Redemption (4 page)

I shook my head.

“Yes, believe me.”

“If you want me to, I'll believe you. It's a good evening for me, too. It's my first date, and I'm too old for dating.”

“You mean—since your wife died?”

“Yes. It's been a lonely three years. I picked you up last night on a bridge, and I don't know a thing about you. But I was married to a woman for forty years, and sometimes I feel that I didn't know very much about her. You're Elizabeth Hopper, young enough to be my daughter, and somehow I don't want to say good night to you.”

“Because I might kill myself?”

“No, I don't think you'll try it again.”

“But we'll never see each other after tonight, will we,” she said unhappily.

“Do you want to see me again?”

“Yes,” she said without hesitation. “Yes, please.”

“I bought a half pound of smoked salmon and half a dozen rolls called bialys. Have you ever tasted them?”

“Of course. I love them.”

“Too much for me to eat in a week. I was sort of hoping that I could entice you to breakfast at my apartment tomorrow.”

“But you have things to do—I can't just barge into your life.”

“I have nothing to do. My Sundays are days of rest, like most other days of my life—rest and boredom.”

“What time?”

“About eleven.”

“Oh, good. I'll go to early Mass and then I'll be there. What shall I wear?”

“No one else will be there. Come in jeans if you wish.”

We walked to her home on Ninety-sixth Street, and I took her to her bare apartment, where we shared another glass of wine, served in those infamous goblets. We talked, and I learned a good deal about her. Her maiden name was Mary Elizabeth White. Until she went to college, she had been a student at a convent school, the Academy of the Sacred Heart, after which she earned her M.A. From St. Mary's in South Bend, Indiana. For eight years after that, she had worked at St. Mary's as an instructor in pastel painting. There were some relationships with various men, but nothing serious until in one of those odd accidents of life, she met Sedge Hopper. He was a large, handsome man, a great athlete with a shock of blond hair. He was dominating and used to getting what he wanted, and he worked as an investment banker, a specialist in mergers and acquisitions. I asked her whether his full name was William Sedgwick Hopper, and while she was curious to know why I asked, I brushed it off with a passing word about seeing it in the papers. Evidently she knew little more about the case than I did. “Yes,” she said, “his name is William Sedgwick Hopper, but everyone called him Sedge. No one ever called him Bill or Billy.

“He thought I was beautiful—or said that he thought that. Perhaps I was pretty—prettier than I am now—but not beautiful. He said that he wanted someone unspoiled. He seemed to think that my being a student at Sacred Heart and then at St. Mary's made me into some kind of a saint. I wasn't in love with him, but my mother had begun to despair of my ever marrying, and I suppose the fact that he came from a good family, as she put it, and was a Catholic, meant a lot to her. The strange thing was that he married anyone, because he did not like women. Every woman was to him a cunt or a whore. He had been married before, but he had the marriage annulled. He boasted that it cost him ten thousand dollars. He wanted children, and I didn't become pregnant. He never forgave me for that. The first time he hit me—”

She began to cry, and I stopped her. “That's enough for tonight, Elizabeth. We'll talk about it another time—if you want to talk about it.”

“I'm sorry. I mustn't dump on you like this. I don't know why I'm telling you all this. I never told anyone else—”

“My mother used to say, ‘A sorrow shared is but half a trouble, though a joy that is shared is a joy made double.' That's kind of old-fashioned, and God help you if I ever make you listen to my woes.”

“I don't know why—”

“No,” I said firmly. “Don't finish the thought. I'm glad you saw the two priests in Zabar's. The ecumenism of food must never be underrated. My father, when we visited New York from Oneonta, upstate, used to take my mother to Dinty Moore's, where their specialties were corned beef and gefilte fish. My mother was critical of the gefilte fish, and she gave them her own recipe, which they embraced and which brought them fame among the Jewish epicures. I will see you tomorrow. Do you remember my address?” I gave her my card, just to be sure.

She was laughing. She was actually laughing. Her face changed, and suddenly she threw her arms around me and kissed me.

I took a cab home, stuffed a pipe, and sat down in my armchair for a conversation with myself, something like: “My aged and foolish Ike—what in hell's name are you getting yourself into? You are living here alone, perfectly content—well, if not content, reasonable and thereby with endurable misery—and you can sit here in the living room, where you were never permitted to smoke, and fill the air with noxious fumes and no one gives a damn; and if you want to stay in bed for half a day, you can do that, too; and you are entangling yourself with a broken, brutalized woman, and you don't know why or where it will lead you—” At that point, I broke off the conversation. I had slept poorly the night before, and I decided that what I needed was a good night's sleep. And as for staying in bed for half a day, that had happened only once, when I had the flu.

I went to bed, took a small sleeping pill, and fell asleep almost immediately, sleeping until eight o'clock the following morning. Then I showered and shaved and set the dining-room table.

I set out to plan a Sunday date. Not that I expected to be with her the entire day, but I felt a need to suppose it might happen that way. I was never much of a lady's man, and aside from being invited to various faculty dinner parties to fill in a male seat, I had dated no woman since my wife died. Mine had been a comfortable marriage to a woman who taught mathematics at the New School and who was far more interested in cooking and being a housewife than in law.

The truth was that I wanted to be with Elizabeth the whole day. If last night had been a catharsis for Elizabeth, it was for me the best evening spent in a long time. By ten o'clock I had decided that if she loved music, we would find a concert—there are always ample concerts on a Sunday afternoon in New York—and then possibly dinner and a movie, unless she was good and tired of me by then.

I kept looking at the clock. I decided that it was not too early to telephone Charlie Brown.

He growled that it was too early. “It's Sunday,” he said. “Don't you know it's Sunday?”

“Of course I know it's Sunday. That's how I knew I would find you at home in the bosom of your family,” I replied mollifyingly. “I want you to do something for me.”

“What? Tell me so I can go back to sleep.”

“No, if you go back to sleep, you'll forget.”

“OK, what can I do for you?”

“You remember that chap you spoke to me about? Harvey Goldberg in Business Administration? You said he could give me the whole story about William Sedgwick Hopper.”

“Ike, what in hell have you gotten yourself into?”

“I'm not sure,” I said slowly. “But if you could arrange a lunch with Goldberg tomorrow or the next day, I would be grateful.”

“The woman on the bridge?”

“Yes, the woman on the bridge.”

“Ike,” he said, fully awake now, “this could be a scam. You've never been down the garden path.”

“This is Hopper's ex-wife. It's no scam, and whatever it is, I'm involved.”

“You're more than involved. Hopper is a first-class prick. You don't need Goldberg to tell you that. Just read the business section of the
Times
. I don't know whether you're in love or being taken, but don't go up against Hopper. He's poison.”

“Charlie, I'm not going up against Hopper. I have no intention of going up against Hopper. But I have to know about him and what he did and how he did it. I'm no Boy Scout. I did five years in World War II. I was in the Normandy landing right up to the end.”

“That was a long time ago, Ike. All right. I'll round up Goldberg, and you pick up the check.”

At eleven o'clock, precisely, that Sunday morning, the doorbell buzzed. She must have been walking around outside to arrive exactly when she did, not a moment later. She was dressed in blue jeans. Her ruddy complexion needed no makeup, and the wind outside had added a blush to her cheeks. She wore a long heavy sweater over a linen shirt, and she looked younger than her forty-seven years, just as I was certain I looked older than my seventy-eight. We shook hands; neither of us tried to kiss the other, and I don't know which of the two of us was more awkward at the moment. I said something to the effect of, “Come inside and make yourself comfortable”; and she walked into the living room, facing the wide entrance to the dining room. I had laid out the salmon on a platter, flanked it with cream cheese and a basket of the hot rolls, just out of the oven a few minutes before she arrived.

“It's lovely,” Elizabeth said. “And you can see the Hudson River. I could never get used to that. If I lived here, I'd just sit and stare.”

“I'll get the coffee,” I said. “Unless you want something first—like a glass of wine?”

“At eleven o'clock in the morning?”

No answer to that. I didn't know what came first. I wasn't used to young women at eleven in the morning. I brought out the coffee and pulled out the chair facing the window. “Sit here and you can have your fill of the river.”

She sat down, smiled at me, and said that I was very sweet and very funny. I never thought of myself as being either sweet or funny. “You went to church,” I said—for want of any other way to open the conversation.

“Oh, yes. I'm not a very good Catholic, but I do lean on it—and I felt so good this morning.”

“Where do you work, Elizabeth?” I asked rather abruptly.

“Part-time in the shoe department at Interdale's. Women's shoes. When Sedge moved us to New York—that was three years ago, just before the annulment came—my new job at Marymount fell through. I tried to find a teaching position at Manhattanville and Fordham and some of the smaller Catholic schools, but none of the art departments was hiring. Anyway, I was sort of going to pieces, and I was paralyzed by three months of utter depression, and that's when I signed all the papers he brought me. I would have signed anything—I was so terrified of him at that point—and all I knew was that I must do what he wanted so I would never see him again.”

There were tears in her eyes now, and I switched to a discourse on smoked salmon, telling her that in Copenhagen, where I had taught a semester one summer, it was the beloved food of the whole population, and they called it lox—which I had always considered to be a Yiddish word but was actually the name for it in all the Northern countries. I piled her plate with salmon and a large lump of cream cheese, and then I spelled out my plans for the day, tentatively.

“I can't take your whole Sunday. I thought it would just be breakfast.”

“Let me tell you about my Sunday,” I said. “I would read the
New York Times
, which would take about three hours. Then I would have some scrambled eggs and toast. Then I would take a walk, and then I would come back here and listen to the Boston Symphony on Channel 13 and probably fall asleep. Can you imagine anything more important or exciting?”

“Ike—why?”

“If you don't stop crying, I can't tell you. A woman's tears break me up.”

“I love music,” she said, drying her eyes, “but I'm wearing jeans.”

“Fine. Absolutely de rigueur. Now eat.”

She was hungry. I watched her finish the lox and cream cheese and two bialys and two cups of coffee. There was no use lying to myself. There was something about her that absolutely fascinated me—an openness and vulnerability, and a gentle acceptance of this relationship that she, like myself, was unwilling to let go of, which left me wondering whether anyone had been kind to her since she had been here in New York. I found her very attractive physically, and I thought of myself kissing and caressing her—at the same time feeling that I, out of my own loneliness, was using her. She was intelligent, well educated, and we talked about books and art. As I was to find out, her knowledge of art and its history was encyclopedic.

The plan worked well. In the
Times
we found a string quartet offering an all-Mozart program scheduled to play in a small hall, and having a few hours to spare, we bundled up and walked across to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. We did the French Impressionists, and I got her to talk, and emerged better informed than I had been. She knew her subject. At the concert I held her hand. It was the first overt move I had made toward her, and she did not draw back. I sat through most of the concert with her small warm hand in mine, telling myself: Ike, this is sort of insane. But since I was obligated to apologize or explain to no one, I decided to hell with apologies or explanations.

The concert ended by seven, and we walked up Broadway to Romer's. It was a brisk March evening, and the wind brought color into her cheeks. She had that almost translucent skin that one finds among some Irish women, and her wide gray eyes registered her every mood and reaction. By the time our dinner was over, I had learned a good deal more about Elizabeth Hopper. It was not confessional, but in the way of having no secrets. It was in the manner of having found a life buoy—and to cling to it, she had to divest herself of every mystery. She had beautiful teeth, and when I mentioned that, in what context I don't remember, she remarked that they were implants. “It was after he discovered that I could not conceive. He went into a rage, and I lost my four front teeth.”

“You lost them?”