Girl on the Best Seller List Read online

  He really pitied Fern. He wondered if that was what his whole attitude toward her had evolved into.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” he had answered. “Poor old Milo.” He had closed the novel abruptly, so that she would not know he was reading the seduction scene between Fernanda and her analyst.

  “Not poor Virginia?” Fern had snapped. “Not poor Min Stewart?” she had added. Freddy knew she meant — not poor me? Fern had slapped cold cream across her face with an angry gesture, and continued, “After all, your own daughter was maligned in that book.And your best friend. Where would you be without Min? Who put up the money for your loan when all the banks refused credit?”

  “All right,” he had said. “Poor Virginia. Poor Min.”

  “But you don’t really mean it, do you?”

  “No,” Freddy had admitted, “I don’t. Ginny can do circles around Gloria Wealdon any day; so can Min Stewart. Neither one of them gives a damn what that idiot wrote about them.”

  Fern had shouted, “Sometimes I think you know less about the human mechanism than anyone I’ve ever encountered!”

  The storm warnings were posted. Whenever Fern began talking about “the human mechanism” at the top of her lungs, the first rag of civility was about to be ripped away.

  “I don’t want to argue, Fern,” Freddy had answered in a mild tone.

  “Don’tI know it!” Fern laughed sarcastically. “You want to keep your hostility all bottled up inside of you. You’ll find other ways to punish me, won’t you, Fred?”

  “The idea of punishing you,” Freddy replied truthfully, “bores me.” He felt like adding: “As does your new vocabulary,” but he checked himself.

  At the last Rotary Club meeting, he had made the same complaint to Jay Mannerheim. Jay had answered that all patients tossed around psychological words in the beginning.

  “In thebeginning!” Freddy had laughed. “Fern’s been laid out on your couch for two and a half years now!”

  Jay had nodded sadly. “I know it seems like a long time to the layman, but it’s really a relatively short time.

  It’s a big job unraveling thirty-three years.”

  Freddy grimaced. “Fern’s thirty-seven, not thirty-three. I can’t see what good you can do if she won’t even tell you the truth!”

  “She will … in time,” said Jay. He had knocked the dottle from his pipe and continued in a confidential tone. “Freddy — about Virginia. You know crossed eyes, in many cases, are due to some hereditary anatomical weakness, but I don’t think that’s so in Ginny’s case. I mean there’s no history of it in either Fern’s backgroundor yours.”

  “I agree,” Freddy had said.

  “No one is responsible for her condition,” Jay had added, “and no one shouldfeel responsible.” “Does anyone?”

  “Fulton, do you know what I’m trying to get across?” “What?”

  Momentarily Jay had studied Freddy’s bland face. Then stuffing his pipe in his pocket, he had said: “You must be punishing Fern for something, Freddy.”

  “You’ve been reading Gloria Wealdon’s version of Fern’s version of life at the Fultons’,” Freddy’d laughed.

  “Except that Gloria Wealdon’s version includes one devoted husband.”

  “And one debauched psychoanalyst.”

  Jay had shaken his head. “That partwas rather pathetic. Patients, particularly women, enjoy imagining that they have the ability to seduce their analysts. It’s a little private daydream. It was sad that it had to be brought out in the open.”

  “Even sadder,” Freddy had said, “that theydon’t have the ability.”

  “I suppose that wouldn’t bother you.”

  Freddy had told him honestly, “I’d feel as though Fern’s analysis was a better investment under those circumstances. At least she’d be gettingsomething for my money, besides a lot of psychological jargon she’s not mentally equipped to grasp.”

  Standing abruptly, Jay Mannerheim had looked down at Freddy Fulton with a serious expression to his countenance. “I’m not out selling my wares, Fulton, but a remark such as that makes me feel obliged to suggest thatyou could use a little therapy yourself. Have you ever considered analysis?”

  Freddy had told him that he already knew the art of being unhappy intelligently.

  Freddy Fulton liked Jay Mannerheim. Of course he was terribly pompous and something of an ass, but Freddy felt he meant well, and in some instances he probably actuallydid help people. If he was getting nowhere with Fern, it was because Fern would never admit the truth. She had long ago stopped admitting it to herself, so why should she tell Jay Mannerheim about it.

  If Freddy were as prone to label things as Fern was, he would label the matter “Fern’s mental block.” For even to Freddy, Fern had never made reference to the year 1953, except to berate Hollywood on occasion for giving Audrey Hepburn an Oscar that year.

  In the year 1953 Freddy Fulton fell in love. Freddy was like a lot of people who had married very young and outgrown their mates. Like the others, Freddy, after he had met Edwina Dare, began to distinguish between the act of loving someone and the experience of beingin love with someone. He had loved Fern; he supposed in some crazy way he would always love Fern — such was the complexity of marital love; but he wasin love with Edwina Dare. Wouldn’t he always be.

  Still, in 1953 he had let her move away from Cayuta; he had not tried to stop her.

  He could still remember the painful night when he had made his decision. Fern had gone to the bedroom, while Freddy sat in the dark in their cream-colored living room. He sat there for hours, debating, reasoning, weeping; he sat there like a man in a dream, who knew how beautiful the dream was, but also knew, the way sometimes a man does on the thin edge of sleep, that soon he would have to wake up. When finally he decided he could not bring himself to abandon Fern and Ginny and go off blissfully with his Edwina, he got up and went into the bedroom to tell Fern. He expected to find her waiting there, tortured, the same way he had been, by the thought that their marriage hung by a hair. When he opened the door, he saw her sitting by the radio, in tears, and for the first time since their trouble had started he had felt compassion for her, he had felt he had made the right decision. Crossing the room, he held out his arms to her, intending to say something comforting, something likethere, there, now; it’s going to be all right between us, Fern. He had been prevented from speaking immediately by Fern’s sudden wailing.

  • • •

  “Audrey Hepburn is no actress!” she had cried. “Gawd, Freddy, remember the old pictures? Remember Ida Lupino in ‘The Hard Way’? We saw it in New York City that Easter, remember? Ida Lupino could act; still can! She deserves an Oscar, butthis one!”

  It was Ginny he had put his arms around that night, holding her sleepy-eyed in her pajamas. It was Ginny he murmured to: “It’s going to be all right.”

  Now, six years later, Freddy Fulton was grateful for the fact Fern was seeing Jay Mannerheim three afternoons a week. Ever since Gloria Wealdon’s book was published, Fern had been carrying on in an astonishing way — praising Gloria one moment, damning her the next. Her moods, lately, were never predictable.

  Freddy would be buckling his galoshes in the kitchen in the morning, on his way to the plant, when suddenly Fern would walk in and announce: “I never told Gloria Wealdon you idolized me! She made that up! I don’t need anyone idolizing me! Believe you me, I had all ofthat I could use when I was a girl. Why, the boys at Miss Bryan’s Dancing School used to break their necks racing across that waxed ballroom floor to get me for the opening waltz. I think I told you that Jack Fowler — he’s a big man in stocks and bonds now, lives up in Fairfield County — Jack Fowler broke his collarbone right there on Miss Bryan’s waxed floor, racing across to get me for the opener!”

  “I’m glad to hear it,” Freddy would answer.

  That would be all there was to it, until the next time.

  The next time, Freddy and Fern and Ginny might be watching television, and F
reddy and Ginny would laugh at something they thought was corny on the screen. Then again it would happen; adifferent version. Fern would say: “It isn’t good to be smug about what youmay think is corny, Virginia. Some people can’t afford to be smug. Your father is a little over-protective. He’ll sit there and laugh with you at the pretty girls who can’t act on the television, without ever explaining that pretty girls have the upper hand in the world, whether they’re talented or not! Your father won’t tell you the simple facts of life, Virginia. Even Gloria Wealdon can figure out the simple facts of life. She told the truth in that novel. That’s why people are so indignant!”

  Freddy — and Virginia, too — became gradually accustomed to Fern’s irrational outbursts, so both were prepared for this morning’s incident.

  After breakfast, Fern had said, “Listen, Gloria Wealdon is coming down here to have coffee with me. Soshe thinks! I think I’ll slam the door in her face! And if either of you speak to her, I’m not going to speak to you!”

  Freddy had sighed tiredly. “I mean it, Freddy!”

  He had said to his daughter, “C’mon, Ginny, let’s get those Matrimonial Vines.”

  “I’m with you, Dad,” his daughter had grinned.

  As they were leaving the back door, they had nearly collided with Gloria Wealdon. Freddy had held Ginny’s arm tightly and whispered, “Try to please your mother, Ginny, and don’t speak to her.”

  “Don’t worry,” Ginny had answered. “I don’t have anything to say to Gloria Wealdon.”

  Freddy had been slightly surprised at Virginia’s bitter tone. He and Ginny had laughed so much overPopulation 12,360 that he had not anticipated that kind of reaction. He was pondering this when Gloria Wealdon nearly knocked them over, waving and calling “Hi” on her way into their house. He was beginning to wonder, for the first time, if his daughter actually had taken the novel seriously.

  His wife’s voice had interrupted his musing: “Well, hi, Glo!” she called from the steps. “Gee, I’m glad you could come!”

  Maybe, Freddy had thought, Fern is really and truly cracking up.

  Beside him now in the Fulton backyard, Freddy heard his daughter say, “Well?” “Well, what?”

  • • •

  “You’ve been dreaming … I asked you if it wouldn’t kill Gloria Wealdon if I used thewhole can? There’s arsenic in it, isn’t there?”

  “Yes,” Freddy said. “There is.”

  “I could write a sequel to her book,” said Ginny. “I could call itPopulation, 12,359.”

  • • •

  Freddy chuckled. Then again he wondered if itcould be possible that the novel had hurt Ginny. Everyone in Cayuta, he supposed, knew who the lisping teen-ager was supposed to be. Ginny herself had once or twice pretended to lisp in fun, after she had read the book. She had teased Freddy about their closeness too, often satirizing an old song by singing:

  “We be-long

  to a mu-tu-al,

  ad-mir-a-tion

  so-ci-ety — my fath-er and me.”

  Once, when Fern was getting ready for her appointment with Jay, Ginny had said, “Will the kindly psychoanalyst be able to resist the devastating Mrs. Frederick Fulton duringthis session? Tune in tomorrow — ”

  Fern had cut her off by screaming, “Virginia! Don’t you ever,ever speak that way again!”

  “What do you want her to do?” Freddy had asked Fern later that evening when they were alone. “Take that book seriously?”

  “Doesn’t she even know when someone’s made a fool of her?” said Fern.

  “She knows someone’s tried,” Freddy had answered, “and she knows how to laugh off a bad joke.”

  “Ginny’s afraid to showyou her true feelings,” Fern had begun shouting again. “You expect her to behave the way you do. Old, unflinching, unfeeling Freddy — old Ironsides!”

  “Don’t raise your voice, Fern!”

  “Freddy, dammit all, peopleraise their voices when their houses are on fire. And our house is on fire! If I want to hollerfire, I will! One of these days Ginny is going to holler fire too!”

  At the time, Freddy had dismissed the whole idea of his inhibiting Ginny by his own example of durability as just another of Fern’s notions. But that Saturday morning when Ginny began all the teasing talk about poisoning Gloria Wealdon, Freddy wondered just what kind of a joke it was. He remembered Jay Mannerheim’s cliché,No one ever jokes, and he thought that it simply was not like Ginny to indulge in such obvious, trivial humor. One of the things he had always admired about Virginia was her subtlety; another was her poise and dignity. To Freddy, she was a remarkably intact personality. Apart from being his daughter, whom he loved, she was a human being he admired and respected.

  He turned to Ginny and said, “Tell me something, honey, would you really like to see Mrs. Wealdon dead?”

  “Yes, a little.”

  “I wonder why. It doesn’t seem much like you, Ginny.”

  “I feel sorry for Mr. Wealdon.” She stood up. She pushed her glasses back up on her nose and squinted at the sunlight. “I keep thinking of the time those bulb mites got at his tulip bulbs. He was furious! I was with him the afternoon he soaked the bulbs in nicotine sulphate. I thought he was going to cry, he was so furious.”

  “It wouldn’t do him much good to cry over his wife’s book, Ginny.”

  “It’s not that. It’s just that it’s too bad a man like that had to marry someone like her!”

  “Someday you’ll discover that people usually deserve each other, Ginny.”

  “I know your theories on that subject.”

  “Do you agree with me?”

  “I have always … but Mr. Wealdon doesn’t deserve her. It was different with you. There was Edwina to make up for things mother lacked.”

  “It was never that your mother lacked something, Virginia. It was just that after I met Edwina, I wanted more. Not from your mother. Just from Edwina — her particular kind of gentleness.”

  “I know all that. I didn’t mean to bring it up. It’s just that I feel sorry for Mr. Wealdon. He doesn’t deserve a woman like her.”

  “Maybe he does. Maybe he wants to protect a woman, watch out for her. You know how solicitous he is with his plants and everything. Well, he’s got a handful in Gloria Wealdon. I don’t know anyone besides your mother who’s ever felt even lukewarm toward that woman.”

  “Mother was sorry for her too.”

  “Yes, I think so. She’d deny it, but I think so. Your mother’s always had a soft spot for people like that.” “Poor mother.”

  “Yes,” said Fulton. “She’s been very upset.”

  Virginia Fulton sighed, kicking the small pile of weeds at her feet. After a moment, she smiled. “Dad, would you like some hot coffee?”

  “Yes, Ginny.”

  “I can sneak in the back way and get some for us. I’ll bring it out here in the old thermos.”

  Freddy watched her run up the lawn. She was so quick and bright and good-natured; so intuitive, too. He found himself thinking for a moment of what her grandfather used to say:“God gave handicaps only to the highest types. Little minds are subdued and ruined by them; great minds are challenged and made by them.”

  He looked after her, and then he experienced the wonderful feeling a parent does, when, for no particular reason, at some random interval, on no especial day, he suddenly has a heart full of pride, when he observes his child in a simple, everyday situation.

  Smiling, Freddy Fulton knelt down by the Matrimony Vine and began looking around for the can of herbicide.

  Five

  His name was Will: Big Will she always called him in her mind, and she always saw him looking at her with a certain cockiness to his expression, a certain snideness, as though he could read her thoughts, and knew what she called him to herself — Big Will.

  — FROM Population 12,360

  STANLEY SECORA sat on the green bench at the bus stop on the corner of Genesee Street and Alden Avenue. A new Buick pulled over, and
the owner pointed toward downtown with his finger and beckoned questioningly with his eyes at Stanley. Stanley shook his head. “No thanks!” The Buick’s owner, an attorney, waved and went on.

  That made the sixth person who had offered Stanley a ride. Stanley didn’t need a ride. In fifteen or twenty minutes he would get up and walk down Alden Avenue to the Wealdons, for his appointment with Mrs. Wealdon. But meanwhile, Stanley liked sitting on the green bench while people stopped and offered him a lift. There was no doubt about his popularity. Every single summer since the war he had more lawns to cut than he needed, and in the winter he had an assistant help him with the walks he was asked to shovel. Evenings when he came home from his regular job, working as a stock clerk for Freddy Fulton, the “Y” switchboard operator invariably had two or three messages for him. He would get painting jobs, planting jobs. He even did plumbing work once out at the Riford summer camp. All kinds of work would come his way in a never-ending stream. Someone once made the remark that in Cayuta,New York, people never used the expression “let George do it”; people said, “call up Stanley.” Stanley liked to remember that.

  Stanley liked the way people counted on him. He always had. When he was a kid, growing up in the Kantogee County Orphans’ Home, on the outskirts of Cayuta, he was the best lawn-raker, ashcan-emptier, bed-maker, floor-mopper, and errand-runner of anyone in the Home. In the army, he never minded K.P. He didn’t even hate latrine duty. Work was work; a job had to be done. That was the way Stanley felt about it.

  Sometimes when you did a job well (like last week when he helped lay Sandran in the Meens’ kitchen, and Mrs. Meen kept saying afterward, Oh, it’s so nice! It really is nice! Oh, my, Stanley, thank you!) your satisfaction was in the reaction of other people. Delighted astonishment, in Mrs. Meen’s case; a direct and forthright compliment from someone like Dr. Mannerheim; a dollar pressed into his palm by Freddy Fulton; or from Min Stewart the offer of a cold beer which he could have out on the back steps in the summer, or in the warm kitchen in the winter.