You Should Have Known (9 page)

T
aking one for the team, Grace ended up in the Spensers' vast lobby on the night of the Rearden fund-raiser, checking in the guests and handing out auction booklets at a table in front of the private elevator. It was a bit surprising how few of the parents she knew by name. Some of the mothers were familiar, part of the regular three-fifteen crowd at pickup. These women squinted at Grace as they clicked across the marble floor, perhaps rummaging about for her name, perhaps not even sure whether she was one of them or merely someone efficient hired for the occasion; then, opting to err on the side of caution, they greeted her with a noncommittal, “Hi there! Nice to see you!” The men were complete strangers. One or two she had actually attended Rearden with years earlier, though their childhood faces seemed to float behind a scrim of years and prosperity. Most of them, though, she had never laid eyes on; save the occasional parent-teacher conference or disciplinary intervention, they had not crossed the school's threshold since their initial admissions interviews (which they always made time for, of course), and Grace didn't doubt that they were attending a school function on a Saturday night under significant domestic duress.

“We've got an amazing auction,” she told a woman whose lips were so swollen, Grace had to wonder if the mild-looking and distracted man beside her had recently hit her in the face. “The view is unbelievable,” she said to one of the moms in Henry's class, who could barely contain her eagerness to get upstairs. “And the Pollocks in the dining room. Don't miss them.” And when the rush ebbed after seven thirty, she found herself alone in the immense marble lobby, tapping a fingernail against the surface of the table they had set up for her and wondering how long she was supposed to stay here.

Being on the fund-raiser committee was Grace's one and only volunteer role at Rearden, and she was happy enough to do it, though she was the first to acknowledge how crazy the entire endeavor had become. Once, not so many years before, these events had been distinguished by their specifically unglamorous charm, with distinctly cheesy decorations and the retro glam of the menu: cheese fondue and pigs in blankets, washed down with some highly alcoholic concoction of yesteryear. They had been sort of jolly parties, not too serious, and the auctions lots of fun, with people getting tipsy and bidding for a session with a personal trainer or a walk-on role in
One Life to Live
. Everyone had a good time, and twenty or thirty thousand went into the till, en route to the school's scholarship fund, so that not all of the kids were children of privilege and students like, she supposed, Miguel Alves could make the school a more diverse and interesting place. That wasn't a bad thing, she reminded herself. That was a laudable thing. And this new incarnation of the school fund-raiser, which she—snob that she was—found so distasteful, was only a bigger, better version of that laudable thing, raising more money (way,
way
more money) for its admirable cause. Which ought to make her happy. But did not.

Grace lingered on in the lobby at her little table. She was moving the few remaining name tags around like a three-card monte dealer and fingering her left earlobe, which hurt just a bit more than the right earlobe, which was also hurting. She was wearing a pair of large diamond earrings, clip-ons that had once belonged to her mother (who, like Grace, did not have pierced ears). Grace had decided that they were more than appropriate for a duplex of staggering size, overlooking a front lawn comprising Central Park, and had built her outfit around them: a silk shirt in basic black (her go-to color, like that of so many of her Manhattan sisters), her highest heels (which brought her to Jonathan's exact height), and the shantung silk pants in highly hot pink, a purchase that surprised no one more than herself when she found them at Bergdorf's the previous fall. This was precisely what to wear when cowering before a Jackson Pollock or explaining to some captain of industry, who clearly cared not at all, that she was a therapist in private practice.

The earrings were part of a collection of somewhat ostentatious pieces that had been presented to Marjorie Reinhart, piece by piece, over the years, by Grace's father, Frederich, and which Grace still kept in a mirrored vanity her mother had owned, in the bedroom that had once been her parents' and was now hers and Jonathan's. There were, among many other items, a pin comprising a large pink rock of something grasped by little gold hands against a misshapen gold surface, a fat jade necklace her father had found who knew where, a leopard-print bracelet of black and yellow diamonds, a sapphire necklace, and a necklace of chunky, oddly proportioned gold links. What they all had in common was their very—how, really, could one avoid this word?—vulgarity. Everything seemed larger than it needed to be: big links of gold, big rocks, a certain quality of “look at me” in the designs. How her father could have chosen so poorly for her elegant mother was almost sweet, it occurred to her. Her father was such an oaf in this department that when he walked into a jewelry store to get his wife a present, he must have been easy prey for any bigger-is-better salesman. The jewels were a representation of someone doing his best to say
I love you
and someone else doing her best to say
I know
.

Tap, tap, tap with her fingernail, manicured for the occasion. Grace removed the clip-on earrings and placed them in her evening bag—she couldn't take it anymore. Then she rubbed her earlobes in relief and scanned the empty lobby, as if that would somehow move things along. Twenty minutes had passed without a single guest's arrival, and only five forlorn name tags remained unclaimed on the table: Jonathan and two missing couples Grace didn't know. Everyone else was upstairs, including the rest of the committee, the headmaster, and the large group he had arrived with (from the pre-event “Cocktails with the Headmaster” party held at the very apartment where Linsey of the Birkins had once told Grace that the doorman could hail her a taxi). She had even seen Malaga Alves come past her table, though she had not stopped. Which was just as well, since there had been no waiting name tag for her. She wasn't surprised, and she wasn't upset, that Jonathan hadn't arrived yet. Jonathan's eight-year-old patient had died two days before, a horrible thing that never got less horrible, despite the fact that it happened over and over again. The parents were Orthodox Jews and the funeral had been held almost immediately, so Jonathan had gone to that, and this afternoon he had gone back to Brooklyn to pay a shiva call at the family's apartment in Williamsburg. He would stay as long as he needed to stay, and then he would come here. That was all.

Grace did not know the child's name. She was not even sure whether it was a boy or a girl. When Jonathan told her about the patient, Grace had thought with appreciation of that barrier they both maintained, or labored to maintain, between the life of their home and family and his life of the hospital. Because of that slender barrier, the dead child was only
the patient
,
the eight-year-old
, which was bad enough. But how much worse, for her, if she'd known more?

“I'm sorry,” Grace had said when he told her about the shiva call and that he would probably be late.

And Jonathan had said: “Me too. I hate cancer.”

And that had nearly made her smile. He said this very often and had said it for years, just like this: as a matter of fact, a matter of benign opinion. He had first said it to her many years before, in his dorm room at the medical school in Boston, though back then it had sounded like a battle cry.
Jonathan Sachs, about to be an intern, one day to be a pediatric oncologist specializing in solid tumors, hated cancer, so cancer had better watch its back! Cancer's days were numbered! Cancer had been put on notice, and payback was a bitch!
Today, there was no bravado left. He still hated cancer, more than when he was a student, more with every lost patient, more today than yesterday. But cancer didn't give a rat's ass how he felt.

Grace had hated having to remind him about A Night for Rearden, to distract him with that from the pain of children and the dread fear of parents. But she had to. The fund-raiser. The school. The Spensers. The three apartments combined into one: an urban McMansion, she had called it when she'd first described it for him weeks earlier. Jonathan remembered everything, only there was so much on his mind that it wasn't always completely accessible. It needed to be called up, like a book at the New York Public Library. Sometimes it took a little time.

“Grace,” he had said, “I hope you haven't had to waste a lot of energy on this. Can't you leave it to the women who don't work? You have far more important things to do than raise money for a private school.”

But it was about the participation, she had said tersely. He knew that.

And they didn't have enough money to mitigate her nonparticipation. He knew that, too.

And all of it had come up before, of course. In a long marriage, everything has come up before: circulating currents of familiarity, both warm and cool. Of course they couldn't agree on everything.

He would just…get here when he got here. And if anyone wanted to know why he was not here, she would be glad to enlighten them, because her husband had a little too much on his plate to make time for everyone else's sick fascination with what he did for a living.

It was something no one else seemed to understand about Jonathan, that you had to dig such a small way into his general affability before you hit a man who was perpetually, brutally affected by human suffering. People felt emboldened by Jonathan's matter-of-factness on subjects like cancer and the death of children, but when they broached these dreaded subjects, they did it in a way that was almost accusatory:
How can you do what you do? How can you stand to see children in pain? Isn't it terrible when a patient you have cared for dies of the disease? Why would you go out of your way to choose that specialty?

Sometimes, Jonathan actually tried to answer these questions, but it never helped, because despite people's obvious scrounging for the details, most of them just couldn't handle the stuff he carried around all day, and they almost always stalked off to find someone with a more upbeat profession to talk to. Over the years, Grace had watched some variation on this script at dinner parties and camp visiting days and previous Rearden fund-raisers, always with a sinking heart, because they reminded her that this pleasant mom from Henry's second-grade class, and the terrific couple who'd rented a house on their lake one summer, and the radio talk show host who lived two floors above them (the closest their building had to a celebrity) were almost certainly not going to become their friends. Once, she had simply assumed their social life would necessarily be populated by oncologists, people living within the same constriction of intense emotions as Jonathan, and their partners, but in fact those relationships never really developed either—probably, Grace decided, because Jonathan's colleagues had the modest goal of leaving cancer behind in the hospital when they departed the building, and perhaps they were better at doing that than her husband was. Years ago, the two of them had socialized a bit with Stu Rosenfeld, the oncologist who still covered Jonathan's practice if he had to be away for some reason, and Stu's wife, and that had been agreeable. The Rosenfelds were passionate theatergoers who always seemed to know, months in advance, which tickets were going to be impossible to secure and ended up sitting in the fourth row next to Elaine Stritch on the first Saturday after the
New York Times
rave. She admired rather than liked Tracy Rosenfeld, who was Korean-American, an attorney, and a fanatical runner, but it felt good to be out with another couple, enjoying the city and its pleasures. The two women dragged their husbands away from the default topics (hospital personalities, hospital politics, children with cancer) and generally pretended to be better friends than they actually were while discussing Sondheim and Wasserstein and the general disgrace of John Simon's hostilities in
New York
magazine. It was all fairly innocuous, and it might still be going on, except that Jonathan had come home one day about five years earlier and reported that Stu had said the most extraordinary thing to him, about a plan for dinner (nothing elaborate, just a Sunday night at a restaurant they all liked on the West Side) that had fallen apart a couple of times. Stu had said that he was sorry, but maybe for now they would just keep things professional. Tracy was up for partner and…well…

“Well?” Grace had asked, heat streaming into her cheeks. “Well what?”

“Did you and Tracy…quarrel about something?” Jonathan had asked her, and she'd had that sudden guilty feeling that came over you when you were sure you had done nothing wrong, or at least nearly sure, because how could you ever be
sure
? People hid their tender places. Sometimes you just couldn't know when you were hitting some nerve.

So they'd stopped seeing the Rosenfelds, except at hospital-related events, but there were precious few of those, or occasionally by chance at the theater, where they always chatted in a friendly way and talked about getting together for dinner sometime, which neither of them ever followed up on, like countless other couples who were crazy-busy with work, whatever the underlying intention.

Jonathan never mentioned this again. He was used to loss, of course, and not just in the sense of loss—to death—because of terrible, grueling, painful, and merciless disease. There had been other losses, not to be slighted because the parties in question might still be among the technically living and no farther distant than, say, Long Island. This, in Grace's personal and indeed professional opinion, had everything to do with the family he had grown up in, the parents who had failed him in almost every way short of violence or physical harm, and the brother who had never understood that he, too, would be harmed by losing that fraternal connection. Jonathan didn't need many people in his life, and he never had, at least as long as Grace had known him, so long as he had his own family: the one he had made with Grace and Henry.