The Three Weissmanns of Westport (18 page)

Miranda, on the other hand--there had never been anything reasonable or cold about her. She was a flurry of impetuous emotion. She understood love. So he tried his other daughter, he tried Miranda: "It's just unavoidable, honey. I can't help it. It doesn't mean I don't love you both." He attempted a conspiratorial smile. "It will all work out in the end." That was Miranda's saying, her mantra.

"You think so?" Miranda said.

She pushed her chair back violently as she stood up.

The wrath of women, he thought. There was a downside to heat, it seemed, as well as cold. They could all go to hell. He watched Miranda's napkin, which she had thrown from her lap, falling like a white gliding gull. He heard the clatter of Annie's chair echoing Miranda's. He heard his daughters' footsteps. A waiter's hand reached down and whisked the napkin off the floor. When he looked up, Miranda and Annie were gone and he was alone.

One morning shortly after the disastrous dinner with Joseph, Betty waited until both Miranda and Annie arrived at the breakfast table before surprising them with the news that she had received an offer from Joseph's lawyer the evening before.

"You mean our dinner with Josie did some good?" Miranda asked. "I knew it would!"

"Thank God," Annie said. "It's about time he stepped up to the plate."

"Yes," Betty said. "Of course, I can't possibly accept it." She shook her head sadly. "Generous as Joseph is being . . . Well, it's just that he's offered a settlement of three hundred thousand dollars."

"Oh brother," Annie said.

"Over ten years."

"That's a joke, right?" Miranda said. Then she added thoughtfully, "Except you still have the apartment. That must be what he's thinking. You could sell it and invest, what, three million dollars? Even in this market. And live really comfortably. Not the way you've been living, but . . ."

"Oh no, dear, the three hundred thousand dollars paid over ten years would be his payment for my share of the apartment. Now that
is
a decent return on my five-thousand-dollar investment, I guess, although it has been almost fifty years. However, there's an argument to be made for it, I'm sure. But I just don't feel comfortable having Joseph live there with that woman."

Annie and Miranda stood dumbfounded.

"That woman?" Miranda said after a long, uncomfortable silence. "
What
woman?"

"Vivacity?" Betty said, looking thoughtful. "Something like that. Joseph's middle-aged young woman. Capacity! That's it."

Miranda and Annie never did learn how their mother found out about Felicity. She never mentioned the incident. She had said her piece, made her decision, and the subject of how she learned of the intruder need never be raised. It had been a shock to her when she had called Joseph at the apartment the night before and the woman who worked in his office answered. Betty had recognized the voice--it was quite distinctive, a high, strong voice still carrying a trace of Boston. She saw the woman's face in her imagination, a pale, heart-shaped face with sharp but not unpleasant features and big, unnerving, round blue eyes. She heard the woman's confusion when she recognized Betty's voice. And she knew. She had known all along, she realized. She had known all along.

"Is Joseph in?" she asked.

"Joe!" she heard the woman call.

Joe. It was as if Joseph had cut off not only half his name but half his life. Her half.

"Betty!" he said. "What a surprise."

"I won't do it, Josie," she said, using the children's name for him.

"Won't do what?" he asked.

But she knew he understood.

"Life is not a picnic," she said. "You were right about that." And she hung up.

In the following weeks, it was as if the spirit of the three women had faded with the leaves. It rained day after day, and with the bad weather, the cottage began to feel as small and damp and rundown as it was. Miranda forced herself to make useless phone calls and write useless letters to people in the world of publishing who would have preferred to forget she ever existed. Annie slid into an ennui of routine, terrified that the order of this methodical, meaningless existence would turn out to be her future as far as the eye could see. Betty tried to cheer them up by claiming they were all suffering from cabin fever, a term redolent of the pioneering West, yet even she had to admit the days were long and tempers were short in the Weissmann household. She ordered an infomercial triangular sponge on a stick called the "Point 'n Paint" and began to slather her bedroom walls a modish but vaguely funereal gray.

It was at this time, when the weather was dismal and the sky dingy and mean, that Cousin Lou and Rosalyn made their yearly migration to Palm Springs, bringing a peevish Mr. Shpuntov along with them. Betty and her daughters stood in the light rain beneath their umbrellas as the Cousin Lous, as everyone called that family, followed a large number of suitcases into the Escalade and decamped for the dry, sunny heat of California, where Lou and Rosalyn had a house on a golf course.

"The desert beckons," Rosalyn said from the car as her cousins stood in the driveway beneath their umbrellas. She threw the three women a magnanimous kiss. "We must follow the sun!"

"That's French for 'So long, suckers!'" cried Cousin Lou.

Mr. Shpuntov, his voice harsh and unnaturally high, said, "What's going on? What's going on here?" He was in the front seat beside the ancient driver, a retired police officer, who would bring the car back and lock it up in the garage. The retired police officer's hand trembled as he adjusted the rearview mirror. Annie wondered if it wouldn't be safer to let Mr. Shpuntov drive.

"You'll have to visit," Lou was saying.

"Of course, our house there is much smaller," Rosalyn quickly added.

"Always room for family," Lou said, and the car backed down the long driveway.

The Cousin Lous planned to be gone until April. To her surprise, Annie found that she missed them. The dinners at their house had often been tedious, it was true. And after a long day at work and a bumpy commute home, making small talk was the last thing she wanted to do. She looked forward to getting into her pajamas and watching
American Idol
or
Project Runway
or the show about the family with dwarfism. Annie had never been a social person, and over the years she had gotten used to filling up the blanks of her evenings. But surprisingly quickly she had also gotten used to Lou and Rosalyn's dinners. Now her cousins were gone, and the nights in the cottage were long and disagreeable. She stayed in town to have dinner with friends once a week or so, but she didn't like to leave Betty and Miranda too much. Her mother and her sister both seemed so fragile, so bare, stripped of everything that had given them joy, like two gray brittle branches rattled by the wintry beach winds.

In New York, Joseph walked from his apartment to the office in the morning, from the office to the apartment in the evening, every day just as he had always done, except now, Felicity walked beside him. She was such a vigorous woman, breathing in the cold air with such determination, exhaling like a thoroughbred about to thunder down the track. Just standing next to her on the elevator thrilled Joseph. His routine was no longer routine. The elevator man who had gathered him up from his apartment for decades now gathered him up with this sturdy little blonde by his side. Good morning, Mr. Weissmann, the elevator man said, as he always had. But it was all different now. All new. Good morning, Miss Barrow, the elevator man added.

Felicity had formally moved into the Central Park West apartment a few weeks before Betty's call. On her first proprietary tour, she saw that the sofa from the study and the chairs and coffee table from the living room were gone and said, "I hope all that furniture won't be a burden for poor Betty, out there in her cozy little hideout." She walked through the rooms noting empty spaces and lighter patches on the walls that told of former household treasures now relocated to Connecticut. "So much
stuff
," she said. "Material things . . . people get so attached . . ." She wandered into the kitchen, opening and closing drawers. "Still, I
don't
think taking the silver was a good idea. There's absolutely no security in those little beach places."

They had come straight from the office, and it was six o'clock. She pulled out the bottle of Scotch and thought, I am giving Joseph his drink in our apartment. She filled a glass with ice. "Lucky Betty, living in a resort," she said as she handed Joseph his drink. She rubbed his tense, tired shoulders. "A permanent vacation. Not like us wage slaves!" Then she laughed and settled in next to Joseph on the living room sofa, which Betty had, remarkably, left behind. That beach cottage must be the size of Versailles, she thought, judging from how few things remained in the apartment.

"Here we are," Joseph said. He put his arm around her. Here we are, he thought uncomfortably. Here we are.

"Home at last," said Felicity. She turned her round blue eyes to his.

Unblinking, Joseph thought. He kissed her head. She was a tough little nut. "Here we are," he said again, more cheerfully.

"She started out being pretty reasonable," he told Felicity the night Betty called. Why had Felicity answered the phone? he wondered. It made everything so much more complicated.

They sat at the dining room table eating Chinese takeout with plastic forks. Felicity, still a little shook up after hearing Betty's voice, eyed the bare wood floor (hadn't there been a gorgeous Oriental here?) with grim neutrality.

"Of course, now that she's found out about us, all bets are off," he said.

"Betty ought to be happy that you're happy," Felicity said. "After all,
you're
happy that she's settled in such a snug little cottage with her loving daughters by her side. She owes you that much, after all these years. It's true she's become difficult, but she can't be completely unfeeling."

Joseph poured himself another drink and breathed in the perfume of the Scotch, so familiar, yet so full of promise. He remembered the glass Betty had thrown at him, the golden liquid pooled on the floor, the heady alcohol vapors floating up through the angry silence. Betty could indeed be difficult. He patted Felicity's hand.

"We'll get some new silver," he said.

"Oh no, that sort of thing is not important to me at all. Though why she needed the silver
and
the Dansk stainless, I have no idea."

"Wedding present from her parents, I think."

Felicity, on consideration of this information and where it might lead the surprisingly nostalgic Joseph, consoled herself with the knowledge that although she could not erase the fact of his wedding to Betty and the existence of those in-laws, the in-laws were by now dead and, regarding the nature of their gift, Joseph was, at least, not sure.

"Here," she said, and she shoveled more sesame noodles on his plate. "You finish these up, darling."

Betty, meanwhile, spoke to the divorce attorney frequently--daily, really--and though she told Miranda and Annie very little of what transpired, her phone conversations were so long and so loud, conducted in Betty's fluty voice of determination, that they were able to piece together a few things. Because Betty would not agree to Josie's terms, Josie would not go ahead with the divorce, leaving Betty in a kind of limbo, legally and financially. She, therefore, had to sue for divorce herself on the grounds of abandonment. This she seemed, surprisingly, to relish. She quit her painting, sparing two of her bedroom walls the sad gray color. Daytime soap operas and talk shows still blared from the TV, but Betty no longer sat on the couch to watch. She established herself formally at her desk each morning and pored over the most recent papers her lawyer had FedExed. She provided herself with a large collection of exquisitely designed folders and file boxes. She referred lovingly to her Case with nearly Dickensian reverence. Because of the Case, she explained, she could no longer do the cooking or the marketing, she was much too busy. In fact, she seemed to have little time left even for eating, living on saltines smeared with almond butter.

"I feel like I'm buried alive," Miranda said one morning.

"Better than being buried dead," said Betty, looking up from her papers. She smiled encouragingly, hoping to cheer Miranda up. Miranda occasionally executed a round of unanswered phone calls, she read the odd manuscript that some memoirist in the boondocks who had not heard of her disgrace still sent in. But she was fading, detaching, disappearing in front of their eyes. All for that young actor? Betty wondered, then answered her own question. No, not for him. For a dream, a dream most women her age had already dreamed and either lived or forgotten. Why had it taken Miranda so long? she wondered.

Then she noticed that both her daughters were staring at her.

"What?"

"Buried alive better than being buried dead?" Annie said. "Hardly, Mother."

"Oh, wait until you're my age."

"God, I hope we're not still in this dump when I'm that old," Miranda said.

"Amen."

Betty looked stricken.

"Not that you're old," Miranda quickly added.

Betty was old and she knew it. That was not the issue. She put both hands down on her pile of legal documents. "Are you so unhappy here, girls?" she said. Her voice was earnest now. "I feel terrible. I thought the change would be so good for you. I'm so sorry, my darlings. I know you came out here for me, and I'm so grateful, but look what it's come to. Oh dear. I've completely disrupted your lives, and for what? I'm afraid I've been very selfish. But I honestly thought . . ."

"No, Mom, it's great, it's fine," Annie interrupted. "It's so beautiful here, it's almost like a vacation for us." She made a face at Miranda--Come on, agree, make Mommy feel better, hurry up . . .

But Miranda was sulking, staring at the floor. "Well, I'm glad
someone
is enjoying themselves," she said. She rose from the table, gave Annie a sour look, grabbed her coat from the closet, and headed toward the door.

Annie examined her hands. They were clasped tightly. She wanted to use them to murder her sister.

"I'll go with you," she called. Her voice took on a tone she recognized from child-rearing days: rage altered by the alchemy of necessity into enthusiasm. Perhaps outside in the air she would somehow be able to speak to Miranda, really talk to her. "A walk!" she said, in consequence. "What fun!"

"A picnic," Betty muttered darkly. "Everything a picnic." And she turned back to her documents.

They walked to the end of the little street, and there before them stretched Compo Beach. The sand was brown and coarse, the sky blowing layers of dark clouds above the rough gray water. There were a dozen or so people out, couples mostly, with their dogs.

"Miranda, talk to me."

"I'm going crazy here, that's all. Crazy, crazy, crazy."

Three grown women, three independent, bossy women in a tiny ill-equipped house? Three unhappy women . . . Annie was about to expound on this, to say how natural it was to go stark, raving mad, how temporary this situation was, please God, when the sun suddenly appeared through a crack in the slate sky.

"My God," Annie said, stunned by the beauty.

"My God!" Miranda echoed her. But she was not gazing at the illuminated gash in the clouds. She was staring at an approaching figure outlined by the sudden glare. The figure was waving.

"Oh, Annie," she cried. "It's him! It's Kit! He's back."

"No, I don't think . . ." But Miranda was already running toward the man.