The Fundamentals of Play Read online

  “He wait here all by hisself.”

  “You go and find Kate. She’ll be upstairs.”

  “That’s where the cousins hang out,” the maid corroborated. “You go upstairs. You don’t want to be hanging around down here with the old folks, do you?”

  “Oh, no she won’t, Bea,” said the old woman. “Kate won’t be with the cousins. She doesn’t like her cousins. You know the only one she likes, Bea.”

  “Oh, yes, I do, crazy. She like Froggy.”

  “That’s right, Bea,” acknowledged Kate’s grandmother. “She likes Froggy the best. And so do I.”

  “You go on up there,” the maid said pleasantly. “You find Kate upstairs with her cousin Froggy.”

  Reluctantly I said I would go and look for them.

  “Froggy’s a little off,” the maid warned me. “You know what I mean, right? You know Froggy?”

  “Froggy’s a good boy,” countered her charge. “You be nice to Froggy, Bea!”

  “I? I? I’m the nicest in the whole place. Froggy and I, we friends.” To me she repeated gently, “Froggy not quite right, you get it, though.”

  “Oh, yes,” I said. “That’s all right.”

  “Then you go on and have fun! Don’t sit here by yourself. You miss the party.”

  “Oh, I will. I’ll go right up. Thank you.”

  “What’s your name, boy?” demanded the grandmother.

  “He already tell you, crazy! You forget already?”

  “It’s George,” I said. “George Lenhart.”

  “Are you a friend of my son’s?”

  The maid smiled, rolling her eyes. “Come on. Let’s go. Bedtime, Granny.”

  I held the door as she wheeled the chair through it.

  “It’s my birthday,” the old woman said.

  “Yes, I heard,” I said. “Thank you for having me.”

  “Did you have a good time?” she asked eagerly.

  “Oh, yes, Mrs. Goodenow,” I said. “The best.”

  She nodded into herself, reassured. “Lenhart?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She nodded again. “Yes, I know,” she said. “I know your name. There are Lenharts in Maine.”

  By that point instincts of self-preservation had overcome propriety; before I went upstairs, I ducked back into the library and took the America’s Cup book and brought it with me for protection. Then I climbed the large curving stairs to the second floor. In a bedroom there, six or eight girls my age and some boys a few years older were lounging on a made bed and hardback chairs. They had evidently gone up there to drink; an arcane drinking game was in full swing, which seemed to involve elements of each of the ones I knew: telling the truth, kissing members of the opposite sex, laying cards down, recitation. I got an odd sensation watching them play. Then I realized that they all looked something alike, but in an odd way. Sitting on one of the beds were two girls who looked up at me when I came in. It wasn’t just that they looked blank, their faces, for I was used to that. It was something stranger, and it wasn’t till I compared them with Kate’s that I formulated the thought, an ugly, inappropriate thought. They looked … inbred. Their eyes were a little bit too close together. I spoke up finally: “Has anyone seen Kate?”

  “Upstairs,” said the two girls, registering me and looking away.

  I closed the door and went up another flight, and there on the third floor I finally heard Kate’s voice.

  “Kate!” I called. “Kate!”

  They were playing inside a little bedroom, the kind every big old house has one of: the neglected bedroom, to which the lumpy twin beds are banished and the stuffed animals and the grammar school primers and the old athletic prizes. They were three: a grown man, a little girl of about five or six, and Kate. The man and the little girl were lying on their backs on one bed, giggling, and Kate was on the floor on her hands and knees.

  “George!” she cried. “I’m a horsey! Come ride me!”

  “No!” shouted the little girl. “I wanna ride!” She jumped down from the bed and climbed onto Kate’s back and began to whip it with an imaginary whip. Kate reared and tried to toss her off, but the little girl screamed and clung to Kate’s hair.

  “Ow, you brat! You spoiled brat!” Kate’s dress was bunched up above her knees and one of the gold straps was hanging off her shoulder. It was as if she had put it on just to ruin it.

  In no hurry, the man on the bed rose and came over to shake my hand. He had a wonderfully warm face with a winning smile. And his handshake was firm. “I’m Fred,” he said. “People call me Frog.”

  “Froggy!” the little girl screamed. “Froggy!”

  The man removed a pack of cigarettes from a breast pocket and lit one while the two girls rolled around on the floor shrieking. There was a curious air of the invalid about Kate’s older cousin. He was wearing slippers and an old cardigan. At the same time he reminded me of an old movie star; he moved through a succession of languid, rather debonair postures.

  “You shouldn’t smoke!” instructed the little girl.

  “Say: ‘You shouldn’t smoke, Fred Goodenow Brown!’ ” Kate ordered.

  “You shouldn’t smoke Fred Goodenow Brown!”

  Mr. Brown bent over with the cigarette between his lips and exhaled pointedly into their faces, whereupon the little girl plucked the butt from his mouth and threw it on the ground.

  “Hey—crazy,” Mr. Brown rebuked her, picking it from the rug. “That’s a lit cigarette! You want to start a fire and burn down Granny’s house?”

  “I hate Granny!” said the little girl, and stamped her foot.

  With a lazy, disapproving shake of his head, the man picked the child up and thrust her bodily from the room, shutting the door and locking it behind him. “That little bitch,” he said.

  I must have looked alarmed, for the man smiled suddenly and said, in a low, rather seductive voice, “Do you live here? I mean, would you like to live here? We have plenty of room, now that she’s gone.” He indicated the door with a nod.

  “Frogs,” Kate said warningly. “Don’t start. You don’t know George. George isn’t family.”

  “Family, shmamily.”

  “Kate, we should probably get back,” I suggested.

  “Aren’t you having fun?” snapped Mr. Brown. The change in tone was so fast, it was almost as if a different tenant had taken up residence in the man’s body.

  “It’s not that,” I began, when Kate’s eyes flew strangely up to mine. “Kate.” Her face was miserable. She looked inconsolable, and more: as if she had just realized she was inconsolable. “I miss Nick,” she said. Outside the door the little girl had begun to cry.

  Fred knelt down beside Kate, momentarily his former self again. “Katie, Katie, Katie, what’s the matter? I’m sorry. I’m sorry, darling. Did I do something to upset you? I’m sorry—”

  In the midst of the confusion, there was a knock at the door. “There’s a child out here wants to play,” said a woman’s voice.

  I instinctively took a step back as Mr. Brown sprang up and wrenched the door open. It banged terribly. “Whadaya want?” he demanded.

  “This little girl wants to play horse and rider,” said the woman.

  “All right,” sighed Fred. “Come on, you little bitch,” he added, in a gentle, resigned tone that didn’t match the words, and laughed at what he evidently considered to be a joke.

  When the woman stepped into the room, I recognized my companion of the alcove. “Oh—hello,” she said. Then she noticed Kate. “I see you found Katie!” she added brightly, retreating from the room.

  “Don’t call me, Katie, Linda,” Kate said. “And you’re interrupting.”

  “All right, Kate. I’m sorry, I’m very sorry—I was just trying to sleep next door and I heard the little girl crying—”

  Now Kate rose from the floor, her dress hanging in distorted folds. Before I could even guess what her expression meant, she had gone to the door and, astonishingly, slammed it in the woman’s face
. “How do you know her?”

  “We met downstairs,” I answered.

  “Linda Van Wijck is a slut,” Kate said.

  “A big slut,” Mr. Brown said gaily.

  “A bigger slut!” the little girl cried, clapping her hands.

  “But you’re a slut, too, Katie.” Mr. Brown gave a wink in my direction.

  “Ha ha, that’s very funny.” Kate was sitting on the bed, picking carpet shards off of her gold top.

  “She’s not a virgin, is she?” taunted her cousin. “Is she? Is she, is she, is she?” By now he was pointing at Kate and dancing a little jig around the room. “You’ve had it in you! You’ve had it in you!”

  The little girl was banging on the bedpost with one of Kate’s shoes.

  “Kate, please—let’s leave,” I urged. “They’ll be wondering where we are—”

  Mr. Brown walked toward Kate, his arms outstretched like a sleepwalker’s, his hands fixed in a strangle grip. There was a horrifying moment when I went to pull Kate up from the bed and away from him at the same time that her cousin grabbed hold of the gold top. Kate shrieked as the material ripped away from her. Mr. Brown held up the top, brandishing it triumphantly. “I capture the castle!” he cried. “I capture the castle!”

  For a second or two, like the stunned expression of a child that falls down, Kate’s face could have gone either way. Then she went with laughter. Her arms folded defensively over her bare flat chest, Kate sat on the little twin bed and laughed. They all did, all three of them, and they had the same laugh—Mr. Brown, Kate, and the little girl. I don’t mean the same timbre or that they laughed on the same vowel—I mean that the intensity was the same. I felt like a real spoilsport. I had to push and push myself to keep laughing while their laughter went on effortlessly into the night.

  They played for hours. I sat on the floor outside the bedroom and read the history of the America’s Cup. I learned all kinds of things, such as who the first skipper was, and what year they invented the Park Avenue boom. At two or three a maid came up and told them to quiet down. Mr. Brown picked a fight with the woman and was sent to his room, and the little girl’s mother finally came back, drunk, from town and took her daughter away. I had a bad feeling, crashing in the room with Kate, that the adults in the house would think I’d try to take advantage of our solitude up there on the third floor, but in retrospect I’m sure no one gave it a thought.

  I never mentioned my conversation under the alcove to Kate, or heard the rumor Linda Van Wijck told me confirmed or denied. I am sure I probably misheard the woman, or misunderstood her—or more likely, that she misspoke out of drunkenness, or some lingering envy from her school days with Kate’s mother. For what I thought I heard her say was that Mr. Goodenow was not Kate’s father. It is strange, perhaps, that I did not try harder to learn the truth. But the idea of doing so behind Kate’s back was more inconceivable only than asking her to her face. I had trouble believing it was true, and yet there were times later on when I felt it would have explained a great deal. A third possibility occurred to me the next morning, when Granny’s car drove us over to the regatta: maybe it was true, and they had never told Kate. Or perhaps—I stole a look at her, dozing lightly across the seat from me, at the jaunty chin, which no messy, irrelevant past had ever brought down—perhaps poor Linda Van Wijck knew more than she knew she knew: maybe it was true, and the women had never told Art Goodenow.

  In any event, in the wake of Nick’s dramatic departure, there were no repercussions about our overnight absence.

  CHAPTER 21

  After Kate’s engagement party Nick found a job steering a boat from Rye, New York, down to the West Indies. At my urging, he’d waited around for a week while I did what I could to penetrate the Goodenow fortress that had sprung up to protect Kate. But it was no use. They wouldn’t take my calls; they wouldn’t let him see her. Kate didn’t answer at home or at work, and it was only when an aunt mistook me for someone else on the phone that I learned she had taken a leave from Sotheby’s.

  Nick put off the job for a weekend, but then they had to go and one Monday in November we had our last breakfast. During his stay in my apartment I’d gotten back into the habit of a morning meal. Nick had learned to cook going down to Bermuda on one of the maxis and he said it was funny now, using a stove that didn’t tilt. He made omelettes for Toff and me every morning but he tried to keep it healthy, leaving out a yolk every other white.

  “I guess I’m not going to see Kate this visit.” Nick had a habit of sopping up his eggs with toast, of combining several dishes into one and eating them as a kind of stew, of finishing his juice and using the empty glass for milk, but with him you attributed all this to the galley, and you admired the practicality.

  “I’ll tell her you were here, that you waited,” I said.

  “Sure. I’ll be back.”

  We finished our coffee.

  It was true that Nick had gotten married, just like the kid told it—on a boat off Anguilla one Race Week. At odd times his wife’s name would come up. I would be on the brink of asking, “Now, who’s Stacy again?” and then I would remember. “I’d like Kath to meet Stacy,” Nick said, pushing his plate aside. “I think they’d get along.”

  “I’ll tell her,” I said. “I’ll tell her you said that.”

  He nodded reflectively. “That guy she’s marrying. Harry. He’s a nice guy, isn’t he?”

  “Oh, sure,” I said.

  “Seemed it. Seemed like a really nice guy.”

  “I’ll tell him you said that. I don’t think anyone’s told him that before.”

  “Yeah? Why not?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “He’s very … ambitious.”

  “Ambitious?” Nick said, after a moment, as if he hadn’t heard right. “But that’s great, George. Ambition is great.”

  “Sure it is, Nick.”

  “Who doesn’t know that? Don’t people know that?”

  “They know,” I said. “But sometimes they see it in someone else and—I don’t know—it bothers them.”

  “Why would it do that?”

  “It’s stupid, I guess.”

  “It is. Stupid.” Nick tipped back from the table and used his fingertips to balance on the back legs of the chair. I picture him that way, suspended in an adolescent’s posture that he had never outgrown.

  “Maybe I should have had more ambition,” he suggested finally, in the manner one might say, “Maybe I should have taken a cab,” and let the front chair legs back down to the floor.

  “Come on, Nick,” I argued, “you’re doing better than all of us. You’ve got it figured out. You do what the rest of us only—”

  “But, George,” Nick said, with a patient smile, “we don’t know where I would have been if I had had ambition. Yes.” He nodded solemnly. “Ambition is good and people shouldn’t knock it. I’m going to write that guy a postcard and tell him so.”

  I was late by then so I took a cab down to work. On my way down, I thought about my second, abortive date with Delia Ferrier, and the excuse I had made of my job. It was a breezy day and the wind seemed to mock me and my ambition—the puffs rippling down the East River; the pointless, metropolitan gust. Since coming to the city, I had done my best to ignore the wind, but sometimes it found me anyway.

  Harry was anxious on the phone: “I’m-unna—I’m-unna—I’m-unna see her soon. Soon as she’s back. She can’t be bothered, George, and I can’t tell you any more. She’s resting, all right? Leave it at that. I’m-unna see her soon, and soon as I do, I’ll tell her you were asking for her. You and she are very good friends, I know. You and she go way back, and I know she’d want to see you if she was seeing anyone. But right now she’s not seeing anyone. So leave it at that, okay. Leave it at this.” I suspected Harry didn’t know where they were keeping her any more than Nick or I did, but felt he had to keep up a semblance of being in the familial know. I didn’t blame him, nor did I press him. I left it at that. For I felt rather lucky to
have gotten rid of Harry for the time being; I always did.

  It was nice, chatty Annie Roth who finally filled me in. Kate was indeed gone from work, and the rumor was that she and her mother had gone away somewhere warm. “We tried to visit her in the hospital,” Annie volunteered, “but they wouldn’t let us in.” I very nearly asked her what had happened—I was picturing Kate with a broken leg or arm—before I grasped the truth. “But Mr. Goodenow took Jess and me out to lunch at the yacht club. Wasn’t that sweet of him? Poor guy, they’re really worried. I mean, this is the second time, you know. You see, Kate never had any of the adolescent rebellion problems the rest of us did. Well, okay, there was the eating thing, but hell, who wasn’t starving themselves in high school? I just wasn’t very good at it! That’s sad, isn’t it, George? A would-be anorexic!”

  Cara, whose presence of late had been refreshingly muted, resurfaced after Nick left. She seemed to be possessed of a great, secret energy, and this energy prompted her to bring over her vacuum to clean the living room, and to mop the kitchen floor and go around spraying spots on the wall. The apartment had never looked so good. She found a torn flannel shirt of Nick’s in the couch he’d been sleeping on and used it as a dust rag and then threw it out. “Good riddance!”

  “He is coming back, you know,” I told her. “He’s coming back tomorrow, so you’d better get used to sharing your space, dear.” I loved to needle her.

  “What?” Cara cried, pausing with spray bottle in hand. “How long’s he gonna stay?”

  “Two, three months. Probably for good.”

  “What? How can you say this? Don’t you know you’re being taken advantage of?”

  “Um …”

  “But he was here on the couch every night!”

  “Ye-es. Well, so have, ahem—”

  Cara was the kind of girl who looks surreptitiously into every reflective surface she passes, and she had been fixing her hair in the window. But now her hands flew to her hips as she spun around. “That’s different! I’m Geoff’s girlfriend!” Till the very end, she was always Geoff’s girlfriend. “I have a right to be here! He’s not … anyone!”