The Three Weissmanns of Westport (32 page)

"One of them seems to have run off with that Barrow fellow," Cousin Lou was saying. "Gweneth is mad as a wet hen . . ."

Where did her cousin ever come up with that colloquial American expression? Annie wondered irrelevantly.

"Rosalyn has been on the phone with hysterical women all day. She's devastated. And with a baby coming . . ."

Annie said, "Cousin Lou, I'm sorry Rosalyn is in such a state, but can you go to the hospital tomorrow morning or not? I kind of have to know."

"What am I? Family? Or family? First thing in the morning."

The meeting took place in an office with a view of the Hudson River. Miranda stared out at a motionless barge roosting in the river's fawn-colored water.

"Garbage scow," she said. "Poor old garbage scow."

Josie's lawyer looked up irritably from his papers. Josie laughed.

"Only you would feel sorry for a garbage scow," he said gently.

"Don't patronize me."

Josie looked genuinely shocked. "Miranda . . ."

The door opened and the forensic accountant, Mr. Mole, entered, a fat man who looked as if he should have been named Mr. Toad of Toad Hall. Behind him, to Miranda's surprise, loped Roberts, a briefcase in his hand.

"You turn up in the oddest places," Annie said, but for once Roberts, with his lanky formality, seemed a perfect fit. He slid into a chair at the head of the table, folded his long fingers together, and gazed out comfortably over his pale blue bow tie.

"Shall we begin?" he said.

"
Semi
retired," Miranda said half to herself.

They signed the papers in silence, the ballpoint pens scratching.

"Now," Josie said, smiling, "I told you girls I would be generous!"

Annie looked at the man who had been until very recently her father, and she knew that sometime in the future he would be her father again. Not because she forgave him. It was not her place to forgive him, really, he hadn't divorced her, and anyway, she didn't forgive him, her place or not, and she never would. It was not that she would forget, either, although she supposed she might, one so often did, with years and years to fade the colors of memory. But it was for neither of those reasons that Josie would somehow leech back into her heart. It was because she loved him.

She just did not love him right now.

"Oh, Josie," she said sadly, and she stood up to give him a lingering embrace, taking in the feel of his fatherly cheek, his fatherly soapy smell. "You really have been a complete shmuck."

"Lunch?" he said rather pathetically, turning from Annie to Miranda and back again.

"We have to get back to our ailing mother," Miranda said, "who will now at last have a decent roof over her head."

Joseph nodded. "Thank God," he said. "Thank God we finally worked out the details."

"Thank forensic accountancy," Miranda said, giving him her most defiant glare, a narrowed-eyed face he knew so well from her growing up.

How could they understand how relieved he was to have Betty properly cared for? But look at them, so fierce, so loyal to their mother, so strong.

"You're good girls," he said.

Silence.

"Your mother deserves this," he added. "She's a remarkable woman. A fine human being."

Miranda burst into tears, threw herself into Josie's arms, then snarled, "I hate you," and ran out the room.

"Well, bye," Annie said, following her sister, and the meeting was over.

They shook hands with Mr. Mole and thanked him.

"Oh, don't thank me," he said. "I would do anything for my old friend Roberts."

Roberts offered to drive them home, and as they walked to the car, Miranda stepped into a deli to get a bottle of water.

"Thank you," Annie said. "I don't know how to thank you for what you've done."

She took his hand and, without thinking, kissed it.

His face creased into a huge smile. Then, noticing his hand lingering by Annie's lips after she had let it go, he coughed, retracted it, straightened his tie, said it was all Mr. Mole, all thanks to the magical Mr. Mole.

"Mole is pretty much the best forensic accountant in the country," he continued as they pulled into the traffic of the West Side Highway.

"Well, he must have done a great job if he got Josie to change his mind," said Miranda.

"Oh, he didn't have do anything at all. It was just the possibility. Just the thought of having Mole go over your books--it gets people to reevaluate their positions, shall we say."

"Thank you again," Annie said. "Thank you for Mr. Mole."

Roberts colored a little. Annie could see the back of his neck grow pink.

"Thank you," Miranda repeated. "Thank you with all our family heart."

They rode in silence for a while. The sun was behind them. The trees glowed with the clear spring light and tender spring leaves.

"I guess we won't be neighbors anymore," Annie said after a while. "It's back to the city for the Weissmanns."

She saw both Roberts and Miranda start.

"Let's get Mom out of the hospital first," Miranda said after a while.

"Well, whenever this exodus occurs," Roberts said, "I will definitely miss you."

Annie caught his eye in the rearview mirror. She looked away.

"Yes," he said. "Yes, I will."

A few weeks earlier, Annie had found herself wondering idly what Roberts's first name was and had consulted a Westport- Weston phone book from 1993 that sat on a shelf in the kitchen. She had leafed through the thin gray pages until she reached the Rs. About halfway down the second page, she found it.

Mr. and Mrs. Phineas Roberts, the phone book entry read. She had smiled at the first name. No wonder. Mr. and Mrs. Phineas Roberts.
Mr. and Mrs.
A couple, an entity. She had not been able to get that listing out of her mind for days. She wondered if he ever had.

After visiting Betty in the hospital and telling her about the meeting, about Josie's bubble of self-regard, about Mr. Mole, who looked like Toad of Toad Hall, and then hearing from their mother, between coughs, about the way Roberts had quietly, quickly, and entirely on his own come up with and executed the plan of frightening Josie with Mr. Mole's prowess, Miranda dropped Annie off at home and drove to Charlotte Maybank's great pile on Beachside Avenue.

"Miranda!" said Leanne, when the maid led her into the living room. "I'm so happy to see you."

She didn't look happy at all, curled in the embrace of the sofa, a half-empty bottle of Johnnie Walker on the table beside her, a glass in her hand.

"How is your mother? She was asleep the whole time I was there. Henry's asleep, too, you know. I know that's why you're here--to see Henry. But he's asleep. Aunt Charlotte is asleep, too. I'm not asleep, though. So you're stuck with me, I guess."

She held her glass out.

Miranda could not tell if Leanne wanted her to take a sip from the glass or to pour more into it. She took it from her friend's hand and gently set it down beside the bottle. "I came to talk to you, Leanne, not Henry."

"Me? Poor me. That's nice that you came to talk to poor me. Did you know I am poor? Poor me is poor? I was always poor, but now I'm broke, you see, and so is Aunt Charlotte, who was always going to leave everything to me, so I never really worried too, too much about being poor, because I'm a doctor and I can always earn a living, so how poor is that, but going to Africa to study epidemiology, that doesn't bring in a lot of money, although it does make you realize that when you're poor here, you would be rich there, but Aunt Charlotte has never been to Africa, so she can hardly be expected to understand that . . ."

As Leanne rambled on, Miranda paced up and down the room. She knew she should be trying to comfort her. This was a financial tragedy of major proportions, she gathered. She should sit down beside Leanne and say soothing things. Instead, she walked to the windows, then back to the door, then to the windows again, and said absolutely nothing.

"Poor Aunt Charlotte is finally poor now, just as she always thought she would be, and now we really will have to auction the portraits and the chairs and the silver spoons, but she thought it would be death duties, that's what she calls them, total affectation, and now the death duties will come while she's still alive, crazy old thing. Well, at least she'll be able to see her fantasy come true, that's one way to look at it . . ."

Finally, Miranda got hold of herself. She had come here to say something, not to listen, not to sympathize. But disaster had struck. What she had to come to say would have to wait. Leanne was in trouble. She needed Miranda. Miranda would speak to her, patiently, gently, discover the parameters of the disaster, offer advice and hope. "What the hell happened?" she snapped. "What the fuck are you talking about?"

"Don't blame me," Leanne prattled on. "I told her not to trust him, I told her not to give him a penny, and she didn't, she says--not a penny."

"Give who a penny?" She saw just how far gone Leanne was. She moved the bottle to a distant table, then came back and sat beside her. "Who?" she said again, curious now, impatient.
"Who?"

"No, not a penny, not one penny," Leanne was saying. She shook her head triumphantly. "Not
one
penny--
every
penny." She took no notice of Miranda. "Not to him, she says. No, not to him, just into an investment he told her about, a nice, safe fund, a friend of his on Wall Street, and he would take only a finder's fee sort of thing, which would all be used for Henry, anyway, and not from her, but from the fund manager . . ."

A light dawned. Miranda, with foreboding, said, "Kit?"

"And it was a
closed
fund, but he could get her in, this friend of his. The manager's nephew could get her into this closed fund. She never could resist anything exclusive, the idiotic old bat."

"Leanne, get up." Miranda pulled her to her feet. "You're kind of hysterical, right? So take a deep breath or something."

"She wouldn't let him stay in her house, even to take care of Henry when I was away, locked him away in the boathouse like Mr. Rochester's mad wife--and now it's all gone up in flames. She couldn't bear him, thought he was a fraud, and then suddenly she gives him all her money, and then suddenly, more suddenly, it's gone. It's all gone . . . I was away for six weeks, and look what happened . . ." She grabbed a pillow and threw it.

Miranda wondered if this was what she was like when she ranted and raved.

"Stop it!" she said. "You're acting just like me!"

She grabbed Leanne. Leanne struggled. Just for a minute. Then collapsed, sobbing, in Miranda's arms.

Miranda buried her face in Leanne's hair. "That's better," she said.

"Better that I'm sobbing?" Leanne said, her voice muffled in Miranda's shoulder.

"Better for me. I can hear myself think."

"Go to hell."

"Let's take a walk, okay? Outside. Fresh air."

"Fresh air," Leanne repeated dully.

They walked to the water's edge, then up and down the little beach. There was a moon, a sliver of a moon low in the black sky.

"Sober yet?" Miranda asked. But it was she who felt drunk. Drunk with confusion, with need, with impatience.

"Yeah, yeah. That's where you met Kit." She pointed to the spot on the beach Miranda had shown her. "The financial wizard." She took a deep breath. "What am I going to do?" she said softly. "What am I going to do with her? Maybe she'll die before she has to move out, before she realizes what's happened."

"Maybe." Miranda tried to listen, but it was difficult for her to focus. She had come to the house that night with a purpose. It had taken all her resolve to drive up the long driveway, to ring the bell, to follow Hilda into the living room. And now, a catastrophe. "I'm sorry, Leanne," she remembered to say. "I'm really sorry about all this."