The Great Man (15 page)

“What are you saying?” Lila asked with a faint air of sorrow.

“I have a suspicion that you’re a romantic. That’s a compliment. But no woman could be romantic and have the stomach for Oscar. To survive him, you had to be practical and a little bit detached from him. I wonder whether your friend Teddy was those things. To look at her, I would guess she was, and good for her.”

Lila sighed, obviously wishing she were more practical, more coldhearted, more whatever it would have taken to have been with Oscar. “I have a confession,” she whispered with a quick glance over at the table. “I’m in love.”

“You are?” Abigail said, surprised. “Who with?”

“A younger man I met on the street! At my age! We’re like teenagers.”

“Well,” said Abigail yearningly, imagining the thrill. She suspected that Lila had told her this to even the playing field, and she didn’t blame her. “Gosh.”

“I can’t tell Teddy.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t want her to be upset. She seems so lonely these days….” Lila’s voice trailed off.

“You should tell her,” said Abigail. “I’m sure she’ll be happy for you.” Her antennae had begun to sense a restlessness at the table. She looked over at them all to make sure Ethan was all right.

“Hey,” called Maxine, “you two, get back here. There’s another item we have to discuss.”

As Abigail and Lila herded themselves back to the war table, Abigail felt renewed resentment toward Maxine but quashed it. Ethan was rocking silently, twiddling an ear with the opposite hand. Katerina was nowhere in sight. Abigail guessed she had gone back to her office, leaving Teddy and Maxine uncomfortably together in prickly silence, and this was the real reason the seconds had been summoned back to the table.

“What were you two getting up to over there?” Teddy asked.

“All sorts of mischief,” said Abigail.

When Lila smiled at her, Abigail was surprised to find herself near tears. Had she really become so lonely that a scrap of proffered friendship could make her weep? Things were dire indeed. She took her place again across from Lila and tried not to look dementedly needy.

“Now,” said Maxine. She poured herself another shot of whiskey and then, by way of hospitality, waved the bottle at the rest of them a little menacingly, Abigail thought, like a pirate offering his captives a last drink before they walked the plank.

“Please,” said Teddy, pushing her glass forward. “Pour some all around.”

Maxine gave Teddy a good-size shot, then poured markedly less into Abigail’s and Lila’s glasses. Ethan touched his nose a few times, fending off the sharp, caustic smell.

“These biographers,” said Maxine. “Oscar would have greatly cared about the things we all say about him to these men. I want him remembered properly, the way he would have wanted to be.”

“You’re a good sister,” Teddy burst out, half in anger and half something else—Abigail wasn’t sure what, maybe admiration.

Maxine looked directly at Teddy, her face blank, and said nothing.

“Well, anyway,” said Teddy in that same half-angry tone. “I’ve already said things about Oscar that I deeply regret.”

“So have I,” said Maxine, sounding oddly relieved.

The two hostile parties stared at each other. Abigail felt the air between them smooth out just a little, become marginally warmer.

“It’s kept me awake at night,” said Teddy. “I betrayed him.”

“Nowhere near as badly as I have,” said Maxine.

“Well,” said Teddy. “It’s true: We should all be very careful what we say about him from now on.”

“The upset apple cart comes to mind,” said Maxine. “As does the open barn door with the horse gone.”

“I haven’t said anything I regret,” said Abigail, “but it does make me a little uneasy to talk about Oscar in such a way. It feels very exciting and flattering to me to have Henry there listening to every word, and I find myself telling more than maybe I should, because I do love to talk about Oscar. I do miss him so much; it brings him back to me a little.”

“Yes,” said Teddy.

“Yes,” agreed Maxine.

Teddy looked over at Abigail and clasped her hands together on the tabletop in front of her. “Abigail,” she said.

Abigail looked back at her.

“I can’t apologize to you,” said Teddy. “I always thought I ought to if this moment ever came, but I find now that I can’t do it.”

“You haven’t got anything to apologize for,” said Abigail. She sounded unconvinced and unconvincing even to herself.

Maxine made a sound in the back of her throat.

“I’m sure I have,” said Teddy, “but I find that I can’t.”

Maxine made another sound in the back of her throat.

“Sounds like something’s stuck in your craw,” Teddy said to Maxine. “Maybe you should spit it out.”

“I will,” said Maxine. “Right in your face. You screwed her husband for decades.”

Teddy looked at Abigail. “If it hadn’t been me, it would have been someone else. Many times, it
was
someone else.”

“Oh,” said Abigail, wanting to agree, wanting this conversation not to be happening. She went on: “Well, yes. But it was mostly you.”

“Sure,” said Teddy. “He needed me, Abigail.”

“I can see that,” said Abigail.

“Stop being such a yellowbelly!” Maxine said.

Abigail stared at Maxine with her mouth slightly ajar. “Maxie, there’s nothing to say now! What would be the point? Why are you pushing me?”

“Because you won’t push yourself,” said Maxine. “Damn it. You should have put a stop to it right at the beginning.”

“I couldn’t,” said Abigail. “What would I have said?”

“Told him to dump her and stick to his little sluts,” said Maxine.

“As if anyone could have,” said Teddy. “It’s not Abigail’s fault Oscar and I carried on an affair. It was nothing to do with her.”

Ethan made a sharp, high sound, as if he were reacting to this in some way.

“Nothing to do with his
wife
?” Maxine squawked.

“I can see that objectively,” said Abigail with a sudden whiskey-fueled clap of rage, “but I have to say that emotionally, that strikes me as purely disingenuous.”

Teddy was silent for a moment. Something worked in her face. Everyone waited for her to answer except Ethan, who rapped his knuckles softly on the table. Teddy said finally, looking fixedly at the air between them all, “When he died, I thought I was going to go insane. I did, maybe. Looking back, now I think I went a little crazy. I sold my beautiful house and moved to an old dump in a sordid neighborhood farther away from everything, and if it hadn’t been for Lila, I might have literally died of a broken heart. Lila sat up with me at night because I couldn’t sleep. My brain was sick with grief. I didn’t talk much, did I?”

“No,” said Lila, “not much at all. You asked about my grandchildren. You wanted me to talk. I always thought you never really grieved properly for Oscar.”

“I didn’t even know he was dead,” said Teddy directly to Abigail. “He died at home, with you. Who would think to tell me? I read his obituary like most of the world. Read about it in the paper…that’s how I learned he was gone.”

“And it didn’t mention you or Ruby or Samantha,” said Lila.

“Well, of course not,” said Teddy. “Abigail and Maxine weren’t going to allow anything about us in Oscar’s obituary. I’m sure if you had any control over the biographies, we’d all be erased from those, too. The reason I can’t apologize is that this was between you and Oscar, Abigail. Not me. Maxine is right, but only half right. If you had tried to put a stop to his affair with me, it would have created an intolerable situation for him. He couldn’t give either one of us up. He needed us both equally. If you had been the histrionic kind of woman to telephone me with your voice trembling dramatically, begging me to give him up for the sake of your marriage, your son, I would have told you it had nothing to do with me, that it was entirely up to Oscar and between the two of you.”

“You have not one fucking idea,” Maxine snarled. “You controlling bitch. You sucked him in and kept him there.”

Ethan made another high keening sound in the back of his throat.

“I had him under some kind of spell?”

“I think you controlled him. You can call it any fancy name you want.”

Teddy laughed harshly. “You think Oscar was that easily led around by the nose?”

“Not the nose,” said Maxine.

Abigail had been looking intently at Teddy throughout this conversation, watching her confident way of speaking, her gracefully precise gestures, imagining that if Teddy had been Oscar’s wife, he very well might not have needed a mistress. This thought both galvanized her and gave her a mournful sense of her own failings. “I was never that kind of woman,” she said. “The kind to call anyone up like that. I had too much pride and what I mistakenly thought was dignity. Now I see I was laughed at and mocked.”

Ethan keened again. He sounded like a wild animal.

“Never,” said Lila.

“All those nights I couldn’t contact him,” Teddy said to Abigail. “The night I went into labor with our daughters, I couldn’t call him. He was at home with you. I knew, I understood, exactly what the deal was. All along I accepted it. But when he died, I saw how much I had given up. And I don’t mean because he left me nothing. I mean because, in the end, a woman needs legitimacy.”

“I know those nights,” said Abigail. “I had them, too. I didn’t have your telephone number, Teddy, did I? And I
was
laughed at; I
was
mocked. Maxine, you mocked me.”

“To your face,” said Maxine. “Right to your face. It wasn’t mockery. I just thought you were being a dumb bunny. He lived off your money and gave you nothing in return. Where was
your
legitimacy, Abigail? A piece of paper that pronounced you Mrs. Feldman? So fucking what. A marriage is in the details.”

“All due respect, but how would you know?” Abigail said in a sudden white-hot explosion of rage at Maxine, the rage that had been rankling her all afternoon—for decades, in fact. “How would you know what marriage is, Maxine?”

Ethan’s hands flapped by his ears. He rocked.

“I know,” said Maxine with blunt indifference to Abigail’s fury, “what Oscar was getting from you for free.”

“You couldn’t stand to see him get exactly what he wanted,” said Abigail. She was out of breath with anger at Maxine, dizzy with it. “And he got it all and no one took it away from him. He had me and Teddy and his little chippies, as Maribelle and I called them. He had his two cakes, ate them whenever he wanted, and all the cupcakes he wanted on the side. Not to mention everything else he had. Because he was bold. He had the courage of his convictions. Shhh. Ethan, it’s all right.”

“That’s for sure,” said Teddy with a little laugh. “Absolute clarity in all things, Oscar. Never wavered, never hesitated.”

“He had balls,” said Abigail.

“He was not a good boy,” added Lila.

Maxine looked around at their three faces. “Please,” she said. “I never got silly about him. I saw him for what he was. Without the haze of sex.”

“Shhh. Ethan,” said Abigail again. “I promise, it’s all right.”

Ethan abruptly went quiet, but his hands moved by his ears and he kept rocking.

“Staking your claim,” said Teddy. “You’re welcome to it.”

“We all saw him, in our own ways,” said Lila.

A silence fell around the table. The four women avoided eye contact, as if suddenly ashamed or shy. Into the breach came the sound of Katerina singing to herself in the far corner of the loft, something in Hungarian in a raspy, slightly off-key voice that somehow managed to be beautiful anyway by virtue of the language she sang in. Her voice sounded to Abigail like a peasant girl’s during wartime as she dug, squatting in a potato patch behind a hut.

Abigail said to no one in particular, “I’ve read too many novels. I haven’t lived enough of life.”

“Oh, me, too,” said Lila, as if she had been thinking along similar lines.

“I wanted to,” said Abigail, “but I could never quite get up my nerve. And then Ethan always needed me.”

“You could have put him in a home,” said Maxine. She looked over at Ethan. His mouth was twisted; he was looking at the tabletop.

“I could do no such thing!”

“Of course you couldn’t,” said Lila.

“Why not?” Teddy asked. “Would he have known the difference?”

Abigail said with horror, “He would have been miserable among strangers!”

“Among his own kind,” said Maxine. “Cared for by trained professionals. And then Oscar might have felt he had your undivided attention, Abigail.”

“Maxine,” said Teddy, “that was not why Oscar—”

“Oh really,” said Maxine.

Teddy and Maxine stared at each other with hatred.

“It wasn’t,” said Abigail. “You’re right, Teddy. He didn’t want my undivided attention. He wanted me distracted.”

“Oscar, Oscar, Oscar,” said Maxine. “Look at us, four smart old bags with plenty to think about, fixated on my putz of a brother, who’s been dead for five years and wasn’t especially nice to any of us.”

“Time for Lila and me to be going,” said Teddy. “You have your tefillin, we’ll all keep our traps shut about
Helena,
we had a nice little volley of long-overdue spats and tantrums, and now I’m tired and ready for a nap.” She stood up and said to Lila, “Ready?”

“Yes,” said Lila. “But I just want to add one thing. Oscar and Teddy were soul mates. That was true love if I ever saw it. It didn’t diminish or tarnish over all those years. I can’t go home without saying that.”

“Stop romanticizing Oscar and me, Lila,” said Teddy. “I appreciate what you’re trying to say, but really, it was as complicated and messy as any relationship between two people always is.”

“Like I said,” Maxine said, “I have heard enough about Oscar for one lifetime. I don’t care if he and Teddy floated in fairy dust and little red cinnamon hearts together, I’ve had it with my fucking brother and all of you lovelorn girls who fell for his bullshit.”

“Good-bye,” said Teddy, pushing her chair back, standing up, smiling enigmatically. “Thanks very much for all the whiskey.” She walked toward the door with her head held high and disappeared through it.