Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
One
Polly Solo-Miller Demarest was the perfect flower of the Solo-Miller family. This family had everything: looks, brains, money, a strong, fortified sense of clan, and branches in Boston, Philadelphia, and New York, as well as London, just like a banking house. The patriarch of the New York gang was Henry Solo-Miller, husband of the former Constanzia Hendricks, nicknamed Wendy. Both were of old, old Jewish families, the sort that are more identifiably old American than Jewish. Solo-Millers and Hendrickses had come from Holland via Spain before the American Revolution, which they had either taken part in or helped to raise money for. Henry and Wendy had three children: Paul, Dora (called Polly by everyone), and Henry, Jr.
Polly was sandwiched between difficult brothers. Paul, a lawyer like his father, had always been mute, preoccupied, and cranky. He was said to be brilliant, but he was so silent that no one had ever really heard him say a brilliant thing. He was forty-three, unmarried, as greatly respected in the legal community as his distinguished father, and a passionate music lover. Henry, Jr., on the other hand, was a lout. He had refused to pursue the normal Solo-Miller and Hendricks occupations—law and banking—and had instead pursued his boyhood adoration of all things aerodynamic and become an aeronautical engineer. He had married Andreya Fillo, a fellow engineer, the daughter of Czech refugees. She and Henry, Jr., behaved more like brother and sister than like a married couple. They wore each other’s clothes, did not plan to have children, played with their dog, and dedicated themselves to kite-flying. Henry, Jr.’s large, smelly tickhound, Kirby, was their child substitute and, like his master, he had resisted proper training.
It was Polly who had made grandparents of her parents. She was married to a big, handsome lawyer named Henry Demarest and had produced two nice, sturdy children: Pete, nine, and Dee-Dee, whose real name was Claire, seven and a half. These children were doted on by their grandparents, who never displayed to them the eccentricities they had displayed to their own children.
Henry, Sr., dwelt in what Polly called “the realm of the higher mind.” This meant that often he was not fully present. He was a rather silent man who was set in his ways the way Rembrandts are hung on a wall—with great care, correctness, and dignity—but he was funny about food and believed that everything, from vegetables to standing ribs of beef, should be washed with soap and water before cooking, and that all eggs were to be scrubbed before being boiled. For a prank, Polly, as a teenager, had once put a chicken into the washing machine.
As a result of these crotchets Henry, Sr., was lied to constantly. He ate happily anything that was put before him as long as someone first assured him that everything had been grown in certifiably organic soil and washed in soap and water. The pollution of the atmosphere was one of his most beloved subjects.
Wendy never got anything right. For years she had called poor Douglas Stern “Derwood,” and now everyone, including his own family, called him that. She did not actually refer to Pablo Picasso as Carlos—Polly claimed she did—but she came close. It was a family joke that Polly had married a lawyer named Henry in order not to give her mother anything to screw up.
In general, the Solo-Millers preferred the company of their fellow Solo-Millers to that of other mortals, and they gathered frequently. Every Sunday they appeared at Henry and Wendy’s at noon for a meal that some people would call lunch and others brunch. The Solo-Millers called it breakfast.
The household Polly had set up with Henry Demarest was very much like her parents’. This made perfect sense: Henry, who came from a Chicago family rather like the Solo-Millers, shared Polly’s feelings about comfort, order, and the way life should be lived. They believed in harmony, generosity, and good works. As a lawyer, Henry was very well respected. He sat on the board of Pete and Dee-Dee’s school; he was a Fellow of The American College of Trial Lawyers and a trustee of the school he had gone to as a boy in Chicago.
Polly had a job, too. She was Coordinator of Research in Reading Projects and Methods for the information arm of the Board of Education. That all children learn to read was Polly’s cause and it was her job to evaluate the stream of new methods, texts, and tests that poured in to the Board. This job combined some of the things Polly held most dear—service, children, and books—but for all that she was committed to it, she did not talk about it very often. Occasionally a truly crackpot reading manual would cross her desk and she would bring it home to show Henry, but otherwise she left her work at work. She felt that methods of teaching reading were chiefly of interest to other reading technicians, whereas the law was a large subject of general interest.
Polly was good at her job, good at games; and she was also a marvelous cook and housekeeper. She was neither oafish and slobby like her brother Henry, nor finicky and allergic to most common substances like her brother Paul. She had been a remarkably sweet-tempered child and as a girl had mediated any fights between Paul and Henry that had looked as if they might end up in fratricide. Those squabbles had been Paul and Henry, Jr.’s only close contact. Now they met only at family gatherings, although Polly saw both of them frequently.
She had graduated near the top of her class at a fine woman’s college (which was Wendy’s alma mater), had studied in France for a year, come home and worked as a reading teacher at a private school, married Henry Demarest, gotten a degree in reading education, taught in the public schools, produced Pete and Dee-Dee, and then found herself a high-level job. She was at her office three days a week, and at home on Mondays and Fridays. This, she felt, left her plenty of time for everything—to run the house, to spend time with Pete and Dee-Dee, and to be a helpmeet and sweetheart to her husband.
In addition, she was her mother’s favorite lunch companion and a great social asset. Polly was a good listener. She could bring the shy forward or placate the arrogant and hostile. Furthermore, she was always happy to provide something scrumptious for dessert. She had never given anyone the slightest pause. Her family doted on her, but no one felt it was necessary to pay much attention to someone as sturdy, upright, cheerful, and kind as she.
Sunday mornings always found Henry Demarest lolling in bed, and Polly in the kitchen making pancakes in the shape of spiders, bats, and snakes for her children. Polly loved Sunday mornings. She liked to have everyone at home, and she liked to look out her window and not see traffic on Park Avenue. She liked to watch families come trooping out from under their building marquees and walk off toward Central Park.
Every Sunday morning, more or less at nine-thirty, the telephone rang.
“Hello, darling. It’s your poor mother,” Wendy would say.
“Hi, Mum,” Polly always said. “How many for breakfast?” Because of complicated legal schedules, and because Henry, Jr., and Andreya were sometimes called away to work on special projects, the number of people at Sunday breakfast changed from week to week. “We’re all here this morning. Just a second. Pete, you may not use all that maple syrup. Sorry, Mum. Who’s coming?”
“Your brother Paul is not coming for breakfast,” Wendy said. “He was supposed to be, but he won’t be.”
“Why won’t he?”
“He sent us an express letter,” Wendy said. “Emergency meeting in Paris.” Paul’s field was international taxation, and he was away quite a bit. “Of course Henry and Andreya will come with that ghastly fleabag of theirs. I do wish you could speak to them, Polly. The dog upsets your father so.”
“Mother, Daddy hasn’t noticed that dog for three years. It’s you who can’t stand it.”
“That isn’t true,” Wendy, who knew it was true, said in a hurt voice.
“Daddy never notices things like that and you know it,” Polly said. She had the telephone crooked under her chin to leave her hands free. On Sunday mornings, Pete and Dee-Dee took turns standing on a chair next to the stove to pour out batter for their father’s pancakes. They did not feel it appropriate to give their father bats or snakes or spiders, so they made the ordinary kind, to which Polly always added some chopped pecans. They had finished their pancakes and were taking turns standing at the stove to pour out batter from a small ladle.
“Your father is more sensitive to these things than you imagine,” Wendy said.
“I didn’t say he was insensitive, Mummy. I said he didn’t notice, and he doesn’t.”
“Well, never mind,” Wendy said. “Darling, is that nice bakery near you open on Sunday?” Wendy would ask every week.
“It’s open till one,” Polly always answered.
“Then would it be too awful for you to stop and get a loaf of that Swiss peasant bread your father is so mad for?”
Polly said it was not a bit of trouble—it was never a bit of trouble. Besides, she had gotten it the day before and wrapped it in a linen towel to keep it fresh. The bakery also made the pain au chocolat Wendy adored, and when Polly made her forays to get the Swiss peasant bread, she always got pain au chocolat for her mother.
Wendy’s telephone call on Sunday was a ritual, like the Swiss peasant bread and the pain au chocolat. So were the pancakes, and the pecans in Henry’s pancakes, and the fact that the children cooked Henry’s pancakes. On Sundays Henry got his breakfast in bed. He worked a tough, hard week, and on Saturdays, if he was not forced to work, he took the children off on expeditions to the zoo, to a museum, or out to a fancy French restaurant for lunch. He said he was training his children to be good luncheon companions for his old age. He and Polly believed that children should learn to dine, which meant tasting new things and behaving at the table. At these lunches they were allowed to have a little wine in their water.
And since every Sunday—if he was not away—found him at the Solo-Millers’, Polly felt that his real breakfast should be brought to him, so that he might stay in bed, rest, and read the papers.
Polly did not ever expect to be waited on. She only worked three days a week, and though her job was demanding, too, it was not so demanding as Henry’s. She was given breakfast in bed on her birthday, on her wedding anniversary, and on the children’s birthdays, since she was their mother.
All the Solo-Millers were big and good-looking. Polly, who had clear gray eyes, thick, ash-colored hair, and creamy shoulders, had married a good-looking man. The sight of him surrounded by bed pillows, warm and sleepy in his striped pajamas, his dark, wavy hair uncombed, and a look of contentment on his face, usually gave Polly heartsease. Henry Demarest was not unlike members of her family. Like Henry, Sr., and Paul, he was passionately committed to his work. Polly was used to an air of abstraction in men. She had grown up with a father who did not notice a good many things, such as squabbles, sibling rivalry, and teenage confusion. Paul’s means of expressing the higher mind was silence and austerity. His intelligence was legend, so that his mere presence was sufficient and he made few social efforts. As for Henry, Jr., no one else had much interest in aerodynamics, but he talked it at them nonetheless. Henry Demarest, on the other hand, was not austere, was interesting on the subject of his work, and was capable of noticing everything. But when the pressure of his work overtook his spirit and mind, he was not fully present either, and closely resembled Henry Solo-Miller, Sr.
“Pete and Dee-Dee,” Polly said, “set the tray for your daddy. I’m going to take him his pancakes and you two can play till we go to breakfast.”
“If we just had breakfast, how come we’re going to have more breakfast?” said Pete, who asked this question every week.
“It isn’t really breakfast,” Polly said. “It’s lunch.”
“Then how come Nan and Papa call it breakfast?” Dee-Dee said.
“Because they do. It’s their first meal of the day, and breakfast means to break the fast.” She handed Dee-Dee a napkin and watched her fold it carefully.
“What fast?” Dee-Dee said.
“Fast is what it’s called when you don’t eat,” Polly said. “Bring the plate over here so I can get these pancakes on it. Pete, you pour the coffee and, Dee-Dee, pour the milk very carefully into that little jug. Okay, thank you very much. Now, git!”
Henry was asleep when Polly appeared with the tray. She put it on the reading table and closed the window—Henry liked to sleep with the window open all night, and in the morning, once Polly was out of bed and off to make the coffee, he liked to hog all the pillows and take all the bedclothes for himself. It was November and the air was very chill. Polly smoothed the quilt over him and kissed him on the forehead. He had dark, wavy hair and hazel eyes. His features were regular and fine, and somewhat old-fashioned. He opened his eyes and stretched.
“Good morning, darling,” Polly said. “Here’s your tray. I’ll go and see if the paper is here.”
The paper had been delivered and was lying in the foyer by the elevator. As Polly walked down the long hallway to the bedroom, she heard Pete and Dee-Dee playing in Pete’s room. They had invented an elaborate game called Cows and Hedgehogs which incorporated their favorite animals. Dee-Dee had been brought up on English children’s books and craved a live hedgehog more than anything in the world. She felt it unfair that she lived in a country to which they were not native, and to compensate she was given hedgehogs made of every possible material. Many of them had been sent to her by Henry’s sister, Eva Demarest Forbes, who was married to an English banker and lived in London. She had been Polly’s roommate at college.
Polly felt fortunate in her children. She and Henry actively adored them but they were not spoiled. They fought as siblings will, but they really did love each other. Pete’s main goal in life was to scare his little sister, but she was afraid of nothing, while Pete was skittish about a variety of animals and objects. Because Dee-Dee was kind, she often pretended to be scared, since this made Pete feel braver. Never, when the family went to Maine for the summer, did she put snakes or worms or spiders, which she did not mind picking up, down the back of his shirt.
