Reinhart's Women: A Novel

by Thomas Berger

  “You have me at a disadvantage,” said Reinhart. “I don’t quite grasp what it is you’re doing here.”

  “This,” said Brother Valentine, “is Paradise Farm.” He spoke as if the name were familiar to all: if not, it would be the worst of taste to admit one’s ignorance of it.

  Reinhart offered: “An experiment in communal living?”

  Valentine gestured grandly towards the fields. He had a style that rose above the blue denims: ten years of age had given him more force of presence than he had displayed in the SS type of uniform favored by the Black Assassins.

  “Waves of purple grain,” said he, “soon enough. God will provide an abundant harvest for His chosen people.”

  Reinhart sucked a tooth. “You’re Jews?”

  “Metaphorically,” said Brother Valentine, “in the sense of the Judaism that is the basis of judiciousness, which leads to good judgment.”

  “Judge not, lest ye, and so on,” said Reinhart, giving back as good as he was being given: Raymond was mocking him now.

  Brother Valentine suddenly understood this. “People of weak imagination and feeble drive must be given a mystique,” said he, “rather than a rationale that they are incapable of entertaining. Therefore we have certain slogans and façons de parler. You will despise them, but be tolerant: they are needed, I assure you.”

  “Raymond—uh, Brother Valentine,” Reinhart said, “you’ll forgive me, I’m sure, but needed for what?”

  “For God’s work,” said the black man. “We shall restore and revitalize this fallow farm, and in so doing bring some human souls back from the dead.”

  Reinhart put his hands in the pockets of his blazer and kicked idly at the dust. “Those souls inside the house?”

  “Oh, don’t they look like much?” Valentine asked this with sufficient self-righteousness to shame Reinhart.

  “No, of course I don’t mean that. But aren’t they a bit too old to do heavy farm labor? I hasten to say that I would consider myself over the hill for something like that.”

  “Brother Reinhart,” said Valentine, “the people you see in the kitchen at the moment are not my entire flock. The younger folk are out in the fields, at work. Your earlier concern for the day of rest was well voiced, insofar as it concerned the world of routine commerce and excess consumption. But here, at Paradise, we toil only for our daily bread.”

  Reinhart still could not decide whether the man was sincere or a charlatan, but most enterprises since the Renaissance have necessarily partaken of both the honest and the bogus in equal amounts to preserve the balance known as modern civilization, and a project that managed to do no more than sway, without tipping, could survive at least for a while.

  A certain void in the corner of the eye told Reinhart that his son had taken French leave. He excused himself. Trotting around the corner of the house, he saw that Blaine indeed was already behind the wheel of the Continental.

  “No, you don’t!” He moved himself to block the projected backing-up. At length Blaine climbed out in disgruntlement.

  “Stop pretending that I am trying to dump you here. Honestly, Dad.”

  “Don’t worry about it, Blaine. You won’t succeed.”

  Valentine appeared. “Might I urge you to stay for supper?”

  “I’m afraid not,” said Reinhart, who regretted having to turn the invitation down: the food was certain to be interesting. “My son has an engagement.” He looked around. “I assume you have more sleeping accommodations in the barn?”

  Brother Valentine inclined his head ever so slightly, perhaps in assent. “I was really hoping you could stay for a meal. We could dine a bit earlier than usual if that’s the problem.”

  Reinhart remembered he had eaten nothing all day since his coffee and toast on arising. The thought of the poached eggs, now chilled, was attractive: he might even take the time to inundate them in aspic, postponing the meal until the shimmering amber jelly was firm, then plunging through it to pierce and release the yolks, a rich, cool, golden cream; this on a bed of Boston lettuce. Followed by what? A chop or cutlet? Hmm... Meanwhile he answered Valentine.

  “I’m afraid we just can’t, but thank you for the invitation. Perhaps another time. I’ll be back later on to see how you’re doing here. Maybe you’ll have some extra garden vegetables to sell?”

  Brother Valentine threw back his head. “We’ll have fresh eggs,” said he, “and frying chickens. Milk warm from the teat, if that’s your pleasure, and farm-made cheese, butter from the churn. Bread from our own wheat, ground in our own mill, baked in our ovens. Country hams from our hogs, steaks from our steers, legs of lambs from our own flock, scallopini from our calves. We’ll have a lake yonder, stocked with fish. A peach orchard and a vineyard. We’ll make beer, cider, and wines. We’ll grind and stuff our own sausages, flavored with our own herbs and spices. We’ll put up vegetables and make jams, relishes, and chutneys.”

  Blaine was wrinkling his nose in boredom. Reinhart realized suddenly that his son had probably never really liked food: there were people like that. For himself he could listen for hours to lists of provender. He reluctantly put out his hand.

  “It’s been a great pleasure to see you again, Raymond. Yours is a wonderful vision. I hope you’re able to realize it.” He decided to produce a piece of wisdom. “That’s the only thing that seems to make sense by now: to make something, or anyway try to. I wish you well.”

  Brother Valentine’s face was working in a strange way. Finally he burst out in desperation: “The thing is, I haven’t eaten since yesterday. I was wondering whether you might be good for a Big Mac.”

  “There’s a McDonald’s close by?” Reinhart could think of no other prompt response: he had been taken utterly by surprise.

  “Look,” Valentine said, shrugging, “anything’d be O.K. Burger King, Colonel Sanders, Arthur Treacher’s Fish and Chips, Dairy Queen... they’re all within a mile.”

  “O.K., Blaine?” Reinhart asked. “Can you spare a few minutes for this errand of mercy?” He turned back to Valentine. “I’m sure he can. Come on.”

  But Raymond né Mainwaring shook his head. “It would make a bad impression if I were seen leaving at this moment, when there’s a certain crise de nerfs around here. If you could just drop the burgers off on your way back, with perhaps some fries and Cokes and—”

  “You don’t mean—”

  “Well, now, I can’t very well eat in front of all this hungry folk, can I?” Raymond asked indignantly.

  “So that’s food for how many?”

  “The young field workers are due back soon.” Raymond closed his eyes for calculations. “Say a couple dozen portions of everything, whatever you get.”

  “I’ve got about seven dollars,” said Reinhart. “About seventy would be required. Blaine, what are you carrying?”

  His son snorted. “A dirty handkerchief,” he cried, plunged back into the Continental, and started the engine. Reinhart feared that his own body and Valentine’s would no longer prove a deterrent to Blaine’s callous getaway, and lest they disappear under the wide trunk of the enormous car, which was already vibrating with power under slim restraint, he drew the black man aside. “This is one of those crazy things,” he said. “Because we can’t afford to feed you all, you all will go hungry. There’s some basic flaw in all communal efforts. I wish I had the answer.”

  Brother Valentine stared at him for a moment. Reinhart would have been at a loss to say what emotion was being felt by the man.

  “All right,” Splendor’s son said finally, turning away. “You’ll see: we’ll have something fine here.”

  CHAPTER 4

  “GRACE? CARL REINHART.”

  “Yes, Carl?”

  “I’ll accept your offer.”

  “Eight A.M. tomorrow, my office,” said Grace. “Know how to get there?” Obviously she wouldn’t waste time telling him if he knew already.

  “Glenwood, in the industrial park, isn’t it? I can find it.”

&nbs
p; “See you there,” said Grace. She seemed especially abrupt even for her. He wondered unhappily if he had called her away from some intimate moment with Winona.

  He hung up the pay phone and returned to the car in which Blaine sat impatiently revving the engine.

  “I don’t regret having gone to the farm,” said Reinhart. “Raymond—Brother Valentine—is an enterprising fellow. Seeing him reminded me that I really did consider his father a good friend. I do want to keep in touch. The results will no doubt be disappointing, but I like the idea he is trying to do something on that order.”

  Blaine said: “Look, if worst comes to worst, I may be able to find something for you at the office. Speaking of blacks, they nowadays won’t do custodial work.”

  “Have I translated that correctly?” Reinhart asked. “You’ll put me on as janitor?”

  “Dad,” Blaine said slowly, turning back to stare briefly into the hub of the steering wheel, “you can’t do anything. You have no skills.” He threw his head back. “God, that’s the kind of thing one should be saying to some high-school dropout and not to a man of fifty-four.”

  “Look, old boy, I have a confession to make,” Reinhart said, clapping his son on the shoulder, a blow from which Blaine recoiled slightly, in an instinctive pretense that it was given with malicious intent. This was too quick to be studied. Their basic enmity, at least from Blaine’s point of view, was profound. “I’ve got a job. You don’t have to worry about me.”

  Blaine pulled away from the curb. They were more than halfway home, already in the outskirts of the city, when his father had asked him to stop at the outdoor telephone. “Please,” he said, “don’t bother to spin fantasies for my sake. Don’t waste the effort.”

  Foolishly, Reinhart was stung by the implication that he was lying. “All right,” said he, “you just ask Grace Greenwood. I start tomorrow. I’m going to demonstrate food products.”

  “You’re going to work for Winona’s girl friend?” Blaine asked incredulously. “You’re trading your daughter to an old dyke for a job?”

  “Remember ten years or so ago, when you were always able to get a rise out of me?” Reinhart asked calmly. “That was the era for that sort of thing, the baiting of the older by the younger. It was especially offensive because people of my generation had always believed they held nothing more sacred than the welfare of their children. To find that the children disagreed with this conviction was devastating. Now we have come to a time when a son can accuse his father of being a pimp for his homosexual daughter—and the father, shameless as he is, fails even to be insulted by the accusation.” Reinhart shook his head and spoke really to himself: “Now you can see why I have submerged myself in cooking—food is really kinder than people.”

  Blaine drove the remaining blocks in silence, chewing his thin underlip. In profile he somewhat resembled his maternal grandfather, Blaine Raven, a penniless snob, a disbarred lawyer, and a man who had never been sober for the last twenty years of life; the day finally came when once too often he fell into bed, lighted cigar in clenched teeth, and burned himself alive. Reinhart’s son was not so good-looking as his grandfather. Neither, in all fairness, could he be said to resemble him in much else but snobbery. Blaine Reinhart, his father had to admit, was far from being all bad. Notwithstanding his “radical” youth he had got good grades in college and had remained to take his degree, which was more than could be said for Reinhart, who had dropped out of school to support his wife, who was pregnant with—Blaine. How strange could be the most banal of life’s sequences.

  When Blaine pulled up before the apartment house he had obviously come to a decision. Not unkindly in manner, he looked at his father.

  “I’m sure you won’t believe this, but for years I’ve actually been your defender against a Certain Person.”

  “Your mother,” Reinhart said.

  Blaine blinked gravely. “No sarcasm, please! The point is that in recent years I’ve got some sense of what a male human being is faced with.”

  This philosophical temper was a new one for Blaine—at least in his father’s experience. He seemed to expect something. Reinhart therefore shrugged inscrutably.

  But Blaine made an unpleasant expression and turned his head. “What’s the use?”

  Reinhart said: “Blaine, will you please go ahead with your statement? I’m not resisting you, believe me.”

  Blaine peered at his father and said slowly, suspiciously: “Women can’t always understand the pressures on us.”

  “Good heavens,” Reinhart said, “you’re becoming a chip off the old block—if you’ll forgive the insult. But the irony is that times seem to have changed in that regard, too, and I suppose so have I. The female propaganda, like the black and all the others, has got really tedious, and like them all it is at least half lie, but one useful thing to have learned from it, maybe, is that no one understands the pressures on anyone else, irrespective of sex. Beyond that, I don’t want to think again in this lifetime about those psychosocial bromides. Surely this is the most boring era in the history of the race!” He moved to open his side of the car, then turned back. “I couldn’t interest you in an exquisite dish of eggs-in-aspic, could I?”

  Though distracted, Blaine managed to reject this invitation with a hideous grimace before going on to prove that he would disregard his father’s statement as well: “What do they know?”

  “Son,” said Reinhart, “are you trying to tell me something?”

  Blaine instantly drew back, asking coldly: “What does that mean?”

  “I don’t have a clue,” said Reinhart, almost guiltily. “Forgive me. I thought maybe you wanted to talk about something personal.”

  “If I did,” Blaine answered, “I would hardly—”

  “To hell with you.” Reinhart opened the door. “I’m not going to listen to another insult.”

  Blaine set a precedent here. He slid to the passenger’s side and caught the door as Reinhart flung it to. “Wait a minute, Dad,” he cried. “I didn’t mean it the way you thought.”

  Reinhart turned back, but Blaine simply stared at him through the window of the Lincoln as he slowly closed its door.

  “Do you have anything more to say at this time, Blaine?” He wondered whether anyone else ever had such a son.

  “Why haven’t I ever been able to talk to you?” This was wailed with no apparent bitterness, simply in helpless incomprehension.

  “The answer to that, son,” said Reinhart, “was supplied by a Roman named Virgil, if I remember my Comparative Lit: ‘There are tears in things.’”

  As he expected, the response got them both over a bad moment. Blaine, who in whatever phase despised literature, leaped back to the driver’s seat and positively sped away.

  Reinhart felt rotten about this, but probably less so than if they had continued to talk. It seemed likely that Blaine had a problem with his wife, but how to deal with him when whatever one said was taken as an attack?

  The doorman on this shift was a large middle-aged Negro of a vanishing breed regardless of race: the competent professional servitor. But he had either misidentified Reinhart early on or mocked him, for some reason, in an honorific style.

  “Good afternoon, Colonel.” The doorman opened one panel of the double glass portal.

  “Hi, Andrew. It’s a lovely day, isn’t it?”

  “Clement, Colonel, very clement.” Except for the use of the undeserved title, Andrew was a specialist in the mot juste, another earmark of the now rare specimen. Brother Valentine’s father had been that sort of guy. Reinhart was suddenly the prisoner of an exquisitely painful nostalgia as he traversed the gleaming, arid lobby and entered the stainless-steel cubicle, which presently lifted him to the fourth floor.

  He turned his key in the lock and opened the door of the apartment. Ah, Winona was home. Her keys and change purse lay on the little foyer table, and he could smell a flowery scent. Another thing done by cooking was, so to speak, to hone the nose. His daughter stuck to no sp
ecial perfume for long: she had access to many.

  He called her name.

  After a long moment her closed bedroom door opened a crack. “Daddy?”

  “The very man,” said Reinhart. “May I fix us a bite of supper?”

  “Gee, I don’t think I can eat anything more today.” Winona opened the door sufficiently wide to display her head. No doubt she was changing clothes for the nth time. In answer to Reinhart’s cluck-cluck of dismay she quickly added: “I ate a while ago. Honestly!”

  “O.K. Want to talk?”

  Winona let her head sink. “I’m dog-tired at the moment, Dad. Do you mind?”

  “Of course not! But I do think you’ll be interested: I took the job with Grace.”

  Something came and went in her eyes. “Oh.”

  “So everything’s O.K. now, dear.”

  But Winona was not responding in an appropriate way. Reinhart amplified his statement: “I’ll have an income, you see.” He realized that he had not even asked Grace about the salary. “I’m going back into the world. You don’t have to take care of me any more.”

  Winona looked at him with feeling. She quickly made some manipulations behind the door and emerged, wearing a white terry-cloth bathrobe.

  Reinhart said: “Nothing lasts forever, darling. We’ve had many good years.” This was beginning to sound like the divorce-of-still-good-friends, which one heard about from time to time but which was always allegedly corrupted by the greed of the respective lawyers. Reinhart’s proper marriage had been sundered under conditions of maximum hatred between the principals.

  Winona came to him. “If that means you’re leaving, then all right.” Her eyes glistened. “But I’m not going anywhere.”

  Reinhart backed away two steps. “You’re not going to be Grace’s roommate?” He had a bizarre feeling that he could not identify: a kind of dread, intermixed with pleasure, whereas of course he should simply have been overjoyed.

  “That’s the last place I’d go!”