The Three Weissmanns of Westport (19 page)

"Miss!" he called, his voice muted by the wind and the slap of the waves. "You dropped your scarf!"

Miranda stopped, all the energy drained from her form: it wasn't Kit, after all.

Then, abruptly, she squealed with joy. "Nicky!" she cried. "It's Nicky!"

But Annie, recognition of that unexpected voice coming upon her headlong, was already running to throw her arms around her younger son.

"If it was anyone else," Miranda was saying, "but it's not, it's you, oh little Nicky, you're gigantic . . ." And she was hugging him, too, all three of them jammed together as the wind whipped the sand around them.

Annie was so happy she felt ill. Her son had been away for more than six months, and now he had come home to surprise her for Thanksgiving.

"Of course, there's the, um, plane fare," he said later when they were sitting on the couch together. "I kind of put it on the credit card . . ."

"Don't you worry," Annie said. He could have put all of South Africa on her credit card at that moment and she would have paid the bill somehow. How? she thought for an instant, but such a fleeting instant, for then she rested her head against his shoulder and forgot credit card bills and money and everything but the familiar smell of his skin.

"I'm sorry you had to bounce from the apartment, Grandma."

"Bounce," Betty said. "I like that. I bounced." She smiled.

Nick looked around him at the little living room. "It's very . . ." He paused. "It's very cozy here, that's for sure."

The mood of the cottage had changed completely with Nick's arrival. The Costco fire cast a yellow glow on the small room. The tea Betty had poured was fragrant and hot. Nick's voice was young and loud as he laughed and told his traveler's tales and made them laugh with him.

"You knew he was coming," Annie said suddenly to her mother. "You did, didn't you?"

"She did," Nick said. "She planned the whole thing."

"How could you keep it a secret, Mom?"

"I have many secrets," Betty said. And Annie realized that she did, that her mother to whom she condescended, at whom she rolled her eyes, her mother whom she adored and admired even as she felt the superiority of a younger generation toward her, this woman whom she thought she knew so well had secrets, had an inner life Annie knew nothing about.

Within its corny hearth, the gas fire from Costco flickered; the teacups clattered musically on their saucers. Outside, a crow cawed from somewhere in the silver sky. Miranda observed her nephew, the large male movements, the deep voice, his cough, loud and rough. He stretched his legs out, and she had to climb over them to get past him.

"I remember you when you were a little boy," she said, so softly he almost didn't hear her. She stroked his hair thoughtfully. "Just a little, little boy." There were tears in her eyes.

"What's up with Aunt Miranda?" Nick asked Annie later. "She seems a little emotionable."

Annie laughed at the word, then said, "She's missed you, that's all," and Nick, in the blissful narcissism of youth, nodded his understanding.

Thanksgiving was a frenetic and happy event in the little household. Charlie came in from Chicago, and Annie was so flooded with feeling that she recognized for the first time the drought she had been living through. It was difficult for her to resist pulling her sons onto her lap. They were affectionate boys, always had been, but they were now so old, she reminded herself. She waited, as if they were yearlings in the forest, for them to come to her.

Betty went all-out for their Thanksgiving dinner. "I haven't cooked turkey in so long, it seems," she kept saying. "I wonder why."

"You wonder why it seems that way, or you wonder why you haven't cooked one in so long?" Annie asked.

"Oh, Annie," said Betty and Miranda.

"Oh, Mom," said the boys.

"I don't know how you did it with this stove," Annie said to redeem herself.

"I got the recipes from Martha. On her show. I liked some of the recipes from Lydia better, and that girl with the awful voice had a few that seemed interesting. But I wanted to be loyal."

"To Martha?"

"She's been through so much. And she used to live in Westport."

"So did the star of
Behind the Green Door
. Maybe we should rent it on DVD."

"One of my favorites, dear," Betty said.

The others stared.

"Katharine Hepburn," Betty continued. "'
The calla lilies . . . Such a strange flowuh'
. . .
She
grew up in Westport?"

No one corrected her. She was so happy cooking her dinner, serving it on her good plates, clearing the table with the boys.

"Now for our traditional Thanksgiving family walk," she announced after Annie and Miranda had done the dishes, and though they had never in anyone's memory ever taken a walk on Thanksgiving before, they got their coats and scarves and gloves and followed her out to the beach.

Charlie and Annie walked hand in hand, a little behind the others.

"Grandpa Josie called me," he blurted out, darting a questioning look at her.

Annie said only, "Did he?" in as neutral a tone as she could muster, but she was furious. How dare Josie go behind her back?

"He just wanted to stay in touch. You know, with the divorce. He said he didn't want to lose us, me and Nick. I didn't mention it in front of Grandma. Because, well, obviously I didn't. He called Nick, too. Is that okay, Mom? I mean, it seemed to be really important to him. He said how much he missed us and . . . everyone. He sent me a check for my birthday, too, which I actually thought was really nice."

Annie looked out at the dark water and the north shore of Long Island, a darker strip just visible below the gray horizon. The air was cold and clean. No! she wanted to cry out. It was not really nice for Josie to call you and make you feel sorry for him and give you money and buy more sympathy when Betty has no money at all. Your sympathies and loyalty lie elsewhere, Charlie, she wanted to say, shaking him by the shoulders.

"I used the money for my ticket home. To see you and Grandma," he added.

"That seems only fair," she said at last. Protect your child, Annie. Protect him from vanity and greed, from reality--the reality of his grandfather. Nevertheless, she blurted out, "He's a bastard."

"I know," Charlie said softly. "I know, Mom."

"I'm glad he feels responsible to someone," Annie said. "Do I sound bitter? I am. But it's hard to be bitter about someone you love. So you don't have to be bitter. That will be my job."

"Mixed message, Mom."

"You bet."

"What about you?" he asked after a while. "Are you doing okay? Living here and everything?"

He had stopped and taken both her hands, and now gazed at her earnestly. She thought how handsome he was, how kind his expression was, how lucky she was. "Well," she said, in a rush of gratitude--someone to confide in!--"it's pretty hard sometimes . . ." But even as she spoke she noticed that though Charlie had asked because he was concerned, he expected her, as his mother, to make that concern go away, the way she had soothed him after a nightmare. "But we're doing great," she quickly said.

He looked relieved.

"We haven't all been together since Miranda and I were children." Then she remembered that in those days there had been another person present. Perhaps she could expunge Josie from her memories the way her grandmother had scratched out all the dates scrawled by a younger incarnation of herself on the corners of her snapshots. "And I really do like the commute. Gives me a moment of repose."

His face cleared of any worry now, Charlie began to give her an animated description of his latest run-in with one of his professors, a tyrant, a bully, an incompetent, and an hysteric. Annie listened to the soft breeze of his complaints and felt refreshed. Her children were home. They slept for five nights on AeroBeds in the living room. She could hear them whispering to each other at night, laughing their deep laughs. Their beard hairs clogged up the sink downstairs. They had more lotions and creams for their skin than she had. They left the foil packaging of their contact lenses, each one with a tiny pool of liquid in it, on the side of the sink. Their clean clothes lay twisted on the floor with their dirty clothes. Annie wanted to lie down among their stuff and roll like a dog in carrion.

And then, one morning, with a short but ruthless storm of searching and washing and folding and tripping over cavernous bags, they were gone.

That night as the three women sat in the flickering light of the fake fire, Miranda said, "Nobody here but us chickens," and threw her head back dramatically.

Annie made a halfhearted chicken noise.

"Let's sing," Betty said. "That will cheer us up."

Annie laughed. "You haven't tried that one in a while, Mom."

When Nick and Charlie left, the household sank into an even deeper state of misery than it had been in before they showed their young faces. Betty rustled through her papers as if she were preparing a well-padded nest. Miranda had taken to leaving shrill messages on answering machines of former colleagues.

"Aren't you sort of burning your bridges?" Annie said.

"I certainly hope so."

"She's being proactive," Betty said. "That's a sign of self-esteem, you know."

Each day the shower rail separated a little more from the wall of the bathroom. Each night Annie lay in bed and tried not to think of their finances. That was how she began to divide her days: first the aluminum disk pulling away from the dull pink tile, bit by bit, while she showered (she swore she could see it moving), then the rush of panic in the shadowy nighttime room.

"We're running out of money," she ventured at breakfast.

"I was never good at money," Miranda said. "Obviously."

"Joseph always took care of everything," Betty said, shaking her head sadly. "Well, those days are gone."

And so they both, each in her own unassuming way, assumed Annie would somehow take care of the finances.

Her sublet apartment, unlike her current roommates, was rolling up its sleeves, putting its shoulder to the grindstone and earning its keep. But there was still Charlie's medical school and Nick's college tuition, only partly paid for by loans. It didn't leave Annie much. Her mother had even less, with any eventual divorce settlement a long way off. Miranda, meanwhile, saw only an occasional royalty check from her once popular and now disgraced authors, but even her tithe, as she called it, was withheld while the legal cases worked themselves out. She appeared to have otherwise run through every penny she had ever earned.

Sitting at the table trying to make a budget, Annie said, "There's very little coming in and there's way too much going out."

The other two nodded, then continued to read the newspaper.

When Annie said it again, louder, Miranda patiently explained that writing down all their debts did not miraculously supply the family with more money. The point of a budget was not to miraculously conjure up more money, Annie answered. The point was to figure out realistically how much they could afford to spend. Betty said she thought it would be far more practical to have more money, miraculously or otherwise, and Annie gave up, sitting with her pencil and her calculations in lonely, resentful silence.

That night, as every night, the bills rose up in her memory and haunted her. She turned in her bed, twisted in the sheets. The thin moonlight came in through her window. It was cold and white, like a marble tomb. She was hot and flushed and alive with worry.

Her anger and frustration with her mother and sister, however, were just bits of sand caught in the wind of her true rage. That was saved for Josie and, now, Felicity as well. Annie still could not believe that the person behind all their suffering was Frederick Barrow's sister.

"And to think Rosalyn invited that treacherous family to Rosh Hashanah," she said one evening as they sat glumly before the faux fire. "Maybe that's why Frederick was so weird."

"You said he wasn't weird," Miranda muttered.

"Well, he was."

"Listen," Betty said abruptly, "I'll just have to get a job."

"What are you going to do, Mom? Greet people at Walmart?"

Betty leaned toward her, suddenly animated. "Is Walmart as nice as Costco?"

It was therefore with great relief that the three women accepted an invitation to visit Lou and Rosalyn in Palm Springs.

"It's our fiftieth wedding anniversary," Rosalyn said when she called. "Can you believe it?"

Betty congratulated her coldly.

"Against all the odds," Rosalyn said.

"And how is your father?" Betty asked to parry the indelicacy. "How is Mr. Shpuntov?"

"The desert agrees with him."

Betty imagined a towering dune nodding polite assent to Mr. Shpuntov.

"Well," she said more cheerfully, "that's something, then."

"Now, Betty," Rosalyn said in a pedagogical tone that got Betty's back up whenever she heard it. It was Rosalyn's docent voice. "Now, Betty, listen, and don't be stubborn. Lou and I both miss you and the girls."

Betty walked out to the sunporch. There was no sun, just weak, struggling light. The sky was overcast and dull. It had rained the night before and the trees were still dark with wet. She was cold on the unheated sunporch. There was nothing to do there, nothing to see, nothing even to hear, no birds or passing children. She stood suspended in a winter void, only the damp cold and the musty smell of old carpet penetrating the deprivation.

"We miss you, too," she said. And perhaps the girls did miss Lou and Rosalyn now and then, she really didn't know. As for herself, she missed only one person.

"We want you all to come out here for Christmas. Our treat, of course. My father was saying the other day that in all his years he had never seen people who were so generous to their friends, but you know us, Betty--that's just the way we are. And I don't want you to start giving me excuses about why you can't come. A trip will do you good, Betty. Lou and I are worried about you. Even my father mentioned it to me just the other day. Sitting there in that hut, of course you get what you pay for, no disrespect to the landlords. Ha! I make myself laugh. But there you are. No one to talk to. Except your daughters, of course. How lucky you are to have daughters. Still, I manage very well, don't I, even without children? Lou and his Like Family. I have to laugh." And she did.

Betty, who had not been listening but had heard the words lucky and daughters, said, "Oh yes," in an absent voice.

"Now, don't you Oh Yes me, Betty Weissmann. I know what you're thinking. You're thinking we're just making this generous offer because we feel sorry for you, and I can understand that, I really can, but you have to believe me, it's
mostly
because we love you and want what's best."

Betty moved back to her desk, but she did not look at the mound of papers and bright folders piled high upon it. She was staring at the television set. There, on the soap opera she favored because it was set in a seaside town not unlike Westport, if Westport were inhabited by spies, terrorists, gangsters, and swinging wife-swapping millionaires, which who was to say it wasn't, there on the screen, in the soap opera's popular new art gallery hangout, stood a handsome dark-haired young man facing another handsome blond young man. There was tension, visible tension between them. And tenderness. And longing. Betty had seen that expression before. She had seen Kit Maybank look at Miranda like that. Only now Kit Maybank was on television in an art gallery standing before a reproduction--she supposed it had to be a reproduction--of a Keith Haring (her friends Arnie and Maureen bought one years ago, she hadn't understood it at the time, but it certainly had appreciated) and his, Kit Maybank's, hand shot out and grasped the hand of the other handsome young man, the one with blond hair, and Kit Maybank stepped forward and the other young man stepped forward and Kit Maybank was in the other young man's arms and the other young man was in Kit Maybank's arms and with the Keith Haring reproduction as a backdrop they were kissing, passionately, with their mouths gaping, as people always seemed to kiss on soap operas.

"Oh my God," she heard Miranda gasp from the doorway behind her.

"Betty?" Rosalyn was saying into the phone. "Betty, are you there?"

"I can't believe it!" Miranda said.

"Now, Miranda, it's just a role," Betty said.

"Betty?" Rosalyn said again.

"Oh, I'm sorry, Rosalyn. Miranda's young man just kissed another young man on television."

"What young man? Kit? Kit's gay?"

"Just on TV."

Miranda, moving closer to the TV, said, "Kit's in Los Angeles!"

"Los Angeles?" Rosalyn said, overhearing Miranda. "I hope he got his marriage in before they changed the law."

"Kit's married?" Betty asked.

"Kit's married?" Miranda said. She grabbed the phone from her mother. "Kit's married?" she asked Rosalyn.

"He is? Well, you live long enough, you see everything."

On the plane ride to Los Angeles, Miranda gazed impatiently out the window. Although all of them were thrilled to be liberated from what Miranda called cottage arrest, it had still not been easy for her to convince the other inmates to make the trip. It was a challenge, but Miranda had always liked a challenge in the good old days before her life had collapsed, and this one had energized her. It was a pleasure to have a goal again, to work her mother and sister the way she used to work publishers and editors. She snapped back into that alert, predatory sentience of her occupation not with pleasure so much as exasperated fondness--this was something she knew, an old fawning pal. She had been forced to campaign using both subtlety and aggression, sweetness and sour-tempered sarcasm. Of course, she had prevailed. She could not recall a time when she had not prevailed within her family. Betty had hesitated, not relishing the role of beggarly relative in two different geographical locations. But she had caved fairly quickly. The holdout, as usual, was Annie.

"They're paying for it, so you can't use that as an excuse," Miranda said. "The library is giving all of you a forced two-week unpaid vacation, so you can't use
that
."

"Go by yourself," Annie had said. "If you want to go so badly."

Only when Annie found out that neither Charlie nor Nick could make it to Connecticut for Christmas did she give in.

"I'm sorry we won't get to see them," Miranda said to Annie.

But she wasn't sorry. She was exhilarated. The nose of the plane was pointed toward the West Coast. Somewhere on that coast were Kit Maybank and Henry Maybank. Somewhere between Los Angeles, where Kit now lived, and Palm Springs, where he spent his weekends in a rented house he shared with a friend. She had read all about him on a soap opera fan blog. Kit's disappearance made sense to her now, his silence. He was not on a little independent movie at all. He was a soap opera regular. No wonder he had been so uncommunicative, so distant. He who had dreamed of Shakespeare was now playing Zink Lattimore, gay graffiti artist. Poor Kit was mortified, that was all. That was why she hadn't heard from him. He had hoped to slink away into daytime TV obscurity, leaving her with her exalted vision of him, with her memories intact.

"Funny about memories," she said to Annie, who had, as usual, volunteered to sit in the middle seat.

"Useless author trivia," Annie said. "That's the kind of memory I have: today is Rex Stout's birthday. For example."

"What street did his detective live on? It seemed an odd address even at the time," said Betty.

"Thirty-fourth Street. 918 West Thirty-fourth Street, sometimes 922, 904. Once it was 918
East
Thirty-fourth Street. It was always the same brownstone, though."

"You were always like that, even as a child," Betty said, patting her arm proudly.

"Memories,"
Miranda said irritably. "Not memory."

"Memories are like fish," Betty said. "Isn't that the expression? After three days they stink."

A layer of white clouds lay beneath them, occasional openings affording quick glimpses of the United States with its crop circles and ribbons of rivers and faded, flat winter landscape. Annie looked past her sleeping sister at the greasy window and the blue sky beyond. That she had agreed to follow Lou, Rosalyn, and Mr. Shpuntov to Palm Springs was still sinking in. But there had been no resisting Miranda. Miranda was more animated than she had been since Kit Maybank left Westport. Annie assumed Miranda and Kit had been in touch. Were they getting back together in some way? She wondered if that was a good thing. Her sister smiled dreamily as she slept, forehead on the window, white billowing clouds beyond. Yes, it would be good. If it made Miranda happy, it would be good. As for Betty, although she hated to fly, although her relationship with Rosalyn could charitably be called prickly, although she loved having Christmas in her own house, once she had given in to Miranda, she had taken up the cause like a true convert. Christmas in the desert! Palm Springs! So mid-century! So Rat Pack!