The Inseparables (30 page)

The afternoon before Lydia's suspension ended, Henrietta took her for lunch in downtown Boston. They left in the early afternoon, taking the Green Line trolley from downtown Aveline. She would have preferred to take Lydia to a proper meal, she told her on the train as it wended aboveground through the snowy fields and the frozen city reservoir, but proper meals necessitated actual money belonging to an actual bank account that she hadn't overdrawn. Which was why they had come here.

It was a Monday in mid-February and the streets were quiet and mostly empty. They emerged near the Christian Science Plaza, the ledge of the reflecting pool flush with pigeons and skateboarders, the fountain water frozen over. She took Lydia's hand as they got closer. From here it was difficult to tell that anything had changed. She had known all along that this was not the case, of course. Jerry Stern had told her. He sent along updates every week, at first. They had taken down the sign, he would tell her. Or they removed the awning, the door, the flower boxes. You know the back steps where the cooks smoked cigarettes? That was gone. Or do you remember the big sugar maple and how the roots bulged the sidewalk out front? They dredged the whole goddamned block. She had to tell him to stop updating her. She didn't want to know.

Cities changed. She knew this. It was the old story. Eventually everything gets knocked down. The Penn Station of her youth, gone. Ebbets Field, gone. The back alley of the restaurant in Manhattan where Harold had taken her on that first date—Honey's on Fifth—it, too, was gone. She had resolved to remain unaffected by this, if only because she considered the alternative to be juvenile. Others cared. Others wept when houses were razed. Others wrote letters to the local architectural boards, the city zoning commissions; other people stood out in the rain protesting the demolition of something particularly crucial or holy or historically important. She, on the other hand, believed it to be progress. Athens burns, Athens is rebuilt. One day Honey's on Fifth serves a particularly divine
escargots à la bourguignonne
that contributes in some small way to you falling in love with your husband, and then, a decade later, it is transformed into a rather bland condominium tower, indistinguishable from the hundreds of other bland condominium towers in Manhattan. Whom did it benefit to be the madwoman standing out front on the sidewalk, informing passersby about what used to be?
My mother cheered Jackie Robinson here!
Or:
My husband kissed me here for the first time! Right here! In that alley where the rats are scurrying!
She could remember standing outside Penn Station the day the demolition cars were unloaded onto the street. If that magnificent building could be demolished, then anything could. She and her mother and her aunt Essie went uptown to 34th Street that day, specifically to see all the machines gathering on 8th Avenue—the bulldozers, the front-end loaders. Her mother and her aunt both worried that the city's willingness to kill such a beautiful building was an indication that the country was doomed. Her mother and her aunt stood out on the sidewalk with some degree of glib satisfaction on their faces—satisfaction because their anxieties had been confirmed. They were women who had worried every day of their lives—worried about their children, about their poverty, about whether or not they were actually and sufficiently American. They were women inured to disappointment, to hot factory floors, to misery, to all the countless stories their friends told them of their families being murdered, of generations lost. Henrietta was spared all of this. She was wholly American, born the year after the Fascists lost. If she was inured to anything, she was inured to bliss and peace and the swell of people on the uptown 6 train. She was nineteen that October, a college sophomore, reading Hegel and Martin Buber and gathering at night at the Judson Church to organize about the rights of women and black people and underpaid workers and destitute children. What was so important about a building, anyway? Buildings go up and buildings come down, do they not?

So it should not have surprised her to see this.

The Feast was a taqueria now.
Boston Taco.
A terrifically large neon sign blinked in a rhythm, first the letters going
T-A-C-O-S,
and then the words
Fast, Good, Eat.
Henrietta stopped a block away. Lydia, sensing her apprehension or her queasiness or maybe just the shock of feeling the loss all over again, squeezed her hand tightly. A long line drifted out the front door. Nothing remained. The new owners had gutted the front face, exchanging the pair of small windows on the front wall for a single clean sheet of glass. These same small windows on whose sills diners who had needed to wait outside for a table often rested their glasses of wine on summer nights. The lantern lights mounted to the brick wall were gone, as were the bricks.

“Should we go in?” Lydia asked.

Henrietta stood frozen across the street. Was it better this way? To see no trace of it left? To see such a terrific crowd here when for so long there had been nothing, nobody, just the empty pavement, the blank sidewalk?

“I think we should go in,” Lydia said, crossing Huntington and all but dragging Henrietta along with her.

“Why?” Henrietta asked.

“So we can eat food,” said Lydia.

Standing here on the block like this reminded Henrietta of opening night, when the crowd was equally large and she had come carrying Oona. She started to say this aloud but stopped.

“What is it?” Lydia asked.

She waved the thought away. “It's nothing you haven't heard, probably,” Henrietta said.

Once they were inside, she saw that the entirety of the dining room had been rearranged so that the cooks and the dishwashers and the diners were all in the same room. Surely this was a matter of economics. Doing away with Harold's kitchen, his pantry, his pastry section, allowed for more tables, more people, more money. But this arrangement, with the cooks here and the customers in a line watching while a man with a cleaver split so many dozen chicken breasts, disallowed the romance and the art of food, disallowed the hungry impatience of waiting for the kitchen door to fly open and reveal a man balancing a tray of perfectly braised osso buco. This was something, she was sure, that nobody cared about. Everything was clean and gleaming white.

Lydia took a seat by the window.

“This is nice,” Henrietta said.

“Is this nice?” Lydia asked, looking around. “It's sterile. Everything is blank and white. It's like eating in a laboratory.”

“I meant being here with you,” Henrietta said. “Not the restaurant.”

Lydia allowed a shy smile. “Right.”

The conversation was not easy. They had been together most of the morning and this was the extent of it. Henrietta had not done this enough. Been in a restaurant with just her granddaughter. Traveled on a train with her. In the beginning it was the kind of thing she had imagined would happen more. Decent grandmotherhood, she had always suspected, depended on being able to do this well—to dote, to dispense wisdom, to spoil an unduly precocious young person with gifts and irreverent humor and perhaps an illicit afternoon glass of white wine. Had she written down her goals for being a grandmother, this kind of thing would have been part of her hopes.

“Did Grandpa even like tacos?” Lydia asked.

“I don't know, actually,” Henrietta said, which felt like a terrible thing not to know.

“Do you recognize anything about the place?”

She looked around. They were crammed tight beside the next table. This was a difference. The lack of breathing room, the absence of privacy. Stark high-contrast photography hung on the walls showing happy-looking pigs and sustainable-seeming fields of corn. She had met Spencer for the first time in this exact spot. She had come here the night
The Inseparables
was published, sat probably in this same spot. They had celebrated Oona's sixteenth birthday here, Harold's fortieth, fiftieth, sixtieth.

“What about you?” she asked Lydia. “Do you remember anything about this?”

Lydia thought about it. She had been a girl when it closed. “I remember butter,” Lydia said. “A tremendous amount of butter.”

This made Henrietta happy. “If that's all you remember, then you really do remember it.”

From here tiers of scaffolding obstructed the front face of Symphony Hall. In the beginning they served all the best musicians, the conductors, the most prestigious visitors. Harold once curried enough favor to have a cellist take them around that first season. The orchestra was in rehearsals. Henrietta dressed up for the occasion. This was Harold's way to get her to see that there was culture here. Those first few years he worried that she would pack up and go back to New York. She got to sit on the edge of the stage while Beethoven played. Harold wore a big grin. They were new parents. She carried Oona against her chest, she remembered. But maybe this was an inaccurate memory. It could have been a different year. A different season. Maybe Oona had run around the stage. Maybe Oona was older then. Henrietta resisted these thoughts. Time goes. Memory changes. Everything shifts.

“The only thing that's really the same is the view,” Henrietta said finally. “That, at least, is the same.”

Lydia looked to see. The busy wide avenue crowded with midday traffic. The noise. The columns on the Christian Science church. The gray sky. The birds. The bare trees.

“I only went to dinner with my grandmother one time,” Henrietta said.

“Was it as nice as this?” Lydia asked, laughing as a man bumped into her, spilling a splash of diet cola onto the table.

“I remember her saying, ‘Life is tough. A bird could come through the window right this instant and impale you.'”

Lydia squirmed. “Yikes.”

“She was a very sweet woman nonetheless.”

“Seems that way.”

“My grandmother didn't speak much English. She was giving me advice, I think.”

“Advice on what, exactly?”

“I don't remember. Birds? Windows?”

Lydia swept a loose bothersome strand of hair away from her face. She had become graceful. Maybe last month it had happened. This small motion was evidence. A particular elongation of her fingers as they glanced at her hair. An ability to passively inhabit more than one place at one time: the past and the future, boarding school and a taqueria, the Internet and also the present real moment.

“If your grandmother didn't speak English, then what did you speak about?”

“Nothing important that I can remember,” Henrietta said.

“I don't believe that. Didn't she live in the apartment down the hall from you? You never talked?”

Henrietta nodded. “Sometimes she would worry in front of me. About all sorts of things. Food. Death. Nuclear conflict.”

“In English?”

“You can talk about worrying without using words.” She made the shape of a mushroom cloud with her hands. “Especially nuclear war.”

Traffic crawled slowly outside. A car pulled into the empty space by the front window. It was the exact model and color of Oona's car. Henrietta watched Lydia's eyes open with a tiny glimmer of optimism. This never leaves. The hope for your mother. The car parked. It was not Oona.

“Don't look so disappointed,” said Henrietta. “I'm not a monster.”

“It's just that we've never done this before. It's not personal. I just don't know what to talk about.”

“We can talk about anything.”

Lydia folded her hands in her lap. Her deep impatient breathing was the most awful sound.

“Except death and money and Israel and the weather,” said Henrietta, “we can talk about anything.”

“If those are your subjects to avoid, then mine are pornography, humiliation, men, technology.”

Henrietta smiled.

“What does that leave for us, then?” Lydia asked.

“Paris. Jazz. Swimming. Chocolate. The good things.”

Lydia put her hands flat on the table, every one of her fingernails jagged with bite marks. Maybe Henrietta was wrong about her granddaughter's impending grace and elegance. But here at least was something Henrietta's grandmother would have seized on, three generations between them: these half-moons of dried blood on Lydia's fingertips. Worry!

Lydia slipped the familiar pink book onto the place mat.

“Or that,” Henrietta said, moaning, pointing, using a napkin to push the book away and back onto Lydia's lap. “I forgot to add that to my list.”

“Too late,” Lydia said. “I read all of it.”

“Your poor brain.”

“I read every word and every caption on every diagram.”

“Did you feel your intelligence and good taste dissipating with every passing page?”

“I have some notes,” Lydia said.

“Oh,
you're
going to critique me, too!”

“First, compared to the Internet this is a children's book.”

“Oh, it seems tame to you?”

“Ridiculously tame,” Lydia said.

“I'm passé now. Is that it?”

“Second, I don't get why you're still so ashamed of it. You shouldn't be.”

Behind Henrietta meat sizzled on a griddle. “That's nice of you to say, Lydia.”

“I'm being serious. What can we do to make you feel better about this?”

“More than once I've tried burning a few copies,” Henrietta said. “It doesn't completely alleviate the suffering. But it helps. We could go burn this one outside. There's a place behind the building where Harold and I used to roast meat. Maybe we can ask them to put it on the grill behind us.”

Lydia was unmoved. “The fact is that if you'd published this thing under your husband's name, nobody would have paid attention. Another book about another man putting his dick in another woman. Who could be bothered to care about that?”

Henrietta regarded her. The sure smile. The casual easy command of a whole orbit of sexual politics and social woe. Who was to say whether this was actually something Lydia knew about, something perhaps accrued over six months in southern Vermont among the filthy and the filthy rich, or whether every fifteen-year-old girl, having been cyberogled or harassed on the catwalk of the local shopping mall, could so swiftly diagnose her book the way Lydia just had?