Reinhart's Women: A Novel

by Thomas Berger

  Edie invited him to sit down. Comfortable facilities were available: a sofa upholstered in tan-flecked brown, a chair or two, modern but capacious and genial. He chose the couch, where he could expand in any direction. When he sat down, he was looking across at a long low bookcase, pleasantly variegated with spines in various hues. He thought he might ask Edie what she read, but when he looked for her, she was gone... but not far. Back of a counter, at the top of the room, was her kitchen.

  She soon returned with a glass of sherry. He could not remember that he had been asked, but perhaps he had. She found a little knee-high table at the end of the couch and brought it near him.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Me?” asked Reinhart. He smiled at her. “Sit down, why don’t you?”

  She chose the rust-colored chair.

  “Come sit on the couch,” Reinhart said. “I want to talk to you like a Dutch uncle, as they used to say. ... And don’t worry that simply because I’ve had a few drinks I will behave improperly. I have always been what the American lower-middle class thinks of as being a ‘gentleman,’ which is to say, a prude with respectable young ladies.”

  Edie smirked at this statement, but she did not blush. She sat down on the couch, at just the right distance from him: not so close as to embarrass, not so far away as to offend. But she sat tentatively, towards the edge of the cushion, as if she might rise. She was now wearing an apron, a merry one, in colorful stripes.

  “Ah, you’re cooking,” said he. “Well, I won’t detain you.”

  “And am I nervous!”

  “Please don’t be.” He started to get up. “Why not let me do it?”

  “I want to do it myself,” Edie said. “I think I can do it, and when I invite a guest, I should do it.”

  This was a new aspect of her, or at any rate one he had previously not given her an opportunity to show. Her manner in her own domicile was very different from that she displayed when abroad. And how right she was to feel strength here: it was a warm and wonderful little cave. The rug was the color of peach preserves. In the embrasure of the window a geranium was blooming redly: one of the few plants in all the world that Reinhart could identify offhand. A hanging pot was blossoming in white stars. He still retained the aftertaste of Scotch, which was not altogether pleasant, yet he was not really sorry he had drunk so much. He felt in a vulnerable state, but well protected here.

  She returned with one little bowl of small, withered black olives, the sort that are cured in fragrant olive oil, and another filled with smoky salted almonds.

  When she was back in the kitchen Reinhart called up-room; “Are you going to tell me what the bill of fare is?”

  “Maybe I shouldn’t, so that if something doesn’t turn out well I can change it!” She looked up from her work, across the counter. “Are you ready for more wine?”

  “Not yet, thanks.”

  “Isn’t it drinkable?”

  “It’s superb, a lot better than I can usually afford.”

  Edie came back. Her apron’s stripes included Reinhart’s favorite combination of turquoise and navy.

  “This is just a delightful apartment,” he said. “It makes one feel good just to sit in it.”

  “It could be bigger. What you see is all there is, except for the bathroom of course.”

  “It’s just the right size for a person living alone, I’d say.” He finished his wine but held onto the glass lest she take it and leave for a moment. “Mine will probably be too big now. You see, Winona has moved out. She’s gone to live with a friend, a woman friend, and it’s high time she came out from under my wing, to tell you the truth, and lived with someone of her own age, more or less.” He looked at Edie with feeling. “I’m misrepresenting that. I’m acting as if it’s Winona who needed me, rather than what is true, the other way around: she supported me for a good many years. I kept house, of course, but she was the one with the career.”

  “I’m sure you were just biding your time,” said Edie. She put out her hand for his wine glass.

  He surrendered it. He was becoming aware of a sort of motherly force immanent in her. When she returned, he said: “I confess I had a bit to drink before I came up here. I was nervous on general principles, and then I was feeling a funny reaction to getting the new job, a mixture of elation and maybe megalomania and greed—and most of all, disbelief. But then I remember that I did step in to fill the breach left when Buxton had his heart attack: I did it, off the cuff, ad lib! Yet even that gives me mixed feelings. Maybe I’ve wasted my life. Maybe I should have been a performer of some kind from the beginning, studied acting or even tap dancing or whatnot.”

  Edie had not sat down this time. She said, in her new maternal style: “I think you’re wrong about wanting to be anything other than you’ve been.” She went back to her work without his feeling that she had left him: that was a true art, but apparently unstudied.

  “I hope you’re aware,” he said, “that it’s all I can do to stay out of your kitchen, but I know what goes on in mine and how I hate to be watched.” There were times when you just had to plunge your hands in to the wrists, so to speak, or retrieve something edible from the floor or scrape off charrings or mask raggednesses with sauce or garnitures. But if the error had been to put too much salt in solution, you might be in real trouble, though you could try boiling a raw potato in the liquid. Over the years one learned a lot of tricks. These would make nice little bits for the show. Already he was thinking professionally.

  Q. If by accident some hardboiled eggs got mixed up with uncooked ones, how could you distinguish each from each without breaking any?

  A. Simply spin each egg on its side. The cooked one will spin in uniform revolutions, whereas the raw egg will wobble erratically.

  Edie came to him. “Dinner is ready.”

  He got up and said, face to face: “We’re about the same height when you wear those shoes.”

  “What a relief,” said she, “to be able to wear heels without making someone feel lousy.”

  “You mean men? I thought that had changed nowadays.”

  “You can’t change biology,” said Edie. “Most men are bigger than most women. If you’re not like most people, then you are in a special situation. You can’t just say it isn’t true.”

  She led him to the counter between living room and kitchen. Two places had been set there for a meal, with wooden-handled eating utensils of stainless steel and blue bandannas for napkins. Each setting was on its own island of a straw mat, bound in blue fabric. As Reinhart sat down Edie went behind the counter and with a big wood spoon and fork served spaghetti and sauce; already combined, from an earthenware casserole onto painted plates of similar crockery.

  Accepting his, Reinhart noted with approval that it had been prewarmed. He asked her if he might at least pour the Valpolicella, which was already uncorked.

  “I see you have a glass for yourself.”

  She put her own plate onto the counter and came around to the eating side and took a stool. She lifted the glass he had just poured.

  “I’m all right now,” she said. “I’m drinking wine.”

  “I didn’t mean—

  Edie touched her glass to his. “To your health.”

  It was a fine and simple and unexpected thing to hear.

  “To yours, Edie.”

  The spaghetti sauce proved to be a rich ragù bolognese, a far cry from the scarlet acidity of Naples, made from ground beef and pork, bacon, and chicken livers, simmered in beef stock and white wine. Edie had found the recipe in a book.

  “Why,” said Reinhart, “this is the best thing of its kind. Did you just happen to have all the ingredients on hand?” It was really a rude question, as he recognized when he had put it. But her transformation from the awkward creature she had hitherto been into this gracious hostess, the accomplished cook, the lovely young woman she was at present, could not be taken as a routine event. Perhaps some of it was due to his altered perception, but if he was drunk
enly upgrading her now, he had soberly failed to appreciate her previously.

  “Let’s just say that I was planning something, for sometime,” said she.

  Reinhart grinned at her over his wine. The Valpolicella was as pretty on the palate as its name was in the ear.

  “Edie, all I know of life tells me you cannot always be as sweet as you have thus far been to me, but I’m shamelessly enjoying it at the moment.” He went on in what to him was a logical progression: “I have lived with my daughter all her life, and yet I had no inkling of... what shall I call it? Her darker side? If by ‘darker’ what is meant is not evil but a kind of moral toughness. Winona can be, well, rude of course, but beyond that... not exactly cruel—though I suppose she could be that, too, outside my experience—but ‘forceful’ would probably be an accurate word.”

  Edie had stopped eating to listen even more attentively than usual.

  He asked: “You know her only to chat in the lobby?”

  Now she seemed guileless again. “I’d seen her pictures a lot. You know how it is when you see a celebrity, you feel you know them.”

  “It was awfully arrogant of her, though, on the basis of that slight an acquaintance, to want to borrow your car.”

  “Oh, I don’t think so!” She took a sip from her glass: There was that about her mouth which suggested the curve of a stringed musical instrument.

  She went behind the counter.

  After a while Reinhart said: “You, Miss Mulhouse, are making a spinach salad with a warm dressing of bacon and vinegar.” He saw that the minced bacon had previously been rendered of its fat; the skillet was now being reheated on the stove behind her as Edie thin-sliced some plump white mushrooms.

  When she took away the dinner plates and served the salad, he said: “The mushrooms are definitely an asset. I have previously known only the purist version: all green, except for the flecks of bacon, though there are those, I believe, who sprinkle on chopped hard-boiled egg, but that is almost entirely an aesthetic effect.” He winked at her. “Forgive me for the shop talk.”

  “Don’t stop,” said Edie. “I really like to hear it.”

  “Judging from this meal, in composition and execution, you know quite a bit about food already. It’s the kind of simplicity that comes only with gastronomical sophistication. For some reason you were deceiving me, with your talk of living on hot dogs and hamburgers.”

  Edie stared at him. “I swear that I just got all these things out of a book.”

  “Nothing wrong with that. It’s exactly how I learned to cook seriously.”

  “But this is the first time for me,” she said, with a mixture of shyness and something else, perhaps defiance: as if she were talking of a sexual experience. “I’ve never really cooked anything before, except maybe a fried egg.”

  Reinhart nodded sagely. “You see how easy it is.”

  “Is it really O.K.?” asked Edie. “Or are you just saying that?” She proceeded to give him an intimate feeling by chiding: “You are always being too easy on me.”

  “Winona says the same thing.” Reinhart brought his fingertips together. “Can I help it if I like girls?” Now Edie sighed cryptically. “Look,” said he, “the Center Café in Brockville? I was out there again today. It’s become an obsession with me to think of acquiring it somehow. It’s a fantasy and will probably never come to reality, but I’ve started anyway to assemble a staff of kindred souls. Would you want to be part of it in some fashion?”

  “Me?” Edie drew back on the stool. She seemed genuinely startled.

  Reinhart touched the Formica counter with his forefinger. “You’re a cashier by trade, are you not? Am I wrong in thinking that if you could practice your profession at a bowling alley, you could do it at a restaurant, where at best the traffic would be lighter? ...Mind you, this is all theoretical at the moment. I am not even considering how we could earn a profit. Marge has been losing money.”

  Edie received this information inscrutably and then went around to the kitchen, opened the freezer compartment of the refrigerator, and removed an ice-cube tray. She looked into it and winced, agitated it slightly in her hand, and winced again.

  “Something didn’t jell?” Reinhart asked.

  “Pear sherbet. I’m afraid I flopped at that.”

  “No, you didn’t. It just hasn’t had time to freeze. It takes a while.” That was the very dessert he had made for the uneaten brunch to which Grace Greenwood had been invited.

  “Would you like to have coffee in the living room?”

  He was not unhappy to be relieved from sitting on the stool, which was a jolly perch at the outset, but even when younger, with his length of body, he liked at certain points during a meal to lean against the back of a chair.

  “I’ll pass up the coffee, though, if you don’t mind. I have acquired the kind of equilibrium between food and drink that caffeine might unbalance.” He went in to the couch. “Why don’t you sit down and tell me about yourself?”

  Edie took off her apron. In the living room she chose a chair some distance from him. She looked at him and said levelly: “I’m not gay.”

  Reinhart had not been prepared for this statement. Of an unusually generous supply of possible reactions he chose in effect to shrug it off. “Neither am I.” He had brought his glass of wine along, and now he drank some.

  Edie said almost fiercely: “I’m not criticizing anyone who is.”

  “I know you’re not,” said Reinhart. He raised his glass to her, but lowered it without drinking. “I must tell you, Edie, that I suspect you do everything well, but you pretend to be defenseless. You must be aware that that’s an old-fashioned style. It’s the one I have always preferred, though having had not only the other kind of mother but also the other kind of wife.”

  “Sometimes,” Edie said, “it seems at first you are making fun of me, but then I realize you’re not.”

  “That’s right. I’m not. I don’t ever make fun of anybody.” He put his glass down and got to his feet. “I think I’ll leave now, though it is awfully rude to eat and run. But I’ll tell you why I think it’s necessary: on the one hand, I think I desire you, but on the other I dislike the idea of lasciviousness in a man of my age—if what I feel is that. I have just been separated from a daughter who is only a year older than you. Maybe what I feel is really a simple longing to be in the presence of a young woman to whom I’m closely attached, and since you’re not a relative by blood, I crave some other kind of intimacy.”

  Edie remained seated and looked up at him with deep blue eyes, “Are those good reasons for leaving?”

  “Then how about cowardice?” But she laughed at him. “All right, then, I’ll just take a nightcap, but first I have to go to my own apartment for a moment. I have to make a phone call. Business....” He put his hand out, and she gave him hers. “Don’t go anywhere.”

  “Not me,” said Edie.

  He took the stairway down to the fourth floor. Inside the apartment he found he had to look up the number in the public book: Winona had taken the personal directory from the drawer in the telephone table. He wished she had also taken that etching full of hairy lines.

  “Grace, Carl Reinhart.”

  “Aha.”

  “May I speak to my daughter?”

  “She’s not here at the moment, Carl.”

  “Not there?”

  “That’s right,” Grace said tartly. “She went to the movies.”

  Reinhart looked down into the living room, but the light was too dim to see the little clock above the liquor cabinet. “She’s out alone this time of night?”

  Grace snorted. “She’s with Ray!”

  “Ray?”

  “My son. He’s in from California for spring vacation.”

  Reinhart had never heard of this person before, but he felt that courtesy required him to fake it. “Oh, yes, Ray. He’s in the last year of college, isn’t he?”

  “Last year of law school!” crowed Grace. Her voice had very clearly take
n on an unprecedented tone of affection. This too was new to Reinhart. He had never heard her use it with reference to Winona, but there are all forms of human emotion, and he himself had certainly experienced many of them.

  He said sincerely: “I’d like to meet him.”

  “You would?” Grace asked, incredulous for a moment, and then she recovered: “I want you to! Which night’s good for dinner? It’s on me this time. But you pick the restaurant. You’re the expert. Make it fancy. We’ve got all kinds of celebrating to do. Did you know that tomorrow I become president of Epicon?”

  Reinhart congratulated her. “And I have a new idea I want to talk to you about in the area of food,” said he. “How about Tuesday night for dinner?”

  “I’d better check with Ray first. He’s seeing my ex, his father, one night this week. ... Good to talk with you, Carl. When should Winnie return the call, tonight still or tomorrow?”

  “I’ll call her tomorrow,” said Reinhart. “It’s nothing crucial.”

  “Sleep tight,” said Grace, in what would appear to be a certain affection for him. Well, he had never thought her the world’s worst.

  As he rode the elevator up to Edie’s floor Reinhart understood that Winona’s absence at this moment was another piece of the good luck he had been enjoying lately. How fatuous had been the impulse to ask her whether she could permit him to have a girl friend younger than herself. Of course she would have refused! Winona was a notorious prig. Who would want any other kind of daughter?

  A Biography of Thomas Berger

  Thomas Louis Berger (1924–2014) was an American novelist best known for his picaresque classic, Little Big Man (1964). His other works include Arthur Rex (1978), Neighbors (1980), and The Feud (1983), which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.

  Berger was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, the son of Thomas Charles, a public school business manager, and Mildred (née Bubbe) Berger. Berger grew up in the town of Lockland, Ohio, and one of his first jobs was working at a branch of the public library while in high school. After a brief period in college, Berger enlisted in the army in 1943 and served in Europe during World War II. His experiences with a medical unit in the American occupation zone of postwar Berlin inspired his first novel, Crazy in Berlin (1958). This novel introduced protagonist Carlo Reinhart, who would appear in several more novels.