Expensive People by Joyce Carol Oates Read Free Book Online

house, monstrously large even for this street. It had the blank, dignified, mad look of private homes secretly used as hospitals.
    “Do you think he brought his wife so soon?” Nada said.
    “Honey what would Griggs be doing in Fernwood?”
    “And his cook, that ugly cook? No, she must have been left behind.” Nada had a tense, white, pained look, as if she were staring into a nightmare but could not make out its terrors. “Why do these people keep following us around, Elwood?”
    “I'm sure no one has followed us, Dear. The man probably looks like Griggs, that's all.” And Father clapped me on the back. “What do you think, Buster? Eh? Pretty farfetched, isn't it?”
    We walked on and they argued without interest for a while, then the talk dissipated with a fresh blast of cold wind and the sight of a new neighbor's Rolls-Royce, a silvery vehicle driven too fast by an old man who did not glance at us. Father admired the Rolls-Royce, with the liberal abandonment of an American businessman who does not flinch at seeing a foreign industry patronized. Nada wasn't sure—perhaps a Rolls-Royce was pretentious? “They are good, solid, stable cars,” Father said.
    I was shaken with the cold but did not want to let on. Father was always healthy—a big bear of a man, with nerves buried far beneath fat and muscle, safe. Nada complained of headaches and faintness, but she too was healthy as a horse and certainly had the appetite of a horse though you dared not tell her that, even jokingly (She liked to frighten us with vague tales of her Russian grandmother, who had droppeddead in perfect health at the age of forty.) Father slid his arm around Nada's shoulders to keep her warm, while my teeth chattered and I walked a little ahead of them, the way a normal child probably would. Or would a normal child say he was freezing and ask to be taken home? I suffered so much, not wanting to disappoint them.
    “Ah, this fine winter air!” Nada sighed.
    “Good for the lungs,” declared Father.
    At such times, uncomfortable as I was, I liked to think that I possessed my parents. I had them. I seemed to be leading them as if on a leash, though when they wanted to go back Father would just reach out and poke me. But I had the dreamy illusion that they belonged to me at these times, Nada and Father, and under my guidance they belonged to each other, they were in love. I did so much spying on them, you know. I'll tell you about it: years of anguished, guilty spying. I had to spy—how else could I have known what life was, or who they were, my parents, what they were? So I spied and I learned and I tabulated, calculated, speculated. But at these special times when we were together I thought that I had somehow, magically, captured a man and a woman from another land, foreign and exotic and not quite speaking my language, who were tamed by my power and love and who walked obediently after me, robust and comely and healthy as horses. Such fine horses! These were my true parents. The others—the dissatisfied Natashya Romanov, minor writer, and the blubbering breast-beating executive Elwood Everett—were nothing but cruel step-parents.
    Yes, I loved them. I loved her especially. It was awful.

5
    And who were their people? Well, Nada's people were a mystery. She spoke of them vaguely and with some embarrassment: emigres, obviously, but shadowy and remotely threatening. They had had a minimum of power in their new life, Nada told people. Everyone was puzzled by her choice of that word “power,” and I was puzzled too. But you couldn't get much out of her. Because she was a writer she presumably chose her words with care, but still “power” didn't make much sense. Her parents were exiled nobility, perhaps, dying broken-heartedin a vulgar, foreign land. I recall something about a hotel in New York City where other Russians were, shadowy intrigue, futility. She hinted that her father was not quite admirable, perhaps unbalanced, that her mother