Rise and Shine (37 page)

Meghan still leaves dinner parties early, not because she has to go to bed but because she has to go to work. But the other guests leave, too, to watch who Meghan talks to and what they say. We get a different kind of comment on the street than we once did. A man in a dark topcoat will bark, “Good job with the chairman of the Fed!,” the sort of man who, five years ago, would have told her that his wife was a big fan.

Meghan says that Edward is her biggest fan, and this is undoubtedly true. In the beginning he was little more to me than a series of conspicuously kind and thoughtful gestures. Theater tickets, private museum tours, box lunches from Française at the rehab facility, a prototype wheelchair afterward. Meghan held him at arm’s length for the first year, and he neither complained nor retreated. He is almost twenty years older than she is, and because of that I was casually dismissive of the relationship, ironic since Edward and Irving are almost exactly the same age.

Then one night when Max and Isabelle were a year old I called, crying, because they had the croup. Their coughing was so abrupt and harsh that they sounded like angry seals, and their faces had gone scarlet with the strain. The pediatrician said to turn on the shower until steam filled the room and sit with them there, although she did not say how to keep two babies who had just learned to walk from putting their hands beneath the scalding spray. I sat in the bathroom and wept in a miasma of steam and self-pity, my sister broadcasting live from a college campus in Chicago, my children’s father in Las Vegas at a law enforcement convention.

I spent most of that night with Edward, I on the floor with Max, he on the toilet with Isabelle. I had seen him as one of those silver-haired aristos whom Meghan had always pointed out as resembling our father, except that his eyes beneath the hood of age were uncommonly kind. But condensation humanized him, and by the time we emerged I knew of his youthful disinclination to go into the family business, the heart attack his father suffered that forced his hand, his wife’s long struggle with breast cancer, and his deep affection for the more old-fashioned writers: Trollope, Dickens, and Henry James. His silver hair was plastered to his forehead, and he made rice cereal for the children and an omelet for me, although I knew he’d had a private chef since he’d bought a duplex apartment overlooking the East River ten years before. He was a widower with two grown sons, and he said that one, the one who was the English professor, not the one who’d taken over the daily running of the business, had had croup a dozen times when he was small, and that he’d felt a flush of nostalgia sitting there with a baby on his knee in the steamy bathroom. “I like the little guys,” he said, smelling Isabelle’s hair.

He and Meghan were married last year in the living room of his apartment, in front of a wall of windows that framed the East River and a great big piece of Queens. At the start of the twilight ceremony, a fireboat sent an enormous spray of water into the air. His sons and hers surrounded the couple, and as they turned toward each other, I saw the faint surprise in her eyes and I knew she was feeling, perhaps not that she loved him, but that she was enormously content. He made everything so easy.

Which made it doubly difficult for her when, after the graduation ceremony, the two of us found ourselves stranded in upper Manhattan, or at least stranded by Meghan’s measure. Leo had gone off to a lunch and a picnic and a party and a party, and Edward to a board meeting downtown. There had been a cavalcade of black cars, and we had seen everybody off triumphantly: Evan, Irving, Tequila back to the office, Maureen to the home of an old friend on Long Island. It was only when we stood at the curb with the twins, our programs rolled damply in our perspiring hands, that we realized we had come up one car short, and not a cab to be found in the press of gowned graduates and departing family. The silver scar on Meghan’s forehead glowed in the way it does when she is angry or upset or simply rattled. It bisects a constellation of freckles like a shooting star.

“This is not how I pictured this,” Meghan said grimly as we pushed through the subway turnstile.

“We’re holding the pole. We’re not letting go,” said Isabelle, repeating the instructions given to her on a hundred rides on the Broadway local.

“I guess it could be worse,” Meghan said, keeping her head low. “We could live in L.A.”

“Bite your tongue.”

It was a party on the train, half the passengers in Columbia blue gowns, some of them already feeling the effects of too much champagne. An old man surprised us all by launching into a shaky a cappella version of “Pomp and Circumstance” at 110th Street. By 96th Street, when we left the train, he had already begun to bore the other passengers. The attention span of the average New Yorker is roughly the amount of time it takes to travel from one local stop to another.

“I can’t believe you take the subway,” a young woman carrying a mortarboard in one hand and a leather diploma folder in the other said to Meghan as she pushed by us on the way up the steep subway stairs. So many things Meghan does that people can’t believe: flies commercial, calls for takeout, buys the paper at the newsstand. Of course, most of them are things she doesn’t do anymore. There is the plane for trips, and Derek and his wife for meals and errands. They had come to live in Brooklyn when Edward sold the Jamaica house after he and Meghan married. Mercedes works for us now, caring for our children.

Our personal favorite was the woman who had said one night, at the Waldorf, “I can’t believe you go to the ladies’ room.”

“Famous people are like Barbie,” Meghan said afterward. “They can’t even be bothered to urinate.”

At the corner of Ninety-sixth Street and Broadway, we blinked in the May sunshine. A few torn clouds moved across the sky, then disappeared behind a new forty-two-story apartment tower that had been built where a six-story brick walk-up once stood. Two double strollers angled for room on the sidewalk. In my neighborhood, the double stroller has become the official icon of the city, the late-in-life babies side by side. If you’re put on hold at my pharmacy, and of course you always are, the recorded message tells you that the place is the largest single supplier of fertility drugs in the nation. Ah, New York, where we are all so busy that sometimes we even forget to reproduce, and then find ourselves paying richly for the privilege. Everyone assumed our children were the result of a clinic, a series of painful tests, and a petri dish, and I had stopped suggesting otherwise.

“Ah, here are some cabs,” Meghan said.

“Come home with us for a while,” I said. “I’ll make grilled cheese.”

“Do you have sweet pickles?”

“My feet are hurting,” roared Isabelle. “My feet are hurting very very much.”

“That settles it,” said Meghan, holding Isabelle on her hip. Max immediately put his arms up, and I lifted him, too. Standing there, we balanced each other perfectly, but not in the way we once had. My sister had been transmuted by what had happened to her and what had happened to her son. Sometimes now, Leo complained, she looked at him with a question in her eyes. He couldn’t figure out what she wanted. But all she wanted was to know that everything would be fine, that the past does not matter. And of course it does. In every city she visits, she meets with doctors who are experts on spinal cord injuries. If walking were ever to be for sale, Meghan would buy it for Leo with Edward’s money.

No one else would see or know, but something had broken inside her, and I could see where the spirit had been forcibly mended. Maybe it had cracked before, when the housekeeper shrieked as the police told her about our parents, when Evan began to make comments about the shallow and transitory nature of morning television. Or maybe it had happened in Jamaica, or in the hospital room, or even in the Tubman projects. For years I had not seen. Now I could not unsee. Does someone have to break so someone else can be whole?

I shifted Max to the other side. He tried a tentative pull at my earring, and I shook him off. “No way, José,” I said, and he replied, as always, “I’m not José!”

We started down the block, and it was then we realized a young woman was standing beside us, waiting for us to see her, to acknowledge her. She pushed her sunglasses up into a head of tight black curls as she looked at Meghan. I watched my sister arrange her face into the sort of pleasant attentiveness, signifying nothing, that she had long ago developed for these occasions. The girl was nervous, worrying the strap of her shoulder bag, and she began with that thing a fifty-one-year-old woman least likes to hear.

“I’ve been watching you since I was a little girl,” she said. “And I just wanted to say, to say that, I’m a journalism student at Columbia, I’m interested in making documentaries, I’m just a huge admirer, huge, the interview you did last week with that geneticist was amazing, it was the first time I understood any of that. Oh, God, I’m babbling, I’m sorry, I’m invading your privacy, I just had to say you’re an incredible role model to us. All of us. All of us women.”

Isabelle squinted suspiciously. “What’s your name?” Meghan asked.

“My name?”

“Yes.”

“Eve.”

“Do you have a pen, Eve?”

The girl was carrying one of those big shoulder bags that all journalists carry. Meghan had had one, when she was young.

“I do,” the young woman said. “I always have a pen in my purse. And a notebook. I always have a pen and a notebook.”

“Good.” Meghan dictated her office number, not the one I had, that went straight to her, but the public number. “Call and tell my assistant that I told you to call. Her name is Tequila. Like the liquor. You can come someday and have coffee.”

“Oh my God, really? Thank you. Thank you so much.”

“You’re a nice person,” I said when we were out of earshot.

“I’m hungry,” Isabelle whined.

“You don’t have to carry her the whole way home.”

“Sure I do,” Meghan said.

I smiled at my sister and said in a falsetto voice, “I’ve been watching you since I was a little girl.”

“Goddamn straight.”

Isabelle lifted her head. “Don’t swear, Aunt Meghan,” she said. “It’s not nice.”

“I know, sweetheart. I just forgot.” Isabelle put her head back down, and my sister looked at me over it. “I’ve been watching you, too,” she said.

“I know,” I said.