Galilee

“You will have noticed,” Garrison’s garish and acidic wife Margie—whose tongue was notoriously acidic—remarked, “that you keep seeing the same sour old faces wherever you go. You know why? There’s only twenty important people left in New York, twenty-one now you’re here, and we all go to the same parties and we all serve on the same committees. And we’re all very, very bored with one another.” She happened to make the remark while she and Rachel stood on a balcony looking down at a glittering throng of perhaps a thousand people. “Before you say anything,” Margie went on, “it’s all done with mirrors.”

Inevitably on occasion a remark somebody would make would leave her feeling uncomfortable. Usually such remarks weren’t directed at her, but at Mitchell, in her presence.

“Wherever did you find her?” somebody would say, meaning no conscious offense by the question but making Rachel feel like a purchase, and the questioner fully expected to go back to the same store and pick up one for themselves.

“They’re just amazed at how lucky I am,” Mitchell said, when she pointed out how objectionable she found that kind of observation. “They don’t mean to be rude.”

“I know.”

“We can stop going to so many parties, if you like.”

“No. I want to know all the people you know.”

“Most of them are pretty boring.”

“That’s what Margie said.”

“Are you two getting on well?”

“Oh yes. I love her. She’s so outrageous.”

“She’s a terrible drunk,” Mitchell said curtly. “She’s been okay for the last couple of months, but she’s still unpredictable.”

“Was she always…?”

“An alcoholic?”

“Yes.”

“Maybe I can help her,” Rachel said.

He kissed her. “My Good Samaritan.” He kissed her again. “You can try but I don’t hold out much hope. She’s got so many axes to grind. She doesn’t like Loretta at all. And I don’t think she likes me much.”

Now it was Rachel who offered the kiss. “What’s not to like?” she said.

Mitchell grinned. “Damned if I know,” he said.

“You egotist.”

“Me? No. You must be thinking of somebody else. I’m the humble one in the family.”

“I don’t think there’s such a thing—”

“—as a humble Geary?”

“Right.”

“Hm.” Mitchell considered this for a moment. “Grandma Kitty was the nearest, I guess.”

“And you liked her?”

“Yeah,” Mitchell said, the warmth of his affection there in his voice. “She was sweet. A little crazy toward the end, but sweet.”

“And Loretta?”

“She’s not crazy. She’s the sanest one in the family.”

“No, I meant, do you like her?”

Mitchell shrugged. “Loretta’s Loretta. She’s like a force of nature.”

Rachel had met Loretta only two or three times so far: this was not the way the woman seemed at all. Quite the contrary. She’d seemed rather reserved, even demure, an impression supported by the fact that she always dressed in white or silvery gray. The only theatrical touch was the turbanish headgear she favored, and the immaculate precision of her makeup, which emphasized the startling violet of her eyes. She’d been pleasant to Rachel, in a gentle, noncommittal sort of way.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Mitchell said. “You’re thinking: Loretta’s just an old-fashioned lady. And she is. But you try crossing her—”

“What happens?”

“It’s like I said: she’s a force of nature. Especially anything to do with Cadmus. I mean, if anyone in the family says anything against him and she hears about it she tears out their throats. ‘You wouldn’t have two cents to rub together without him,’ she says. And she’s right. We wouldn’t. This family would have gone down without him.”

“So what happens when he dies?”

“He isn’t going to die,” Mitchell said, without a trace of irony in his voice. “He’s going to go on and on and on till one of us drives him out to Long Island. Sorry. That was in bad taste.”

“Do you think about that a lot?”

“What happened to Dad? No. I don’t think about it at all. Except when some book comes out, you know, saying it was the Mafia or the CIA. I get in a funk about that stuff. But we’re never going to really know what happened, so what’s the use of thinking about it?” He stroked a stray hair back from Rachel’s brow. “You don’t need to worry about any of this,” he said. “If the old man dies tomorrow we’ll divide up the pie—some for Garrison, some for Loretta, some for us. Then you and me…we’ll just disappear. We’ll get on a plane and we’ll fly away.”

“We could do that now if you want to,” Rachel said. “I don’t need the family, and I certainly don’t need to live the high life. I just need you.”

He sighed; a deep, troubled sigh. “Ah. But where does the family end and Mitchell begin? That’s the question.”

“I know who you are,” Rachel said, drawing close to him. “You’re the man I love. Plain and simple.”

ii

Of course it wasn’t that plain and it wasn’t that simple.

Rachel had entered a small and unenviable coterie: that group of people whose private lives were deemed publicly owned. America wanted to know about the woman who had stolen Mitchell Geary’s heart, especially as she’d been an ordinary creature so very recently. Now she was transformed. The evidence was there in the pages of the glossies and the weekly gossip rags: Rachel Pallenberg dressed in gowns a year’s salary would not have bought her six months before, her smile that of a woman happy beyond her wildest dreams. Happiness like that couldn’t be celebrated for very long; it soon lost its appeal. The same readers who were entranced by the rags-to-riches story in February and March, and astonished by the way the shop girl had been made into a princess in April and May, and a little tearful about the announcement of an autumn wedding when it was made in June, wanted the dirt by July.

What was she really like, this thief who’d run off with Prince Mitchell’s eligibility? She wouldn’t be as picture-perfect as she seemed; nobody was that pleasant. She had secrets; no doubt. Once the wedding was announced, the investigators went to work. Before Rachel Pallenberg got into her white dress and became Rachel Geary, they were going to find something scandalous to tell, even if they had to turn over every rock in Ohio to do it.

Mitchell wasn’t immune from the same zealous muckraking. Old stories about his various liaisons resurfaced in tarted-up forms. His short affair with the drug-addicted daughter of a congressman; his various trips around the Aegean with a small harem of Parisian models; his apparently passionate attachment to Natasha Morley, who’d lately married minor European royalty, and (according to some sources) broken his heart by so doing. One of the sleazier rags even managed to find a classmate from Harvard who claimed that Mitchell’s taste for girls ran to the barely pubescent. “If there’s grass on the field, play ball, that’s what he used to say,” the “classmate” remembered.

Just in case Rachel was tempted to take any of this to heart, Margie brought over a stack of magazines that her housekeeper, Magdalene, had hoarded from the early years of Margie’s life with Garrison, all of which contained stories filled with similar vitriol. The two women were in almost every way dissimilar: Rachel petite and stylish, reserved in her manner; Margie big-boned, overdressed, and voluble. Yet they were like sisters in this storm.

“I was really upset at the time,” Margie said. “But I’ve begun to wish ten percent of what they were saying about Garrison was true. He’d be a damn sight more interesting.”

“If it’s all lies, why doesn’t somebody sue them?” Rachel said.

Margie offered a fatalistic shrug. “If it wasn’t us it’d be some other poor sonofabitch. Anyway, if they stopped writing this shit I might have to go back to reading books.” She gave a theatrical shudder.

“So you read this stuff?”

Margie arched a well-plucked eyebrow. “And you don’t?”

“Well…”

“Honey, we all love to learn about who fucked who. As long as we’re not the who. Just hold on. You’re going to get a shitload of this thrown at you. Then they’ll move on to the next lucky contestant.”

Margie, God bless her, hadn’t offered her reassurances a moment too soon. The very next week brought the first gleanings from Dansky. Nothing particularly hurtful; just a willfully depressing portrait of life in Rachel’s hometown, plus a few pictures of her mother’s house, looking sadly bedraggled: the grass on the lawn dead, the paint on the front door peeling. There was also a brief summary of how Hank Pallenberg had lived and died in Dansky. Its very brevity was a kind of cruelty, Rachel thought. Her father deserved better than this. There was much worse to come. Still sniffing after some hint of scandal, a reporter from one of the tabloids tracked down a woman who’d trained with Rachel as a dental technician. Giving her name only as “Brandy,” because she claimed not to want the attention of the press, the woman offered a portrait of Rachel that was beyond unflattering.

“She was always out to catch herself a rich man,” Brandy claimed. “She used to cut pictures out of newspapers—pictures of rich men she thought she had a hope of getting, you know—but rich, always real rich, and then she pinned them all up on the wall of her bedroom and used to stare at them every night before she went to sleep.” And had Mitchell Geary been one of Rachel Pallenberg’s hit-list of eligible millionaires, the reporter had asked Brandy. “Oh sure,” the girl had replied, claiming she’d got a sick feeling when she’d heard the news about how Rachel’s plan had worked. “I’m a Christian girl, born and raised, and I always thought there was something weird about what Rachel was doing with those pictures up there. Like it was voodoo or something.”

All idiotic invention, of course, but it was still a potent mixture of elements. The headline, accompanied by a picture of Rachel at a recent fund-raiser, her eyes flecked with red from the photographer’s flash, read: “Shocking Sex-Magic Secrets of Geary Bride!” The issue was sold out in a day.

iii

Rachel did her best with all this, but it was hard—even accepting that she’d been a consumer of this nonsense herself, and thoroughly enjoyed it. Now it was her face people were staring at as they waited at the supermarket checkout, her life they were half-believing these lies about. All the detachment she was able to muster didn’t spare her the hurt of that.

“What are you doing even looking at that shit?” Mitchell asked her when she raised the subject over dinner that night. The establishment was Luther’s, an intimate restaurant round the corner from Mitchell’s apartment on Park Avenue.

“They could be saying anything,” Rachel said. She was close to tears. “Not just about me. About my mother or my sister or you.”

“We’ve got lawyers watching them all the time. If Cecil felt they were going too far—”

“Too far? What’s too far?”

“Something worth fighting over,” Mitchell said. He reached over and took hold of her hand.

“It’s not worth crying about, baby,” he said softly. “They’re just stupid people who don’t have anything better to do than try and tear other people down. The thing is: they can’t do it. Not to us. Not to the Gearys. We’re stronger than that.”

“I know…” Rachel said, wiping her nose. “I want to be strong, but—”

“I don’t want to hear but, baby,” he said, his tone still tender despite the toughness of the sentiment. “You’ve got to be strong, because people are looking at you. You’re a princess.”

“I don’t feel much like a princess right now.”

He looked disappointed. He pushed the plate of kidneys away, and put his hand to his face. “Then I’m not doing my job,” he said. She stared at him, puzzled. “It’s my job to make you feel like a princess. My princess. What can I do?” He looked up at her, with a kind of sweet desperation on his face. “Tell me: what can I do?”

“Just love me,” she said.

“I do. Honey, I do.”

“I know you do.”

“And I hate it that those sleazeballs are giving you grief, but they can’t touch you, honey. Not really. They can spit and they shout but they can’t touch you.” He squeezed her hand. “That’s my job,” he said. “Nobody gets to touch you but me.”

She felt a subtle tremor in her body, as though his hands had reached out and stroked her between her legs. He knew what he’d done too. He passed his tongue, oh-so-lightly, over his lower lip, wetting it.

“You want to know a secret?” he said, leaning closer to her.

“Yes, please.”

“They’re all afraid of us.”

“Who?”

“Everybody,” he said, his eyes fixed on hers. “We’re not like them, and they know it. We’re Gearys. They’re not. We’ve got power. They haven’t. That makes them afraid. So you have to let them give vent once in a while. If they didn’t do that they’d go crazy.” Rachel nodded; it made sense to her. A few months ago, it wouldn’t have done, but now it did.

“I won’t let it bother me any more,” she said. “And if it does bother me I’ll shut up about it.”

“You’re quite a gal, you know that?” he said. “That’s what Cadmus said about you after his birthday party.”

“He barely spoke to me.”

“He’s got eyes. ‘She’s quite a gal,’ he said. ‘She’s got the right stuff to be a Geary.’ He’s right. You do. And you know what? Once you’re a member of this family, nothing can hurt you. Nothing. You’re untouchable. I swear, on my life. That’s how it works when you’re a Geary. And that’s what you’re going to be in nine weeks. A Geary. Forever and always.”

V

Marietta just came in, and read what I’ve been writing. She was in one of her willful moods, and I should have known better, but when she asked me if she could read a little of what I’d been writing, I passed a few pages over to her. She went out onto the veranda, lit up one of my cigars, and read. I pretended to get on with my work, as though her opinion on what I’d done was inconsequential to me, but my gaze kept sliding her way, trying to interpret the expression on her face. Occasionally, she looked amused, but not for very long. Most of the time she just scanned the lines (too fast, I thought, to really be savoring the prose) her expression impassive. The longer this went on the more infuriated I became, and I was of half a mind to get up, go out onto the veranda. At last, with a little sigh, she got up and came back in, proffering the pages.

“You write long sentences,” she remarked.

“That’s all you can say?”

She fished a book of matches out of her pocket, and striking one, began to rekindle her cigar. “What do you want me to say?” she shrugged. “It’s a bit gossipy, isn’t it?” She was now studying the book of matches. “And I think it’s going to be hard to follow. All those names. All those Gearys. You don’t have to go that far back, do you? I mean, who cares?”

“It’s all context.”

“I wonder whose number this is?” she said, still studying the book. “It’s a Raleigh number. Who the hell do I know in Raleigh?”

“If you can’t be a little more generous, a little more constructive…”

She looked up, and seemed to see my misery. “Oh, Eddie,” she said, with a sudden smile. “Don’t look so forlorn. I think it’s wonderful.”

“No you don’t.”

“I swear. I do. It’s just that weddings, you know,” her lip curled slightly. “They’re not my favorite thing.”

“You went,” I reminded her.

“Are you going to write about that?”

“Absolutely.”

She patted my cheek. “You see, that’ll liven things up a bit. How are your legs by the way?”

“They’re fine.”

“Total recovery?”

“It looks that way.”

“I wonder why she healed you after all this time?”

“I don’t care. I’m just grateful.”

“Zabrina said she saw you out walking.”

“I go to see Luman every couple of days. He’s got it into his head that we should collaborate on a book when I’m finished with this.”

“About what?”

“Madhouses.”

“What a bright little sunbeam he is. Ah! I know! This is Alice.” She tossed the book of matches into the air and caught it again. “Alice the blonde. She lives in Raleigh.”

“That’s a very dirty look you’ve got in your eyes,” I observed.

“Alice is adorable. I mean, really…sumptuous.” She picked a piece of tobacco from her teeth. “You should come out with me one of these days. We’ll go drinking. I can introduce you to the girls.”

“I think I’d be uncomfortable.”

“Why? Nobody’s going to make a pass at you, not in an all-girl bar.”

“I couldn’t.”

“You will.” She pointed the wet end of her cigar at me. “I’m going to get you out enjoying yourself.” She pocketed the book of matches. “Maybe I’ll introduce you to Alice.”

Of course she left me in a stew of insecurity. My mood now perfectly foul, I retired to the kitchen, to eat my sorrows away. It was a little before one in the morning; Dwight had long since retired to bed. L’Enfant was quiet. It was a little stuffy, so I opened the windows over the sink. There was a light breeze, which was very welcome, and I stood at the sink for a few moments to let it cool my face. Then I went to the refrigerator and began to prepare a glutton’s sandwich: several slices of baked ham, slathered with mustard, some strips of braised aubergine, half a dozen sweet cherry tomatoes, sliced, and a dash of olive oil, all pressed between two slices of freshly cut rye bread.

Feeding my face put everything in context for me. What was I hanging on Marietta’s opinion for? She was no great literary critic. This was my book, my ideas, my vision. And if she didn’t like it, that was fine by me. Her opinion was a complete irrelevancy. I didn’t just think all of this, I talked it through to myself, a mustardy mingling of words and ham.

“Whatever are you chattering about?”

I stopped talking, and looked over my shoulder. There, filling the doorway from side to side, was Zabrina. She was dressed in a tent of a nightgown, her face, upon which she usually puts a little paint and powder, ruddily raw. She had tiny eyes, and a wide thin-lipped mouth; Marietta called her a beady, fat frog once, in a moment of anger, and—cruel though the description may be—it fits. The only glamorous attribute she has is her hair, which is a deep, luxurious orange, and which she’s grown to waist length. Tonight she had it untied, and it fell about her shoulders and upper body like a cape.

“I haven’t seen you in a long while,” I said to her.

“You’ve seen me,” she said, in that odd, breathy voice of hers. “We just haven’t spoken.”

I was about to say—that’s because you always rush away—but I held my tongue. She was a nervous creature. One wrong word and she’d be off. She went to the refrigerator and studied its contents. As usual, Dwight had left a selection of his pies and cakes for her delectation.

“Don’t expect any help from me,” she said out of the blue.

“Help for what?”

“You know what,” she said, still studying the laden shelves. “I don’t think it’s right.” She reached in and took out a pie with either hand, then, pirouetting with a grace surprising in one of her extreme bulk, turned and closed the refrigerator door with her backside. “So don’t expect me to be unburdening myself.”

She was talking about the book of course. Her antipathy was perfectly predictable, given that she knew it to be at least in part Marietta’s idea. Even so, I wasn’t in the mood to be harangued.

“Let’s not talk about it,” I said.

She set the pies—one cherry, one pecan—on the table side by side. Then she went back to the refrigerator, with a little sigh of irritation at her own forgetfulness, and took out a bowl of whipped cream. There was a fork already in the bowl. She lowered herself gently onto a chair and set to, loading up the fork with a little cherry pie, a little pecan, and a lot of whipped cream. She clearly had done this countless times before; watching the skillful way she created these little towers of excess, without ever seeming to drop a crumb of pastry into the cream, or a spot of cream onto the table, was an entertainment unto itself.

“So when did you last hear from Galilee?” she asked me.

“Not in a long while.”

“Huh.” She delivered a teetering mound between her lips, and her lids flickered with bliss as she worked it around her mouth.

“Does he ever write to you?”

She took her leisurely time to swallow before answering. “He used to drop me a note now and again. But not any more.”

“Do you miss him?”

She frowned at me, her lower lip jutting out. “Don’t start that,” she said. “I told you already—”

I rolled my eyes. “In God’s name, Zabrina, I just asked—”

“I don’t want to be in your book.”

“So you said.”

“I don’t want to be in anybody’s book. I don’t want to…be talked about. I wish I was invisible.”

I couldn’t help myself: I smirked. The very idea that Zabrina, of all people, would dream of invisibility was sadly laughable. There she was, conspiring against her own hopes with every mouthful. I thought I’d wiped the smirk off my face by the time she looked up at me, but it lingered there, like the cream at the corners of her own mouth.

“What’s so funny?” she said.

I shook my head. “Nothing.”

“So I’m fat. And I wish I was dead. So what?”

The smirk had gone now. “You don’t wish you were dead,” I said. “Surely.”

“What have I got to live for?” she replied. “I’ve got nothing. Nothing I want anyway.” She put down her fork, and started on the cherry pie with her fingers, picking out the syrupy fruit. “Day in and day out, it’s the same story. Serving Momma. Eating. Serving Momma. Eating. When I sleep I dream I’m up there with her, while she talks about the old days.” With sudden vehemence she said: “I hate the old days! What about tomorrow? How about doing something about tomorrow?” Her face, which was, as I mentioned, flushed to begin with, was now beet red. “We’re all so passive,” she said, the vehemence mellowing into a sadness. “You got your legs back but what did you do with them? Did you walk out of here? No. You sat exactly where you’d been sitting all these years, as though you were still a cripple. That’s because you still are. I’m fat and you’re a cripple, and we’re going to go on, day after day after day living our useless lives, till somebody from out there—” she pointed out toward the world “—comes and does us the kindness of putting a bullet through our brains.”

With that, she rose from the ruins of the pies, and made her exit. I didn’t attempt to delay her. I just sat back in my chair and watched her go.

Then, I will admit, I sat for a while with my head in my hands and wept.

VI

i

Assaulted by both Marietta and Zabrina, feeling thoroughly uncertain of my talents, I returned to my room, and sat up through the rest of the night. I’d like to tell you that I did so because I was agonizing over the literary problems I had, but the truth was rather more prosaic: I had the squirts. I don’t know whether it was the baked ham, the braised aubergine, or Zabrina’s damn conversation that did it: I only know I spent the hours till dawn sitting on my porcelain throne in a private miasma. Somewhere around dawn, feeling weak, raw, and sorry for myself, I crawled into bed and snatched a couple of hours of sleep. By the time I woke my slumbering mind seemed to have decided that I’d be best writing about Rachel and Mitchell’s wedding in a rather curter style than I’d been employing so far. After all, I reasoned, a wedding was a wedding was a wedding. No use belaboring the subject. People could fill in the pretty details for themselves.