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This Trey was a Baltimore boy, a graduate of Gilman and Princeton who worked now in his family’s firm, doing something with money. So over summer vacation, when Merrick and Pookie and their friends gathered on the Whitshanks’ front porch to smoke Pall Malls and talk about how bored they were, Trey was often there as well. He seemed to keep a very loose schedule at the office. By the time Red got home from his summer job, at four p.m. or so — contractors’ hours — he’d find Trey lounging on the porch with the others, a pristine white cardigan tied oh-so-casually around his shoulders and his feet encased in leather loafers with no socks (the first time Red had ever seen this practice, although unfortunately not the last). Later they’d all go out and do whatever they did in the evenings. Since Red was the one telling this story, there was no knowing what Merrick’s friends did, but presumably they ate in some joint and then caught a movie, maybe, or went dancing. Late at night they would return to sit on the porch again. It was an unusually spacious porch, after all, so deep that they could stay dry there even during a rainstorm. Their voices would drift up clearly to the two front bedrooms — Red’s bedroom and his parents’. Red often leaned out his window to call down, “Hey! Some of us have to get up in the morning, you know!” but his parents never uttered a word of protest. Junior was probably gloating: all those shiny-haired, nonchalantly graceful boys and girls on his porch, when their folks had never invited him and Li
The young people were pairing off that summer. Senior year was approaching, and this was back when girls tended to marry right after college. Merrick seemed to have not just one boy in attendance but two, neither of whom Red knew well. They were a few years older than he and they sort of resembled each other, so that he was always getting them mixed up. Besides which, he had trouble believing that anyone could be seriously attracted to his sister. Merrick was ski
Her father asked her, once, “Now, who is that blond fellow? With the crew cut?”
“Which one?” Merrick said.
“The one who was complaining about his golf game last night.”
“Which one, Dad.”
From this, Red gathered that neither young man had particularly impressed her. Also: that his parents, or at least his father, had been listening to those porch conversations with more interest than Red had realized.
Meanwhile, Pookie was getting down to the fine points of her wedding. It was less than a year away now, and an event of such scale took some pla
Red had started noticing that any time it was a girls-only gathering, Pookie had a tendency to speak of Trey belittlingly. She mocked the loving care he gave to the sheet of blond hair that fell over his forehead, and she referred to him habitually as “the Prince of Roland Park.” “I can’t come shopping tomorrow,” she’d say, “because the Prince of Roland Park wants me to go to lunch with his mother.” Partly, this could be explained by the fact that her crowd liked to affect a tone of ironic amusement no matter what they were discussing. But also, Trey sort of deserved the title. Even during high school he had driven a sports car, and the Barristers’ house in Baltimore was only one of three that they owned, the others in distant resorts that advertised in the New York Times. Pookie said he was spoiled rotten, and she blamed it on his mother, “Queen Eula.”
Eula Barrister was stick-thin and fashionable and discontented-looking. Any time Red saw her in church, he was reminded of Mrs. Brill. Mrs. Barrister ran that church, and she ran the Women’s Club, and she ran her family, which consisted of just three people. Trey was her only child — her darlin’ boy, she was fond of saying; her poppet. And Pookie Vanderlin was nowhere near good enough for him.
Over the course of the summer, Red heard long recitals of Pookie’s tribulations with Queen Eula. Pookie was summoned to excruciating family di
Over and over, Merrick gasped, like somebody on stage. “No! I can’t believe it!” she would say. “Why doesn’t Trey stick up for you?”
“Oh, Trey,” Pookie said in disgust. “Trey thinks she hung the moon.”
Not only that: Trey was inconsiderate, and selfish, and given to hypochondria. He forgot Pookie existed any time he ran into his buddies. And for once, just once in her life, she would like to see him make it through an evening without drinking his weight in gin.
“He’d better watch out, or he’ll lose you,” Merrick said. “You could have anyone! You don’t have to settle for Trey. Look at Tucky Be
Often, Pookie delivered her recitals even though Red was present. (Red didn’t count, in that group.) Then Red would ask, “How come you put up with it?” Or “You said yes to this guy?”
“I know. I’m a fool,” she would say. But not as if she meant it.
That fall, when they were all back in college, Merrick fell into a pattern of coming home every weekend. This was unlike her. Red came home a lot himself, since College Park was so close, but gradually he realized that she was there even more often. She went with the family to church on Sunday, and afterwards she would stop out front to say hello to Eula Barrister. Even when Trey was not standing at his mother’s elbow (which generally he was), Merrick would be eagerly nodding her head in her demure new pillbox hat, giving a liquid laugh that any brother would know to be false, hanging on to every one of Eula Barrister’s prune-faced remarks. And in the evening, if Trey stopped by for a visit — as was only natural! Merrick said. He was marrying her best friend, after all! — the two of them sat out on the porch, although it was too cold for that now. The smell of their cigarette smoke floated through Red’s open window. (But if it was so cold, his children would wonder years later, why was his window open?) “I’ve had it with her. I tell you,” Trey said. “Nothing I do makes her happy. Everything’s pick, pick, pick.”
“She doesn’t properly value you, it sounds like to me,” Merrick said.
“And you should see how she acts with Mother. She claimed she couldn’t help Mother sample the rehearsal-di
“Oh, your poor mother,” Merrick said. “She was only trying to make her feel included.”
“How come you understand that, Bean, and Pookie doesn’t?”
Red slammed his window shut.