Half the Kingdom (3 page)

What did these two old friends talk
about
? Their conversation had two trajectories. One was circular, always looping backward over familiar matters; while the loops looped incrementally in the other, bringing them from their graduation holiday in Venice with Joe and Bertie, the two men whom they might or might not have been going to marry, to this lunch at the Café Provence on 57th Street.

Lucy told Jenny about Maurie neither accepting nor rejecting her story called “Rumpelstiltskin in Emergency,” which she had sent to
The Magazine
in October, she said. “This is July! How long can it take someone to read a three-page short-short?” Lucy always wondered but never asked Jenny if
Jenny
read her stories.

And they talked about the children. Jenny said, “My poor Bethy! Is she too unhappy, too cross, or maybe just too mean to just let me take her out to lunch?”

Lucy said, “I remember watching my little Benedict on his way to the bathroom. I’d say, ‘You need a haircut.’ I’d watch him coming out of the bathroom and I’d say, ‘Tuck in your shirt!’ You look at them with your chest in a riot of
love wanting them to
be
happy, to
tuck
in their shirt. Today, in the office,
I
knew that picking up a grown son’s sweats from underneath his chair impinges on his liberty, so I did it quick, quick, like gulping forbidden food before the calories have time to register.”

Jenny was thinking about Bethy. “She says I don’t talk about the real—the front-page matters, and, Lucy, I was thinking, the day you came to my place and we had lunch—do you remember if we even mentioned the tsunami? Did we used to talk about the Berlin Crisis? The Rosenbergs? McCarthy, Sputnik, the Cuban missiles, the Six-Day War? Watergate? Yes. The Kennedy assassination—everybody talked. Selma? Vietnam …”

“Our dinner parties!” remembered Lucy.

“MoMA was our midtown club. The theater was mostly beyond our means. The Opera was never our thing.”

“Bertie knew where to find the good jazz. And then you and Joe were in Connecticut, running Concordance. Bertie is dead. And you’re back, and we are two old women, and we’re talking.”

An ambulance passed outside. Lucy said, “I get this familiar taste of gall—but, curiously, in my gut.” She located the proprietress, who was talking with the couple by the window, caught her eye and signed a check in the air.

“Come with me,” Jenny said. “Now I’m downtown, I want to go window shopping.”

“Can’t!” said Lucy. “I have to get back to the office and read Mary Shelley’s
The Last Man
.”

Jack and Hope

The couple who had gotten Lucy’s favorite table were Jack and Hope. Jack had phoned Hope, suggested lunch, and said, “I have an agenda.” No need to specify the Café Provence or the time, fifteen minutes before noon, when they were sure of getting their table by the window. The proprietress brought the menu and told them the specials. Hope said, “I always mean to order something different,” but ordered the onion soup. Jack ordered the cassoulet saying, “I should have fish.”

“And a bottle of your Merlot,” he told the proprietress, “which we will have right away.”

“We’ll share a salad,” said Hope. She saw Jack watch the proprietress walk away in the direction of the bar in a remarkably short skirt for a woman in her fifties. Hope watched the long, brown, athletic legs with Jack’s eyes. She looked at Jack, a large man with a large dark bearded face. He turned to Hope.

“So?”

“Okay, I guess. You?”

Jack said, “My agenda: If it were New Year’s and we were making resolutions, what would yours be?”

Hope’s interest pricked right up. “I’m thinking. You go first.”

Jack said, “Jeremy tells me I’ve got to watch what I eat.” Jeremy was Jack’s son. “Idea for a
New Yorker
cartoon: Fat man eating a whole capon in front of a mirror. Legend ‘Henry the Eighth watches what he eats.’ ”

Hope said, “To watch what I watch and then turn the TV off. It feels debauched waking in the morning with the thing flickering.”

Jack said, “No more buying books from Amazon till I’ve read the ones on my shelves.”

Hope said, “Hanging my clothes in the closet even if nobody is coming over. Nora is very severe with me.” Nora was Hope’s daughter.

The wine arrived. Jack did his label checking, cork sniffing, tasting. He nodded. The salad came. Hope served their two plates. “In Provence it came after the main course.”

Jack indicated Hope’s hair, which she had done in an upsweep.

“Very fetching,” he commented.

“Thank you. And my old resolution: What was her name—my French teacher after we got back from Paris. I once counted nine years of school French—and you had to do all the talking.”

Jack said, “To learn how to pray.”

Hope looked across the table to see if he was being funny. Jack concentrated on folding a whole lettuce leaf into his mouth.

Hope said, “I will never understand the principle of not cutting it into bite sizes.”

The onion soup came; the cassoulet came. Jack asked Hope if she would like to go back.

“Back! Go back to Provence?”

“To Aix, to Paris.”

Jack and Hope had lived together, before marrying two
other people. Jack subsequently divorced his wife who had subsequently died. Hope was widowed.

“There’s something I’ve been thinking of asking you,” Hope said. “Were you and I ever together in a very old garden? Do you remember walking under century-old trees? Where was it we lay in the grass and looked into the crown of a tree? France? Was it in England? Or is this a garden in a book?”

“What’s to stop us going back?” Jack said.

There were reasons, of course, that stopped them. Two of the littlest were this moment flattening their noses against the outside of the restaurant window.

Eight-year-old John stuck his thumbs in his ears and wiggled his fingers at his grandfather. Hope made as if to catch her granddaughter’s hands through the glass. Little Miranda laughed. On the sidewalk stood Hope’s daughter, Nora, with baby Julia in the stroller. She had come to fetch her mother. Jack’s son, Jeremy, had come to get his father.

“I’m just going to the bathroom,” Hope mouthed to her daughter through the glass.

“
What?
” Nora mouthed back, her elegant features sharpened with irritation. The baby was howling and a wailing ambulance passed at her back. “She has to
know
I can’t hear her,” Nora said to Jeremy.

Jeremy told Nora to stay with the kids. “I’ll go in and get him and see what she wants.”

In the doorway, Jeremy stepped back to let Jenny and
Lucy come out. He walked straight to the corner where, an hour earlier, he had folded up his father’s wheelchair and wheeled it to the table.

Hope stood up. She came around to kiss Jack and be kissed good-bye.

“On the double, Dad!” said Jeremy. “I need to get back to the office.”

“I’ll phone you,” Jack said to Hope, “and we’ll have lunch.”

Hope was mouthing to Nora again.

“Julie, shut up,
please
!” Nora said, and the baby started screeching. “
WHAT
, Mom!”

Hope stabbed a finger in the direction of the ladies’ room.

Nora signaled, “You need
me
,” pointing at herself, “to go with
you
?” pointing at Hope. Hope shook her head no. One of the reasons for the Café Provence was that its bathrooms were on the street floor, not in the basement down a long stair.

Hope opened the door into the ladies’ room and saw, in the mirror above the basins, how her hair was coming out of its pins. She removed all the pins and stood gazing at the crone with the gray, girlishly loosened locks around her shoulders and saw what Diane Arbus might have seen and was appalled, and being appalled pricked her interest right up: “I’ve got an agenda: The Arbus Factor of old age,” Hope looked forward to saying to Jack the next time it would be convenient for Jeremy and Nora to arrange lunch for them at the Café Provence.

Jenny

Summer, and Manhattan lies tranced, lush, and melancholy with the absence of friends traveling abroad, or away in their houses by summer ponds, or a hop and a skip from the ocean beaches. The afternoon belongs all to Jenny. Not a person in the world—well, Lucy—knows that she is walking on “the Fifth Avenue,” as Henry James called it, a tourist in her own city. Jenny is surprised all over again at the gigantism of the new glass structures. When did this block and the next turn seedy and brutal? Jenny follows the old glamour on its move a block to the east. Here, behind the great plate glass, is a single, delicious, appalling, little, translucent, winged, thousand-dollar cotton blouse.

Jenny walks and keeps walking, passing store after store before she gets herself to enter one through its high glass double doors. The interior was designed by Gehry.

Is it the subliminal retreat of Jenny Bernstine’s head downward between her shoulders that cues the expression peculiar to ruminating camels and unoccupied salesladies in Madison Avenue boutiques? The saleslady intuits the approach—sees hovering on the outskirts of her domain, the type of wrong—the non-customer.

Jenny smiles into the Madison Avenue boutique saleslady’s grossly inhospitable eyes. “I used to dream,” she tells her, “when I was a girl, of such a dress. A gown!” Jenny lets the tea-colored liquefaction glide across the back of her hand. “I’d
love
to get my daughter a tea-colored gown! It’s that grown-up daughters wouldn’t be caught dead in a ditch
wearing something their mom has picked out for them,” chattered Jenny. “What I could do is buy it for myself, and then my daughter can come and borrow it?”

Has the Madison Avenue saleslady missed her cue? Her facial expression undergoes an alteration. There was a game with which Joe used to amuse little Bethy. He would arrange his face into the tragic mask and wipe it away with an upward sweep of his open hand, revealing his comic grin. The saleslady’s smirk registers her readiness to be of service to the customer who might turn out to be a live one: If the young lady has brunette coloring, these golden notes would be a perfect accent.

“She’s a reddish blonde, like San Giuliano.”

Beautiful, and which this color, believes the saleslady, would particularly complement.

“I think you’re right,” agrees the customer, “except that tea-colored silk would radically disagree with my daughter’s politics.”

The smile goes out and reveals the look, on the Madison Avenue saleslady’s face, of a terminal discouragement. She’s no youngster; her salary makes for a sorry living without commissions from the sales to the customers traveling abroad or away in their houses by summer ponds, or near the ocean beaches. Her look of defeat accompanies Jenny on the escalator to the upscale floors. It hangs like an odor about the collections with designer names known to those in the know about the human genius that expresses itself in winged cotton blouses partnered with nine-inch see-through skirts and coats of many colors that it wouldn’t occur to you and
me to put next to each other—embroidered cloths / Enwrought with golden and silver light / The blue and the dim and the dark, and the speckled, stippled, freckled, dappled stuffs which—the sales lady was right the first time—Jenny is not going to buy, and Bethy will never wear the tea-colored gown to Cinderella’s ball.

Bethy

Bethy had tried to reach her mother, but nobody knew where Lucy had taken Jenny to lunch. Neither of them had a cell phone, so it was not till she got home, in the late afternoon, that Jenny learned Joe had stopped breathing and the ambulance had taken him to Emergency at Cedars of Lebanon.

By the time Jenny, her face wizened and diminished by terror, forged through the curtains of his cubicle, Joe was grinning at her from his gurney, and Bethy, having survived her own hell of fright, was letting him have it.

“He knew something was wrong at lunchtime when you came up to the office,” she shouted, “but he went right ahead unpacking his apocalypses!”

Joe said, “You tell yourself, ‘If I am doing what I do when I’m all right, I must be all right.’ ”

“What are you smiling
about
?” screamed Bethy, beside herself.

“Bethy!” said Jenny.

“Not being dead yet,” Joe said.

“You know what Al calls you behind your back? Smiley-face!”

“Beth. Please!”

“Benedict says it’s your antique grin in the bone.”

“That’s rather good,” her father said.

The young and pretty Dr. Miriam Haddad walked in. She had Joe Bernstine’s record and said, “Your vitals are good, but Dr. Stimson, our head of Emergency, would like to keep you in Observation over the weekend. Just to see what is going on.”

“Darling,” Jenny says to Bethy the next day, “There’s no need really for you to sit around here.”

“If there’s no need, really, why are you sitting around?” Bethy says. “If you are sitting, why wouldn’t I sit?”

So they both sit with Joe.

“Why is he even lying in bed?” says Bethy. “He’s not
that
sick.” Bethy gets up, walks to the TV, and puts it on. Joe turns on his side to watch the vintage movie. The hero’s evening dress shows that he has a waist. He has shoulders and a flat stomach. This is the hero, in evening dress, who climbs out of a window.

Joe says, “Turn it off.”

Bethy says, “Why?”

The man in evening dress has stood up so that the points of his evening shoes jut over the narrow ledge.

“Turn it off,” says Joe.

Jenny says, “Bethy, please, turn the TV off.”

“I’m not turning it off.”

Joe has turned his face to the wall but looks around to check on the man on the ledge, who has spread his hands seeking contact with the wall behind him and inches himself along the ledge looking down at the pygmy traffic on the move so many stories below. Joe sits up, struggling to untangle his legs from the sheet to find the ground under his feet.

“Where are you going?” Bethy asks her father.

“The bathroom.”

“Bethy!” pleads Jenny.