Rise and Shine (14 page)

I
N EVERY CITY
in the world, the airport offers a disinclination to visit. It’s not what they look like inside necessarily; in a couple of the southern cities they’ve got rocking chairs tucked into every alcove on the concourse, I guess so you can sit there and imagine you’re on a front porch as the Airbuses lumber onto the runway. The problem is where the complex is located in the first place. No one wants to waste prime real estate on runways and hangars, so most airports are in the part of town that looks most like the place you’d least like to visit. In warm-weather countries, you’re looking forward to a piña colada and water clear down to your toes, and you look out at disintegrating cinder-block buildings, ramshackle houses with no windows, and sometimes even the wreckage of a past plane. Irving and I went to Mexico together once, a big mistake since for Irving a real vacation is a shooting under the boardwalk in Coney Island in July. He’s the kind of guy who starts checking his messages the moment the landing gear hits the tarmac. In Mexico there was a half-finished hangar with no roof just off the left wing of the plane. Someone had scrawled a sentence on it in Spanish with black spray paint. Irving, who has learned Spanish by osmosis after years of being a cop, said the sentence was “You should die, you scum.”

“We should feel right at home here,” he said. And he did when he paid a courtesy call on the chief of police, who let him go along while they rousted a gang selling bootleg phone cards. I went snorkeling and took a Pilates class and threw out my back.

But as far as I can tell, there is on the face of the earth no airport to compare with John F. Kennedy Airport in New York. Every kid who passes through our shelters and transitional housing has at one time or another had to go on a field trip to Ellis Island, which has now been retrofitted so that the early immigrant experience seems like a cross between a trip on a cruise ship and a celebration of diversity. (“Jesus, if it had been like this, they wouldn’t have sent my father home with the typhoid,” I heard an old man say once when I took the tour.) Our kids miss the irony of all the “give me your tired, your poor” stuff they’re fed by the guides on these trips; they’re kids, so they haven’t entirely tumbled to the fact that they are the tired and the poor of this generation. Maybe a generation from now someone will open a homeless shelter museum and it will look like the floors were waxed and there were comfortable cots.

The modern incarnation of Ellis Island is instead JFK. First you fly into Queens, over attached brick houses and small apartment buildings. The water landing is over a stretch of ocean as gray as a battleship, the sort of sea that looks utterly impenetrable, as though it would close over anything that touched down there so convincingly that it would be as if the thing never existed at all.

But it is the insides of the terminals that really say it all. Dun-colored, dirty, with winding corridors that seem to go nowhere, then suddenly give out onto vast open spaces of dark flooring and multilingual din. Elsewhere in America, airports have begun to sprout day spas, Calder mobiles, historical murals, indoor playgrounds, shoe stores, jewelry stores, cosmetics stores, museum stores. Not JFK. Its arriving passengers from other countries must wonder, just as those at Ellis Island once did, what in the world they were thinking when they decided to come here. Those returning to their own countries know the answer. Czech Airlines, Korean Air Lines, Varig, Aerocaribe: the lines snake between the faded ropes, people traveling as companions to their packing boxes. New microwaves, DVD players, flat-screen TVs, air conditioners, even Lava lamps. They came, they drove through the single-family sprawl of Queens to the Emerald City, they shopped at a favorable exchange rate, and they went home.

“Tourists,” we mutter when we’re trying to hotfoot it through Columbus Circle and there is a family in shorts and “I (heart) NY” T-shirts walking at a normal pace in front of us.

No one escapes the drab and hostile monotony of JFK. I know this from experience. Meghan and I have gone on several trips together: the spa, the think tank conference, the five days at the Ritz in Paris. We arrive at the airport in the way the rich and famous do. The black car pulls up at a prearranged location. A woman from the airline is there in a blazer and a colorful matching scarf. She holds a clipboard. She directs someone who disappears with the luggage, which we will not see again until it appears, a tiny islet of home, in the middle of the carpet in our hotel suite. (Once, Meghan said, she never saw her luggage for an entire trip. She was staying at a castle in Scotland, doing a story on the son of a bus driver who had become the wealthiest man in England. The luggage had gone from the plane to the castle in a separate car, up a separate staircase, unpacked by the maids, and then stored in a separate room. “Beam me up, Scotty!” Meghan had said of the experience. On the air.) We are taken down a secret corridor into a special room and from there down another corridor that suddenly opens onto the boarding area. We are boarded last, and when we sit down there is a sound like bees swarming, which is the sound of everyone in First Class turning to their seatmates to whisper, “Meghan Fitzmaurice.” It’s that
zzz
in the middle that makes the noise.

There are two sorts of children of this sort of privilege: the little brats who embrace it wholeheartedly, who order room service waiters around and complain that the spa doesn’t have good shorts for sale, and the other kind. Leo is, of course, the other kind. He and I went together to visit Stanford, a visit he had arranged for a weekend when Meghan was speaking to a cybertech brain trust gathering in Seattle. I am never sure how much of this is deliberate on Leo’s part. I do know that Meghan is a major distraction. Brides whose fiancés are up-and-coming network reporters or business associates of Evan’s are always dazzled by the idea of having her at their weddings. But the brides who are network reporters themselves never are. They know that no matter what they are wearing, who has done the flowers, how good the food, or how beautiful the room, the guests will care only that Meghan Fitzmaurice is sitting at table number 3. At Stanford, Leo would have had a different sort of tour with his mother, the tour that included a meeting with the president of the university, a walk through the campus with the valedictorian and the head of PR, the avuncular calls afterward from alums who just happen to be studio heads or name partners in law firms.

With me he got the information session with a hundred people so nervous that the whole room turned clammy. With me he got the airport line and the security check and the inattentive flight attendant. Or as inattentive as the flight attendant ever is in First Class.

And with his friends he even got coach, and a lost duffel bag, and the security drone who pulled them out of line and patted them down. When he came down the long corridor with his headphones hanging around his neck, carrying only a single large bag and yelling, “Dude! Dude! Dude!” at another kid who was getting his yayas out by leaping into the air to skim the pocked ceiling tiles with his fingers, I felt a surge of happiness, and then of fear. I wondered if Meghan had felt it when we were children: No, Bridget, they’re not coming back. No, we can’t stay here. No, we can’t have our own rooms. Meghan was a practiced bearer of bad news, especially now that she had been doing it for a living for so long. It didn’t catch in her throat the way it did in mine. Meghan could tell you seven miners had been killed in a shaft collapse in Monongahela, Pennsylvania, without even stumbling over the name of the town.

Which comes first, I thought as I watched Leo hitch the ubiquitous backpack on his shoulder, his red head shining in the dull fluorescence that was part of the hideous Kennedy ambience. Which comes first, his mother’s foul mouth on national television or his father’s determination to leave? Which comes first, disgrace or divorce? The first he would laugh off. The second would break his heart.

“Bridey,” he cried, “you irascible daughter of St. Patrick!”

“Leo FM Grater,” I replied, “the pride of the Yankees.” When he hugged me, I felt small. He is the only person who has ever made me feel that way. I don’t know why I love that so.

“What are you doing here?” he asked, letting me go, looking around, searching the crowd. I felt a surge of rage at both Meghan and Evan. Then Leo grinned and pointed. To one side of the crowd was a limo driver in a dark suit holding a sign.
WELCOME HOME, LEO
! it said.

“That’s not our driver,” I said.

“No, that’s the guy Mom sent. She called me in Spain and set it all up last week. I told her I couldn’t stick around because of a big comp lit paper I’ve got to crash overnight. So she said she’d send a car to drive me right up to school. Beats the train.” Leo chuckled drily. “Crossed signals?” he said. “Miscommunication? Duplication of effort? All of the above? Or are you just so happy to see me that you had to drive all the way out to Queens? We can get dinner, anyhow, and then I’ll get the guy to drive me to school. But if I bomb on this paper, I’m blaming you, and you know your sister will be pissed. And when Mom is pissed, watch out.”

The other boys eddied around us, some to cabs at the curb, others nodding to drivers and handing over bags, a few to their parents. “You want to offer anybody a ride?” I murmured against his boy-fragrant shoulder.

He pulled back and looked at me, his mouth up at one corner with what would be a smile if you were a person with a perpetual sense of irony. His nanny had always said Leo was an old soul. At the very least, he has eyes that will not lie no matter how much he bids them try. If Leo loves you, they are like lights behind copper-colored glass. If he disapproves they go flat as a mud puddle.

“I think just us, Bride.” And I knew he knew about what had happened on the show.

“You guys all thought I was on a
farm
farm,” he said when I’d sheepishly sent Meghan’s car away and we’d climbed into the one Evan had insisted on sending for me. “But it was a farm like the Holdernesses’ farm, or the Beltons’.” Both were families who lived near Meghan and Evan’s country place, and the closest they came to farming was that occasionally the wives would pick chives to throw into the eggs on Sunday morning, feeling extraordinarily domestic. I liked Vannie Holderness, who always acted as though Meghan was just another guest, but when she waxed poetic about how uppity and arriviste the Hamptons are, it was hard not to crack wise about her garden, which was planted with nothing but white flowers.

In the backseat, Leo cracked open a bottle of spring water. “These people had about three thousand acres and a whole stable full of horses. Really, really nice, though. The mom was great. She just raises the horses, does stud stuff, shows them sometimes. He’s in the government, but I think he must have done something else before. Or maybe she did. All I know is they have a Picasso over the fireplace.” Leo looked out the window. “Like Mrs. Booth would say, a big Picasso. Not an etching.”

Peter Booth is Leo’s best friend. The fact that he is a great kid who wants to become a pediatric oncologist proves that it’s nature, not nurture, that makes the man. His mother is one of the most loathsome climbers in all of New York, which is a little like saying someone is the chicest person in Paris. Hadley Booth was incapable of mentioning Leo without mentioning Meghan, which was why Leo and Peter spent most of their time at Leo’s house.

“Anyhow, the señora is really smart and interesting, but just like you she’s got her weird gossipy things she’s interested in. And one of them is this magazine called
Olé!
which is filled with movie star stuff and the royal family and all that. And last week she’s reading
Olé!
in the den, and she suddenly looks up as though she got bit by a bee. She goes into the kitchen and starts talking very quietly in French to Georges. The dad.”

“French?”

“They speak German, too. English. Americans are so bad. They think one language is enough. It was kind of embarrassing to only speak two. I think I’m gonna take Chinese next semester. Anyway, their kid, who’s another Georges, only they call him Googy, he’s like, What’s up? I said maybe one of their friends was in the magazine, but he said they don’t have those kinds of friends. So we have a normal night, the parents go out but they’re still acting wack, so we find the magazine in the trash and we’re paging through it and there’s a big story. Big story. Not as big as the one about the Spanish soap star and the soccer player, but still pretty big. You want to know how they say ‘fucking asshole’ in Spanish?”

“Watch your mouth.”

“You’re talking to the wrong person.” It’s true. Leo has been notoriously abstemious in the matter of profanity since he grew out of the purely imitative toddler phase. It is as though he feels one sewer mouth in the family is enough. “How’s Mom, anyhow? Are the picture guys all over her?”

“She’s away, hon. She left early for Grosvenor’s Cove. Did she tell you about that?”

“Yeah yeah yeah, that’s right. They’re gone, huh? Yeah, she made this big thing about how they were supposed to leave just when I was coming back and how they would postpone so we could all be together, and I was, like, I’m not going to be there anyhow, save it until after this term’s finally over and we can all hang out. How’s Dad holding up? I bet he’s digging this a little bit. He’s been telling her for years that her mouth was going to get her in trouble.”