The Divorce Papers: A Novel (32 page)

TRAYNOR, HAND, WYZANSKI

222 CHURCH STREET
NEW SALEM, NARRAGANSETT 06555
(393) 876-5678

MEMORANDUM

Attorney Work Product

That was some lunch—and some letter. I don’t know that anyone has ever addressed Bruce Meiklejohn with that sweetness and confidence. That little girl knows he loves her, and she loves him back and trusts him. I’m betting that’s a first for him. He may tell his daughter he’ll underwrite the divorce and her post-divorce life, though I can’t see her going along unless he stops rewriting his will and creates an irrevocable living trust that she can control and/or invade. That would be my advice. What’s yours?

Bruce Meiklejohn never ceases to surprise me. I’ve been his lawyer for 22 years, and I’ve never been able to second-guess him.

Dear Poppa,

Thank you for the new computer. I love it! It’s absolutely beautiful. I never saw a purple one before. All my friends are jealus. I’m glad its a powerbook. I can use it everyweher. My typing is getting better. Mommy says she is going to show me how to use the Internet but I know how. We use computers at school all the time. I don’t have spelchekker on this computer so my spelling is sometimes odd. I do it foneticaly. I hope you don’t mind. I can read much better than I can spell. I can see where it’s wrong. I just don’t know how to make it right.

I need to talk to you about Daddy. I don’t understand why he stopped loving Mommy and me. Do you? Mommy is sad and I’m sad too. I cry sometimes but I try not to let Mommy see. I know it makes her feel sadder. Tito is very sad too. I can tell. He’s very mopey. Fido hasn’t changed. He’s always cheerful. Lucky dog.

I have a very big favor to ask you. Would you ask Daddy not to do this divorce. I bet he would listen to you. He says your very very smart. You just fake being stupid. Tell him I promise to be good and I’ll behave myself.

You never got divorced. You got married again because Granny died. I think that’s the way to do it. Mommy isn’t going to die at 46 is she? She promises she wont but she still could. Who will take care of me then? I cant live with Daddy. Could I live with you? Cindy might not like it. I have a lot of things to worry about.

Your loving granddaughter,
Jane

TRAYNOR, HAND, WYZANSKI

222 CHURCH STREET
NEW SALEM, NARRAGANSETT 06555
(393) 876-5678

MEMORANDUM

Attorney Work Product

What does Jane mean when she says she couldn’t live with her father if something happened to her mother? You don’t think he’s hurting her in some way, do you?

My advice to Ms. Meiklejohn has been to stay the course. The house is the key to the settlement. Bruce Meiklejohn may love Jane more than anyone else, but I don’t think he’ll ever relinquish control of his money. Have you read his latest will? I did. I wanted the full measure of the man. The Law Against Perpetuities has met its match. He’s got everything tied up for decades. He’ll be pulling the strings long after he’s dead. Ms. M may finally get her hands on some dough when she’s 70. (Of course, in next month’s will, he may decide to put all the money in a charitable foundation.) I did learn something interesting. Her mother left an estate of about $900,000, in addition to the Martha’s Vineyard house, which she put in trusts for her children. She left $400,000 to Cordelia, and $400,000 to Ms. M. She also made a direct bequest of $100,000 to a scholarship fund at the Peabody School in memory of James Meiklejohn. Who is he? The money to Ms. M vests in 2007, when Ms. M is 50. Cordelia’s remains in a trust. Ms. M never mentioned her trust. Does she know about it? It’s got to be at least $2 million now, unless of course a bank was doing the investing. It must be 20 years since her mother died. Proctor is a trustee of both trusts, and he has the power to invade in the event of “necessity.” He said he’d give me the numbers after the June 30 statements arrive; he reviews the accounts semiannually. He seems to think the money was invested in blue chips.

Bruce Meiklejohn currently pays all of Cordelia’s expenses, and he has made arrangements in his will for her to be taken care of for the rest of her life. Do we have to let Kahn and Dr. D know about this money? I suppose so.

How did Meiklejohn find a purple computer? That was genius. He qualifies for the
Guinness Book of Granddads
with that one.

Casting Your Life

Dearest Sophie—

I know your dad was hard on you during the bad years. I saw it even though you tried to protect me (or was it him you were protecting, from my bad opinion?). But it wasn’t only you. He was hard on Luc, too. And he barely paid Francoise any attention at all. (I used to wonder if he thought she was David Cummings’s daughter. Where did that unwashed bronze hair come from?) Remy somehow avoided his wrath. Think of your parents’ divorce as war. Now it’s over, time to draw up a peace treaty. Keep it simple. I think he behaves badly because he feels guilty. Does that make sense?

Sometimes, Sophie, it’s hard to hear your complaints against your parents. It’s not only that I love them and that they saved my life; they are by any standard you can think of so much better than my parents. I had this fantasy when I was 10 or 11 that my parents had kidnapped me, that I was really the daughter of cultured and distinguished people (your parents!?). Classic family romance, but what did I know then? Your mother somehow got wind of this, probably something I said, and decided to do an intervention. I can picture it to this day; it’s like a scene in play. We were in the kitchen, just the two of us. I don’t know where you and your siblings were. I was sitting at the table, drinking chocolate milk; she was cooking. “Magpie,” she said, “you belong to a very lucky tribe, did you know that?” I must have looked startled, if not incredulous. “Yes,” she went on, “the self-made. Against the odds, despite your tough upbringing, you will be brilliantly successful. You don’t need rich or royal parents or even me and John. You’ll do it by dint of brains, beauty, talent, drive, guts, and, most important, hard, hard work. I know it.” I would have died for her, right there, on the spot. And I believed her.

Interestingly, she never ever criticized my parents, only my “upbringing.” Once when I was older, maybe 15, I was complaining to her about my dad’s drinking, and she said, with no hint of criticism (of me or him), but with that simple, direct style of hers that could turn someone else’s rhetorical questions into legitimate ones: “Do you think he decided to be an alcoholic? Do you think that’s what he wants to be?” That stopped me in my tracks. I had never given him a point of view. I had only asked: Why doesn’t he stop it and behave responsibly?

Your dad’s depressed and has been, I’m guessing, most of his life (probably since Granny Diehl packed him off to boarding school), and being English public school, he regards therapy and drugs as crutches. I can still hear him saying to one of you (and sometimes to me, too), “Pull up your socks, old man.” You’re never going to change him; he’s never going to change. You might be able to change. That’s your best hope. I am now going to pull up my socks and learn some lines till bedtime. (It worked for me; I am a perfect monument to sock-up-pulling.)

Love you,
Maggie

TRAYNOR, HAND, WYZANSKI

222 CHURCH STREET
NEW SALEM, NARRAGANSETT 06555
(393) 876-5678

MEMORANDUM

Attorney Work Product

Mia Meiklejohn sent me a copy of a letter her father sent Jane in response to her letter to him. I can’t imagine a letter that could make Jane feel better, safer, or more loved. I’ll bet it made her feel smart, too. It’s perfection. How did he know how to do that? No question: he is really and truly very smart.

BRUCE MEIKLEJOHN

50 SAINT CLOUD
NEW SALEM, NARRAGANSETT 06555

June 8

Dear Pumpkin,

You can live with me anytime you want to, always and forever. You can live with me for a day, a week, a year, a decade, a century, or a millennium. I won’t die until you’re all grown up. But your mommy is not going to die either, so you can stop worrying about that. (And, just in case you’re worrying about your own health, you are not going to die until you are very, very old, at least 99.)

You are my number 1 person and all-around champ.

Here’s my direct telephone number: 393-875-7575. Isn’t that a good number? Only three people in the world have this number: my secretary, Dulcie, Cordelia’s houseparents, and YOU. You can leave a message if I don’t answer. I check the messages every day, usually once an hour. If you need me, I can get wherever you are in a trice.

I love you,

Poppa

P.S. I don’t know how to use a computer. If I buy one, will you teach me? Do you have email? We should get it, you and I, so we can always be in touch.

Grandparents

Dear David—

I’m sorry I broke down in your office the other day. It was the correspondence between Bruce Meiklejohn and Jane that undid me. This divorce has revived all kinds of terrible memories. You were very kind to listen. And you were right about my parents. They were so much better than their own parents. My grandmothers, who were doting and adoring of my sibs and me, were basically incapable of saying a single nice thing to or about their own children. (These are vocabulary words I learned from hearing my parents talk about their mothers:
harridan
,
virago
,
termagant
,
shrew
.) It was a bond between my parents, a shared source of grief and outrage. They had both been raised under harsh and rigid disciplinary regimes, and they reeled with shock and amazement at the love, generosity, kindness, and praise their martinet mothers heaped on us. We—the children—didn’t know what to do. We could see the difference, and it shamed and embarrassed us (and of course also pleased us).

The weekend I turned 10 we were visiting Grandmere at her house on the Cape. In the course of doing a handstand in her living room, I knocked over and broke an antique Lalique candy dish. “Oh, that old thing,” she said, taking me in her arms, “Ne t’inquiete pas, cherie. As long as
you
don’t break.” Next day, at breakfast, with all of us sitting at table, Maman knocked over a juice glass as she was lifting Francoise onto her lap. Grandmere made a big fuss about cleaning it up, pushing Maman away and saying: “You were always so clumsy.” We all looked down at our eggs. When I was 15, I asked Grandmere whether she loved my mother. “Of course. A mother always loves her children even if they’re not lovable.” And she went on her way, lavishing kisses on the grandchildren and abusing her daughter.

Granny Diehl’s style was equally cruel, but less direct, passive-aggressive, county Tory style. She was always saying things like “Your father could have done anything—he’s got an excellent brain—I’ll never understand why he teaches at an American university. Has anyone heard of Columbia? None of my friends have, except the vicar of course. Harvard, now there’s a university we all know about, like Oxford or Cambridge. Why doesn’t he teach at Harvard?” This is a woman whose husband was the English publisher of Margaret Mead and Moses Hadas. When Papa won the Wolfson Prize in History, Granny asked him if it was as important as the Booker. There was no point explaining. My theory is Papa became a communist (at 12) in the hope that come the revolution, she would be rounded up, jailed, tortured, and hanged. When I finally asked her why she was so tough on Papa, she denied it. “Oh, no, sweetheart, he’s a fine man. Look at all you darling children.”

And here is the question we’ve been waiting for: What effect did their mothers’ meanness have on my parents? Maman made a determined, and successful, effort to be different from her mother; if she didn’t like something we’d done, she’d simply say: “I don’t like that.” Papa did not escape unscathed. He’d lavish us with praise and affection when we pleased him, and when we didn’t, he made us feel terrible: stupid, incompetent, beneath notice. Sometimes mid-screed, he’d suddenly realize what he was doing and apologize, but not often enough. If he comes to New Salem to visit me as he is threatening, I probably won’t bring him to the office. I keep him out of my life; I keep the people I care for away from him. It’s safer. I know it isn’t at all what Keats meant, but I call what I do Negative Capability: since I can’t make him be nice to me, I’m not nice to him. I come away from a meeting with my father feeling hateful, toward him, toward myself. It’s hard enough to love someone who’s mean to you; it’s almost impossible to love someone who brings out the worst in you.

It’s plain I shouldn’t do divorces anymore. Thanks for listening to me; thanks for being interested and kind.

Sophie