Reinhart's Women: A Novel

by Thomas Berger

  Winona ran her tongue inside her upper lip. “I guess we don’t have a choice.”

  Reinhart grasped the phone. “You or me? ...I’m not trying to dodge the job, but don’t you think it wouldn’t be quite as bad if you...”

  “Sure, Daddy. Sure.” She looked in the little leatherbound private directory for the phone number, then dialed it.

  Almost immediately she cried: “Mercer?”

  Reinhart reached for his chin.

  Winona spoke with the faint smile of incredulity. “It’s Winona, Mercer. Are you O.K.? ...Uh-huh. ... Uh-huh. Oh, I’m sure. Yeah, the vase. ... Yeah, if you want.” She covered the mouthpiece and said to Reinhart: “She says she left the car keys in the blue vase.” He went into the living room to the shelf-and-bar complex and upturned the vase: a pair of keys joined by a beaded chain fell into his left palm. He dangled them at Winona as if the whole thing made perfect sense, but he felt worse in a certain way than when Mercer had been at large. Perhaps he was the lunatic?

  He made gestures at his daughter. He feared that she might simply hang up after exchanging these polite commonplaces.

  Winona chuckled into the telephone. “I just thought of something, Mercer. How’d you get home if you left the car keys here? ...Oh. ... Well, I’m glad to hear you’re feeling better. ... Listen, any time!” Despite more violent gestures from her father she did now ring off.

  “So that’s it?” He looked at the ceiling.

  Winona was shaking her head. “She claims she took a cab home.”

  “Jesus Christ.” He strode back and forth. “I don’t know what to think. If it weren’t for Andrew, I might believe I had a hallucination. How did she sound? She was first sick as hell and then unconscious. That should have some effect on anybody.”

  “She sounded O.K.,” said Winona, shrugging and speaking in an adolescent style, which was often characteristic of her response to any questions from her father. “That’s what’s so funny.” Then she peeped at Reinhart in a fashion that could have suggested dubiety.

  “You think I imagined all of it?” He was annoyed. “Then look at what I’m going to have to clean up!”

  “No, Daddy, of course not.”

  “You didn’t know whether Blaine was there, I guess. I keep thinking of that poor guy.”

  “He may not be back yet from Willowdale.”

  “He went along with your mother? Aw, hell...” He felt he should sit down; the strain was known. But the couch, and in fact the living room as a whole, was unusable. “Let’s go to my room and talk. I’ve been on my feet a lot today.”

  In his bedroom he made an ushering gesture at the overstuffed chair in the corner, where, under an old-fashioned bridge lamp (an heirloom from his childhood home, having indeed faithfully provided light since the Depression), he had, ever since moving in, intended to settle down with a good book, but in practice he invariably flopped on the bed and watched television.

  The blanket with which he had covered Mercer was in a reassuring heap. Had it been folded and put away, he would have been in trouble. He flipped it aside now and sat on the bed’s edge. Winona accepted the chair, but hardly had she sat down in it when she rose, went to the foot of the bed, and found something on the floor.

  “Huh.” She held up a beige, waferlike object.

  “What’s that?”

  “Pad from a shoe. I guess Mercer’s heel was being chafed.”

  But he hadn’t undressed Mercer here: her shoes were in the bathroom, with the rest of her stained attire. Suddenly he remembered Helen, as if from many years before.

  “There’s a wastebasket over there,” he told Winona. “Now we’d better work out a strategy. First, let me tell you about the earlier part of the day.” He omitted any mention of Helen except as a vague personage who assisted him in the demonstration. Nor did he chide Winona for telling her mother where to find him—as she undoubtedly had told her. He spoke only of Genevieve’s obviously disturbed state at lunch. “I assume the causes had to do with her career in Chicago. When things go well, a person generally doesn’t suffer a breakdown.” He realized that he sounded insufferably smug. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what else to say. In a way I don’t want to analyze my precise feelings towards her, and if I did, frankly, I wouldn’t want to do it in front of you. A man in my situation has many responsibilities. Some of them even apply to her. I have an obligation to myself. On the other hand, I can’t be too critical, if half your blood is hers.”

  Winona was shaking her head. “Mercer can’t stand her. That’s what set her off.”

  “Who?”

  “I mean, Mother didn’t show up because Mercer walked out—like Blaine said. The fact is that Mother came down from Chicago about a week ago and announced she was going to live with them. That’s what caused Mercer’s trouble.”

  Reinhart was grinding his teeth. “Still, it was a bizarre response, no? Mercer didn’t just leave, period. She must have troubles of her own.”

  “I don’t know much of anything about her,” said Winona. “Today was the first time I’ve ever seen her alone. You know how she’s always been at the family get-togethers.”

  Reinhart felt like getting into bed and pulling the blankets over his head, but he forced himself to stand up now. “What I meant about working out a strategy was how to deal with her after this, and also what we can do about Blaine, with both his women in trouble. Think about that, will you? I’d better get to work on the living room before the stain is permanent.”

  “I’ll help, Dad,” said Winona, nobly, and got up. “Tell me what to do.”

  “Go about your business. This is my affair.” He waved a finger at her. “I mean it. I’m a veteran in such matters. A great deal of my Army service was spent on latrine duty. You go and take your bath. By the time you’re finished, I’ll have cleared the decks.” Which would be true, given even his dirty work. Winona’s sessions in the bathroom were lengthy, and until she left next morning, she would be seen only in bathrobe and turbaned towel.

  But now she said neutrally: “You don’t want to hear the details about Mother, I guess.”

  “If you want to tell them.”

  “I met Mercer at this drugstore, in some mall over at Elmhurst. I hardly knew what to say, never having exchanged more than ordinary greetings with her. But it turned out O.K. I didn’t have to talk. She just wanted someone to listen to her troubles.”

  “That’s often the way, Winona,” said her father. “And you make a very sympathetic listener.”

  “You trained me, Daddy, if so. Remember all the times...”

  As a young teenager she had often come to Reinhart with her problems. The tenderness of this reminiscence was somewhat limited now by his acceptance of the truth that such confidences were things of the past.

  “So Mother shows up there a couple of weeks ago, walking in unannounced so far as Mercer was concerned. But of course it turned out that Blaine simply hadn’t told her Mother was coming! Now, Mother needless to say began right away to take over, and to keep the peace Mercer—who’s anyway a polite sort of person—wouldn’t resist. But Mother simply takes that kind of thing as surrender—”

  “Yes, yes,” Reinhart said quickly, a sour taste in the back of his throat. No wonder at Mercer’s performance in the living room. “We don’t have to dwell on that subject.” But he couldn’t forbear from adding: “I’m the world’s foremost authority on it.”

  “Well, Mercer and Blaine aren’t any too intimate on things of this sort, apparently.” Here Winona sniffed disdainfully, reminding Reinhart of her immunity to heterosexual failures.

  “She made a mistake in letting herself be run out of her own house,” he said. “You might say I did the same, ten years ago, but it was mostly your mother’s house at the time, and she had lots of justification for her dim view of me in those days.”

  “Well,” said Winona, “I’ll tell you what she says you’re going to do now: get married to her again.”

  So he was not the only p
erson to whom Genevieve had spoken on that subject: he had not even been the first.

  He stood up, leaving the springy side-of-bed without the aid of hands: his legs were not yet finished. “Listen, how about going out to dinner with your old dad? This would seem the night to get out of this place for a change. And I’ll even pick up the tab—if you’ll lend it to me.” He was no longer so sensitive about taking money from his daughter, now that he had worked at least half a day.

  “Daddy, are you going to remarry Mother?”

  “I see the question bothers you. Do you mean you’d like to see us back together after all these years?”

  “Oh, God, no,” Winona said on one intake of breath.

  “Good,” said Reinhart. “Because it’s not going to happen.”

  But Winona had more to say, more than she had said or so much as implied on this subject in all her life, but obviously she had been storing up her thoughts. “I hate her, Daddy.” She struck both arms of the chair, but the movement was not that of a little girl in tantrum. Nor did Winona, an old addict of tears, look even close to weeping now. Indeed there was a glint of metal in her eye, the like of which Reinhart had seen only in—Genevieve’s. It had taken him a quarter of a century to find this lone resemblance between mother and daughter.

  “That’s your business, Winona. I acknowledge your feeling. If I said anything further it would be offensive to the gods. Now, let’s get to our respective tasks and then go out to dinner in what—an hour?”

  Winona got up. “Gee, Dad, I wish I had known...” She mumbled something.

  “You’re saying you’re engaged.”

  She blurted: “I have to see Grace.”

  “Oh. Well, good. Give her my—” Reinhart had started to leave the room, but he stopped now and turned and said to Winona, walking just behind him: “You might ask her whether I’ve still got my job—and where I should go tomorrow morning, if so.”

  “Oh,” Winona said smugly. “You’ve got it—if you want it.”

  “No,” Reinhart said. “I don’t want it on that basis, Winona.”

  She almost wailed: “I didn’t mean anything! I mean, what I meant was, why wouldn’t you have the job? Grace is not going to be impressed by what some crazy woman told her. ... I’m sorry. But you should have seen her.”

  “Your mother? You were at Blaine’s?”

  “After what Mercer told me, I really thought I had to speak to him. While I was over there Mother came back from lunch with you. To show you how far gone she is, Daddy—she was raving that you hired some Mafia hit man to murder her.”

  “Christ Almighty.”

  “What choice did I have but to call for help?”

  “It was you?”

  “Do you think Blaine would have had the guts?”

  Reinhart shook his head. “Me neither. To have someone committed...”

  “If someone is being violent? She threw a heavy vase against the wall.”

  “So they came and put her in a straitjacket or something?”

  “No.” Winona laughed coarsely. “I called the police. They came and talked to her and to us for a while, and then they called an ambulance. When it came, the attendants gave her a shot of tranquillizer, I guess.”

  “So the cops were called twice in the same afternoon for members of our family?” Reinhart shrugged. “We’re getting to be like the Jukes and the Kallikaks.”

  “Who?”

  “It doesn’t matter.” He finally left the room, clearing the doorway so that Winona too could emerge.

  “Some gangster in a white Cadillac!” she howled.

  Reinhart marveled at how a diseased mind could put quotidian phenomena to its own use. Genevieve had seen the car from which Helen Clayton had emerged to join him in the parking lot. He had not really thought much about that episode, but he realized now that he had assumed the driver thereof not to be Helen’s husband. She had said she was never free for lunch, and she was hardly a newlywed. Ergo, she met a lover every day at noon and not a spouse. And yet she had enlisted Reinhart as still another alternative!

  “But wait a minute,” he said now to Winona. “Your mother says both that I am going to remarry her and have her killed?”

  “She’s nuts, isn’t she?”

  He went to the kitchen to fetch the materials and equipment needed to clean up the living room. For a good many years of his life not only the starring roles, but even all the interesting subsidiary parts, had been played by women.

  CHAPTER 9

  BLAINE CALLED HIS FATHER on the morning after his mother had been taken to the hospital and his wife had returned home from her escapade.

  “We have to talk,” were his first words on the telephone, and this morning Reinhart found it easy to forgive his failure, habitual, to offer any kind of greeting.

  “Come over here if you want privacy,” Reinhart said. “Your sister has gone off to work, and I’m alone. I had a job myself for a day, but already I’m on vacation.” He said that as a lightener-of-the-moment, but no sooner was it out when he regretted having given Blaine the opportunity to remember, from back in the bad old days, how often his occupational matters had come to grief.

  “That’s how it usually goes, doesn’t it?” Blaine asked. “You haven’t changed, and now it’s happened, hasn’t it? You’ve finally driven Mother beyond the point of no return.”

  In another time Reinhart would surely have risen to this bait, but now he maintained self-control. “No, if that were true, you wouldn’t be calling me now. I’m not, ten years after the fact, the cause of her troubles, and you know it, Blaine. So let’s please have a minimum of horseshit.”

  The admonition had the desired effect. Blaine was silent for a moment, and then he said, somewhat sullenly but without the accusatory note: “They’ll be examining her for a day or so, I guess. But what happens then? Will she be kept in the hospital? What will that cost? But if she comes out, where will she go?”

  “That could be a problem. Has she really closed out in Chicago?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Only that she lived there nine-ten years. She must have made friendships, associations, had some kind of home. She wasn’t back much to visit here, if ever: am I right?”

  “We were always in close touch,” said Blaine. “I saw her frequently.”

  “In Chicago, though, right? What I’m getting at is—”

  “I know what you’re getting at,” said Blaine. “You’re telling her to go back to Chicago. You’re saying you’re washing your hands—”

  “No, I’m not saying that, Blaine. Not at all. I’ll do what I can to help. But what I am saying is that I shall not live with her again.”

  “Then how could you help?” Blaine replied contemptuously.

  Perhaps in involuntary resentment, Reinhart asked: “How is Mercer?”

  “Mercer?” said Blaine. “Why would you ask about Mercer?”

  “She’s my daughter-in-law, I think.”

  Blaine said loftily: “I try to keep my own family matters from her, frankly. She was raised among a different kind of people.”

  “And the boys?”

  “Don’t worry about them. They’re being fed.”

  This struck Reinhart as a bizarre thing to say, but he passed over it. “Look, Blaine, I’d go to see your mother at the hospital, but I suspect it wouldn’t help her to recover. I don’t intend to give her a home, and I could scarcely contribute financially if I wanted to. And, frankly, I don’t think I’d want to. When I was younger I wouldn’t have had the nerve to say such a thing, or when even younger, even to think it, but with age one gets morally braver.”

  “Brave? You call it brave?” Blaine snorted. Reinhart was prepared to hear a vicious attack on himself, and was wondering how much of it he must tolerate. The boy had certainly been under pressure. Perhaps his father could do him some service by sustaining an assault, rolling with the punches.

  But Blaine all at once changed his tune. “O.K.,” he
said explosively, but without apparent rancor. “What I’m really calling for is to invite you and my sister to dinner tonight.”

  “You’re joking,” Reinhart said quickly, and then apologized with the same speed. “I didn’t mean that. What I do mean is that I accept, thank you. I don’t know about Winona, but I’ll leave a message with her agency and get back to you when she calls.” He added prudently: “If she turns out to be busy, am I still invited?”

  “No,” said Blaine.

  Reinhart found it possible to laugh at this. “We’ll be there unless you hear otherwise. What time would that be?”

  “Seven,” said Blaine. “It shouldn’t take long, tell her. Tell her I very much want her to make it.”

  “Yeah,” Reinhart said and hung up. Some invitation! He dialed the agency and left the message. And then he called Grace Greenwood’s number, but her secretary told him she was out.

  “Will you ask her to give Carl Reinhart a ring?” He still didn’t know about the future of his job. Winona had apparently come home the night before, after he was asleep, and then left for work this morning before he got up. She sometimes did this, with the energy of youth. Reinhart lacked in one symptom of age: he was not an early riser.

  Before hanging up, he asked and received Helen Clayton’s home number.

  When Helen answered he said: “Hi. This is—”

  “Carl!” said she. “How’d it come out, Carl? I was thinking of calling you, but I didn’t want to jeopardize anything.”

  He told her about Mercer’s adventures.

  “Well,” she said finally, “let’s hope that’s the last we hear of the problem. It might have been a one-shot, and from now on she’ll keep her nose clean. You know, they talk about menopause, but a lot of women have their real trouble when they’re younger. Especially nowadays.”

  “Is that right?” Reinhart continued to find new depths in Helen’s sense of things.

  “Expectations are greater. That always leads to trouble. Just because people expect more doesn’t mean they’ve got it in them to deliver more.”

  “I should tell you, Helen,” said Reinhart, “I get a lot of comfort in talking with you.”