A Friend of the Family (8 page)

“Oh, don’t be silly, Pete. We wouldn’t do anything with them otherwise. You’ll take ’em for free.” She lay a beautiful hand on my arm for a minute, and I’ll admit it, I tingled right through my jacket. “Ashley, aren’t you going to say hi to Dr. Dizinoff?”

“Hi,” the girl said, burying her mouth in her mother’s side.

“Hi, sweetheart.”

“Well, we should get going soon, but I wanted to ask you about the tickets. I’ll come by the office and drop them off.”

“Or I’ll bring them,” Shelly said. “I have an appointment two weeks from now, a checkup.” Louis’s death had turned the two ladies into fast friends. I still saw all the Shermans regularly except Ashley. They still trusted me completely, despite the loss they had suffered under my watch, a loss that still caused me such shame.

“Well, looking forward to it,” I said.

And as the Shermans disappeared, my wife, whose presence I’d been completely unaware of, came up to me with a wry smile and powdered sugar on her sweater. She stuffed half a doughnut into my mouth and said, “Happy New Year, baby.”

“Happy New Year to you,” I said, trying not to choke on the doughnut. Elaine laughed. She was in a good mood and, I think, judging from her breath, had spiked her hot chocolate. She kissed me on the cheek. The kitchen had cleared out—open-house guests were like a tide, with their own hourly ebb and flow — and so it was just Iris, Elaine, and me in the room, each of us a little bleary from the night before and the frenzy of the party.

“Happy New Year, Pete,” Iris said.

“Happy New Year, Iris.” She was curled up in the breakfast nook, letting the mess in the kitchen build around her. She had a dusky voice—it was one of her innumerable charms—and a perfectly wonderful way of adjusting to chaos. Glasses and mugs piled up in the sink, stray pastries lined the counter, and the Crock-Pot of hot chocolate had spilled over and dribbled pools of chocolate on the floor, but Iris just sat back under the window, her grayish red hair pulled back in a ponytail, her cool green eyes half-closed. Once upon a time, I had loved her beyond reason.

“This is a wonderful party,” I said, and I slid next to her in the breakfast nook.

“Are you enjoying yourself?”

“How could I not?”

“Doughnuts and shots of scotch and people who admire him,” Elaine hummed. “These are a few of Pete’s favorite things.”

Iris laughed. “I didn’t know we were serving scotch.” She leaned her head against the frosty window behind the breakfast nook. She was wearing a black turtleneck and bronze hoop earrings and looked as much like a graying bohemian as she did a commercial banker. There had been an article in the
Wall Street Journal
about her a few years ago, some dilemma she had had with unethical clients, a pixelated picture on the front page, her hair pulled back, severe glasses. The story had claimed her income was somewhere just north of a million dollars. According to my brother, the
Journal
underestimated it by at least half a million.

“That much money? Come on, Phil. These are people who buy their sneakers at Target.”

“Congenitally cheap,” Phil explained to me. “The quirks of the truly wealthy.”

In half a lifetime of talking about everything, Joe and I never talked about the article. I was ashamed of my jealousy, and Joe, I think, was ashamed of how much money his wife made. He was ostentatious about frugality, liked to complain about his daughter Pauline’s J.Crew habit. But that year, when we went to the City Opera for a modernist staging of
Bohème,
Elaine poked me in the side. She was holding open the program, fingernail pointing at the tiny type in the back: the Sterns were in the Director’s Circle, one hundred thousand dollars plus. And when we needed a new lobby at Round Hill Medical Center, were looking for named sponsor opportunities, Joe quietly arranged for the thing to be built by some hip Manhattan architects and named for his dead father.

“There’s scotch out on the deck, I believe,” I said. “Joe was keeping it for his closest comrades. Want me to get you some?”

She shook her head. “Unlike some people, I can’t drink scotch in the afternoon.”

“Who are you kidding, Iris?”

“Oh, come on, Pete.” She winked at me. “Them days are long gone.”

“Them days,” Elaine echoed. She sounded wistful. Them days, them days, them boozy, steely, wintry, pot-fueled Route 80 West days. Iris used to sit next to me in statistics. She wore short skirts, huge earrings, go-go boots, and low-cut peasant blouses in the dead of winter. She was from Allentown, where her parents ran a struggling butcher shop. She and I were both funded by the same scholarships. She walked me to organic chemistry and warned me about my future.

“You better do well here, Pete. Med school exemptions are harder and harder to come by.”

“So I’ve heard,” I said, and boy, had I heard: classmates were going to medical school in Mexico, Belgium, New South Wales. “But there won’t be another draft.”

“There won’t be another draft?” She laughed. “Don’t be an idiot. Only an idiot would believe a goddamn thing Nixon says.”

“There’s no way anyone’s going to send me to Vietnam,” I said. “I don’t care what it takes.” I didn’t even know what Nixon had said on the matter. I was only sure I loved Iris Berg with every filmy corpuscle in my body.

“You’re an idiot,” she said. And I was.

From the deck outside, Stu Hurdy, red-cheeked from the winter and the booze and the pleasures of his emerging koi pond, banged loudly on the window. Iris turned and banged back.

“What a bunch of fucking drunks. I’m too old for this kind of thing. Remind me why we keep doing this every year?”

“Your husband enjoys playing Santa,” I said.

“Playing Santa.” She sighed. “Of course he does. My husband, Kriss Kringle.” Iris often spoke this way about her husband, in tones of charmed exasperation or grim tolerance. They’d been married for longer than Elaine and me by four years, had four children, and had built a (very) prosperous life and suffered both normal and unique sufferings, yet still Iris often made it sound as if Joe was the little brother she’d allowed to tag along. At Pitt, after I’d introduced them, Iris would often shake her head at me and ask me how I’d let her get talked into this, “this” meaning a long-standing love affair with Joe Stern.

“You should ask him,” I’d say, because I never had the courage to say, Well, Iris, because you wouldn’t have me.

“So is everyone behaving themselves out there?” she asked me, raising a languid arm above her head. “Do I have to go outside and take charge?”

“You don’t have to do a thing,” I said, patting her narrow knee. “I met Neal’s girlfriend, by the way. He seems quite enamored.”

“Amy?” Iris smiled. “She’s a hoot, isn’t she? Straight from Kowloon to Cambridge, her father’s big in Red Party politics, supposedly. Her mother was raised in Singapore. She’s full of disdain for the American way of life but drags Pauline to the mall every chance she can get.”

“She seems like she’s good at taking charge.”

“Oh, she’s got a pair of brass balls on her.” Iris grinned. “Bosses my son around like a foreman. I’ve never seen Neal kowtow like this, not even when he was trying to sucker teachers into writing his college recommendations. I get an enormous kick out of it, to tell you the truth.”

“I didn’t even know Neal was dating,” Elaine said.

“They’ve been together for almost six months. Neal thinks he’s gonna marry her, I can tell. He’s probably right. Brace yourselves for a Jewish-Buddhist ceremony on some lucky-number date this fall.”

“Really?” Elaine said. “That’s so exciting!”

“Please,” Iris scoffed. “She’s only in it for the citizenship.”

“Are we talking about Amy again?”

I looked up. The voice was an echo of Iris’s, sardonic, grumbly, but still it took me a second to put it together.

“Dr. Pete,” Laura Stern said. “It’s been a while.”

My goodness.

“Hello,” I said. “It certainly has.”

I hadn’t seen her since the week they took her to Gateway House thirteen years ago, and Christ, the girl had changed in a million beautiful ways. Back then she’d been hollow-eyed, eviscerated by the trial and the confinement and everything that preceded it. A criminal, a teenager, depressed and hidden in oversized shirts. But now — now she was like Iris twenty years ago, only more so, or better, or right here in the soft pink flesh.

“You remember Laura, don’t you, Pete?”

“How could I forget?”

But she was nobody I’d met before. Thick reddish hair falling over her shoulders, white skin, green brown eyes, a pale smattering of freckles, thin shoulders, white blouse. Benign smile, demure twinkle in her eyes. She’d spent the past three years tending goats. I stood.

“Laura,” I said. “How are you?”

“I’m well,” she said, and she leaned in to press her cheek to mine. She smelled like clean laundry. The girl who’d made cowrie-shell jewelry on a godforsaken island, washed her dirty clothing in a creek for three years.

“Hey, Elaine.”

“Hi, sweetheart,” Elaine said, her voice soft with familiarity. Elaine knew Laura almost better than anyone did. They’d corresponded while the girl was at Gateway House and even after: Elaine had sent
her her Bergen lecture notes on Chaucer, the Angles and Celts, the Norse influence on the English language; Laura sent back long letters about the terrible food at Gateway, taking up smoking, trying to quit, missing her siblings. I frowned whenever the letters arrived, and often thought about tossing them before Elaine came home, sure that Laura was bad, bloodstained, and that Elaine shouldn’t spend her time on charity cases, even the daughter of our closest friends.

Elaine and Laura hugged. “You look beautiful, Laura. Just beautiful.”

“So do you.”

“Oh God, no,” Elaine said reflexively. “I got so fat.”

“Stop it, Elaine. She’s right — you look great.”

Laura smiled at me, and did I note something complicit there? I felt instantly guilty — although at that moment I had less than nothing to be guilty about—and sat back down next to Iris. Laura scooched in on the other side of the breakfast nook. Elaine pulled up a chair. “So,” she said. “Tell me everything.”

“Mmm … let’s see.” Laura pulled a crumb from the babka sitting on the kitchen table. “I was in California, as you guys probably know. Learning cheese making with my aunt Enid, which is an experience I only recommend for the truly dedicated or the truly insane. We managed a flock of fifty-two floppy-eared Nubians and seventy white-spotted Alpines on one hundred acres of Sonoma pasturage. We had two thousand-yard sheds full of sixty-four-gallon bulk stainless tanks, milking equipment, pens, everything. Enid and I had to oversee the milking, the aging, the caves, the packaging. I was supposed to help with the distribution. Marketing. Thank God I spoke Spanish. Enid’s a nut, you know.”

“Be fair,” Iris said. “She’s built a million-dollar business out of a flock of goats.”

“She’s a nut,” Laura said, more definitively, and I thought, Takes one to … “And then I was in France for a month after that with my cousin Harris — remember him? Steve’s son? He got an internship at a vineyard and asked me to come along.”

“A vineyard?” Elaine said. “How lovely. I didn’t know.”

“Neither did we,” Iris said. “We never know where she is half the time. We just assume she’s somewhere in the world living the life of Riley.”

“Oh, come on, Mom,” Laura said, rubbing her mother’s shoulder as though Iris were a recalcitrant child. “I was picking grapes in Alsace,” she explained.
“Le vendange.
Late harvest. Part of the whole riesling process.” Elaine and I must have looked perplexed. “I’ve been trying to learn about traditional foodways, putting together this body of knowledge that’s really being lost. Wine making, cheese making. I’m thinking of taking some bread classes next.”

“Ah,” Elaine said. Iris smirked.

“So what brings you home?” I asked. “Bread classes?”

“Oh, you know,” Laura said, waving her hand in the air. She had small hands, freshly painted fingernails, light beige, a small pearl ring on her right index finger. There was something almost costumey, though, about her decorous getup.

“She needs money,” Iris said blandly.

“I’m sorry?”

“She needs money,” Iris repeated. “She came back home because she’s broke.”

“Thanks, Mom.”

“I’m sorry.” Iris sighed. “What I meant to say was that my sister is selling the goat farm to an Austrian dairy conglomerate, and after a brief vinicultural tour of eastern France, Laura came home to reassess her prospects for a while. And learn how to bake bread.”

“My mother has a way of making it sound as though I’ve been frittering away my life instead of educating myself for the past eight years,” Laura said.

“That’s not what I said—”

“She also likes to make it sound as though I didn’t have the right to return to my own family. As though I were somehow unwelcome.”

Elaine and I both reached for the babka at the same time.

“You could have called first,” Iris said, her voice flat.

“My mother,” Laura said, “seems to like it when I call first.”

Were they really going to fight like this, right in front of us? Elaine plucked more cake. “Well, let’s see what you’ve missed here in Round Hill—”

“I’ve missed something?” Laura asked, flaring her attention at my wife. “Isn’t the whole point of Round Hill that you can be gone for ten years and not miss a thing?”

“They busted a school board member for kiddie porn a few years ago,” Elaine blurted.

“Ah,” Laura said after a few seconds. “Well, I guess that’s something.”

The sullen teenager clutching
Daniel Deronda.
The girl in the news stories, in the big flannel shirt. The toddler clutching roses at our wedding. The day they took her to Gateway, leaving before dawn, stealing away like thieves in Joe’s Volvo. She twirled her pearl ring on her finger and smiled benignly at me, then Elaine, then her mother. (The Sterns weren’t cheap, by the way. They kept their money in trusts for Laura to use in perpetuity.)

“You know,” she said, “I was just thinking it would be nice to get to know my siblings a little better. It’s been a long time since we all lived under the same roof. And Neal’s home for winter break for maybe the last time, so I thought I’d, you know, interact with him a little bit
before he goes off to the world of high-profile bioengineering. And before he marries the Red Menace.”