“What’s that—wrought iron?” Alfred asked him as the taxi line crept forward.
“Yes,” Chip said, touching his ear.
“Looks like an old quarter-inch rivet.”
“Yes.”
“What do you do—crimp that? Hammer it?”
“It’s hammered,” Chip said.
Alfred winced and gave a low, inhaling whistle.
“We’re doing a Luxury Fall Color Cruise,” Enid said when the three of them were in a yellow cab, speeding through Queens. “We sail up to Quebec and then we enjoy the changing leaves all the way back down. Dad so enjoyed the last cruise we were on. Didn’t you, Al? Didn’t you have a good time on that cruise?”
The brick palisades of the East River waterfront were taking an angry beating from the rain. Chip could have wished for a sunny day, a clear view of landmarks and blue water, with nothing to hide. The only colors on the road this morning were the smeared reds of brake lights.
“This is one of the great cities of the world,” Alfred said with emotion.
“How are you feeling these days, Dad,” Chip managed to ask.
“Any better I’d be in heaven, any worse I’d be in hell.”
“We’re excited about your new job,” Enid said.
“One of the great papers in the country,” Alfred said. “The Wall Street Journal.”
“Does anybody smell fish, though?”
“We’re near the ocean,” Chip said.
“No, it’s you.” Enid leaned and buried her face in Chip’s leather sleeve. “Your jacket smells strongly of fish.”
He wrenched free of her. “Mother. Please.”
Chip’s problem was a loss of confidence. Gone were the days when he could afford to épater les bourgeois. Except for his Manhattan apartment and his handsome girlfriend, Julia Vrais, he now had almost nothing to persuade himself that he was a functioning male adult, no accomplishments to compare with those of his brother, Gary, who was a banker and a father of three, or of his sister, Denise, who at the age of thirty-two was the executive chef at a successful new high-end restaurant in Philadelphia. Chip had hoped he might have sold his screenplay by now, but he hadn’t finished a draft until after midnight on Tuesday, and then he’d had to work three fourteen-hour shifts at Bragg Knuter & Speigh to raise cash to pay his August rent and reassure the owner of his apartment (Chip had a sublease) about his September and October rent, and then there was a lunch to be shopped for and an apartment to be cleaned and, finally, sometime before dawn this morning, a long-hoarded Xanax to be swallowed. Meanwhile, nearly a week had gone by without his seeing Julia or speaking to her directly. In response to the many nervous messages he’d left on her voice mail in the last forty-eight hours, asking her to meet him and his parents and Denise at his apartment at noon on Saturday and also, please, if possible, not to mention to his parents that she was married to someone else, Julia had maintained a total phone and e-mail silence from which even a more stable man than Chip might have drawn disturbing conclusions.
It was raining so hard in Manhattan that water was streaming down façades and frothing at the mouths of sewers. Outside his building, on East Ninth Street, Chip took money from Enid and handed it through the cab’s partition, and even as the turbaned driver thanked him he realized the tip was too small. From his own wallet he took two singles and dangled them near the driver’s shoulder.
“That’s enough, that’s enough,” Enid squeaked, reaching for Chip’s wrist. “He already said thank you.”
But the money was gone. Alfred was trying to open the door by pulling on the window crank. “Here, Dad, it’s this one,” Chip said and leaned across him to pop the door.
“How big a tip was that?” Enid asked Chip on the sidewalk, under his building’s marquee, as the driver heaved luggage from the trunk.
“About fifteen percent,” Chip said.
“More like twenty, I’d say,” Enid said.
“Let’s have a fight about this, why don’t we.”
“Twenty percent’s too much, Chip,” Alfred pronounced in a booming voice. “It’s not reasonable.”
“You all have a good day now,” the taxi driver said with no apparent irony.
“A tip is for service and comportment,” Enid said. “If the service and comportment are especially good I might give fifteen percent. But if you automatically tip—”
“I’ve suffered from depression all my life,” Alfred said, or seemed to say.
“Excuse me?” Chip said.
“Depression years changed me. They changed the meaning of a dollar.”
“An economic depression, we’re talking about.”
“Then when the service really is especially good or especially bad,” Enid pursued, “there’s no way to express it monetarily.”
“A dollar is still a lot of money,” Alfred said.
“Fifteen percent if the service is exceptional, really exceptional.”
“I’m wondering why we’re having this particular conversation,” Chip said to his mother. “Why this conversation and not some other conversation.”
“We’re both terribly anxious,” Enid replied, “to see where you work.”
Chip’s doorman, Zoroaster, hurried out to help with the luggage and installed the Lamberts in the building’s balky elevator. Enid said, “I ran into your old friend Dean Driblett at the bank the other day. I never run into Dean but where he doesn’t ask about you. He was impressed with your new writing job.”
“Dean Driblett was a classmate, not a friend,” Chip said.
“He and his wife just had their fourth child. I told you, didn’t I, they built that enormous house out in Paradise Valley—Al, didn’t you count eight bedrooms?”
Alfred gave her a steady, unblinking look. Chip leaned on the Door Close button.
“Dad and I were at the housewarming in June,” Enid said. “It was spectacular. They’d had it catered, and they had pyramids of shrimp. It was solid shrimp, in pyramids. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“Pyramids of shrimp,” Chip said. The elevator door had finally closed.
“Anyway, it’s a beautiful house,” Enid said. “There are at least six bedrooms, and you know, it looks like they’re going to fill them. Dean’s tremendously successful. He started that lawn care business when he decided the mortuary business wasn’t for him, well, you know, Dale Driblett’s his stepdad, you know, the Driblett Chapel, and now his billboards are everywhere and he’s started an HMO. I saw in the paper where it’s the fastest-growing HMO in St. Jude, it’s called DeeDeeCare, same as the lawn care business, and there are billboards for the HMO now, too. He’s quite the entrepreneur, I’d say.”
“Slo-o-o-o-w elevator,” Alfred said.
“This is a prewar building,” Chip explained in a tight voice. “An extremely desirable building.”
“But you know what he told me he’s doing for his mother’s birthday? It’s still a surprise for her, but I can tell you. He’s taking her to Paris for eight days. Two first-class tickets, eight nights at the Ritz! That’s the kind of person Dean is, very family-oriented. But can you believe that kind of birthday present? Al, didn’t you say the house alone probably cost a million dollars? Al?”
“It’s a large house but cheaply done,” Alfred said with sudden vigor. “The walls are like paper.”
“All the new houses are like that,” Enid said.
“You asked me if I was impressed with the house. I thought it was ostentatious. I thought the shrimp was ostentatious. It was poor.”
“It may have been frozen,” Enid said.
“People are easily impressed with things like that,” Alfred said. “They’ll talk for months about the pyramids of shrimp. Well, see for yourself,” he said to Chip, as to a neutral bystander. “Your mother’s still talking about it.”
For a moment it seemed to Chip that his father had become a likable old stranger; but he knew Alfred, underneath, to be a shouter and a punisher. The last time Chip had visited his parents in St. Jude, four years earlier, he’d taken along his then-girlfriend Ruthie, a peroxided young Marxist from the North of England, who, after committing numberless offenses against Enid’s sensibilities (she lit a cigarette indoors, laughed out loud at Enid’s favorite watercolors of Buckingham Palace, came to dinner without a bra, and failed to take even one bite of the “salad” of water chestnuts and green peas and cheddar-cheese cubes in a thick mayonnaise sauce which Enid made for festive occasions), had needled and baited Alfred until he pronounced that “the blacks” would be the ruination of this country, “the blacks” were incapable of coexisting with whites, they expected the government to take care of them, they didn’t know the meaning of hard work, what they lacked above all was discipline, it was going to end with slaughter in the streets, with slaughter in the streets, and he didn’t give a damn what Ruthie thought of him, she was a visitor in his house and his country, and she had no right to criticize things she didn’t understand; whereupon Chip, who’d already warned Ruthie that his parents were the squarest people in America, had smiled at her as if to say, You see? Exactly as advertised. When Ruthie had dumped him, not three weeks later, she’d remarked that he was more like his father than he seemed to realize.
