You Should Have Known (29 page)

“Mrs. Sachs,” said Mendoza, when he came and sat beside her on her own couch, “I think you want to help us.”

“Why on earth would you think that?” she snapped, but even as she said it, she knew that he was not completely wrong. Not anymore. Something had altered—some deep, rusted place inside her had been forced into a new position. When, exactly?

He shrugged. He was holding his head a little at an angle, the way he did. She had known him only a couple of days, but she already knew his angles. She knew the way his neck overflowed his collar. She did not know him well enough to suggest that he invest in larger collars, and she hoped she never would.

“I guess, because I think at this point you're more angry at him than you are at us. And just between us, you're right to be.”

“Don't patronize me,” she said tersely, but again, even before it came out, she knew he was only trying to be kind.

“I'm sorry. I didn't mean to do that. I've dealt with this kind of situation many times. Well, not precisely this. I've dealt with husbands who have kept their wives in the dark about a lot of things, and by the time I'm in the picture there's some fraud or a robbery, or maybe an assault. This is pretty extreme, the exact circumstances, but I've met a lot of very smart women who've had to go through some of what you're going through now. And I want to say I'm sorry it's happening. And sorry it's me making it happen.”

And don't manipulate me
, she wanted to add, because that was precisely what he was doing. But now there was no fight left at all.

“We need the hairbrush for DNA,” Mendoza said. “We need DNA for…well, a couple of reasons.”

Why didn't he just come out and say it? Did he think she was going to fall apart?

“You mean, for the crime scene,” she finally informed him, but he didn't seem that impressed.

“Yes, but also for paternity. There's an issue with paternity. You probably know that Mrs. Alves was pregnant at the time of her death. That was in the
Post
, thanks very much. Pathology department is like a goddamn sieve. Doesn't matter how much we yell about it. I'm sorry you had to find out in a rag like the
Post
.”

Grace could feel herself gaping. She could feel her own mouth open, but nothing came out, and nothing else went in, not even breath.

“Mrs. Sachs?” Mendoza said.

“Don't be ridiculous.” Her head had come loose from her body and was galloping around the room. When it returned, if it ever returned, she would laugh and laugh and laugh. It was crazy, the idea of it, and not just inappropriate crazy, but logic crazy. And Mendoza could take his “Now we're friends” delusion and go fuck himself if he thought she was going to swallow this. How ridiculously stupid did they think she was?

Again, down the hall, in her own dining room, she heard the unmistakable sound of laughter. The woman from the door, she supposed. The man with the computer. How many people were in her house?

“Well, it's moot,” he told her, “because we would have had to run a panel anyway. Mr. Alves…it's understandable he wants to take his wife back to Colombia as soon as possible. There's going to be a funeral there, and he wants to finish up his affairs. He doesn't want to return after that, apparently. And the body's been released, but he's refusing to take the baby, the little girl. You know what I mean.”

Grace, who did not, who truly, truly did not know what he meant, found the wherewithal to shake her head.

“He's demanding a paternity test. He insists he isn't the father. And of course we can't force him to take her. But it has to be settled. His attorney is insisting. Social Services is insisting. We just need to fast-track this.” He peered at her. He was beginning to see something, and she watched him doing it. That was how she came to see it herself.

Grace had started to cry. She didn't realize it until he handed her a handkerchief. An actual handkerchief. Not even a tissue. Then she felt her own face, which had lost all its surfaces.

“I'm sorry,” Mendoza said. He was sort of patting her shoulder. “I'm so sorry. I just…I really thought you knew.”

I
n 1936, when very few of his neighbors were going to work anywhere to do anything, Grace's maternal grandfather, Thomas Pierce, got up every morning at about five a.m. and took the Stamford train into New York. He had a job in advertising, which had not been the dream of his youth, but the firm was solvent and its president had given him to understand that his work was valued, and frankly, when you had to step over bodies to get out of Grand Central and there was a breadline across the avenue from the office and your wife, back in Connecticut, was greatly pregnant, you just counted yourself lucky and tried not to think about what could happen.

They already had a little boy, Arthur, and privately he hoped the new baby would be another boy, but Gracie was sure it was going to be a girl and wanted to call her Marjorie Wells. Wells had been her maiden name.

Typically, Thomas Pierce got home around six thirty, to the curious stone house (it had a round sort of turret with a design of faux timbers at the top) in the Turn of River neighborhood of Stamford, and he had a drink while his wife finished up with the baby and then made dinner for the two of them. Gracie, considering that she had grown up with servants and nobody'd ever shown her a thing, was fairly capable with a meal. She cooked out of something called
Mrs. Wilson's Cook Book
, which had just the kinds of dishes he had grown up with, but also a few pretty daring concoctions like “Chop Suey,” an Oriental delicacy involving pork, cabbage, onions, and a thick brown sauce. Lately she had also discovered
The Settlement Cook Book
, and the arrival of Bundt cakes and “matzo pancakes” gave him a sort of thrilled but guilty feeling. He had never told his wife that his own mother was Jewish.

One night, he found himself leaving work alongside a new colleague, a man named George whom the firm had taken on to write radio scripts. George, it turned out, was living with his sister's family in Darien while he got settled, not the nicest of circumstances, apparently, and by the time their train reached Greenwich, Thomas Pierce had invited his colleague home for dinner. There wasn't an opportunity to let Gracie know about it. The phone at the station wasn't working, and by the time they drove to the drugstore there were already two people waiting for the single booth, so in the end he just drove them home, arriving as the sun set.

Obviously she was peeved, but she got drinks for them both and went off into the kitchen, presumably to work out what to do. It was not a Chop Suey night, more's the pity, but something far less stretchable—she had purchased, that morning, four and only four lamb chops from the butcher—and all Gracie could think to do was peel and boil more potatoes. Once the baby was down, she got herself a little sherry and went back in.

They weren't talking about work, at least. They were talking about George's sister, who'd married a pretty rough type and thought all college boys were pansies. Gracie, quite to herself, had already decided George was a pansy, but that was not the point.

“What a shame, for your sister,” she said.

“Yeah. She's a smart girl. I couldn't think why she did it.”

They had more to drink, and Gracie put the chops on to broil. She set the table in the dining room for three. If she had known, if she'd had even a couple of hours, she'd have made a stew and there would be plenty for all three of them. There was a recipe she'd been meaning to try in
The Settlement Cook Book
, a Brunswick stew she could have made with chicken instead of beef. Making things for less was a bit of a specialty of hers. In four years of marriage, and four concurrent years of Depression, she had made it her business to leave over some of the housekeeping money—as much as four or five dollars a week. Whenever they needed something—something for the house or for the baby, even for Thomas—she said it would cost a little more than she actually thought it would and then kept the rest back. It was almost like having a job. The previous spring she'd even opened up an account at First Stamford—a joint account, of course, not that Thomas knew the first thing about it.

“I wish I could,” their guest was saying when she returned with the chops. They were both polite—George, who was ravenous, seemed appreciative enough—though neither of them said a word about her own meal, which now consisted of mashed potatoes. Their guest did not pause in his speechifying to chew the food, and Gracie was forced to observe the mastication of her own much-looked-forward-to lamb chops in a little too much detail, but she focused on her mashed potatoes and tried to follow along.

There was an apartment in the city, in a place called Tudor City over on the East Side in the 40s, a good walk from the office. He'd been to see it and taken his “lady friend”—Gracie made herself not ask—and it was a sweet little place, and he didn't need to be told he could have it for a song, things being the way they were in the city now and half the building empty. But that was just it: He didn't have a song, just his salary and a house nobody wanted to buy, up in the northwestern part of Connecticut.

“What town?” Thomas asked. He was only being polite.

The closest was a place called Falls Village. Not too far from Canaan, George said. The house was on a lake and had been his mother's once, but now it was his. He hadn't been up there for a couple of years, but he'd put it on the market with a broker in Lakeville. Great timing, right? Nobody'd even been to see it.

What sort of house?
Gracie wanted to know. She had to tell him there weren't more lamb chops but passed him the bowl of potatoes.

It was an old house, about 1880s, George thought. Then his own parents had put on a sort of ell about 1905, with a kitchen downstairs and a bedroom over that, so there were three bedrooms upstairs. It had been on a bunch of acres, about four, but he'd managed to sell off those lots, at least, just before the Crash, so the house had only about half an acre, but it ran down to the little lake. The lake was called Childe. That was his own family name: Childe.

“What are you trying to sell it for?” said Gracie. She had stopped eating.

When he told her, she got up from the table and went upstairs. She kept the checkbook in the top drawer of her bureau. It had a leather cover, which was stiff to open. She had never written a check before.

It was hard to say which of the two men was more stunned.

My wife,
the foundress of the feast
, Thomas Pierce would sometimes intone, years and years after the night in question, making a grand gesture with his arm. He was a man of property, a squire, and he liked to observe his domain. He liked to sit on the porch with his guests and look down the sloping lawn to the lake's lapping edge, and to watch the two children, Arthur and Marjorie, play on the little dock, pretending to fish. In the summers, he spent all of August there. It was the place he was happiest. After the war (he managed to return from the South Pacific; his colleague George Childe was not so fortunate), he told his wife that the sound of rain on the lake was what he had listened for when he tried to fall asleep, out in the open and far from home.

The stone house in Stamford, with the faux-timbered turret, went to Arthur, who sold it and moved, of all places, to Houston. Grace Reinhart Sachs, his niece, never met him at all.

The lake house went to Marjorie, who would become Grace's mother, who would spend at least a week of every summer of her life there, except, ironically, for the year in which she gave birth to her daughter, and when she died it went to Grace. Grace loved it, too, like her mother, her grandfather, and her namesake—her thrifty and clever grandmother. But none of the others had ever needed it as much as she did now.

Where else could she have gone that very afternoon, fleeing her home on 81st Street with a duffel bag of her son's clothing, a suitcase of books and laptops, an already fraying garbage bag of her own underwear and sweaters and toiletries, and one very expensive violin? Already the front of the apartment building was lit up like a film premiere, with two news vans and a tangle of electrical wires and a waiting, chattering, bellowing firing squad. The wolf had found her door and was settling in to wait her out, but one of the doormen, in an act of unanticipated grace, had wordlessly taken her down into the basement, shouldered the duffel and hoisted the suitcase, and let her out into the alley that ran behind 35 East 81st Street. On Madison, he helped load up a cab and refused to accept a tip. On the other hand, he no longer seemed able to look her in the eye.

Only three hours after that, she and Henry were driving north on the Saw Mill in a rented car, the atmosphere without (frigid and overcast) perfectly matching the silent chill within. She could only tell him that Grandpa was fine, that Eva was fine, that something had happened, and yes, of course, she would explain about it and not lie (not lie
much
, she appended to herself), but not now, because now she had to concentrate on driving. And this was wholly true: The Saw Mill, twisty at the best of times, was slick to boot, and once or twice (and it wasn't her imagination) she saw the patches of black ice on the ground, and once or twice she even imagined the whirl of herself and her son and the car, spinning and splintering into oblivion. It made her grip the wheel tighter, until her back spiked with pain, and think—and she was thinking this for the first time, and it still felt so terrible and new—
I hate you for this
.

He was the love of her life, the companion, the partner, the spouse. He was every single thing she urged her male clients to be, and every single thing she had told the imaginary readers of her book they deserved, and now she would never not hate him, not one day for however long she lived. It felt as if she'd had to exchange every individual cell in her body that had chosen and adored and tended to Jonathan for a cell that rejected and despised him, running them through a monstrous dialysis machine that stripped and purified her, but the new and purified Grace didn't function the way a human body was supposed to function. It couldn't stand properly or speak or feel or care for Henry or drive at the right speed on a twisty road that might have ice, with her child in the car. It was so focused on where it was going that it had no idea what it was going to do when it got there.

At least she knew the way. She had been covering this same ground for so long that it felt almost mythic, first in her parents' faux-wood-paneled station wagon, crammed with a summer's worth of supplies for herself and her mother. (They collected her father off the Peekskill train every Friday night and drove him back each Sunday afternoon.) She and Vita had snuck up on their own, in high school, for various illicit activities (sometimes with boyfriends), and once, in college, they'd had their own raucously nostalgic weekend, pulling together their Rearden friends, home from college, to drink Rolling Rock and pore over their yearbooks. She came to write her senior thesis the spring after she met Jonathan, leaving him to his infectious diseases rotation and clinic hours at Brigham and Women's Hospital and then pining for him so much that she spent her time reading her mother's stash of yellowing old novels and barely managed a word on Skinner.

And then there was the wedding, right there on the sloping lawn, only a few months after that. Maybe a little too soon, her mother would have said, but she was old-fashioned that way (in her mother's view, an engagement of Edith Wharton dimensions ought to be mandated for all couples), and besides, her mother was dead and therefore incapable of objection. And her father…well, it wasn't as if Grace were asking for a great production. They wanted to marry, not cohabit—it was important to them both. Or at least it was important to her, and Jonathan wanted whatever she wanted. They did not want a religious ceremony or a display of wealth. They were just two people lucky enough to have found each other, starting out in their professions, intent on the same kind of life: comfort and dignity and children of their own, and helping to eradicate human pain in at least a few of its myriad forms. They wanted enough money to be secure, a few nice things, perhaps, but nothing gaudy or undignified. They wanted contentment and of course a sense of accomplishment, the respect of their peers, the gratitude of their patients, obviously, and in return they wanted to feel that their own talents and hard work and altruism were being well spent in the service of others. It was not such an elaborate platform. It was not…she searched, now, driving the Saw Mill north into the early winter darkness…such hubris.

And as for his family, well, they talked about that at length. She had met with them for that strained and utterly unrewarding Chinese meal, and walk around Rockefeller Center. Jonathan had barely seen them himself since the day he left for Hopkins, and needless to say they had declined to support him financially or in any other way since college. His education had been underwritten by the trustees of the university, his own part-time employment, and also by an elderly woman in Baltimore who had taken an interest in him and had no children of her own. Jonathan had met her while delivering chairs for a party and ended up actually living in her guest room for his final year of college. He had deflected Grace's natural curiosity about his family by reminding her that these were the people who had declined to love him, who did not grasp his determination to become a doctor, who resisted any notion of responsibility to support his needs. But even so, this was a wedding, by any definition a new start, and worth confronting the obvious discomfort. They were duly invited, but they failed to respond, and it was only later, looking at the photographs when they came back from the developer, that she learned that one particular young man—tall and a little fleshy, with Jonathan's same curling dark hair but without his ready grin and general sense of ease—was actually Jonathan's younger brother, Mitchell. He had come, witnessed, and departed, all without ever speaking to her.