Til the Real Thing Comes Along (30 page)

Mrs. Goldman turned, eyes wide, to her husband.

“What did I tell you? She’s pregnant by that goylshe dog!”

“She’s not,” R.J. said. “But one day after they’re married she will be and you’ll want to be there.”

“For goyishe grandchildren?” Pearl Goldman said, horrified, and then she said, “Ptooey,” as if she were spitting on the ground.

“You better go,” Francie’s brother Marshall said again, his grip on R.J.’s arm tightening. But R.J. didn’t move. She stood
tall and looked at both Goldmans and begged them.

“Don’t do this. She isn’t dead.”

There was no response.

“Don’t, please. She isn’t dead.”

Marshall moved her slowly but firmly toward the door, and as if to say a polite goodbye, the other guests stood.

“Do you want to borrow an umbrella?” Marshall asked as he opened the door and R.J. found herself standing on their porch.

“No,” R.J. said. “Marshall, Frande is—” And then the door was quietly closed in her face. A crackle of lightning across the
sky lit up the night for a moment, and R.J., her wet clothes sticking to her, walked down to the street and home.

Her parents were sitting at the kitchen table, and while Rifke warmed up some soup, R.J. told them the whole story about Frande.
Her mother
tsked
and looked down at the table and commented with the Yiddish expression of anguish:
“A zochen vey.
” What a pity. And her father grunted and at one point pushed the spoon so hard into his matzo ball that when it broke apart,
the noodles spilled out of the bowl onto the table. When she had finished telling the part about how Marshall had dosed the
door on her, her mother
nodded, as if to say she wasn’t surprised, and then added inexplicably, “Well, at least we have our health.”

“Ma,” R.J. asked. “How can they sit shiva for her? I mean, it’s crazy. She isn’t even dead. She isn’t.” And she put her head
down on the kitchen table and said it again. “She’s not dead.”

But R.J. was wrong, because only minutes before, Avery Willis’s Nash Rambler, on its way back from Cumberland, Maryland, skidded
on the wet turnpike and had a head-on collision with a gasoline truck, and the newly married couple was killed instantly.

At the Follies during the curtain call, Mrs. Joseph, the drama teacher, asked the audience to “please observe one minute of
silence for our departed friends Avery Willis and Francie Goldman.” She said it that way—Avery Willis and Francie Goldman—because
Francie’s parents had telephoned the school and requested that she not be referred to as Francie Willis, even though that
was legally her name when she died.

1962

A
fte five years of traveling all over the world with his father, Davey had had enough. Enough of sitting at endless dinner
parties with some general’s wife on his left and some senator’s wife on his right. Enough of waking up in the morning and
not knowing in which company apartment he’d fallen asleep the night before. He would look out the window of the flat in Belgrave
Square to the street below and see a group of boys his own age running and shouting to one another in play and he would envy
them.

Once he got on the elevator to go upstairs to the penthouse on Park Avenue and two boys were already on the elevator waiting
for the doors to close. Though Davey faced the front, he could tell that the boys were sniffing and snorting and poking one
another behind his back. Probably because they could tell that he was the eleven-year-old freak who sometimes lived here,
other times in London or Paris or Los Angeles, and who had never once been to school.

“Best goddamned education there is,” his father always said. “Learns history while it’s happening. From men who make it.”

It was true. Rulers of nations, giants of industry, men who were only faces in the news to most of the world taught Davey
how to play golf, how to tie his tie, how to grill a steak to perfection. Made him laugh with funny stories about their own
boyhoods. Entertained him and his
father with backgammon and sumptuous meals and conversations about world problems. Problems these men not only knew a great
deal about, but had the power to control. Davey listened and asked questions and was never patronized. Instead he was always
answered thoughtfully and carefully, as if to make certain that when the answer was complete, the boy understood even the
fine points.

“School would bore him silly,” his father said. Davey wasn’t so sure. He sensed that the real reason his father was keeping
him out of school had nothing to do with the education he was or wasn’t getting and everything to do with their shared loneliness
over Lily’s death. Even the passing of five years hadn’t helped decrease the pain for either of them. And with every passing
year, Davey noticed his father becoming quieter, more closed off from the world. Never once in all those years had Davey seen
him laugh the way he had when Lily was around.

Davey hungered for stories about Lily and would listen gratefully to any old friend of the family’s who had a memory of her
to share.

“I fell in love with your mother,” Roland Spencer said to Davey one night at a dinner party at the house in Hancock Park.
Yona had just removed the dinner plates and Rico was pouring the last glass of champagne. “Just about the time she met your
father,” the handsome actor said, then smiled and added almost to himself: “How’s that for a case of bad timing?” Davey remembered
how Mr. and Mrs. Spencer used to come for screenings all the time when Lily was alive. Now, the few times Davey and Mal were
in Los Angeles, Mal would see to it that they were invited over for dinner. Mr. Spencer was retired, which meant that what
he did most of the time was play golf and talk about going into politics.

“I was always too shy to tell her, though, so as it turned out, we were only friends, even though she was so beautiful she
made my heart race every time she walked into the room.”

Davey glanced protectively over at nice Mrs. Spencer, who was waving away Yona’s offer of coffee or tea, and chatting animatedly
with his father. Now Mr. Spencer looked meaningfully into Davey’s eyes. “I was a big star then,” Mr. Spencer said. “And I
harbored the secret hope that if I got brave enough to ask her, she’d want to marry me because
we had so much in common. One day just before she left the studio, I stopped by her dressing room. She hadn’t told the studio
boss, Julian Raymond, that she was leaving yet, but she was packing up her things. She told me how much she loved your father
and showed me a letter your father had written to her earlier that day. He wanted her to carry the letter with her to remind
her how much he would miss her during those few hours.”

As Davey listened to Roland Spencer talk, he noticed how the actor would pause for a moment to search for the right word,
the way he had when he played Abraham Lincoln in
Good Evening, Mister Lincoln,
And also the way he tried to hold back a smile when he remembered something pleasant, the way he had in
All My Darling Daughters,

“The letter said”—Mr. Spencer looked into space now, as if the letter were there for him to read, and then went on—” There
isn’t a moment while we’re apart that I don’t long for you. You are everything I prayed my love would be.’”

Davey looked away and moved his finger back and forth on the white linen tablecloth, making a pile of the crumbs he had spilled
there during dinner.

“I knew then,” Roland Spencer said, “that up against Rand Malcolm, I didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell.” Then he laughed
a hearty laugh and said, “‘Cause if it was me, I’d have had to hire writers to be able to say those things.”

Davey smiled at Mr. Spencer’s joke on himself, then looked over at his father, who now, although he was nodding and murmuring
an occasional
mmm-hmm
to Mrs. Cornell on his left, wasn’t really listening to her at all. It was funny to think of his father as a man who was
more romantic than Mr. Spencer, a movie star women fans cried over and stood in line to see again and again. Davey remembered
now hearing a story about a woman fan who killed herself the day it was announced on the news that Mr. Spencer had married
Mrs. Spencer, because now he was no longer “an available dream.” People behaved in crazy ways sometimes. Or maybe just grown-ups
did, and children, as Yona once told him, were just meant “to love life.”

But Davey could never remember feeling like a child. Maybe because for the last five years he had been living a
man’s life. At eleven he knew more about limousines than he did about bicycles and infinitely more about mixing martinis than
making milkshakes. He had never been to McDonald’s, but he was acquainted with Mr. Kroc, and the one time he’d gone to Disneyland,
he and his father had been shown around the park by Mr. Disney.

“I want to go to school,” he said to his father. He had practiced saying it aloud again and again, but now it came out so
softly that his father didn’t even look up from
Le Monde,
the newspaper he was reading at the table. They were in the apartment in Paris, on the Avenue Foch right near the Arc de
Triomphe. It was the morning after another long late dinner party, where Davey had sat between Mrs. Niarchos, the wife of
the Greek shipper, and Eleanor Benning, a friend of his father’s. Mrs. Benning must have had a lot of business to do all over
the world, too, Davey thought. She was in Paris now, and she was also in London last week when he and his father were there.
And a few weeks before, when he and his father were in New York and Davey had the stomach flu, his father said, “Having supper
with Mrs. B.,” and was out the door. In black tie. Mrs. Benning called Davey “honey,” and called his father “Mal, darling.”

“My son Douglas, who’s a bit older than you are, goes to the Hollingsworth School in Pennsylvania,” Mrs. Benning had told
Davey more than once. The Hollingsworth School was very tough, but everyone knew that Douglas Benning had been admitted because
the estate of his late father, Keaton Benning, had financed the Benning Gymnasium. “The boys and girls have a glorious time
there,” she said, smiling a big smile. Mrs. Benning always wore glasses, and the chandelier, which hung low over the dining
room table, was reflected in them so Davey couldn’t see her eyes at all.

“They have fishing and hunting and ski trips,” she said. “They also have summer athletic programs. And they have a reputation
for having the prettiest girls. It seems my Douglas never wants to come home.” And then she’d laughed and said, “Oh, yes.
I know everything there is to know about young boys.”

“I want to go to school,” Davey was about to say again, but before he could, he heard his father’s voice come from behind
the newspaper.

“It’s a mistake,” Rand Malcolm said.

“No, sir, it’s not,” Davey answered.

“Let me look into it,” his father said, and kept the newspaper in front of his face until the boy finished his breakfast and
left the table.

In the last five years they hadn’t spent one day apart. By now, Davey knew his father very well. He knew that a certain faraway
look in the eyes meant that though his father might be looking right at him while Davey was describing a model airplane or
a comic-book character, he wasn’t really listening. Or that a certain twinkle in his eye meant that though he sounded very
serious about a subject, the truth of the matter was that he was only kidding. This morning, despite the fact that Davey hadn’t
seen his father’s face, he could tell by the sound of his voice from behind the newspaper when he said
It’s a mistake
that he was very hurt.

School was already in session and Davey would have to start late but he didn’t care. The plan was to visit at least three
schools before he made a decision. As it turned out, Davey liked Hollingsworth so much that they didn’t bother to look at
any others. By prearrangement, their tour of the campus was given by Douglas Benning, a lumpy-looking gravelly-voiced boy
who said, by way of explaining why the gymnasium bore his family’s name, “That’s how my mom bought me in here.”

Davey was going to laugh at that, but his father’s tight-jawed reaction made him reconsider. Douglas Benning was not too bad;
neither were the bay-windowed, hardwood-floored, high-ceilinged dormitory rooms. The food in the cafeteria, the gold-buttoned
navy blazer uniforms, or the short-skirted navy plaid uniforms worn by the girls. The girls. With flashing eyes and squeals
they bumped and pushed one another and hugged—even hugged one another in the cafeteria line. One whispered a secret into another
one’s ear which made the second one’s eyes grow wide, and she yelped with excitement And then both girls jumped up and down.
One girl braided another’s hair while they talked. Another girl was so overwhelmed by the pile of books she was carrying that
when she tried to move them onto her hip, her loose-leaf notebook fell to the ground, and when the papers flew all around,
two of the other girls rushed to help her pick them up.

Davey’s eyes couldn’t get enough of the girls. Girls.
Watching them was like watching creatures in the zoo. For him. That was how unique they looked and how amazingly they behaved.
Girls. They were fimny. And pretty. And not a little bit frightening. like that one with the silver-blond hair. She had the
most beautiful hair, and the most beautiful hand to push it away from her face, and the most beautiful face.

“Casey,” someone screamed, and the girl looked across the cafeteria and waved a vigorous wave and smiled. Casey. Casey. Davey
sat at the table eating his roast beef, mashed potatoes, and gravy, answering the questions the eager admissions director
was asking him. Favorite sports, favorite athletes, favorite books, favorite authors, and every now and then he would take
one quick look at Casey. She was leaving her roast beef on the plate. Too busy to eat because she was laughing with her friends.
At things that must be really funny because she didn’t stop laughing all through lunch. Casey.