In the smoggy sunlight, she saw the sagging flesh of Sterret’s throat jump as if in a painful hiccup. “I’m not saying this, you understand. But other people have pointed out that it would help if Mrs. Ivory showed up.”

  “Honora?”

  The light changed and they started across the street.

  “If she were at the hearings his . . . well, his flamboyance wouldn’t be so damaging.”

  “They’re separated,” Joscelyn said sharply.

  “But not divorced.”

  “His personal life is his own.” A mottled redness appeared on her throat. She was remembering the night she had attempted to enter into that personal life: time had in no way blurred the image of her brother-in-law’s revulsed yet pleading expression.

  “I don’t like saying this, but the press has already found him guilty of a certain amount of, uhh, lax morals.”

  “If you’re talking about his lady friends, why not say so?” Joscelyn snapped.

  “With Mrs. Ivory in Washington, people might be more sympathetic—”

  “Jesus!”

  “Nothing like a good woman standing by her husband . . . .” His words trailed into a muted cough as if, Joscelyn decided, it was coming to him that this particular good woman had stood by her husband and cracked his skull with a large, Venetian glass ornament.

  After half a block, Sterret asked, “You’re close to him. Do you think he could be convinced to at least talk it over with Mrs. Ivory?”

  “There’s a subject I’d never bring up.”

  “Having her there would be immensely helpful.”

  “Then why don’t you talk to Curt?”

  They walked the remainder of the way in silence.

  As they turned the corner to the Windsor she saw the rest of the Ivory Investment MBAs gathered beneath the canopy. It was only too obvious that Sterret had been elected spokesman. If they’re so worked up about losing their job, maybe I ought to worry a bit, too, she thought. Her anxiety was not directed at her own possible unemployment—husband killers don’t deserve the luxury of fearing for themselves—but for Curt. The smart money’s consensus was that Congress and the media would stretch Curt out like beef drying into jerky. Are they right? Would Honora’s presence make the difference?

  * * *

  A pot of tea and heel of toasted Hovis smeared with butter, Honora’s lunch, waited on a bedside table while she clasped her hands around her knees, drawing her bent legs toward her chest to flatten her spine on the restorative electric heating pad.

  It was Saturday, and a few minutes ago Vi and Lissie had bundled in rainclothes to go see a specially captioned matinee of Sunshine Boys. Honora had begged off to rest her capricious vertebrae.

  It had been a loser of a week on all counts. Chill air from the North Sea had brought icy spring rain whose sibilance now hushed the square. She had shown preliminary sketches to three prospective clients: none had phoned her back. Lissie’s Head Mistress had called a parents’ meeting to raise funds for a school for the hard of hearing in Zambia: Honora, moved by the black children’s plight, had donated a thirty-pound check before realizing that her bête noire, an improperly balanced bank account, left her with under five pounds. There wouldn’t be any deposits until payments came for her previous two jobs, so she had been forced—once again—to float a loan from Vi. Langley, yet gloomier from being kept indoors, had spouted jeremiads of universal doom. And a particularly copious period had added to her lower-back discomfort.

  She straightened her legs, wincing, then rolled cautiously on her side to pour her tea. Picking up her book—she had finished Far Tortuga and was starting a yellowish paperback of Lost Illusions that she’d picked up at a second-hand stall—she alternately sipped her milky, sweet tea and munched her brown crust.

  She was someplace deep in nineteenth-century Angoulême when the doorbell rang. Positive the intruder was a salesman, she stayed put. The bell sounded again and again, a vibrato of irritation. Cautiously she swung her feet down into the flattened fake fur of her slippers, drew her bathrobe sash tighter around her slight waist and went to unlock the front door.

  “I’d abandoned all hope,” Joscelyn said.

  Honora, who had never quite accustomed herself to the way her younger sister dropped in as though she lived nearby in Fulham, pressed her cheek against Joscelyn’s icy, rain-scented one.

  “What’s with you?” Joscelyn asked. “A cold?”

  “No, it’s nothing. My back’s been kicking up a bit, that’s all. What brings you to this sunny clime?”

  Joscelyn didn’t answer. Taking off her raincoat, whose epaulets were dark with wetness, she slung it across her overnight bag. “Let’s go where you’ll be comfortable.”

  Honora returned to her room to lie on her comforting heating pad, expecting her sister, after the long flight, to kick off her wet flats and stretch out on Lissie’s bed for a chat about their daughter. Instead, Joscelyn paced wordlessly around, crossing and recrossing the scrappy maroon carpet to touch the daffodils Vi had bought yesterday to cheer Honora, to shift a schoolbook on Lissie’s shelf. As she adjusted the dressing table mirror, the murky light reflected her as if from a deep pond.

  Honora was beginning to get anxious. “Joss, what about some tea? It’s no trouble to make fresh.”

  Joscelyn’s eye twitched. “Have anything to drink?”

  “Vi just bought some vodka. I’ll fix you a Bloody Mar
y.”

  “Don’t move. In the kitchen?”

  “In the cabinet above the sink. The tomato juice is in the fridge.”

  The sounds of Joscelyn fixing the drink were torturingly slow. She returned, sitting on the dressing table chair, holding the glass with both hands.

  Honora’s throat felt bruised, but she managed an easy modulation. “Joss, what’s wrong?”

  “Nothing. Do I always have to be your crippled sparrow?” Joscelyn inquired, exhibiting the perversity that from earliest childhood had disguised her troubles.

  “You seem a bit nervy, that’s all.”

  “I’m not in the market for a ministering angel.” Joscelyn took a long drink. “But Curt is.”

  “Curt?” Honora’s head jerked up from the pillow. “Is he ill?”

  “Fit as a fiddle, whatever that means.”

  “Is it something to do with this hearing?”

  “Yes, and I don’t know why you should rush to his support after he’s been such a Grade-A shit to you.”

  “I left him,” Honora murmured.

  “Who wouldn’t, after learning he’d been getting it on with Crystal and having a kid with her? And what about his whorelets?”

  “Did he send you?”

  “He’d string me up if he knew I were here. Either that or excommunicate me from my profession.”

  “But I gather you feel I ought to be helping him.”

  “I’m ambivalent.”

  “Joss, there’s simply no way I could be any good to him. I’ve met quite a few Washington people, but he introduced me to all of them and knows them far better than I do—not to mention that he’s a major campaign contributor.”

  “Did I ask you to suborn Congress?”

  “Then how on earth could I help him?”

  Joscelyn examined her ice cubes. “Remember at the Watergate hearings how Maureen Dean sat behind John, showing the television audience her wardrobe and wifely support? Could a man so beloved be all bad?”

  “I understand what you’re saying, but you know how things are between us. He didn’t even call when Lissie had that bad case of mumps. Believe me, he doesn’t want me there.”