“Where exactly is Walt?” Ralph asked.
Irene reached for the wine bottle, swirled its contents to gauge how much was left, and poured the rest into her glass. “Walt is in New York.”
“New York? What’s he doing in New York?”
“Oh, I would imagine he’s setting up the apartment for himself and the woman he left me for. The one carrying his child.”
“Do you have to bring that up!” Frances said, grabbing her glass. Wine splashed out of it and onto the tablecloth.
“What?” Irene said to her mother. “Ralph asked where Walt is. I merely answered him.” Irene turned to Ralph again. “He got tired of the family he had and decided to start a new one. One without a prenuptial agreement that made him feel inferior from the second Mother and Daddy made him sign it. So he did. He’s divorcing me. Starting over.”
“That is not the reason he left you, and you know it!” Frances said, slurring her words a bit. “It’s because you slept around!”
Irene laughed. “And he didn’t? Which one of us do you think slept around first, Mother? Do you really think it was me?”
“This is neither the time nor the place for this conversation,” Hugh said softly, not looking at anyone, only at his empty plate.
“I’m sorry to hear that, Irene,” Ralph said. “I really am.”
Irene shrugged and reached for her cigarettes and a lighter. “It’s just the way it is.”
“He didn’t let you keep the house?”
“He sold the house out from under me. It was in his name, you know. And I’ve got loads of money, he said, so I didn’t need to worry about where I’d end up. He said he’d come out and see the children in the summer, if he wasn’t too busy. Father of the Year, right?” She lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply.
“I’m sorry, too,” I said. Because I was. As I had been sitting there listening to her, I could see that I wasn’t the only wounded person in this house. Frances, for all her pomp and prickles, seemed so sad. Missing her late husband, perhaps. Missing his nearness and company and presence. Hugh, the bachelor with no children, also seemed sad. He probably wasn’t any happier about still living at home than his brother was. And Irene, while she pretended not to care intensely about anything, had been hurt in the deepest part of her. I had my own woes of course, and even Ralph was pained that the world of haves and have-nots was such an awful place and didn’t have to be. The whole lot of us seemed to be in quiet misery, despite not just the safety but the luxuriousness of our surroundings.
Irene looked over at me and smiled. It wasn’t a big smile, but it was the first I’d seen from her that day that didn’t smack of derision. “I wanted to get a place on my own for the kids and me, I did,” she said to me, but she was speaking also to her brothers and mother. “But we Doves aren’t at our best when we’re on our own. We need each other even if it’s just to have someone to bicker with.”
The table was silent for a moment. No one challenged her remark.
“I’ll go see to removing the rest of my things from the casita,” Hugh said, as he stood and laid his napkin down on the table next to his plate.
“You’re sure you don’t mind giving us your room?” I asked.
He looked at me and his piercing gaze seemed less icy. “You and Ralph just got married. That merits some privacy. I don’t mind.”
I felt my face blush at the veiled insinuation that, in the casita, Ralph and I could make all the racket we wanted to in our lovemaking.
“So. You going to show Elise around LA tomorrow?” Irene inhaled from her cigarette and blew out a blue cloud of smoke. Hugh was picking up his plate to take to the kitchen and Frances was telling him just to leave it for Martha for the next day.
“Uh, if that’s what she wants,” Ralph said casually, like he hadn’t given much thought to what we’d do as a couple. He had probably been making plans for what he wanted to do on his first day in Los Angeles in four years.
“You could take her to the observatory, maybe,” Irene said. “Or to the Brown Derby for lunch.”
“Or enroll her in classes at the high school,” Frances mumbled before tipping back her glass and gulping the rest of her wine.
“Mother, stop,” Hugh said as he took her dinner plate and set it atop his.
She swallowed and looked up at him, as though surprised he’d heard her. “What?”
“Stop,” Hugh said quietly. “You’ve had too much to drink.”
“I have not.”
“Yes, you have, Mother,” Irene chimed in. “You’re picking on Elise, and it’s not nice.” Irene turned to me. “She doesn’t mean anything by it.”
“The hell I don’t,” Frances said, loud enough for us all to hear. She looked over at Ralph, her eyes lined with silvery tears. “You’ve thrown your life away,” she said, loudly now. “You promised your father you’d stay in college. You promised him on his deathbed you’d be here to help Hugh run the company. You promised him you’d marry a girl who’d been raised like you’d been raised. You promised him you’d make him proud.”
Ralph didn’t flinch. “I didn’t promise him those things. You did. I have no interest in finishing college or helping Hugh run the company or marrying a girl who was raised the way I was, to spend money like there aren’t millions of people starving in the world. That’s the last kind of girl I’d want to marry. I haven’t thrown my life away, Mother. I’ve taken it back. You should be happy for me.”
I sat there stunned. Hugh and Irene stared at Ralph for a moment.
“You hate the money and yet here you are at the big house in Beverly Hills,” Irene said calmly, “drinking the good wine.”
“You want Elise and me to leave?” Ralph said, to his mother, not Irene.
For a second, Frances said nothing. “No,” she finally murmured. “I don’t.” She started to stand and teetered. Hugh set the plates down and reached out to steady his mother.
“Help me upstairs, would you, Hugh?” she said, her voice laced with alcohol and regret.
“Of course. Here we go.”
The two of them left. A moment later Irene pushed her plate away and stood. She reached for her cigarette case and lighter and swept them up.
“Well, Elise,” she said. “Welcome to the family.” She, too, turned and left.
For a few seconds, Ralph didn’t say anything. Then he stood. “Come on. You and I can help move the rest of Hugh’s stuff.”
I rose from my chair and began to clear the table.
“You can just leave it for Martha,” he said, and his voice sounded tired, like it had been exhausting for him to fall back into his old life that day.
“No,” I said, smiling slightly. “I can’t.”
He cracked a smile, too. We cleared the table together, and then, in the kitchen, he rinsed the dishes while I put the leftovers away.
Hugh came into the kitchen on his way out to the casita and found us busy at our tasks. He seemed surprised.
“She couldn’t leave it,” Ralph said, nodding toward me while he rinsed a plate.
Hugh turned to me. “I want to apologize for our mother. She . . . she’s been drinking more since Father died. She says things she doesn’t mean. It’s her grief talking.”
“It’s all right,” I said, not so much because it was all right but because I just didn’t want to think about what had been said about me at dinner, or even before it. I just wanted to clean up the kitchen, something I knew how to do.
Hugh stood there for a moment; then he grabbed a dish towel, and the three of us silently washed the dishes and put them away.
When we were done, Ralph offered to help his brother move the rest of his belongings.
“I only have a few things left in there,” he said. “I had Higgins bring your luggage to the casita before he left for home. You can come out with me if you want.”
Hugh was moving into a spacious bedroom on the ground floor of the main house. This bedroom was the only one on the ground floor and would certainly have been private enough for Ralph and me. I said as much to Ralph, but he whispered back that I would want some privacy when he left for his photo trip until I found my own place. His words made me realize he intended to start that trip sooner than I had thought.
We followed Hugh out of the kitchen and down a short tiled hallway that led to a set of changing rooms for the pool and French doors that opened out onto the patio. The cottage by the pool was perhaps thirty yards from the rest of the house.
“So why do you call it a casita?” I asked Ralph as we walked across the patio.
He glanced at me and smiled. “That’s Spanish for little house.” He leaned in close to me to murmur something Hugh wouldn’t hear. “I’m surprised you don’t know that from your time in Crystal City. You were practically in Mexico.”
I wanted to remind him there had been a fence. And barbed wire. And armed guards on horseback. “Isn’t it just a guesthouse?” I said instead.