“See what happens?” Grant said. “I stick with you, I get the royal treatment.”
“You stick with me,” Bianca said.
“Seven years,” Grant said.
“Seven years …”
Bianca broke the thoughtful pause that followed. “Grant, I have a little teeny teeny teeny announcement to make: I’m six days late.”
“Late?”
“On the monthly. Let’s just say there’s some possibility I may be expecting.”
“Oh darling,” Grant said. “Oh darling,” he said, and the look on his face—a handsome and openhearted, proud and avid look—immediately elevated Bianca into the state of mind she’d been seeking all day: a grateful sense that she’d never loved anybody else, and could never love anybody else, the way she loved this good-looking, good-hearted man she’d married seven years ago.
They raised a toast to the baby. They toasted each other. Grant reached across the table and stroked her hand. “This is so silly,” Bianca cried. “This whole business might be nothing. I’m only six days late.”
“What do your instincts tell you? I trust your instincts.” And why not? She had second sight, after all.
Bianca gazed at her husband and, feeling oddly embarrassed, giggled. “Well, my instincts tell me I am. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have mentioned it.”
“Then I say you are.” And they raised another toast to the baby.
Pierre reappeared. “You are enjoying the Saint-Émilion?” he asked.
“Absolutely,” Grant said. “It’s our anniversary. Married seven years ago this week.”
Pierre paused only a second. “Seven years? Then I would say to you, sir, you married a very young bride.” The mention of Mrs. Olsson’s name had seemingly restored him. He was almost the old Pierre again. He added, “I’m not sure it’s legal, marrying so young a bride.”
Grant’s boisterous laugh, warmed with a hint of shared male roguery, pleased Pierre, who smiled, bowed, and strode away.
“He’s all right,” Grant said.
“He kissed my hand,” Bianca said. “I’ll never forget that. I come in here, an eighteen-year-old girl, and the owner of one of the city’s fanciest restaurants kisses my hand.”
“I want to know what your instincts tell you about the sex of the child, if I may be so bold as to ask.”
Bianca needed think only a moment. “A girl,” she stated confidently. “If I’m pregnant, if I’m pregnant, I’m carrying a girl.”
“And as regards this putative girl-child you are so to speak carrying, have you considered a moniker?”
This was a little joke, or rather a line of jokes, which reliably amused her—it was a routine of his. Grant often spoke in a sham-formal patter, with a generous sprinkling of legalisms, the whole of it vaguely, and perhaps somewhat inaccurately, spun through an Irish brogue; Grant’s maternal grandfather had emigrated from Cork.
“Tabatha for the wee lass?” Grant went on. “Agatha? Plethora?”
He got the laugh he was looking for.
“Peppa?” he went on. “Is that a name?”
“I think you mean Pippa, honey. It’s a name in English novels.” Bianca had a particular fondness for English novels—not that she read enough of anything, ever since the twins’ arrival. She’d been taking a course in The Grand Tradition of the English Novel down at Wayne, working toward her B.A., when, to her utter amazement, married just a few months, she became pregnant.
“I’ll be the Poppa to a girrrl named Pippa,” Grant sang, thickening the brogue—which, in addition to serving him as a raconteur at parties, had a treasured private currency: it often provided him with a language of desire. Bold, sometimes almost too bold, intimacies emerged out of his brogue: declarations that both abashed and amused her. The world was full of wives—Bianca had come to see—who smiled tiredly at their husband’s stories and jokes. But Grant had a way about him—he made her laugh, and the laughter was genuine.
He downed his second glass of wine. He’d already finished his steak, and fries, and green beans.
“Boy, you’re pretty,” he said.
“You’re not so bad yourself.”
“How will your mother respond?” he asked.
“She’s always the great mystery, isn’t she?”
It had been something of a surprise, and an enormous relief, when Mamma developed a deep fondness for Grant and the twins. Really, there didn’t seem to be anything strained or awkward in her affection. No doubt they had helped matters greatly—those voracious Ives triplets—by being so partial to Mamma’s cooking. All those dishes drawn from the worst cookbook in history—The Modern Housewife’s Book of Creative Cookery, a collection so disastrous that Bianca had come to wonder whether it was assembled as a publisher’s joke—pleased them no end: Grant and the boys simply could not get enough Shipwreck, enough Drowned Tuna Loaf and Slumped Pork and Smothered Liver and City Chicken Sticks.
“I’m only six days late, we shouldn’t go assuming anything,” Bianca said, even as she felt her imagination carrying her off. In a game that might be called How Will So-and-so Greet the News? Grant happily prompted her with names of people they knew and Bianca happily supplied their responses.
Papa would be pleased, of course, hugely pleased, though he wouldn’t say much. But he would pull her aside at some point and call her his Bia and surreptitiously slip her a little money. (It didn’t matter that she probably had more money in the bank than he did.) And—eventually—he would construct a wonderful wooden pull-toy for the new infant. He’d outdone himself for the twins: a matching pair of tigers, with bold stripes and twitching tails. And the blazing stones in their eye-sockets? Tigereyes, naturally.
And Grant’s mother would be positively elated. She’d always wanted a granddaughter—perhaps because, Bianca secretly speculated, she’d mishandled her own two daughters, who lived so far away and returned home so rarely.
Dad Ives would be pleased, too, though the news wouldn’t strike deep. Ever since his stroke, two years ago, few topics engaged him except his own health, which wasn’t good. Though he had trouble moving and walking, the stroke had left his mind unimpaired—which only increased his frustration. “But he’ll be glad,” Bianca said. “He’s always liked girls.”
“All too well,” Grant said, and laughed. Girls—grown-up girls—were one of the few things that still pricked Mr. Ives’s interest. “And Stevie?” Grant asked.
“Oh he’ll be delighted, truly. But then the next time I see him I’ll have to remind him. After all, there’s no reality but the Ford Motor Company.”
Stevie had taken a job at the Ford plant in Highland Park. He was forever working overtime.
“And Rita?”
Rita, Stevie’s wife, presented a more complicated question. The whole issue of pregnancy was an uneasy matter in Stevie and Rita’s little house, which lay almost under the shadow of the plant. Stevie had married Rita two years ago, in a panicky hurry—though as it happened they managed to beat, by exactly one week, the arrival of her miscarriage. Back then, Rita had been just-turned-seventeen.
“And Edith?”
“She’ll concoct some new health regimen for me. I must henceforth eat only what pregnant Armenian women eat. Or vegetarian Koreans.”
Grant laughed. Edith was forever reading about faraway lands, but always—Edith being Edith—with an eye toward improbable, practical applications. “And Aunt Grace and Uncle Dennis?”
Bianca pondered a moment. “They’ll make a special trip, won’t they, when the baby’s born. Aunt Grace in particular—she’ll be so pleased.”
Grace’s cancer had appeared four years ago. She might plausibly have turned bitter, having had her right breast removed at the age of forty-five, but the illness had made her, if anything, more generous.
“Priscilla will find it odd,” Grant said.
Bianca laughed. “Odd? Yes, she will, won’t she. I don’t know how or why, but she’ll find it odd.”
Priscilla was a new frie
nd—and much the best-educated woman in Bianca’s circle. She’d gone to Mount Holyoke College, in Massachusetts, and then to the University of Michigan for medical school. She found most developments in Bianca’s life “rather odd,” which was only fitting, since she herself was so odd. Grant didn’t much care for her—he said she wasn’t a real woman—though her observations amused him.
“And Maggie,” Grant said. “She won’t be pleased.”
Lunch was going very well. It was a sign of how much fun they were having, and how secure Grant was feeling, that he would bring up Maggie in this way—a sore subject for a variety of reasons.
“No, she won’t be, will she?” Bianca said, and laughed.
“Hey, just listen to my girl’s mischievous laughter. It’s time you admitted it: you don’t like her, do you?”
“I like her,” Bianca protested.
“But you don’t much like spending time with her.”
“That’s true.” And this time Bianca’s laughter emerged as an unladylike snort.
“Oh you girls,” Grant said, and shook his head mock-sternly. “Always complicating everything …”
“It isn’t that I don’t enjoy spending time with her. What I don’t enjoy,” Bianca began, and saw that, propelled perhaps by the second glass of wine, the distinction she meant to draw was difficult to express. She pushed on anyway. “What I don’t enjoy isn’t so much how she’s always showing off her money. No, it isn’t that. It isn’t that at all. It’s how she fails to understand what a fluke her life is. In her eyes, she was born to have all this money. She doesn’t see how odd it is (and now I know I’m sounding like Priscilla, but I’m going to say it anyway), how odd it is she’d wind up filthy rich.”
Maggie’s marriage to George Hamm had dissolved soon after his return from the Army. Displaying even poorer judgment the second time around, she’d married Peter Schrock, who owned a tavern on Seven Mile and who mistreated her even worse than George had—though Maggie hadn’t treated Pete much better. And then, already twice divorced and still in her twenties, Maggie had consented to marry Wally Waller, whose devotion, originating at Field Elementary, remained unwavering. It was one of the greatest of all mysteries of that greatest of all mysteries—love. Why was Wally so devoted? He’d become a man of note in the city—a highly eligible bachelor, somebody who could range far and wide in pursuit of a wife. Exempt from military service because of his deformed hand, Wally had done very, very well in business, both during and since the War.
“In any case,” Bianca said, “whether I want to or not, I’m seeing her tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow?”
Grant could never keep her schedule in his head, no matter how many times she reminded him. “She’s coming over for coffee—remember?—while you’re at the game.”
The Tigers were in town and Grant and the boys would be in the bleachers tomorrow. Cheap seats. When it came to sports, Grant enjoyed slumming it. He was never happier than when playing handball with a factory worker who hadn’t bathed in a week.
“That’s right.”
“She said she wants my advice about something. What’ll it be? Whether to buy a yacht? Whether to spend Christmas in Florida, or would California be even nicer?”
The game contentedly petered out over coffee and Bianca’s third—and last—cigarette. Grant called for the check. At the door, Pierre, roused to his former magnificence, actually kissed Bianca’s hand while murmuring, “À bientôt.”
“You’ve got to love the old fruit,” Grant said the moment they stepped out into the sun. Having seized her kissed hand in his, he lifted his free hand and pointed: “Look! Another gull.”
This one, too, was wheeling toward the river.
“I take that as a good omen,” Bianca said.
A couple of years ago, desiring a still bigger house, Grant had proposed a move up to Huntington Woods or even Birmingham. Bianca had resisted, but it had taken a couple of days before her objections crystallized. If she settled any further north, she’d lose all sense of living by the river. “I don’t want to move to Birmingham because there aren’t enough gulls up there.”
It was precisely the kind of answer Grant loved her for—loved the artist’s eccentricity of it. He broadcast the story everywhere, to everyone. Who was he? He was the sort of man who offered to build his wife a splendid house in Birmingham. And his wife—who was she? She was the sort of woman who refused his offer because there weren’t enough gulls up there.
CHAPTER XXVII
Maggie arrived twenty minutes late—which was all right. She breezed in and, without so much as a single question about Grant or the boys, launched into a lament about her impossible new maid—which was a little annoying but mostly all right. But why was she wearing pearls and a cocktail dress?
Bianca was wearing khaki pedal pushers and a yellow cotton blouse from Montgomery Ward. Maggie made a passing but significant reference to having somewhere else to go—clearly prodding Bianca to ask the where and what. She didn’t ask.
Maggie shifted topics from her maid to her mother-in-law, whom she called Witch Waller. In appearance, Maggie’s life was altogether transformed from the days when she’d shared a cramped bungalow out Grand River with the Jailer, but fundamentally it was the same, and would always be the same. If Maggie were to get married and divorced a hundred times, it was a safe bet that all one hundred mothers-in-law would be insufferable.
Maggie got along fine with Mr. Waller, but no surprise there: men adored Maggie.
Bianca asked whether she’d like tea or coffee, and Maggie wondered whether there might be some beer or wine, and Bianca replied that she had both, and Maggie pointed out that some wine might be nice. So Bianca poured Maggie a glass of wine and, a little guiltily, recalling those two glasses at yesterday’s lunch, a half glass for herself. They both lit cigarettes.
When Maggie had called she’d suggested, rather urgently, that she needed Bianca’s advice, and it turned out, after a few minutes’ conversation, she did indeed have a problem—quite an amazing problem. “Walton wants me to have plastic surgery.”
“Plastic surgery!” Here was something completely out of the blue. “Why? On what?”
“On my chin.”
“On your chin! I don’t think they even do plastic surgery on chins.”
“They do,” Maggie said softly, almost meekly. “It’s called chin enhancement.”
“Chin enhancement! Who ever heard of such a thing? Maggie, do you plan to walk around town with an enhanced chin? Are people going to say about you, There goes the lady with the enhanced chin? This is absurd.”
“I have a weak chin,” Maggie said, more meekly still. They were sitting at the kitchen table. Each was on her second cigarette. Maggie was on her second glass of wine. Bianca was on her second half glass.
“You don’t have a weak chin, Maggie. You have your chin.”
“I do have a weak chin. Not like yours. You with your bone structure, easy for you to talk. But I’m getting a double chin because my chin is weak.”
“You drop five pounds, you’d lose it I’m sure.”
“I’m not so sure. I have a weak chin. You don’t. You’re lucky.”
“Maggie, you look great as you are. You’re forever turning heads.”
“It’s very hard to argue with Walton’s logic—”
“It always is,” Bianca interrupted, though Maggie didn’t seem to notice and went right on: “He says, Kid, you’re twenty-eight years old. Do you want to spend the next forty, fifty years with a double chin? Or without a double chin? You choose.”
“Maggie, is this plastic surgery something you want?”
Maggie hesitated. “I think so.”
“Maggie, you go tell Walton to have his own chin enhanced.”
“Easy for you, giving that advice …”
“What do you mean by that?” The conversation had turned a little dicey, all of a sudden.
Maggie again hesitated, then plunged in: “Just that you’
ve got Grant wrapped round your little finger. That’s all.”
Bianca laughed a little as she protested: “Maggie, I do not.”
Maggie proceeded more confidently, with dramatic pauses: “Around … your … little … finger. Look, I say it with envy. What wouldn’t I give to have Walton wrapped round my little finger?”
“This is absurd,” Bianca protested. “Walton’s the most devoted man I know.”
“Devotion’s different. We’re talking about having the say-so. We’re talking about having somebody like a bug under your thumb. Honey, believe me, Walton’s not the sort of man you have under your thumb.”
This pronouncement was vexatious on a variety of fronts: the cinematic way Maggie exhaled a cloud of smoke before uttering it; the honey; and, worst of all, the implication that somehow Grant was a victim or a patsy—which manly Walton refused to be. Behind this remark lay an assumption that everybody in the world, except Bianca, now seemed prepared to concede: Walton Waller was a formidable personage. Even Grant, though often tough on the men in their circle, had nothing but respect for Walton, who was “one helluva businessman,” who was “easy to underestimate,” who was “a gutsy guy.” Grant was forever pointing out that having been born into a good thing—his family’s plate-glass business—Walton hadn’t needed to venture out as he had.
All right, she’d concede this—but what a way to venture! He’d started buying up small businesses, beginning with some car washes. Over each one he’d post a sign: “A Walton J. Waller Establishment.” You saw those signs all over town. Grant used to share her laughter at the overweening solemnity of it. But in recent years, as the signs proliferated, he’d stopped laughing. And it had fallen on Bianca to recall that, even were he to become the new Henry Ford, Walton J. Waller was really Wally Waller.
Bianca said: “Look, Maggie, do you want your chin enhanced?”
“Well I think I do,” Maggie replied. “Only—”
“Only?”
“Only I’m frightened. Terrified. Of needles, knives. I get the jim-jams. You know how I am.”
Bianca did. It was a famous story: Maggie’s fainting after a shot in the doctor’s office. Here she sat in pearls and cocktail dress, the wife of a helluva businessman, and yet she was still Maggie Szot, of Inquiry Street, that brash young lollapalooza who blanched at the thought of a little needle …
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