Read Expensive People for Free Online Page B

minor, secret people are gifted. They are minor and famous and my wife is prominent among them—”
    “Shut up! I said I want this house.”
    “Her vocabulary indicates—”
    “Indicates, shit. I said I want this house,” Nada cried. “You, take out the papers, whatever the hell you have, and write it down! We offer them seventy-eight thousand, because I want this house, goddam it, and he can talk all night and we still want it. Not enough money, eh! He can live in the bathhouse and babble to himself, who else is listening?”
    Mr. Hansom smiled shakily from one to the other.
    “Natashya, you forget yourself,” Father said, wagging a finger.
    “Don't wag your obscene … finger at me,” Nada whispered.
    “This will be our new neighborhood, Dickie's new environment. He must fit in here and be happy with his friends—”
    “His name is Richard. Richard, not Dickie. Richard,” Nada said. She stared at me. “Richard, go into the other room. What is that room?”
    “A library. No, a sunroom,” Mr. Hansom said, startled. “Which one do you mean?”
    “Go in there, get out of the way. You're not interested in this,” Nada told me.
    So that was how we bought the house and Father got his way. He was a clever, stupid son-of-a-bitch, Father was.
    * My mother had wanted me to call her “Nadia” but, as a small child, I must have been able to manage only the infantile “Nada.” Hence Nada—strange name!

4
    And so we came to Fernwood, a far-flung suburb of a famous American city, and moved into a house that was too large for us but never mind, we had to live somewhere. Our furniture and belongings were loaded up for us back in our other house (in Brookfield, a suburb of another famous city), and by the time they reached us over the hundreds of miles of winter highways I had already discovered surreptitiously, and Nada announced to us one morning, angrily, that there was a family from Brookfield over on the other street, who had apparently moved at the same time we had; and not one mile away was the same house we had lived in for the last three years in Brookfield, present here in Fernwood like a miracle; and the Hunt Club was the same Hunt Club as Brookfield's, except that it had “Valley” prefixed to its name and had evidently sold its lands, bridle paths and all, to a housing contractor; and worst of all, only two houses away from us was Edward Griggs or someone who looked just like Edward Griggs, a man who had been something of a social catch back in Brookfield. He dealt in expensive antiques and had in his living room Emerson's tin bathtub (so narrow it made you wonder about Emerson's physique) and two Regency tables that had been in the collection of the Duchess of Kent, worth $19,000 and $23,000.
    But Father said slowly, “That can't be Griggs, Honey. How could he have moved here so fast?”
    “It's Griggs,” Nada said.
    “I doubt it,” said Father.
    We all went for a stroll one evening after dinner. These first few weeks in a new home (we were always moving) drew us close together, Nada, Father, and I, a happy family even though we had the look ofbeing three strangers who have met by accident on a walk and are waiting for the first chance to get away from one another. (A clever, bratty classmate of mine back in Brookfield, observing the Everett family on a stroll, had told me we looked like that.) Sometimes on these walks Nada's gloved hand would fall on my shoulder or touch my hair, and Father might pat my back as if urging me on, the two of them perhaps using me to show that they had something in common after all. But they loved me, of course. I think they loved me. Would it be too pathetic for me to write that I pushed this doubt back and forth through my brain until my brain was like a sieve? Like a sieve? Is that pathetic or ludicrous—how does that strike a normal reader? Anyway we strolled by the house Griggs supposedly lived in. It was a baronial Georgian thing, even better than his other