by Daniel Klein
Stephanie takes the ball low in the bounce and swats it back to Bunny’s backhand. Bunny replies with a drop shot so loaded with backspin it bounces backward towards the net, but Stephanie is familiar with Bunny’s spin game from watching her play doubles so she has anticipated the shot. She not only gets to the ball easily, but sends it sailing right into the dedans to make the point. That is something else Stephanie noticed watching Bunny play: The girl is lax about protecting her dedans. The set is now tied, three all.
Switching sides for Stephanie to take service end, she again glances up at the gallery. Her dad salutes her, smiling broadly. Mark’s face, however, exudes strained nonchalance—very strained. No, there is not a particle of doubt about who the parties to the wager are and who is betting on whom.
Waiting for Bunny to announce she is ready to accept service, Stephanie is again struck by her opponent’s genteel bearing, particularly the way her elongated neck sets up her perfectly oval head. From Advanced Placement Biology, Stephanie understands enough about Mendel’s law of independent assortment to know that the Saunders genetic line has been class-selective for scores of generations; squat-neck genes—even recessive squat-neck genes—need not apply. Bunny nods and Stephanie whacks the ball off the penthouse into the far corner of the service box. Bunny stumbles trying to get behind it. Point, Cyzinski.
Only now does Stephanie realize she can take the match. Going in, she did not believe she stood a chance. In fact, going in she did not care. The charade was over, so what difference did it make? But now Stephanie can taste victory and the bittersweet irony that would come with it.
On the next serve, she catches the edge of the penthouse, sending the ball to a near corner of the service box, then skittering into the net before Bunny can reach it. Stephanie wins the game in straight serves. Different as royal tennis is from the game Stephanie grew up playing, the looseness and spontaneous inventiveness aroused by winning a string of straight points is the same. Stephanie is in the zone. On a roll. This is the way to end this whole episode, she thinks. Not with a whimper, but a bang.
Stephanie takes the first set, 6–4, the second—and the match—6–2. Coming to the net to shake Stephanie’s hand, Bunny bows her regal head and says, “You’re beautiful,” and Stephanie thinks, ‘No, you are beautiful, but I won.’
Her father had indeed bet on her and won. As they roll by the Harvard river houses, he proposes they use the winnings to splurge on a fancy dinner in Harvard Square. He even has a restaurant in mind, Chez Henri.
“No, thanks, Dad,” Stephanie says. “I kinda want to get home. A hamburger on the Pike is fine.”
“Hey, Steph, we’re celebrating!” Terry Cyzinski says. He has been in an ecstatic mood ever since her win. He takes a right onto John F. Kennedy Street toward the Square.
“I’m not going to Harvard, Dad,” Stephanie says in a flat, matter-of-fact voice. She had planned to tell him this today, but not until they were home.
“What are you talking about?” Terry says. He laughs.
“I’m just not. I’m not going to get in. The place on the team is already filled. It’s a done deal, Dad. Somebody lied to you.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.” Terry keeps driving, only slowing at intersections to read the street signs. “We’re looking for Shepard Street. It should be on the left.”
Stephanie watches her father’s face bob up and down as he searches for the street that will lead them to Chez Henri. She has always admired his single-mindedness; it inspired her to do her best in school and sports since she was in grammar school. But in the last few months the mania that drives that single-mindedness has become impossible for her to ignore. Until this moment, that realization saddened Stephanie, but watching him now in a fit of dumb denial, she feels contempt crowding out her compassion.
“Bunny Saunders,” she says. “Her father was on the Harvard team. And now her brother. She goes to Andover, same year as me. She’s a legacy, you know? And she’s New England girls junior champion.”
“And you just beat her, kid!” Terry barks back at her.
“So what? That doesn’t make any difference! Nobody gives a crap about that! Don’t you get it?” Stephanie’s tone is sharper than it has ever been with either of her parents, or with any other adult, for that matter. Yes, she just beat Bunny Saunders and the grit of that win is still with her.
“Harvard will hear about what happened today. You can bet on that,” her father goes on, but his voice is already losing command. Both of them can hear that.
He turns onto Shepard Street. Chez Henri is right there. Terry halts the car in the middle of the road.
“Who told you about that open spot on the team?” Stephanie asks quietly.
Her father shrugs. “I’m a guidance counselor, for crissake. People talk to me.”
“You talked to somebody at Harvard? The coach? You talked to him personally?”
Behind them, a car stops, unable to pass. It flashes its high beams. Terry looks in his rearview mirror, then back at his daughter. He is breathing hard and his face is flushed. “I have my sources,” he murmurs.
The car behind them blasts its horn. Before Stephanie can take in what is happening, her father is out the car door stomping toward the horn-blaring car. “Shut the fuck up!” he is screaming. “Shut the fuck up or I’ll wring your neck!”
* * *
This time, Flip’s note is written in all capitals with a red Magic Marker:
“TOMORROW, 3 O’CLOCK, THE MT. I GOT US A MOTEL ROOM WITH A JACUZZI. BE READY, BABE.”
Lila crumples up his daily missive and dumps it on the floor of her locker with the others.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
In the 1620s the deVries family of Rotterdam in what is now The Netherlands unknowingly participated in a social experiment that would resonate in Western civilization forever after. Jacob deVries, a retired ship captain turned shipping agent, presided over a household of relatives, servants, business associates and visiting clients, plus the occasional former shipmate in town between voyages, for a total of sometimes up to thirty occupants. At night, every room of the deVries dockside residence was slept in, including the chamber where Jacob conducted business by day, the laundry and cooking outbuilding behind the main structure, and the long ground floor quarter where the ten-meter board on which meals were served was transformed into a bed by covering it with a silk drape imported from Persia. This last was the boudoir of Jacob and his second wife, Marta, a woman twenty years his junior whom he had married one year after his first wife succumbed to tuberculosis. Up to seven others slept on the floor of this same chamber.
Marta, light-haired, blue-eyed, and well-proportioned, had lived and worked in the house since she was ten, the age when girls of her social class typically left their parents to earn their keep and a pittance more. At the end of each month Marta delivered her entire five stuiver salary to her parents’ door. She began as a maid, moved on to become a kitchen helper, and was the household chef at the time of her mistress’s illness and death. With Jacob’s blessing, Marta retained this last responsibility after their marriage in spite of the fact that it was considered unbecoming for a woman of her new station to do any household work other than supervision. But Marta took great pleasure in planning meals, shopping in the market, and preparing food, and more significantly, Jacob, a gourmand by the standards of any era, loved the way she cooked. In permitting this small exception to the cultural mores of Rotterdam—in fact, of all of Western Europe—Jacob unwittingly contributed to the start of a social revolution. It began in the kitchen and climaxed in the bedroom.
Jacob deVries adored the way his new young wife prepared oysters: shucked, dipped in batter, fried in pig fat, and served in a sauce of her own invention whose ingredients included beaten eggs, minced onion, and a spice recently come upon in Constantinople and brought back to Rotterdam by a sailor in the family’s employ—cumin. Jacob could eat the dish four and five times a week, but he was denied this indulgence b
ecause the cost of oysters was prohibitive—they had to be imported from France—and the supply of cumin limited. This, in itself, would not have prevented Jacob from enjoying this dish regularly, but the custom of the age was for the entire household to eat the same meal at the same time and, well off as Jacob was, he could not afford a steady diet of oysters for twenty to thirty people.
Marta had a brainstorm that resolved this predicament: She would prepare and serve her husband’s and her own meal separately. From the perspective of a mere century later, Marta’s proposal would hardly appear ingenious; and certainly from the vantage point of one of her New World descendents, Lila deVries, Marta’s idea would seem like a total ‘no-brainer.’ But the conventions of a late-Renaissance household were as fixed a reality as, say, the conventions of a twenty-first century American high school where it would be unimaginable for pubescent boys and girls to sit at their desks stark naked, logical as that might seem on a ninety degree day.
Jacob was caught in a wrenching dilemma: Oysters or convention. Again, his appetite won.
This seemingly small change in the way things were done chez deVries set the stage for a series of other small changes, starting with the request by Jacob the Younger, Jacob deVries’s eldest son and right-hand man in the family business, to sit at the same meal table with his father and stepmother. The younger Jacob made his entreaty more as a matter of pride than of a lust for oysters; indeed, in short order he tired of Oysters Marta, although the same pride that brought him to the table kept him there. The second son, Henrik, also in the family business, predictably became jealous of his elder brother’s privilege and requested a place at the table too. It was only a matter of two years’ time before all of Jacob the Elder’s children shared their meals with him and Marta.
From this new order, there followed other readjustments. The cost of feeding oysters to a table of eight was straining the family budget, so Marta prepared separate dishes for the rest of the family, most of which, to the children’s unspoken relief, were heavy on potatoes and sausages. In time, much as Marta enjoyed preparing food, enough was enough, so she turned over the task of feeding the non-immediate family to the help.
It was about this same time when Marta, emboldened by the ease with which old routines could be revised, suggested a change in the household’s sleeping arrangements or, more to the point, its accommodations for sexual activity. Although the word ‘inhibited’ did not exist in Middle Dutch, it perfectly describes how Marta felt about engaging in sexual congress with her husband in a heavily populated room. She was not, of course, so ahead of her time that she was concerned about her own pleasure in the act, but hearing the rustle of the room’s other occupants while she lay on the table top as her oyster-invigorated husband energetically gratified his lust made her shrink with shame. And this, she believed, was the reason she had not conceived a child with Jacob in over three years of marriage. She told him so. Thus it was that Jacob and Marta decamped for a third floor chamber of their very own where, in a matter of months, the seed was planted for Lila’s direct ancestor.
For Jacob and Marta deVries, these subtle shifts in household arrangements stopped here. But generated by the same zeitgeist—if for different particular reasons—families like the deVrieses all over the Lowlands were making similar incremental changes in the way they ate and slept, emptied their bowels, and made love. Family diners became segregated from unrelated boarders, interior doors were installed and closed, squat pots were curtained off, and sex became a sequestered enterprise. The twin values of private space and personal comfort had slipped almost unnoticed under their front doors, and with them came the concept of home—a place where families could thrive.
* * *
It is a Sunday morning in mid-February and Wendell, having left Lila sleeping in her bedroom, is taking Binx for a walk. It is an overcast day with the promise of snow and Wendell is swinging his arms and slapping his chest to keep his blood sprinting ahead of the penetrating cold air. Meanwhile Binx, dog to the bone, laps up street slush as if it is hot cocoa. They are heading for town.
Wendell’s mind is frozen. Even reading poetry, a diversion that has always stirred his thoughts, leaves him cold. At home in his easy chair when he tries to recapture the once-dependable solace induced by reading old favorites, he is overcome with gloom. Last night, waiting to pick up Lila at her job, he opened his collection of William Blake poems to the “Songs of Innocence” and read the familiar lines,
The Sun descending in the west,
The evening star does shine.
The birds are silent in their nest,
And I must seek for mine.
But Blake’s scene of a tranquil nightfall only deepened Wendell’s melancholy. It provoked an image of Franny waiting interminably for the sun to rise. Wendell set the book on top of the living room’s new centerpiece, his Brenkert projector, without reading on.
Binx trots down Mahaiwe Street making for Write Now, unaware that it is Sunday, the one day of the week Wendell takes off. A woman Franny recommended, Tiffany Korand, fills in for him, selling the Sunday newspapers. As Wendell and Binx approach the shop, Wendell sees Michael Dowd exiting, a two-pound paper under each arm. In addition to wanting to spend as much of his Sundays as he can with Lila, Wendell’s reason for hiring Tiffany was to savor one idle chat-free day a week, so he stoops and scurries past Dowd without a word. Binx stops in front of the Phoenix.
Wendell automatically reaches into his pocket for his ring of keys and lets them in. He wonders if Livio works on Sundays; Livio’s family did not come with him from Rome and Wendell doubts he has any friends in Grandville, so what else would there be for the man to do on a Sunday? But the theater is dark. Maybe Livio is catching mass over at St. Peter’s, even if they no longer conduct it in Latin the way Livio must surely believe it is supposed to be done.
Wendell switches on the lights and Binx bounds up the stairs to the balcony. Wendell follows, master after mutt, and in a moment they are both inside the projection booth. This is the first time Wendell has been in here since he cleared out the booth months ago.
Empty, it feels twice the size Wendell remembered it. He steps over to the peep window that frames the stage below. Livio has completed repainting the proscenium, its now-dry Nile green embellishments far subtler to the eye than they must have appeared to the Phoenix’s original audiences in that period before pigment chemists created a screaming palette of unnatural colors.
Gazing down, Wendell waits for nostalgic thoughts; this is, after all, the spot where he spent most of the waking hours of his life. But no such thoughts come. That, too, has come to an end. ‘Too many endings,’ Wendell muses, then smiles ruefully to himself—that was a criticism he had often heard about the films he showed.
Outdoors again, Wendell gulps in cold air. He feels unaccountably refreshed. Binx is trotting down the alley between the theater and the fire station. By the time Wendell catches up with him, the dog is prancing up the embankment to the railroad tracks. In unison, they strut from tie to tie. It reminds Wendell of an animal act in an old vaudeville variety show, and he laughs out loud. This time Wendell leads the way as he and Binx descend the embankment to Methuan Road and make their way to Pleasant Street.
Wendell and his dog are now standing in front of Zion church. The temperature has risen and snow begins to fall. Wendell hears the congregation singing inside.
“Who’s that young girl dressed in white?
Wade in the Water
Must be the Children of Israelites
God’s gonna trouble the Water.”
Wendell senses a sweet synchronicity between the lilt of the hymn and the slowly falling snow, and the sweetness of the moment begins to melt his frozen heart.
Wendell and Binx are still there some ten minutes later when the church doors open and out steps Reverend Willa Jones in her black robe. She looks to the sky, smiles at the falling snow, and whoops, “Hallelujah!” Esther and her children are the first to shake the
minister’s hand on their way out. And Kaela is the first to see Wendell. She skips up to him and wraps her arms around his waist. “Hi, Wendell!”
It is because of Kaela that Esther attends Zion. Esther has not been a churchgoer since she was a child and alternated Sundays between her mother’s Eastern Orthodox and her father’s Presbyterian church, but her daughter took to Zion from the first time they attended a service there last autumn. Esther thinks the attraction comes from Kaela being nonwhite too, but it may also be the music: Kaela sings the gospel hymns she learns in the church all week long. For Esther’s son, Johnny, the after-service spread is enticement enough; he has become an authority on the differences between Martha Hodges’s sweet potato pie and Sharon deVries’s. Sharon’s is significantly sweeter.
Esther has not urged Wendell to join her and her children at services, just as she has not urged him to make any changes in his routine since Franny’s breakdown. Esther especially would not ask him to give up time on a Sunday, the day he devotes to Lila, even though the girl seems to sleep through most of that day’s daylight hours. That is why Esther has not told Wendell about her regular, after-church brunches with Bill and Sharon deVries at the Soup and Sandwich; she does not want him to feel either left out or guilty.
Bill and Sharon are right behind Esther on the church steps. It only takes Wendell a moment to realize that the thirtyish woman standing next to the couple belongs with them. What gives that away is not her face—it is darker and more African-looking than either of theirs—but her clothing. Like Bill and Sharon, she is finely dressed, her tailored, camel-hair overcoat alone enough to set her apart from the local congregants. Bill sees Wendell and shouts, “Hey, Cuz!”
A moment later, they are standing in a circle in the falling snow—Wendell, Esther and her children, Bill, Sharon, and the young woman, Emmanuelle, their niece. Introducing her to Wendell, Bill says, “Strictly speaking, she’s not a deVries, but she makes up for it by being a famous writer.”