Mourning Glory (18 page)

Worse, aside from this business about Jewish people, which
was awful, she had stated a partial truth. Perhaps it was naive to have
integrity, to be honorable. It stood for honesty and decency and keeping one's
word and doing the right thing. Unfortunately, Jackie's argument was
compelling. Being honorable had, indeed, gotten her nowhere. Besides, wasn't
she lacking integrity in lying to Sam? What was one more packet of lies?

She knew she was living a paradox, being honorable on the
one hand and being dishonorable on the other. The fact was that she was a
goddamned hypocrite. Certainly she wasn't being honorable with Sam Goodwin. Who
was she kidding? If she knew about Sam, Jackie would see right through her. All
Grace's high-minded preaching would explode in her face.

It was a subject she wished she could exorcise from her
mind. She opened the drawer in the end table next to her bed and took out the
bottle of sleeping pills she kept for emergencies. Shaking two into her hand,
she gulped them down without water, then lay down and waited for their effect
to begin.

She was awakened by a persistent ringing of the front
door-buzzer, which pulled her out of a dreamless void. Stumbling to the door,
she opened it a crack, surprised that the chain lock had been unlatched. A
young black man stood in front of her.

"Pickup for Jewish Welfare Services," the man
said.

"Oh, yes," she mumbled, still groggy. "Just
a moment."

She returned to the bedroom and put on her terry-cloth
robe, then opened the door and let the man inside.

"Over there..." she began, then stopped abruptly.
The pile of clothes on the couch was gone. She looked in the closet. With the
exception of two outfits that Jackie had tried on last night, the others were
gone as well.

"I don't know what to say," she muttered, looking
at the young man. Her head had cleared instantly and she needed no mental
prompting to know what had happened.

"Is there some mistake?" he asked.

"Gone. All gone."

The young man shrugged.

"Guess there was some mistake."

"I'm so sorry."

He seemed puzzled, shrugged again and left the apartment.
Seething with anger, she sat down on the couch. Then she spied the note that
Jackie had left her on the Formica counter. Grace rose and ripped open a sealed
envelope.

Mom,
Somebody has got to take charge here. We have to think of ourselves first.
If you can't, I'll have to think for both of us. This doesn't mean I don't love
you. In fact, I'm doing this because I love you and I hope you'll understand.
I'm taking the car and bringing the clothes to a secondhand consignment shop.
I'll bring the car back. Darryl is meeting me in front of the apartment. He'll
take me to school. I know you think I'm being terrible and disobedient, but
sometimes I believe I have to save you from yourself. Please don't yell at me
when I come home tonight. I still love you.
Jackie

Grace read the letter again, then let it float to the
floor. It was obvious by now that she had little influence over her daughter,
and this letter, she supposed, represented the end of parenthood for her. She
felt utterly helpless and discouraged.

For a long time she sat on the couch and contemplated how
she should react. It was, she knew, pointless to get hysterical. No one was
actually hurt by her act, except perhaps the poor and homeless or others who
might have needed the clothing. And it was true that these expensive designer
clothes were incongruous to their situation.

Of course, she was concerned that somehow this might get to
Sam's attention, which would be a disaster. She would lose all credibility.
Worse, aside from being unmasked as a liar, a hypocrite and a cheat, he could
bring charges against her for theft. She tried softening the anxiety with
logic. Yes, it was worrisome. Yes, there was a risk of exposure. Jackie's
disobedience would be of little value as an alibi. The fact was, that
revelation itself would explode Grace's plot to snare Sam Goodwin as a husband
with all its ludicrous scheming and weird duplicity.

She could adopt a less pessimistic notion, she decided
after a bout of serious rumination. After all, the clothing's ownership was
theoretically anonymous. She had made no representations to Sam that she was
going to reveal the true donor. Not really. And Jackie didn't have a clue as to
the clothing's owner. It did occur to her that, perhaps, she should have gone
through the pockets for any identifying items. There was always a chance that
the storeowner might question where the clothing had come from, but somehow she
felt certain that Jackie was resourceful enough to provide the owner with a
logical cover story.

Whatever the consequences, she decided not to brood over
the issue. Moreover, she also decided to heed the voice of destiny. This plan
of hers was having side effects she hadn't banked on. Her clothes ploy had
backfired. In fact, the entire process was getting too complicated for her to
continue. Hypocrisy, she was learning, with all the associated baggage of
dissimulation and invention, was much too stressful for her.

Her eye drifted to the clock. It was past eleven. Sam had
already returned from his walk along the beach. Destiny was shifting gears,
driving her life in another direction. Should she turn back, retreat?

Perhaps it was time for this caper with Sam Goodwin to end.
She was getting in over her head.
Mrs. Burns,
she screamed inside of
herself,
go to hell.

"Okay, okay," Sam said to Marilyn, who was pawing
his leg with impatience. He looked at his watch. It was nearly nine-thirty. It
was a beautiful, sunny day. He had waited long enough.

Not that she had actually said that she would meet him. He
had merely suggested it. For some reason, he had felt that she would jump at
the chance. Why? He had disobeyed one of his prime caveats: never assume. And
he had assumed. Vague assumptions almost always resulted in disappointment.

He stepped out on the beach. The sand was still cool as he
walked to where the water hit the beach. Marilyn had shot out ahead of him and
was sniffing the edges of the wire rubbish baskets placed at intervals along
the beach, safe from the tide.

Perhaps he had talked too much about Anne. Maybe the
heaviness of his grief had put her off. Unfortunately, there was no way to hide
it or avoid thinking about Anne. He supposed that time would soften the
terrible sense of loss.

Last night he had awakened at three a.m. He hadn't had a
complete night's sleep since Anne had come back from the hospital. Declared
terminal, she had wanted to die in her own bed. She had gotten her wish.

He had felt Marilyn's weight at the foot of the bed. She
hadn't stirred. Then he had reached out and patted Anne's side of the bed. The
emptiness was palpable, instantly recalling the pain of his grief, the terrible
reality of his loss.

Yet, there was no alternative to accepting the fact of her
death. Death was final, the end of life, but far from the end of memory. Memory
survived in the living. Anne was still alive in his memory. Not only the memory
of his visible life with her, but also the memory of his invisible life, his
secret life. It was odd that he was more troubled about this secret life now
that she was gone than when she was alive.

The fact was that he had been a liar and a cheat, a fraud.
He wished that he hadn't been so successful in keeping his dirty little
secrets. Perhaps that would have eased his current pain. He had let her go into
oblivion with this unfinished business hanging in his mind and conscience.

The only bright spot in his nocturnal thoughts was that
Grace might be walking with him along the beach in the morning. Grace was
pleasant and attractive, easy to talk with, unthreatening, a tonic. He sensed
no hidden agenda on her part, no wish to get involved. She seemed open and
honest. Getting emotionally involved with another woman was, at this stage in
his grieving, the furthest thing from his thoughts.

He dreaded what was coming up in that regard. Even in those
few calls that he took from old friends and from his children, their concerns
were ominous. When the appropriate time came, if it ever did, he supposed that
their warnings might have some validity. He could understand their
protectiveness and tried to be tolerant of their cautionary views.

He was, in fact, a rich widower and ambitious,
fortune-hunting ladies would be expected to swarm around him, like hyenas
around carrion. Examples abounded among his circle of foolish older men getting
involved with younger women whose eyes were more on the money than the man. Did
his children think he was stupid enough to fall for that?

Nevertheless, both he and his children would have to accept
the risk of his single state. Perhaps he would be vulnerable, although he
doubted it. And if he was, so what? It was his business, not theirs. He felt a
growing belligerence rise to the surface of his thoughts.

He had no intention of cutting himself off from life,
although he wondered if he would still be comfortable in the world in which he
had lived with Anne, the world of country clubs, golf and tennis, dinner
parties and charity balls, the world at the so-called pinnacle, where the old,
moneyed WASP aristocracy mixed on occasion with the new, rich, super-achievers
of the meritocracy, even if they were Jews. Big money was a great leveler,
allying the old aristocrats of Palm Beach with the new money, providing they
greased the skids of their favorite charities. Indeed, the fuddy-duddy, bigoted
old guard had let some of the barbarians, like him, through their guarded gates
for a glimpse of their restricted strongholds.

Anne had been his guide and mentor in this world. Without
her it would not be the same. Not being Jewish, she knew the turf and made him
acceptable, or made him behave in ways that assured his acceptability.
Actually, he had learned to tolerate many of the people in that social world, overlooking
their narrow focus and overblown sense of entitlement. They were different
enough from what he had come from to appear exotic. Often they struck him as
some alien species lost in a time warp. They were often amusing, if one didn't
take them seriously. Some were even comical.

He picked up a piece of driftwood and flung it into the
foaming surf. Marilyn dived in after it and brought it home clutched in her
jaws. He patted her wet muzzle and pulled her ears, then moved on, leaving
Marilyn temporarily nonplussed. Marilyn would never tire of the repetition of
retrieval.

God, he missed Anne. He sat on the sand, pulled his knees
to his chin and looked out to sea, rippling and glistening out toward the
horizon. Seagulls floated gracefully overhead and little sandpipers strutted
along the ocean's edge. Marilyn came up and sat down beside him.

Without Anne, he knew he was adrift. She had been the Pied
Piper who had led him into the social web of wealth and privilege. She had an
unerring instinct about what having money really meant. She knew how it was
done; her sense of direction was flawless as she led them through the
minefields into the privileged oasis.

She had known how to dress and how to dress him, what to
say, what not to say. She knew the chitchat and the nomenclature, the various
procedures and protocol, how to walk into a room with memorable dignity and
flair and, equally important, how to walk out of a room toting your aura with
you.

He marveled at her uncanny talent to magnetize people and
capture them as loyal friends. Indeed, he had the sense that he was more than
simply her husband but an honored member of her coterie. Without her, he knew,
he was lost in that world.

And the other? With an extreme effort of will, he pushed it
out of his mind. His life with Anne, he knew, was really half a life. But he
had participated in that half joyously, obediently, and he had kept it totally
segregated, a world apart from the other half.

He got up, patted away the sand, then continued his walk,
Marilyn beside him. Even dogs, he thought suddenly. Even dogs, like Marilyn,
seemed to have pledged their fealty to Anne.

It was one of the great ironies of fate that she went
first. All of his planning for the future was dependent on him being the first
to die. She was the one who was supposed to be the survivor, to deal with the
details of passing their fortune to the next generation.

While Bruce portrayed himself as the loving son, which he
might very well have been, he couched his concerns in lawyerly ways, concocting
scenarios that would move "the fortune" into his generation with the
least tax impact. Apparently, he had consulted a number of his peers, who had
provided numerous methods to make such a transfer possible.

Carol was more emotional and less subtle, but the bare
bones of her motives were clearly evident through her skein of daughterly love.
Her various peccadilloes had already cost him a small fortune. She seemed to
specialize in liaisons with artistic types with profound appetites for
extravagance. Her present lover seemed to be world class in that persuasion.

If Anne had been the last survivor, Sam knew that she would
not have been able to stand up to their relentless pressure. She would have
capitulated early and gone along with their various allegedly unselfish
scenarios. A streak of strong guilt ran in Anne, far more than he was able to
muster.

These days he almost dreaded Bruce's calls. Sometime during
the call he would profess to have an "expert" on estate planning
waiting in the wings, by which he probably meant the wing chair that faced his
desk. Each step of this strategy, he knew, had been gone over with his wife,
whose covetousness was far more transparent than Bruce's, if that was possible.

He handled Carol differently, offering relatively small
donations to the cause periodically, not quite enough to keep her off his back
but to keep the spaces of her entreaties at longer intervals.

He had never confessed to Anne how terribly disappointed he
was in the way their children had turned out. He would have wished for more
loving children, more devoted, more demonstrative of their love and respect. He
would have liked his son to have joined him in business and would have
preferred his daughter to have stuck to some single enterprise instead of
fishing all over the lot for so-called "fulfillment" and consorting
with men who used and abused her.

Yes, he decided, as far as Bruce and Carol were concerned,
Anne's death before his own was an awful blow in more ways than one. She would
have been a lot easier to deal with.

He had no illusions about his children. He no longer had
any confidence in their attachment to him as a loving father figure, another
fantasy destroyed by life's experiences. If this was the ultimate reward of
money, he wanted no part of it.

He doubted that either his son or his daughter would be
there for him in his hour of need. His exit, he knew in his heart, would, if
left to them, be lonely and forlorn. He would leave this earth unloved, in pain
and despair, suffering their lip service and hypocrisy. It was, of course, a
painful idea, horrific in many ways, but he was convinced it was the truth.

What had he expected? He wasn't sure. Certainly not
gratitude. It was a paradox. He had loved his parents to the end and beyond,
and he had never once doubted their love and admiration for him, their respect
and encouragement. He supposed that in many ways he had failed his children,
but he wasn't sure how. Perhaps he was exaggerating his disappointment or
developing a case of galloping paranoia.

He would have liked Grace Sorentino's company. Perhaps it
had been impossible for her to get going that early, he thought hopefully,
although it was more likely that he had offended her in some way.

She wasn't at the house when he returned. But then, no
specific time had been imposed on her, and he had no reason to believe that she
had abandoned the project of disposing of Anne's clothes. Yet his
disappointment at her absence surprised him.

He showered, dressed, went off to the club, where he was
greeted by the regulars with handshakes, pats on the back and whispered
condolences. Somehow, he knew, the calibration had changed. Anne knew better
than he how to mix and maneuver in this world. Without her, he felt unsure and
uncomfortable, less secure about his place in that world.

When Anne was alive, he actually enjoyed, or allowed
himself to believe that he enjoyed, the country club life. Or, more to the
heart of the truth, he tolerated the life because of her. Please, he urged
himself, no more heart-of-the-truth personal confessions. Not yet. Not now.