Reinhart's Women by Thomas Berger Page A

didn’t go up?”
    “No.”
    Winona had never enunciated her precise feeling towards her mother, but it was unlikely to have been excessively warm: ten years before, she had readily chosen to live with Reinhart.
    “I wonder how the shop will run without her.” Genevieve was manager of a dress shop in Chicago. Blaine kept him apprised of her career. She had started out, in the late Sixties, in a local boutique. She and Reinhart, Blaine and Winona, had all lived as a family at that time, and it was Genevieve who supported them, Reinhart having lately suffered the last of his failures in business. He also slept alone: Gen’s favors went to her boss, one Harlan Flan, a boutique-chain tycoon in his early thirties. When she divorced Reinhart, however, Flan not only failed to marry her: he coldly dumped her altogether. Reinhart had fitted this story together from various bits and surmises, but the pity was that he got no comfort from it—unless indeed the consolation was that he had thereby been proved to be not a spiteful man.
    Genevieve had subsequently emigrated to Chicago, where according to Blaine she had made a new and successful life for herself. Unfortunately, the last five years of their life together had been so bitter as to color Reinhart’s memory of that earlier time when he at least had been happily married.
    But “normal” life was long gone for him; Blaine’s was the case at hand.
    “You know,” he said to Winona, “for him Mercer has always been more than a wife: she’s the proof he has bettered himself socially. It gives him a lot of private satisfaction. And no doubt he is helped professionally. His in-laws are all in the financial world.”
    “I feel sorry for him,” Winona said. “When he gets to feeling bad enough to call me for sympathy—”
    “It was he who called you?”
    “This morning when you were showering, I guess—but as I say, he doesn’t want you to know anyhow.”
    It really was disgusting of Blaine, despite his anguish, to pretend that Winona had sought him out to reveal her sexual orientation.
    Reinhart decided to be candid about this. “He did say you had been to see him. I was wondering, Winona, why you decided at this time to tell him about your personal life.”
    She smiled. “I thought it might make him feel better about himself.”
    Reinhart rubbed his chin. “Better?”
    “I’ve known my brother all my life. It always makes him feel great to think he’s got something on you. Besides, what other help could I give him?”
    She really was one in a million. “Have I told you lately,” said Reinhart, “how much I love you?”
    She made a pshawing sort of wave and left the room.
    He was about to remove Grace Greenwood’s place-setting, at long last, when the telephone rang. There was a wall-mounted apparatus just inside the kitchen door. When Winona was home he never touched the phone unless she was bathing; all calls were for her.
    The bell now continued its spasmodic jangle. He came around the corner of the dining ell and shouted her name. No answer. Either she had slipped out or she was distracted in some fashion. He seized the instrument that was on the table near the front door.
    For a moment there was no response to his hello. Then the connection was broken without a word. That sort of thing always gave him the willies.
    He went to look for Winona. The door to her room was closed again.
    He spoke in the hallway. “I think I’ll make some fresh tomato soup, dear. Remember how you used to love Campbell’s when you were a child?” He had always made the canned version with milk. Winona’s practice had been heavily to butter a handful of saltines and press them one by one into the liquid, crushing them with the back of her spoon, until her bowl contained a thick pink mush. There had been more calories in that dish than she consumed in an entire day now.
    She made no answer to his announcement. She had probably gone to bed. It was not a simple matter for him