The War of the Roses

by Warren Adler

  In one corner of the room was a sleigh bed, circa 1840s; beside it an inlaid-mahogany Empire table on which stood an Art Nouveau Tiffany lamp guarded by a rustic Staffordshire porcelain milkmaid who had wandered in from the downstairs collection. On one wall was a chest-on-chest festooned with intricate ormolu and a French bibliotheque with glass doors. Near the dormer was an English folding desk on which rested a hurricane lamp.

  ‘We get a knee-jerk reaction every time we get near an antique auction,’ Barbara explained. ‘We’re like antique junkies. We even met at one. There’s no more room to put things.’

  ‘It’s fantastic,’ Ann had replied.

  ‘We’ve been at it for years,’ Barbara told her. ‘But they say that people who collect never really stop. Maybe we’re afraid to…’ Her voice trailed off as if she were wary of the sudden intimacy. ‘Anyway,’ she had chirped, recovering her lightness, ‘you can commune with all the ghosts of times past.’

  ‘With pleasure,’ Ann had said. ‘My major is history.’

  But if the ‘room’ part was overwhelming, the ‘board’ part staggered her. Ann remained endlessly fascinated with the Roses’ kitchen.

  It was a carpeted rectangle lined with French provincial walnut cabinetry and rough stucco walls, designed to resemble a French country kitchen. Built into the walls were two double sinks, two double ovens – one electric, one gas – a huge refrigerator with an outside , ice-water tap, a matching freezer, and a dishwasher. Also built in were tiers of open shelving filled with cookbooks, botdes, spices, canned goods, pots, pans, plates, jugs, trays, and bowls of various shapes and sizes. Huge drawers containing silver and flatware were fitted below the counter tops. Shiny copper pots and pans hung on hooks in various corners and cubbies. And on the counter tops were a microwave oven, two blenders, a coffee maker, a toaster oven, a warming oven; an inventory that never failed to expand in Ann’s eye with each inspection.

  In the center of the kitchen was a large rectangular island over which hung a huge hood. Built into the island was another stainless-steel sink, two four-burner stoves – one electric, one gas – an army of utensils, collanders, ladles, spatulas, pans, and more pots hanging from the hood; a wooden box filled with upended knives in slots, a wide marble top built into the cutting-board counter, and an electric kitchen center designed to accommodate a variety of mixing bowls and whatnots.

  Remembering her mother’s broken-down, noisy refrigerator, the gas stove with a pilot light that never seemed to work, and the chipped and stained porcelain fixtures, Ann felt she had wandered into a fantasy land.

  ‘I cook,’ Barbara had announced, the understatement obviously carefully honed from long use. Ann followed her into an alcove that served as a storage pantry and in which was a large, humming, temperature-controlled wine vault.

  ‘We planned and built it together,’ Barbara explained to the baffled Ann. ‘Oliver’s a whiz at fixing and making things. And I’ve got a degree in plumbing from the school of hard knocks.’

  She was, Ann remembered, as eager to make a good impression as Barbara was to be ingratiating. Yes, there was a certain indelibility about their first meeting, despite the confusing, information-packed grand tour.

  Barbara had given particularly detailed descriptions of every piece in the dining room.

  ‘Duncan Phyfe,’ she said, rapping her knuckles on the shiny table. ‘Queen Anne chairs. And that rococo monstrosity is my favorite.’ She had pointed to an elaborate candelabrum with room for more than a dozen candles. ‘Decadent, don’t you think?’

  ‘I guess they knew things would outlive human beings,’ Ann replied, patting a marble-top credenza for emphasis.

  At that first meeting, Barbara’s curvaceous figure was encased in tight jeans and a T-shirt on which the word hausfrau was stretched tautly over ample bosom, intimidating the statement. She possessed, as a miner’s daughter like Ann would observe, Slavic good looks: deep-set hazel eyes, peering cautiously behind apple-contoured cheekbones, under a broad forehead. Her chestnut hair was cut to cascade, like a wild brook, down either side of her head, almost to her broad shoulders, which served as a sturdy crosspiece for her magnificent bosom.

  ‘I’m going pro,’ Barbara had announced, as if it were necessary to explain the kitchen. She had flashed a wide, ingenuous smile, growing momentarily wistful. ‘Hell, I’ve got the talent and the facilities. That’s for sure.’ Her attention had suddenly departed from Ann, as if there were someone else she had to convince. But when her attention came back to Ann again, she explained that she had just sold a batch of her special cassoulet to an embassy in the neighborhood and her pate was becoming a staple at the French Market.

  ‘It’s just a humble beginning,’ she had said. ‘But that’s why I need a little help with the kids. Just a watchful eye. A little tidying up. Perhaps some help for me. Nothing heavy. A maid comes in to do the hard stuff. Teenagers need a maternal surrogate when Mom’s busy in the kitchen.’ She laughed nervously, which, by inference, put Ann at ease, as if illustrating that she wasn’t the only one with anxieties about the new arrangement.

  As she talked, Ann remembered, she had lifted Mercedes, the spayed Siamese, from one of the upper open shelves, wedged between a can of Crisco and a box of brown sugar. The cat snuggled against her hair and briefly shared an Eskimo kiss before jumping to the floor, scurrying off to a sunny adjoining room that appeared to be filled with plants.

  ‘There’s an overgrown standard schnauzer, whose bark is worse than his bite, that you’ll meet shortly. He spends the day servicing the local bitches. Mostly, he obeys only Oliver, who says that’s because they both share the same drives.’ She had flashed her smile again and giggled a throaty, girlish laugh. The reference to men’s drives seemed to offer a female bond, and from that moment, sisterly affection began to ferment. Ann’s confidence rose. The little exchange seemed to underline that first impression.

  Barbara had mentioned in passing that the schnauzer’s name was Benny, but it was Eve, their sixteen-year-old daughter, who had explained to Ann the not-so-subtle connection.

  ‘Mercedes-Benz. Of course. I should have caught it immediately.’ Ann had actually felt embarrassed.

  ‘No reason to, Ann, really. It’s just one of those very inside family things. It was Dad’s idea.’

  Reticence marked their first encounters. But Ann thought that was understandable, since the assignment of an au pair girl to watch over a sixteen-year-old seemed an insult by definition. Eve’s first move was to give Ann the shock treatment.

  ‘I keep my stash of pot behind Louisa May Alcott,’ the girl explained as she introduced Ann to her room, the style of which was an obviously deliberate attempt on Eve’s part to stem the tide of antiques that had engulfed the house. Every piece in it seemed ruffled with flowery prints except for the pink bookcase and Andy Gibb poster. The inside of the closet was a mess and schoolbooks were scattered under the bed.

  ‘And I’m on the pill,’ she said, watching Ann’s face for a reaction. Ann’s features were calculatingly immobile. She herself wasn’t on the pill for two reasons, health and infrequency. She wasn’t shocked, although she had made a mental note as to how much lower the starting age was now.

  As if to buttress her rebel image, Eve offered Ann a cigarette, then lit up and inhaled deeply.

  ‘Screw cancer.’ She shrugged. To Ann, the bravado was a dead giveaway. Eve wasn’t a brat at all. Just unsure, like most teenagers… and adults.

  ‘I don’t smoke,’ Ann had replied. T chew.’

  Eve’s giggle, like her mother’s, seemed to break the tension.

  ‘Really?’ Eve had exclaimed, showing her age.

  She was, Ann observed, vulnerable and gawky, still unfleshed and willowy, but with all the promise of inheriting her mother’s Slavic sensuousness. With her father’s blue eyes and rich, thick hair, she would soon be quite a beauty.

  To make it with Eve, Ann knew instinctively, was to find some important way to illustrate her trust in th
e girl. She detested being so calculating as she searched for opportunities. But it meant a great deal to win Eve’s favor, especially in practical terms. The job in the Roses’ household was a stroke of luck. Banishment, for whatever reason, would be a personal and financial disaster.

  The opportunity arose when Eve flunked math at Sidwell Friends School, a posh private school of Quaker origin for the children of the Washington elite. Eve, too frightened to tell her parents, confided the horror to Ann.

  ‘I’ve disgraced them,’ she cried.

  Calming her down, Ann agreed to act as go-between, a role not without its risks. Oliver had been disappointed, but resigned. Barbara had been angry.

  ‘Lack of preparation is a curse,’ she had snapped. ‘I know.’ Ann had learned by then that Barbara had married at nineteen and had dropped out of college.

  ‘I promised them you’d go to summer school if there were no recriminations or bad words,’ Ann had announced proudly to Eve, who collapsed in shivery tears. In its way, it was a kind of victory and certainly represented a turning point between them.

  ‘I’ll make them proud,’ Eve promised, her lips pursing in determination. There was, Ann had discovered, an invisible, fiercely competitive standard loose in the household. She wondered if it was a good thing.

  This standard was at its most obvious in twelve-year-old Josh. What he wanted most of all was to be a member of the Sidwell Friends junior-varsity basketball team. She heard his basketball rattling, with irritating punctuality, against the backboard that his father had made in the alley over the double garage.

  Like his sister, he, too, was a well-made mixture of his parents’ genes: hazel eyes, cheekbones like his mother’s, and a space between nose and lip that would surely in late adolescence sprout his father’s thick moustache. His hair, sadly, was his mother’s chestnut, which meant that he might not grow his father’s salty, waved hair. Like Eve, he wore braces and it was a family joke, one of many, that the Roses were an orthodontist’s dream.

  Ann’s relationship with Josh started out vague and unpromising. She had barely any memories of prepubesceht boys, having gone to a Catholic girls’ school. To the stern sisters of that establishment, young boys, if they existed at all, were messengers of Satan. To her, Josh was, nevertheless, a challenge to be surmounted.

  She found him one day hunched over his basketball on the third-floor landing outside her room. She had been studying and it was obvious when she saw him there, gloomy and distraught, that he had been waiting for her to come upon him ‘accidentally.’

  ‘You look like you just lost your best pal,’ she had said, standing over him. He was holding the basketball in a tight embrace. He looked up at her, dry-eyed, but with a visible trembling of his lower lip that threatened the total collapse of his pseudo-manly courage. She sat down beside him, noting that he had deliberately left room for her on the step.

  ‘Damned coach,’ he said, telescoping the message that he hadn’t made the team. It was enough of a signal to set her mind racing to find something reasonably reassuring to say. Providentially, the Johnstown house was on the edge of a school attended mostly by black children.

  ‘Any black kids on the team?’ she asked. He held up one finger. ‘Get a chance to play with any black kids?’ He shrugged, obviously having no idea where she was leading him.

  ‘Go to the schoolyards where the black kids play. Couple months of that and you’ll run rings around those lily-white honkies.’

  He took the advice, still sulking as he brushed aside her attempted caress of his shoulders. It was weeks later, when he suddenly broke out in black street talk, that she knew he had taken her advice. Pure chance, she had decided, but a definite icebreaker.

  The sun was barely visible through the arborvitaes and would soon be hidden behind the cedar fence, leaving a soft hush in the air. From the kitchen two floors below, exotic, mouth-watering odors wafted upward. In the oven, Ann knew, was a crusting cassoulet, layers of simmering goose, pork, lamb, and sausage on a bed of flageolets, bubbling in an essence of garlic, thyme, bay leaves, and other glorious herbs and spices. Cooling on the marble of the kitchen island was, a deep sniff confirmed, a loaf of fluffy banana bread. Barbara was at that moment probably mixing a light salad of greens and mushrooms in the big wooden bowl inundated with the tart oils of a thousand previous concoctions. There would be sliced pate de campagne as well and a chocolate mousse to sweeten the celebration.

  God’s in his heaven and all’s right with the world, Ann thought, prompted by the smells and the delicious knowledge of her treasure chest of family secrets. The festivities were Barbara’s original idea to celebrate Eve’s summer-school victory, a B-minus in advanced algebra. Ann had spent half the summer sweating over that one with Eve, certain that her effort had lifted the grade by one whole letter jump.

  And Oliver had embroidered the victory with his own contribution. He had bought Eve a silver Honda, which, unbeknown to the victorious scholar, lay in wait in the garage next to his prized Ferrari, rarely used but fondled and caressed like a precious baby.

  ‘You mustn’t breathe a word,’ Oliver had warned. ‘Not a word.’

  Barbara had come to her that morning with two secrets.

  ‘Josh made the team. But don’t tell Oliver. It’s a surprise. We’ll spring it at dinner.’

  ‘You said two secrets.’

  ‘I just got a hell of an order. Chicken galantine for twenty-four. For the Paks. They’re entertaining the French ambassador Tuesday night. Just don’t tell Oliver. Let it be my surprise.’ Barbara took Ann by the shoulders, looking deeply into her eyes as if they were a mirror. ‘You know, I’m going to make it big as a caterer someday. I mean big.’

  Eve came into her room sometime later with a further announcement and Ann literally had to turn away to hide her amusement.

  ‘You might think this dinner is for my B-minus, but Dad’s got a topper to that. The firm picked up one of those big Fortune Five Hundred clients in New York. But don’t tell Mom. He’s going to break out the Chateau Lafite-Rothschild ’59. When he does that, we’re into heavy duty.’

  Any more secrets and Ann was certain that she would burst wide open. Surprisingly, she didn’t feel left out. She had her little secret, too, reminded of it again as she passed Oliver on the back stairs. He had just come from the sauna that he had built in the basement, complete with adjoining shower. Sometimes the family gathered there. Nakedness was not a hang-up, although in deference to Ann they no longer went about the house without robes, another secret that Josh had confided.

  Passing him on the stairs, she turned quickly away as her eyes caught a tantalizing picture. The damp had curled his hair and the terry-cloth V showed a profusion of jet-black body turf down to his navel. She could not bring herself to look below that but she could not ignore the piny scent that his skin exuded, embellishing the exciting aroma of his maleness. Passing him this close, with him in a state of semi-undress, was dizzying.

  ‘Soon,’ he said, winking as he passed her. ‘I’m going to give Eve the Honda keys at dinner.’

  In the kitchen, Barbara was wearing a long mauve velvet at-home dress with a single strand of matched pearls and even Eve had parted for once from her jeans and was wearing a more fitting, preppyish outfit of pleated skirt, blouse, and saddle shoes. As always, when it came to clothes, Ann felt inadequate, despite the fact that she wore one of Barbara’s beige slack-suit hand-me-downs, a far cry from the J. C. Penney polyester she had worn that first day.

  As if by silent consent, Ann picked up the cooling banana bread and joined the procession to the library, which doubled as a kind of family den. They moved through the marble-floored foyer, over which glistened a huge crystal chandelier, hanging three stories high in x brass-banistered stairwell. From the foyer’s corner, a tall clock in an inlaid-mahogany case offered seven chimes to underscore the Roman hour on its dial.

  Oliver had built the walnut bookshelves in the library to hold their rows of leather-bound old b
ooks. Against a blank wall was a huge, carved nineteenth-century armoire, nine feet high, which he had fitted with shelves that now held an assortment of liquor. On the fireplace mantel was an array of Staffordshire figures. The Staffordshire collection was Oliver’s pride and there were more than fifty figures scattered around the house -milkmaids, sailors, Napoleons, Garibaldis, Little Red Riding Hoods, and crude, rosy-cheeked farm boys.

  On a marble table in the foyer were displayed what had become the legendary Cribb and Molineaux, poised in their eternal pugilistic confrontation. The story of the Roses’ first meeting had been repeated in the household ad infinitum.

  Over the library fireplace hung a large English oil, a hunting scene, appropriate to the leather Chesterfield couch and matching chairs in front of it.

  It was, Barbara admitted, a mishmash room, but perfect for squatting around a heavy, low oak ‘rent table,’ on a Sarouk blue-and-red Persian rug, to have Sunday dinners.

  ‘It seems to be the only time we’re all together,’ Barbara had told her, offering a mysterious, wistful look, disturbingly out of character.

  By the time Oliver arrived, with Josh trailing smugly behind, the platters of cassoulet and pate and the big wooden salad bowl had been laid out. An unsuspecting Eve picked at the banana bread and dropped little morsels in her mouth, unaware of the impending surprise.

  The family squatted around the table while Oliver, with great ceremony, poured the Lafite-Rothschild ’59 into crystal wineglasses. He looked about, offering a cryptic smile, winking at Barbara and lifting his glass.

  ‘Before we dine on this magnificent repast,’ he said, savoring the arcane language, ‘we must toast this moment of triumph.’ He looked at Eve, who smiled broadly, two rougelike puffs of excitement on each apple cheekbone. ‘B-minus will not an A make, but it’s a hell of a long way from F.’ Josh snickered. He always brought home straight A’s and was not above teasing his sister on that score. ‘And a longer way from H.’