As Husbands Go (36 page)

Sparky came into the kitchen while I was chopping a load of rosemary for roast chicken and said, “I’m so glad you convinced Ethel to stay here. I was hating the thought of flying in from Miami to spend two days on the Long Island Expressway, back and forth from the hotel.”

“I didn’t do any convincing,” I said. “I picked her up at the hotel, and the bellman tapped on the window to get me to open the trunk for her suitcase. That was that, and she’s here.”

“Is she okay with the boys? I mean, is she behaving herself, not waving them away and saying ‘Begone, you ghastly creatures!’ or some such nonsense?” Sparky sat at the kitchen table, slipped off a loafer, and repositioned her sock. She had a great look: simple. She’d come from the airport in khakis, a white cotton shirt, and a dark blue suede blazer. Her only jewelry was a watch with a brown alligator strap and her giganto diamond stud earrings.

“She’s fine. I mean, she’s not getting down on the floor and playing with their Hess Oil trucks, but she’s amazingly good with their noise. I wouldn’t say she’s enchanted by them, but she’s definitely tolerant.”

Sparky gave a small sigh of relief. “She said everything was fine with them and that they adored her. If you haven’t noticed, she’s given to overstatement.”

“In fact, I did notice.” I dumped the rosemary into a couple of spoonfuls of olive oil.

“Obviously, I don’t have to explain it to you, but she’s defensive on the subject of children. It comes out as a stand against a childcen
tric culture. Or as sarcasm.”

“Four-year-olds don’t get sarcasm,” I said. “They are able to read people, though, even if they don’t understand motivations. She’s not giving off hostile vibes. I wouldn’t go so far as to say they adore her. But she’s tall enough to reach the shelf where I keep the cookies, and she doles out one to each of them—makes almost a ceremony out of it. I think they see her as an ally, maybe even a friend.”

Grandma Ethel strolled into the kitchen. “Are you talking about me?”

“Yes,” Sparky said, “though we were hoping a more interesting subject would come up. Any suggestions?”

“Did Susie bring you up-to-date on her trip to Dorinda’s lawyer? She told him she was a journalist. Ethel O’Shea.”

Sparky looked from her to me and shook her head in disgust. “Both of you . . . Why didn’t you call me before doing something like this? That shmuck is going to be representing Dorinda in court. Do you know what he’s going to do when he sees Mrs. Gersten take the stand and Mrs. Gersten is Ethel O’Shea?”

“I pulled my hair straight back,” I told her. “Very severe look. Not like Grandma Ethel’s photo ID, but I was planning on telling him that I’d let my hair go back to its natural color. He didn’t ask for any ID.”

“Except—correct me if I’m wrong—he did see you. It’s not only that you pretended to be someone else. It’s that you visited counsel for the defense under false pretenses.”

“Is that a crime?” my grandmother asked. She sat at the kitchen table beside Sparky.

“I don’t practice criminal law,” Sparky answered.

“That’s French for she hasn’t a clue,” Grandma Ethel told me. “Anyhow, the trial is still not set, most likely months away. Maybe he’ll forget you, or you can have your shrink testify that you were acting under some sort of insanity.”

Sparky was about to challenge her. I crushed a clove of garlic with the side of a knife and said, “Dorinda insists she didn’t do it. She won’t go for a plea bargain.”

“She’s going with the electric-broom story,” my grandmother said. “You know, I was thinking. Maybe it was a burglar. It could happen. He knocked Dorinda out. Maybe she saw him, maybe she didn’t. But she wasn’t the threat. Jonah was, being a man. Maybe the burglar felt threatened, or Jonah could have even tried to stop him, and that’s why he got stabbed.”

“Eth,” Sparky said, “a burglar would probably be armed. And even if he wasn’t, why would he get scissors from the bathroom and not a knife from the kitchen? Or some other weapon—the proverbial blunt instrument? Or he could have used the famous electric broom on Jonah as well as on Dorinda.”

“I don’t think it could have been a burglar,” I said. The oven dinged to show it had reached 375. “If it had been, how come he didn’t take Jonah’s watch? It was a Cartier tank. A burglar would know it or figure out it was worth something. And why didn’t he take the money in Jonah’s wallet? Dorinda was the one who did that.”

“If she’d killed him to rob him,” Sparky said slowly, “which would have been completely crazy, it being her apartment . . . But if robbery was her motive, she would have taken the watch. She didn’t, which leads me to believe all she wanted to do was get the hell out of there and needed some quick cash.”

“She went to her ATM after she left the apartment,” I said. “She got another four hundred dollars.”

Sparky turned to look at my grandmother. “I don’t buy the burglar theory. If a burglar is going to break into an apartment, all he has to do is take one look inside. From what I read and saw on TV, it wasn’t a luxurious place. Just the basics, although I think I read something about a carpet in a leopard-skin pattern. But what was
there to steal? She didn’t seem to go outside wearing a lot of jazzy jewelry. She was a recreational drug user, maybe dealt a little, but she wasn’t a dealer with a ton of cash on hand.”

I gave the big roasting chicken a rosemary rub and stuck it in the oven. “I’m with Sparky on this,” I told Grandma Ethel. “I don’t see her having a lot of money. I’m sure her rent wasn’t cheap, and there wasn’t a line outside the door waiting for the pleasure of her company. She did okay, but I don’t know if it was much better than that. She needed to supplement her own clients by freelancing with escort services. And even though she’s not using Legal Aid, she can’t afford a top lawyer. The guy she’s going to couldn’t even be called third-rate.”

“She would have been much better off with Legal Aid,” Sparky said.

Grandma Ethel began, “She would have been much better off . . .” She dropped it, but we all knew she was going to say “not killing Jonah.”

I decided to go with roasted sweet potatoes. My grandmother said she’d set the dining room table. She asked, “With Ida and Ingvild, how many? Oh, eight, and you don’t have to tell me no wine for the boys.”

That was Friday. By Sunday, I was exactly halfway between regretting that Grandma Ethel was leaving with Sparky and rejoicing at having the house to myself—or my version of myself, which included the kids, Ida, and Ingvild. Just as my in-laws arrived on their way back from Water Mill in the Hamptons, exchanging excited hellos and air kisses with my grandmother and Sparky in the manner of the mutually sophisticated, Grandma Ethel informed me she had canceled the suburban taxi. She was taking my car to drive Sparky to La Guardia, then returning. “You’re not ready to be on your own yet,” she told me when she pulled the car keys from my hand. I had no idea what kind of a driver she was, but I decided that if Sparky was willing to put her life on the line with my grandmother behind the
wheel, it might be okay.

I was tired from a weekend of cooking, so for my in-laws, I’d defrosted a vat of meatballs I’d made in December. I had a brief fantasy of saying “Why don’t I go out and you can enjoy the boys’ company by themselves?” They’d say “Wonderful!” and I would rush out to Main Street before my grandmother got back and go see a movie, any movie, a Jackie Chan or something sensitive from Hungary, and finish off a giant bucket of popcorn.

When I offered to give them quality time alone with the boys plus meatballs, they asked me please not to go, they really wanted to spend time with me, too. In spite of my fantasy, I’d known that would happen. The older the boys got, the more reluctant most people were to be alone with the three of them. I felt Babs and Clive viewed the triplets as if they were wild horses: beautiful but uncontrollable—rearing up unexpectedly and galloping around stirring up great clouds of dirt.

After dinner and the boys’ baths, my in-laws took them off to bed to read to them. I stretched out on the living room couch and prayed that either Sparky’s plane would be late taking off or my grandmother was a slow driver. That was the last I recalled until I heard Babs and Clive coming down the stairs, saying “So adorable!” and “What a vocabulary that kid has!” to each other.

I sat up and was smiling expectantly when they came into the living room. I felt like I was giving off waves of charm and totally down-to-earth, nondelusional goodwill.

“We’ll only stay a few more minutes,” Babs said.

“Please, stay as long as you like.”

“That grandmother of yours is a charmer,” Clive said. “And I like Sparky, too. What’s her real name?”

“Felicia.”

“She’s much more of a Sparky,” Babs said. “Felicia has such a languid sound. So your grandmother’s staying on?”

“I guess so. She seems to think I need her, but it may be that Sparky’s preparing for a big trial and is working really late every night.”

“Maybe she’s trying to somehow make up for the fact . . . with your mother.” Babs paused, perhaps worrying that her analysis would set me off.

“I think there’s a lot to that,” I said. “But every time I bring up my mother, just the simple mention of her—not that the two of them should get together or anything—my grandmother changes the subject.”

My in-laws nodded their understanding. Then Clive, quite casually, which he wasn’t very good at, asked, “Do Ethel and Sparky share a room?” I must have looked at him like he was nuts because he quickly said, “I assume they do. I was just wondering, and you can put it down to my old-fashionedness, if it would have any kind of a negative impact on the boys?”

“You think gay is contagious?” I asked.

Clive smiled—a little. With him, it was hard to tell. Babs didn’t smile. “Susie,” she said carefully, “it’s not that we care one way or another. They are a marvelous couple, which is amazing, because there’s such a big age difference. My only concern, our only concern, is the boys. You grandmother is really incidental because she won’t be staying that much longer. But with all due respect to you, because you’re doing such a magnificent job with them, the boys’ lives have changed so drastically. Don’t you think they need all the stability they can get?”

“Absolutely.” I wanted out of the conversation and was on the verge of offering to make coffee, slice a pineapple, anything to escape them for a few minutes. But I couldn’t find a way out. So I sat up absolutely straight, maybe mimicking Andrea’s I’m-an-aristocrat/stick-up-the-ass posture, and said, “Tell me what you’re thinking about when you’re talking about stability.”

“To be perfectly honest, we know what a huge job this is for you,” Babs said.

“It is pretty huge,” I agreed.

“And as a woman who worked all through her children’s growing up, I certainly wouldn’t ask you to give up the wonderful business you and Andrea have created,” she went on.

“Good” was all I could think of to say.

“My question is this: Do you honestly feel that two teenage girls, sweet, lovely girls, I’m not saying they’re not, are enough help for you? Enough for the boys? When Jonah and Theo were growing up, we had Margaret. Well, of course. You’ve met her. When she started with us, she was well into her thirties and had superior credentials. Experienced. Trained. She was a proper nanny. You know, I was talking about this with Jonah—”

“Listen to me.” I looked first at her, then at Clive, and sat even straighter. Slumping was a signal of defeat, and I was on the offense. I took a deep breath to calm down, because I didn’t want to seem offensive. “I know you spoke about this with Jonah, about us getting a so-called proper nanny. He and I discussed it. And you know what? We rejected it, at least for the time being. But let’s put that to the side for a minute.” They were about to break in, so I kept talking. “We’ve all had a loss that’s unbearable. Maybe it’s bearable, because that’s the only way to go on. But you know what I mean.” They both looked away from me but not at each other. “The boys are what’s left of Jonah. My sons, your grandsons. We can disagree over how I should raise them, and there are going to be times you’ll be right and I’ll be wrong.”

“Susie,” Clive said. His mouth, with its upturned smileyness, looked more inappropriate than at any time since the funeral. “It’s not a question of right or wrong.”

“Fine. But let me be blunt, though you can call it coarse, which apparently is my
spécialité de la maison
. You’re concerned about the boys. I know you genuinely love them.”

“We do,” Babs said.

“But what have you done for them?”

“What would you have us do?” she asked in her cold voice, which, with me, didn’t differ too much from her warm one.

“I’d have you spend time with them. If you can’t take all three at once, how about one at a time for two or three hours? As for a proper nanny, Ida and Ingvild are two of the finest, most proper people I’ve ever met. They’ve worked harder than I would ever dream of asking
them to. They are loyal beyond loyal, and they’ve never once complained. They love the boys, and the boys love them.”

“We’re not saying—” Clive started.

“Right now I’d rather be the one talking,” I told him. “The twins’ visas expire in May. I’m already talking to the agency that found them for me. The agency has another set of twins, a brother and a sister, who sound great. So either I’ll be getting them or two others like them. If that doesn’t sit right with you, if you really, truly feel a proper nanny would be better, then all right.” They took a fast glance at each other, then turned back to me. “I’ll go along with a proper nanny as long as it’s someone who meets my standards, and I’m not just talking background check. I’m talking about someone who will be loving to the boys, strong enough to deal with them, and easy for me to have in the house.”

“We wouldn’t expect you—” Babs started to say.

“Hold on; that’s not all.”

“What else?” Clive asked.

“If you want this kind of person, then it will be the two of you who will pay for this kind of person. I’ll be glad to contribute, but I’m not going to squander our resources paying for proper.”

Clive looked at Babs. She didn’t even glance his way. “We’ll pay,” she said. Then she cleared her throat. “And I
never
called you coarse.”