“I don’t know,” said Houghton.
“The newspaper that Ramsey won by growing a cotton plant in a glass box she made last February over by the pond.”
Houghton put down the paper. “Glass box?” he asked Lance, his gaze drifting to Ramsey before he’d finished the question. “Is this true?”
Her head lowered and facing what was left of her pancakes, Ramsey nodded. “Yes, sir.” She waited for her father’s anger to detonate. To keep from flinching, she tightened the muscles in her face, held her breath, and willed herself not to blink. Across the room a kitchen timer tick-tocked like a fingernail on tooth enamel. Outside a bird started to whistle. Both those sounds, however, were soon overwhelmed by Houghton, who was laughing so hard he could barely catch his breath.
Eleven years later, while telling the story about the hothouse, Ramsey concluded, “I think he was more proud of me after he found out I’d cheated than when he thought I’d won it fair and square.”
She was at a house party in the West Village, New York, hosted by one of Ramsey’s friends from boarding school. In the living room of a two-story, four-bedroom apartment, its hallways scuffed by the workman boots Emma Goldman was said to have been fond of a decade back, its bathtub sandy to the touch because of a gin recipe Joe Gould had claimed would remedy the measles, Ramsey was surrounded by poor shades of the neighborhood’s bohemian past, in particular a group of recent Bryn Mawr graduates with clambake accents and topiary hair, none of whom seemed amused by her hothouse story.
“That sounds like a very, uh, colorful childhood,” one of them said. Then, referring to the host of the evening, she asked, “And how is it you came to know Liz?”
At Miss Porter’s, Ramsey and Elizabeth Katherine Peterson of St. Paul, Minnesota, who both found it difficult to fit in with the East Coast set while so far away from their own families, bonded as first-years, often joking they hailed from opposite ends of America’s great river. They soon developed a code language as a means to deal with their classmates. One phrase was a favorite. Did the daughter of a shipping magnate mock their performance on the oral exams in French class? “Sic transit.” Had a girl in their dorm claimed they once got drunk on gin with some local boys at the nearby fairgrounds? “Sic transit.” So now, though years had passed since high school, Ramsey knew the perfect answer to the Bryn Mawr girl’s question about how she knew Liz. “Through a mutual friend,” she said. “Name of Gloria Mundi.”
“Oh, I believe I’ve met her! Gloria Mundi. From Philadelphia, right?”
Just as Ramsey was about to say, “Yes, that’s right, Gloria Mundi of the Philadelphia Mundis,” Liz appeared at her side, saying, “Girls, do forgive me for stealing Ramsey from you. There’s someone I simply must introduce her to.” She handed Ramsey a martini. “Come, come, dear.”
They walked cocktail by cocktail down the hall, so close one occasionally spilled into the other. “Sorry, but I had to get you away from them.” Liz took a sip. “I didn’t want anybody getting hurt.”
“I wouldn’t have gotten hurt.”
“I wasn’t talking about you.”
Oh, thank God, thought Ramsey. It was the same old Liz. For a moment there, hearing the way she spoke to the other girls, Ramsey was worried her friend had switched sides, giving up her Minnesota scrap for New England refinement, a world of alley breweries overcome by one of swallowtail coats.
“There really is someone I want you to meet,” said Liz.
“Who?”
Liz simpered. “Why, the man of your dreams, of course.”
According to an interview conducted on May 5, 1986, Elizabeth Peterson, sole heiress of the Peterson Radio Network, knew nothing of what was to happen later that night. “They were two of my dearest friends. I’d never want either of them to get hurt. He did not do anything to her. Honestly I’m offended at what you’re suggesting. What did you say your name was again? You don’t look old enough to be a journalist.”
Liz said, “Follow me,” to Ramsey. She led her friend through various clusters of people at the party, most of them arranged by alma mater, Ramsey could tell by catching the frequent “What house were you in?” The number of mandarin collars on the men was matched only by the number of bob cuts on the women.
“He’s a Roosevelt once removed,” Liz whispered over her shoulder. “Lacrosse champion at Andover. Summa cum laude from Harvard. He loves his mother, writes poetry, and looks like Bobby Jones. I mean, have you ever?” With an imaginary roll of her eyes Ramsey agreed that she had in fact never.
They stopped in front of a tall man, early twenties, dressed in Oxford bags and a white pongee shirt, hair parted crisply down the middle. Liz had at least been right about one thing. He was as handsome as Bobby Jones. For a second Ramsey pictured him in the rotogravure section, looking tan somehow despite the gray scale, against one shoulder propped Calamity Jane, his famous putter.
“Nathaniel, meet Ramsey. Ramsey, meet Nathaniel.”
In the living room of Liz’s apartment, the yellow light from the lamps making everyone there seem not preserved in amber but animated by it, Ramsey and Nathaniel, each claiming the pleasure as their own, shook hands. Liz excused herself. Although things started rough for them—“Nathaniel,” he corrected her when she addressed him as “Nate”—Ramsey soon began to warm to the guy. The unprohibited alcohol helped. Both of them exercised the Twenty-First Amendment while exchanging their bios. Born and raised in Westchester County, New York, as a third-generation American, Nathaniel Afternoon, whose Slavic family name had been Anglicized by Ellis Island officials, bore a chip not on his shoulder but in his signature. He resented the near-comic quality of his surname. What made the situation worse, he explained to Ramsey at the cocktail party, was that the success of his family’s business, a chain of five-and-dimes called Good Afternoon!, owed much to their unusual name. “So I’ve kind of gone through life as a flagpole sitter,” he said. “In an elevated position but with a constant pain in my ass.”
“Nice metaphor.”
“English major.” Nathaniel finished his third martini. After fetching another round from the bar, he looked at Ramsey and, with the authority of the resentful, advantaged, and drunken, a medley she admired, said, “You’re not like the other girls here.”
“How so?”
“You’re not the type to call your mother ‘Maman,’ just so people know you summered in France as a child.”
This guy was starting to grow on Ramsey. He was such an unabashed contradiction, someone pretentious enough to insist on being addressed by his full first name but who also despised his last name, a Harvard graduate, lacrosse player, boarding schooler, and cousin of the Roosevelts with the gall to mock people for having spent their childhood summers abroad. Ramsey had always enjoyed a good paradox.
“How else am I different from the other girls here?” she asked Nathaniel, whose subsequent grin was only partly obscured by the lip of his martini glass. He pretended to think.
“You’re the type who would say yes.”
“To what?”
“Us finding someplace private to talk.”
Although the apartment, so crowded with people, was sweltering that night, Ramsey, who prided herself on being modern minded, crossed her arms, feigned a shiver, and said, “Chilly in here. I think I need my shawl.” Together she and Nathaniel found the coatroom.
On top of a bed covered with fur, cashmere, and wool, paletots and chesterfields, coverts and ulsters, mounds of car coats, trench coats, and peacoats, Ramsey began to make out with Nathaniel. He was a decent kisser. His mouth tasted so strongly of gin it felt as if she were drinking a giant martini. Through the closed door, which they’d locked, she could hear a group of people, muffled but distinct, talking about a new musical. One person loved it. Another said it was terrible.
“Hey there,” she said, pushing Nathaniel’s hand from her thigh. “Watch it.”
Ramsey gathered the musical under discussion was Anything Goes. She had seen a matin
ee of it last week. Ever since then the lyrics of its catchy title number had been lodged in her mind. We’ve often rewound the clock, since the Puritans got a shock, when they landed on Plymouth Rock. The weight of Nathaniel on top of her began to make Ramsey uncomfortable. Coat buttons were pressing into her spine. She tried asking him to move, but he did not seem to hear her. But now, God knows, anything goes. The stubble of his cheek burning the skin of her own, Ramsey tried pulling away from Nathaniel, but he just burrowed his face into the crook of her neck. With one hand he held her wrists pinned above her head. The other he used to go where she had told him he could not. If driving fast cars you like, if low bars you like, if old hymns you like. Clanking filled her ears—the sound of belt buckles, the sound of zippers, the sound of pant buttons—as she repeated one word. “Don’t.” The world has gone mad today, and good’s bad today, and black’s white today. Ramsey could smell herself on the hand he was using to cover her mouth. Please, she couldn’t say, stop. Focusing all of her concentration she tried to relax her body. Let it happen, she told herself. Even the voice in her head was muzzled by his grip. Then . . . I suppose . . . anything goes. From beneath her she noticed the different smells of coats, perfume on one, musk on another, ghosts of the people who had worn them, all of which she imagined watching her intently now, their presence worldly, ephemeral, and uncaring.
In the corner of her eye Ramsey saw her clutch on the bed. It was just out of reach. She freed one arm, straining toward it. As her fingers grazed the metal clasp, though, she heard a sigh uncouple from a grunt. Nathaniel rolled off her.
“I don’t remember why I even agreed to this interview. Hear this, young man. I had no idea. It was clear she was shaken up, but how could I have known? I just supposed she regretted letting things go too far. That’s still what I think,” said Elizabeth Peterson, seventy-five years old, in her palatial estate near Wayzata, Minnesota. Fifty years earlier, following the tragic death of her parents in a car accident, Ms. Peterson had diversified her family’s business, then a commercial broadcaster in radio, by taking a risk on a new invention from some man named Farnsworth. Residents of the Great Lakes region during the 1950s may recall that I Love Lucy was often “Brought to you by our friends at Good Afternoon!”
Without looking at anyone, Ramsey, hair disheveled and eyeliner smeared, walked through the crowded party, out the door, down the stairs, and onto a sidewalk of Christopher Street. It took all of her effort not to crumple sobbing to the ground.
Take a deep breath, she told herself, taking a deep breath. Everything has its place, a place where it belongs. Pain was the sensation of something being out of place. Nothing more. Disorder could always be ordered. The bean could always be put back in the king cake. Ramsey took another deep breath. The inside of her felt empty, hollowed out, an echo waiting for a scream.
Ramsey needed a cigarette. Despite the trembling of her hands, she managed to open her clutch, inside of which, next to a Bond Arms derringer, she found her pack of Luckies. Lighting one proved more difficult. The flame from her lighter kept slipping out of alignment with the end of her cigarette. Finally she got it going. Beneath a streetlamp, its light sieved by the branches and foliage of an overgrown pin oak, Ramsey slowly exhaled. Her gaze was unfocused but aimed toward the street, where, on the other side, her brother Lance stared back, the sight of him obstructed by smoke.
How long had his sister been standing there? Lance figured it was clearly long enough for her to have seen him walk out of the sporting house. Of course he would end up getting caught his very first time. He never should have come to this place.
Just as he was about to cross the street and try to explain, his sister threw down her cigarette, hailed a taxi, and sped off into the darkness uptown. Lance watched as her cab broke apart a column of gutter steam. It soon disappeared in traffic. Unsure of what had just happened, he began to walk through the Village, trying to figure why Ramsey had not spoken or waved to him or even shaken her head in disapproval. She had to have seen him. At the entrance to Washington Square, crossing the threshold of its archway, Lance decided the whole thing was typical Ramsey, a maneuver to get him riled. She wanted him to wonder if she had seen him. That way she knew he would torture himself about what he had done. God damn her. How would she have him live? Celibacy was plain unnatural. Onan’s solution solved nothing. Across the street, a young woman with marcelled hair stepped out of a brownstone, followed soon after by three other women, a redhead and two brunettes, wearing clothes so tightly fitted they could have served as riding habits.
Okay, fine, all right! Lance thought. He shouldn’t have paid for it. At the south end of the park, noting the laughter from tearooms and nightclubs a few blocks away, he decided his trip to the sporting house tonight had been his first, his only, and his last. Ramsey had won again.
For a number of years Lance Forster would stand by his vow. In May of 1947, however, he spent an evening with one Patty Simpson of St. Louis, Missouri, who surprised him the next morning by requesting fifty dollars for what he had thought were innocent, nonvocational services. Nine months later she gave him some even more surprising news. The subsequent adoption of the child by Lance’s sister would, ironically and fatefully, reconcile the Forster twins after more than a decade of ill will. Ramsey came to discover she had needed a daughter in her life as assuredly as her father had wanted a new addition to the next generation of Forsters. Who else would carry on the family legacy?
2.6
Fortuneless Son—Now a Word from Our Sponsors—The Horns of a Dilemma—No More Fizz
In 1984, Ronald Reagan, fortieth president of the United States, promised voters, “It’s morning again in America.” He claimed that more people were employed than ever before in the country’s history. He claimed that on each day that year 6,500 men and women would get married and nearly 2,000 families would buy new homes. He claimed that interest rates as well as inflation were half of what they’d been four years earlier. “Under the leadership of President Reagan,” noted the television commercial that would lead to his landslide reelection, “our country is prouder and stronger and better.” In September of that year, Harold Forster repeated those words in his mind as he arrived at work, duct tape securing one arm of his eyeglasses, button-up oxford from JCPenney mired with sweat prints, and leather fixative holding his shoe soles together.
The worn tires on his pickup slid a foot through gravel as its rusty gasket left a trail of oil spots on the ground. Harold was in too much of a hurry to give it mind. He was half an hour late. At nine thirty in the morning just north of Batesville, Mississippi, he started his day as proprietor of the Panola Cola Historical Museum by unlocking the doors with his key ring and flipping the light switch to reveal shelves of Forster’s Delicious Fizzy, their crown caps furred with dust.
“The Forsters lost their entire fortune during the 1970s. Your brother committed suicide after investing in a Detroit venture two months prior to the fuel crisis. Your nephew saw the stocks drop 90 percent with the introduction of PanCola Too after his controversial takeover as CEO of the company,” a New York Times reporter had said to Harold years earlier during an interview for the Business Day section. “Your sister died in a car accident on the Pacific Coast Highway with a criminally high blood-alcohol level. Perhaps most tragic of all, your older brother, once considered a presidential hopeful, died of an accidental gunshot wound on your family’s estate. Have I missed anything, Mr. Forster?”
Harold wiped the countertop for dust. He turned on the overhead fan and tuned the radio to his station. He drew the venetian blinds and hung the we’re open sign. Afterward, while eating an early lunch, Harold sat on a hickory stool behind the front desk and laid out cards for a game of solitaire. Each round he came close but never quite achieved the pattern he had in mind. Around four o’clock, he almost had the perfect composition of kings, jacks, queens, and jokers when the door opened with a jangle of its cowbell.
“Rats.”
Despite
his initial reaction, Harold was wracked with joy on seeing a family enter the museum, a husband and wife, Peter and Claire, as well as their daughter, Rose, and two sons, Jones and Brooks. Five visitors in one day! Such an occasion Harold could barely recall. The family was on the last dogleg of a road trip to the father’s hometown of Memphis, where his aunt had recently passed away from a coronary. Formerly a failed novelist but now a successful biographer, Peter could have afforded plane tickets from the family’s current city of residence, Austin, Texas, but instead felt a road trip would help him and his wife bond with their sons, twelve and fourteen, and their daughter, nine. Success for the family could be discerned on closer inspection. From Claire’s wrist hung an eighteen-carat tennis bracelet from Cartier. An alligator gaped its jaw on Jones’s polo, and a man rode horseback on Brooks’s broadcloth. Beneath Rose’s dress shone the patent leather of dance shoes bought for private lessons. Three months after Harold’s death, two dozen marble-print boxes full of registration ledgers, each filed with impressive precision according to month, would identify not only this family but every child, woman, and man who had made footfall through the museum.
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