The Social Climber of Davenport Heights (20 page)

I waited for a moment while she listened to the other end of the line. “No, it’s not like that at all,” she said. “It’s worse.”

She glanced in my direction.

“Dr. Reiser, could you hold on for a minute,” she said.

Taking the phone from her ear, she spoke to me.

“Thanks Mom,” she said dismissively. “If you don’t mind, I am talking to my therapist.”

We were back to our relationship as usual.

“Okay,” I said, rising to my feet. “Be safe and call me when you can.”

Brynn was noncommittal. I walked away.

It was two nights later when I finally got the news from David. We were divorced. They were married. It was all nice and neat and very, very final.

These facts filled David with optimism and enthusiasm. My own bag of emotions was stuffed with emptiness.

“The weather here is great,” he told me. “Mikki’s feeling wonderful. The morning sickness hasn’t bothered her a bit here. We’re so happy.”

I tried to talk to him about Brynn. I give him credit, he did his best to give me his full attention on that. But his heart just wasn’t in it. He was brimming with excitement and exuberance. Who could blame him for wanting to keep the cares of his past in the past?

“She feels so lost right now,” I said. “We’ve turned her world upside down and she needs some reassurance.”

“Brynn’ll be fine,” David insisted. “She’s a strong girl, lots of grit and depth. She gets that from you, I guess.”

I wasn’t sure that grit and depth were ever in sufficient supply in either of us.

“You should call her,” I suggested. “Tell her yourself what’s happening and how much you still love her.”

“Yeah, I do need to call her,” he agreed. “When I get back I’ll do that.”

There was a pause. I suppose in our married life I would have filled it with an insistence that he call her
now
. But he wasn’t
my husband anymore. I couldn’t really tell him to do anything. So I didn’t.

The silence lingered and he was obliged to say something.

“I shot a five under today,” he told me. “And Mikki is at the top of her game. Her putting still needs work, but she’s been playing some great golf here.”

“That’s wonderful, David,” I said. “Listen, I need to hang up now. But I appreciate your call. Best wishes to you both.”

“Thanks, Jane,” he said. “We…well, I’m sure all of us are going to be happier now.”

“Yeah,” I agreed with as much hopefulness as I could muster. I hung up the phone and allowed myself a good old-fashioned cry. I felt as if I had earned the luxury. But I didn’t linger in self-pity. Within an hour I was past the moment. I washed my face and went on.

Before I gave myself a chance to chicken out, I called Brynn at her dorm. Hailey, her roommate, said she was out. Of course, she said it in a way that sounded as if Brynn just didn’t want to talk to me.

Hailey connected me with her voice mail and I didn’t tell her anything, I just asked her to call. Maybe I should have just said, “Okay, it’s over. Your dad is now married to somebody else.” But somehow it didn’t seem like the kind of words that should be left on a message machine.

David thought that we were all going to be happier. I wasn’t so sure. He knew nothing about being a faithful, devoted husband. That wouldn’t be easy to learn. Mikki would have a name for her baby, but she was going to have to work at making a marriage. Brynn was going to find her position as David’s daughter a secondary one to the new baby. And me, well, I wasn’t sure what was going to happen to me.

The next few days did give me some ideas.

News of our divorce must have been posted in a flash box on the Internet. I didn’t have to tell a soul. Everyone I knew was already informed. The dinner invitations dried up immediately. Even my calls at the office dwindled to nothingness. I couldn’t tell whether people no longer wanted to talk to me, or just didn’t want to bother me while the wound was still fresh. But it seemed that none of my friends or long-term associates had any interest in commiserating with me.

A lot of people I didn’t know got the details of my social downsizing, as well.

Thursday morning I received a call from a woman I’d never even heard of, Nancy, who introduced herself as executive assistant to the general manager at the club. She had been given the unenviable task of calling to tell me that my membership in the club existed as Mrs. David Lofton. Since someone else now held that title, I was…I was basically nobody.

I kept myself deliberately calm, although I was almost nauseated by the finality of it. The club had been the symbol of everything that I’d gone after in life, everything that I’d achieved. I watched it slip away, unable, or maybe just unwilling, to stop it.

“Of course,” Nancy assured me in a tone almost syrupy with sympathy, “we would be happy to write you a reference to any of the other country clubs in town. They say the tennis at Western Hollow is to die for.”

“Thank you,” I answered. “I really don’t play much these days.”

My reasonable behavior relaxed the woman tremendously. She began to chatter. She gave me several interesting tales of her confrontations with other women in my position. Women who were not nearly as cognizant of the fact that she merely had a job to do and was doing it.

She also admitted that she’d admired my car.

“Are you going to get to keep it?” she asked me. “If you’re going to have to convert it to cash or anything like that, I really might be interested, if you don’t want too much for it.”

Her words seemed genuine, although it did occur to me that she might be fishing for gossip about the financial arrangements of my divorce.

“I’ll let you know if I decide to sell it,” I told her. “I’ve only had the car a couple of months. It’s practically new, hardly any mileage at all.”

“I’m really sorry about having to call you like this,” she admitted. “It’s the policy of the club. But the people who make the policy don’t have to be the ones to call up and enforce it.”

“I understand,” I said honestly.

“I heard some talk about
her
,” Nancy said, lowering her voice conspiratorially.

At first I didn’t know what
her
she meant, then realized she was talking about Mikki. I probably should have refused to listen to anything the woman said. Fortunately, I’m not that nice a person.

“She’s woefully ignorant and completely gauche,” Nancy assured me. “They say she picked her china pattern at Nordstrom’s instead of Scrivener’s.”

For a moment I was stunned into silence. Then I laughed out loud. Encouraged by my response, Nancy kept talking.

“Can you believe it?” she said. “It is so new-money. And the way she dresses! I heard that Mimi Parton described her fashion style as ‘drug-dealer’s girlfriend.’”

I continued to laugh. Not really at Mikki’s expense. Unbeknownst to Nancy, I was not all that interested in the trials and tribulations of my
Mrs. Lofton replacement
. I was actually laughing
with the delightful realization that after twenty years of toeing the line, I was now free to select my china pattern anywhere I wanted.

I felt so good after I got off of the phone, that when I went to fill up the Roadster Z3, I bought a gigantic Snickers bar and headed out to Bluebonnet Manor Assisted Living. I’d been to see Chester twice in the last week. I’d discovered the man had a strong shoulder to lean on.

I had to walk around an ambulance-like vehicle called a Handi-cab that was blocking the doorway. A white-garbed attendant was loading up an empty gurney. He gave me such a thorough once-over that I wondered if somehow I now
looked
like a divorced woman.

Inside the lobby area the usual suspects were bunched with their wheelchairs facing the booming voice of Bob Barker cajoling them to “Come on down!”

The sight was a familiar one to me now, these people, this place, had become as much a part of my life as the office. I comfortably and confidently walked down the hallway.

As I approached Chester’s room, a nurse stopped me.

“You’re here to see Mr. Durbin?”

“Yes.”

“Give the aides a minute or two,” she said. “He’s just come back from his treatment and they’re getting him settled.”

“His treatment? What kind of treatment?” I questioned her.

“HBO,” she answered.

A woman down the hall called out to her and she hastily excused herself before I could ask more.

HBO? I was pretty sure they weren’t taking Chester anywhere for cable-movie therapy. I waited outside his room for a few more minutes before two middle-aged women in white slacks and pink uniform shirts emerged.

I brushed past them, worried, eager to see Chester.

Sitting up in his chair in clean pajamas and robe, he looking bright-eyed and healthy. Immediately I was reassured. Why had I worried?

“What’s HBO?” I asked immediately.

He glanced up and smiled.

“And hello to you too, Jane Lofton,” he said.

I smiled, apologized, greeted him more politely, seated myself in the chair beside him and then rephrased my question.

“What kind of treatments are you having?”

“It’s some nonsense my doctor is trying,” he said. “Hyperbaric oxygen. You know, like Michael Jackson.”

From somewhere in the dim recesses of my mind I could recall a doctored photograph on the front of a grocery-store tabloid. It showed the gloved one lying in a big glass compartment with a shocker headline like Pop Star Discovers Secret to Eternal Life.

“You’re getting hyperbaric oxygen treatments?”

“Yeah, they’re taking me down to Memorial Ambulatory twice a week now,” he said. “I guess it’s a pretty good outing. I told the fellow today that it would be perfect if we could schedule in a picnic lunch.”

“What is this therapy for?” I asked.

“It’s something covered by Medicare,” he said. It wasn’t so much an answer as a reason.

“Is it helping?”

He shrugged. “I breathe better,” he replied. “What about you? Are you breathing any easier these days?”

It was a deft ability of his, to steer the conversation away from anything he didn’t want to discuss. And I had long since learned that his health was something he never liked to discuss.

I recognized it for what it was, but figured he had a right not to talk about himself. The nursing home didn’t offer a
whole lot of privacy of any kind. I was more than willing to give him as much as I personally could.

“Are you getting along all right?” he asked.

“Yes, I think so,” I said. “If I’m not, I guess I just don’t realize it yet.”

“Are you afraid that you might accidentally break down in public?” he asked.

“I think I’m more likely to start screaming, tearing my hair out and go running through the room,” I said.

“Well, that would certainly be interesting to watch,” he teased.

“And I wouldn’t mind you watching,” I told him, chuckling. “It’s just the rest of the world that would probably take offense.”

“If you can laugh,” he said, “then you’re beginning to accept it.”

“I suppose so,” I said. “Although at times it’s almost more change than I can really take in.”

“Ahh…” He was thoughtful, considering, as he gazed at me through rheumy eyes.

“Everything has happened so quickly,” I told him. “Twenty years of marriage just disappearing before my eyes.”

“It didn’t disappear,” he corrected. “It finished. Now it exists forever. It just exists in the past.”

I nodded, agreeing with his words, but somehow not very comforted by them.

“Maybe I should have insisted that we move slower,” I said. “Legally, I probably could have dragged it out for years.”

“You didn’t have years,” he said. “That baby will be here in months.”

“Being born out of wedlock is not the big deal that it used to be,” I reminded him. “Half the little kids in his kindergarten class will probably end up the same.”

“But you would know the difference,” he said. “It was best for the child, it was best for his parents. And it will be best for you.”

“You think so?”

“I know so.”

He took my hand in his own. His tone was solemn, almost sad.

“It is my duly considered opinion, Jane Lofton, and I think I can speak about this with some authority, that it’s better to do things quickly, face the unknown defiantly and take control. Otherwise the shilly-shallying just chip, chip, chips away at you, tainting all the good that went before.”

There was such emotion in this declaration, I wondered at the depth of it. I found myself reassuring him.

“I know I did the right thing,” I said.

“Not only the right thing, you did a good thing,” Chester said. “How many points did you give yourself for that one?”

T
HEY SAY THAT
in the months after divorce you are numb. I suppose on some level that was true. But it was just as true that I felt everything with an intensity that I’d never really experienced before.

I went on about my days, putting one foot in front of another and somehow life went on. I spoke with Brynn briefly on the phone, but she asked me not to call her again. According to Dr. Reiser’s latest pronouncement, she needed to face her father’s new marriage without the distraction of her mother’s undoubtedly irrational point of view.

I missed her terribly, but gave her the space she requested. I figured that was probably some help. Perhaps that was a kind of true motherhood, willingness to be the lightning rod in the midst of the storms of young adulthood.

I saw David from time to time, often enough to keep up with how his golf game was going. He always volunteered that information. If I wanted to know about Mikki’s pregnancy, I had to politely inquire. He seemed a little disconnected from the process and more than a little embarrassed by it.

“Do you want a boy or a girl?” I asked him.

He seemed surprised by the question.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I guess I haven’t really thought about it.”

“What about Mikki? Does she have a preference?”

He shrugged. “I don’t guess so,” he answered. “I don’t think she’s said anything about it.”

That didn’t seem very likely to me.

“What has she said?” I asked him.

David hesitated, pondering. “Oh, she said something about classes,” he admitted. “But I told her that I’d already been through this.”

I frowned at him. “David, I had an emergency C-section, that isn’t the same as natural childbirth. And you weren’t even there.”

“I wasn’t?” He was genuinely surprised.

“You and your father were out on some boat in the gulf, fishing for marlin.”

“Oh yeah,” he agreed, nodding. “I remember now. That was really before I got into golf.”

“David,” I said firmly, “take the classes with Mikki. You always wanted more children. This is your chance. I don’t want to see you throw it away.”

“Sure, Jane, sure,” he answered a little uneasily. “I’m…well, I’m surprised that you are really into this.”

Honestly, I was a little surprised, myself, but I didn’t tell him that.

“You and I have spent the biggest part of our lives together,” I said. “We share a daughter and a lot of memories. I will always care about what happens to you. I will always want you to be happy.”

It felt good to say it. It felt good to feel it.

I tried for the same sort of magnanimous sentiment with W.D. and Edith. W.D. wasn’t that interested in maintaining
friendly relations. He did engage me for a few moments one evening about how sorry he was that things had not worked out between David and I.

“Of course,” he explained in a tone that was boastfully oracular, “I said from the beginning that the marriage was doomed to failure.”

He didn’t elaborate as to whom he had said this. It no longer mattered to me to even know. Although I did wonder if all those years when I was trying so desperately to fit in at the club he had been quietly undermining my efforts with suggestions about the temporary nature of my relationship with his son.

Edith was more interested in my mental health and ongoing role as Brynn’s mother. She called regularly to keep me updated on every program that Oprah did on divorce, blended families, troubled adolescents or women starting over. She raptured at length on the wisdom of Oprah’s Dr. Phil. And she sent me postcards with the authors and titles of all the books mentioned. Edith had never really liked me that much, but clearly she was working hard to transcend that reality.

“Don’t allow yourself to lapse into despair, Jane,” she cautioned me over the phone one evening. “Light some candles around the house and focus on your inner joy.”

I didn’t do any candles, but then I never felt in any danger of despair. I was not housebound, depressed or unable to concentrate. Quite the opposite, actually, I was very, very busy. I went to my job every day. I was working cleanup crew at the homeless mission one evening a week. Reading to toddlers at the library while their preschool siblings attended story time. And I was working with Ann Rhoder Hines and the Metro Realtors Alliance on a regular basis, trying to evaluate non-qualifying households and prepare them for home ownership.

If that wasn’t enough, Loretta called me and asked if I would
give a talk to the women in the safe house about reinventing yourself as a career woman.

I don’t know what Loretta thought I would have to say, but once I got started talking about my own experiences and the things I had to learn to get from Sunnyside to Davenport Heights, the women were completely engaged. I took questions for three hours. A week later Loretta called again and asked if I would talk to a larger audience, with other clients of Domestic Violence Alternatives. I showed up at the basement of First Presbyterian to a crowd of over a hundred. I was still no formal speaker, but that wasn’t what anyone wanted. They were ordinary women who wanted to hear from an ordinary woman. Being ordinary was something that heretofore had never appealed to me.

The event had been so successful, the DVA decided to begin a program series. They asked me for suggestions. I had a few contacts with knowledgeable people in town, which I passed on to them. My personal suggestion was to have Cecil and Emily from the Interfaith Thanksgiving Dinner.

“I just think it would be good for these women to see a truly happily married couple,” I told them. “Two ordinary people who are facing life together, neither one of them abusing or dominating the other. If you’ve never seen that, you might not believe it really exists unless you see it with your own eyes.”

The board was wary at first, and Cecil and Emily were unsure about what they had to offer. But it turned out spectacularly and was acknowledged to be the most helpful of all the presentations.

As the weeks and months passed I was on my own, and I began to feel a whole lot better. Strangely it reminded me of something that had happened in a long-ago summer when we’d been out at the lake for a month. Arriving home during Labor
Day weekend, I realized I’d forgotten to clean out the refrigerator before we left. I nearly wore out my touch tone trying to get a maid service to come take care of the job. No one would. I simply had to deal with the foul, disgusting ickiness myself. I’d hated that. But when it was done I had felt a tremendous high, as if I’d scaled Mount Everest or swum the English Channel.

My marriage had been an unpleasant mess that I should have taken care of years ago. Now that it was over and done, I felt unencumbered enough to almost free-float up to the ceiling.

Lexi called to accuse me of becoming a hermit.

“We’ve looked for you at every trunk show in town,” she said. “We are all wondering what you’re planning? Are you going to New York? Paris? Where are you going to buy clothes this season?”

I was momentarily at a loss for words. For the first time in twenty years, I had completely forgotten both the after-Christmas sales and the new spring fashions. Shocked at myself, I suffered an instant of uncertainty at what I would do for something to wear. Then I actually laughed out loud. The women from Loretta’s safe houses probably wouldn’t know last year’s wardrobe from last decade’s. And Chester’s vision seemed to be getting so bad that I was doubtful if he could tell whether I was dressed at all.

“I think I have enough to get by,” I assured Lexi. “I’ve just been too busy lately to shop.”

Such a suggestion stunned Lexi into silence.

When she finally found her voice again she utilized it to haltingly ask what I am sure seemed to her to be the obvious question.

“Did David not do right by you in the divorce settlement? Because if he didn’t my divorce lawyer can renegotiate the whole thing,” she assured me. “Building that house for her,
flaunting his affair among your friends, it doesn’t matter how
old family
he is, in court they’d easily crucify him.”

“No, Lexi, please don’t worry,” I told her. “David was very generous and I am completely satisfied with the arrangement.”

She hesitated as if trying to decide whether to believe me.

“Okay,” she said finally. “Then why aren’t you buying clothes?”

In the end I agreed to meet her, along with Tookie and Teddy, for lunch at Le Parapluie. It was not as fun a time as it should have been. I wanted to talk about all the things I was doing, all the interesting people I was meeting. They wanted to bad-mouth Mikki behind her back and assumed that I would be an eager participant in that game. I wasn’t. It wasn’t that I wanted to protect the woman, or defend her. I just found the whole preoccupation with her pretty boring. I tried changing the subject. But I discovered that having lost interest in shopping, decorating and social climbing, there were no longer any interests that I shared with them.

We parted with hugs and kisses, promising to stay in touch, but I knew that we wouldn’t. I regretted the loss.

Other than that, my life was great. Until the morning that Brynn called me.

“Dad invited me to stay with them, but I’m not coming home at all this summer,” Brynn announced rather casually. “I’m spending three months in Tuscany.”

“Tuscany? You mean as in Italy?” I was surprised, to say the least, but also pleased. Brynn had never shown any interest in traveling to Europe.

“Yes, Mother, where else could I mean?”

“For all I know there is a Tuscany, Missouri, out there,” I said, chuckling. “Are you going by yourself?”

“Of course not,” she answered.

“Who are you going with?”

There was a moment’s hesitation on the other end of the line.

“I don’t believe that is any of your business, Mother,” she said.

“What do you mean it’s not my business?”

“I mean exactly that,” Brynn answered. “I’m calling as a courtesy. I do not require your permission or approval for anything I do.”

“I’m your mother,” I pointed out. “You at least owe me an explanation.”

“Dr. Reiser told me you’d say that.”

“Dr. Reiser?”

“He said I should be prepared for your interference and guard against it,” she said.

“You’re to guard against me,” I said, “but he can interfere all he wants.”

“Dr. Reiser isn’t interfering, he’s directly involved.”

“What do you mean he’s directly involved?”

“He’s my therapist.”

“Well, he’s not going with you to Europe.”

There was another moment’s hesitation and then a heavy sigh.

“Whether he is or not is really none of your business, Mother.”

I was standing in the kitchen putting soup in the microwave. Brynn’s matter-of-fact comment caught me off guard. I spilled soup all over the cabinet.

“What do you mean by that?” I asked her.

“I mean that Dr. Reiser and I are none of your business.”

Dr. Reiser and I.
Somehow the link of their names together created an irrational fear in my gut.

“Brynn, are you involved intimately with Dr. Reiser?” I asked with deliberate calm.

“Is that what you think?” she asked.

“No, no, of course not,” I backtracked quickly.

“Dr. Reiser is helping me,” she said. “He understands that I don’t want to stay with Dad, and seeing you would be counter to my personal growth. So he’s helping me make plans for a wonderful summer on my own.”

“Just so he isn’t personally included in these plans,” I said.

“My plans, Mother,” she answered, “are my own, and are none of your business.”

Even after she hung up on me, the worry nagged me. I couldn’t protect Brynn if I wasn’t sure what to protect her from. There were awful men in the world; powerful, manipulating, unethical men. I couldn’t stand the idea of one of them taking advantage of my beautiful Brynn.

I sat down at the breakfast nook and tried to get my bearings. My first thought was to call Dr. Reiser directly and find out the truth. If he and Brynn were going to Europe together, I could threaten him. I could almost hear myself saying, “If you have so much as touched my daughter, your license to practice is something you’d better kiss goodbye. And that’s the easy part. If you’ve hurt her, I’m coming to find you. When I do, I’ll castrate you with a rusty garden tool!”

I managed not to call and say that. Coming up with an alternative course of action was far more difficult.

What had I decided about Brynn?

I dug through my purse until I found my journal. Flipping through the pages to where I’d written her words down.

“Help, unrequested, is intrusion,” it read.

That sounded really good, really right. When I put that idea down on paper, I’d thought it was a mantra to live by. But did it mean that when my own daughter was perhaps being taken advantage of by an older and more sophisticated man, I should just let it happen? No, I was sure that I shouldn’t. I was sure that as a mother I couldn’t.

I called David to ask his advice.

“Oh, I’m sure she’s not going anywhere with her therapist,” he responded.

He was on his cell phone at the golf course. In the background I could hear Mikki chatting with someone.

“How can we know that?” I asked him. “If she doesn’t tell us what’s going on, we can’t really know. David, we can’t let her go to Europe if we don’t know who she’s going with.”

“Jane,” he said, “we’ve got to let this one go by.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t have the time or energy for another crisis with Brynn,” he told me. “She’s almost twenty years old. And she’s right. We can’t tell her where she can go, who she can see. We can’t and we shouldn’t.”

“Well, we can certainly tell him that we’ll drag him into court if he’s pursuing a relationship with her outside the office,” I said.

“She wouldn’t like that,” David said. “If we go against her on this, it might encourage her to cut ties with us completely. We might never see her again.”

“Have you been watching Oprah with your mother?” I asked facetiously. “She can’t cut ties with us. She’s never had a job in her life. We pay for everything.”