Saving Grace (17 page)

Lily knew she could defeat Tamar in a moment, merely by urging her contrary daughter to accept the invitation. But did she want to? Leaving home might not heal the wound of Gracie’s disastrous love affair, but it would take her out of the public sphere. It would separate her from Jonathan, too, which would not be a bad thing.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” she said.

“It’s a very good idea,” Gracie said predictably. “I’d go if I could. But I can’t desert Dad now, not when this whole thing’s my fault.”

“Just part of it. A relatively small part.”

“He warned me. I wouldn’t listen.”

Lily knelt on the mattress, facing Gracie and pressed a hand to her cheek. “Listen to me, Gracie. Barnaby was out to smear your father with your help or without it. He knows that. If he didn’t tell you that, it’s only because he’s angry at you for saying what you did. As he has every right to be.”

Gracie removed her mother’s hands. “I’m sorry I was stupid enough to tell that story to Barnaby. But I didn’t make it up. It really happened.”

Lily wasn’t going there. “No matter what you think happened, you never should have told it to a reporter. Really, Gracie, where was your head?”

“If you’ve come to scold me, you’re wasting your time. There’s nothing you can say I haven’t already said to myself. I’m a traitor. Daddy hates me now, and I deserve it.”

So dramatic, thought Lily, so proud. So like Jonathan. “He doesn’t hate you,” she said. “He’s angry and hurt; but he could never hate you.”

“Leave me alone.” Gracie flung herself down and buried her face in the pillows. Lily stroked her long black hair, soft as the fine black down she was born with. Lily closed her eyes. Her thoughts turned to the day her daughter was born.

When her labor had started, two weeks early, Lily settled herself for a long wait. But Gracie
 
was in a hurry. Jonathan drove her to the hospital, weaving through rush-hour traffic. By the time they arrived, the contractions were continuous. As she lay on the examining table, Lily felt the first unmistakable urge to push. “It’s coming!” she gasped.

A bleary-eyed young resident dressed in jeans and a plaid shirt glanced between her stirruped legs and shouted for a stretcher. “Don’t push,” he told her. “Don’t push,” as if Lily had anything to say about it. The baby was pushing, and it was stronger than both of them.

Time passed, an agonizing blur. Lily found herself in a delivery room, lying flat on her back on a table. Jonathan was behind her, holding her shoulders. The young resident, still in street clothes, joked about express deliveries as he held up his hands to be gloved. Another contraction swept over Lily. She felt the baby pushing, pushing at the door.

The doctor’s hand slipped inside her. She felt him pressing it back. “Let it out,” she screamed. “Let it out!”

But the doctor stood very still, staring downward, his face a mirror that suddenly turned dark. “Huh,” he said.

“Almost there,” Jonathan whispered encouragingly, his mouth to her ear. “One arm’s already out.”

“Idiot!” she snarled, for she knew the baby hadn’t crowned yet, and who but a man could think that delivering a baby fist-first was good! Then another contraction bore her away. “Pant, don’t push!” the doctor commanded, but he was just a voice: all the urgency in the world was concentrated on the life within her, struggling to emerge. On the next contraction, Lily felt herself tear open and heard a lusty wail coming from both within and without her body.

“It’s a girl,” the doctor said, and he held up the baby, still connected to the umbilical cord. She was brick red, wriggling and bawling. Her little face was scrunched up with indignation, and her skull was an odd shape, flattened on top. Lily looked up at Jonathan. He was gazing at the baby as if he’d never seen anything so beautiful.
 

After the cord was cut, the nurses cleaned the baby, swaddled her, and carried her over to Lily. But Lily was mid-contraction, expelling the afterbirth. Jonathan took the baby instead, and smiled down at her face. “Grace,” he said. “Amazing Grace.”

Then Lily held out her arms, and Jonathan passed the baby to her. “Hello, Gracie,” she said, and suddenly the baby stopped crying. Her eyes met Lily’s with a look of recognition that said as plainly as words: “It’s you!”

And she’d never changed, Lily thought. Gracie went through life as she entered it, fist-first and with that odd, discerning look. Lately, though, judgments had accrued to the look, like bits of barnacle adhering to a rock.
 

Gracie’s breath was slow and deep, as if she had fallen asleep. Lily was not deceived. “Can we talk about Barnaby?”
 

“No!” was the muffled reply, so immediate and inevitable it made her smile.

“Then don’t talk, just listen. I’m speaking not as your mother, but as an older woman. Barnaby deceived you. He’s spent his whole career manipulating people, and he has no scruples at all. You didn’t have a chance, Gracie.”

“I should have known,” said the muffled voice. “I just closed my eyes.”

Lily sighed. “Don’t we all?”

“But I don’t want to be like that,” Gracie said.
Don’t want to be like you,
she meant, and Lily knew it.

* * *

In a small artery close to the heart of old Greenwich Village stands a run-down, dingy old tavern called Maxie’s. Never renovated, never sold, the bar is run by the same man who opened it in 1942, Max Horowitz, then a twenty-three-year-old greenhorn from Galicia. Within months of arriving in New York he knew what he wanted to do, but it took two years of backbreaking eighteen-hours-a-day labor as a stevedore to accomplish it. Even after he had the money, it took six months to find the premises: a sprawling workshop in an alley near MacDougal. The owner had died and the widow was selling cheap. Max put in plumbing, installed a bar, and purchased a mismatched assortment of tables and chairs off the back of a truck. The tavern was almost ready; all it lacked was a name.

All the best bars of the day bore their proprietors’ names: Clancy’s, Reilly’s, O’Malley’s. The Irish names had a ring that “Horowitz’s” lacked. Max couldn’t imagine the guys he had worked with on the docks calling out to their mates, “Meet you for a beer in Horowitz’s.” Of course, it wasn’t just the name. Who ever heard of a Jewish barkeep? A good
yeshiva bucher
could grow up to be a storekeeper, sure; a scribbler, maybe; but a barman?

Max Horowitz was what he was, a Jew. Couldn’t hide it and wouldn’t if he could. He named the joint Maxie’s.

The walls were a dingy olive and hadn’t been painted in ten years. Horowitz had a thing about hiring workers and kept saying he would do it himself, but everyone knew he was past it. The drinks were your basic drinks. He could manage a Scotch and soda, but Horowitz wasn’t big on cocktails. Ask Max for a White Russian and he’d send you to Siberia; but his shots were generous and cheap, and though he couldn’t be bothered to serve food, the peanuts were the best in town. Reporters from the
Probe
and the
Village Voice
began frequenting the tavern soon after it opened, and never found a reason to stop. Its air of embedded neglect sheltered it from the waves of gentrification that periodically inundated the Village; and if he liked you, Horowitz was a soft touch for credit.

So it was natural and fitting that Barnaby should repair there after finishing his day’s work. His reception was gratifying, especially by his Voice colleagues; indeed, Barnaby would have been quite overwhelmed by all the drinks and the accolades had it not been for his consciousness that they were well-deserved and overdue. Fleishman’s psychotic interlude had blighted what should have been the best day of his career. But no outsiders knew about that, and chances were they never would—because no matter how obnoxious they were to your face,
Probe
staffers didn’t wash the paper’s dirty laundry in public.

At least, he found himself rather fervently hoping they didn’t. Somehow the business with Gracie had grown from a niggling discomfort into a full-blown hassle. Barnaby couldn’t understand his colleagues’ attitude. It hurt him that they credited Fleishman’s accusation. Why should they? Fleishman had every reason to accuse him falsely, and this seduction story was a perfect red herring. The fact that it was true didn’t excuse their believing it—for after all, Barnaby was not the kind of man to do what he had done, and his colleagues above all should have known that.

And even if Gracie confirmed it, what did it matter in the greater scheme of things? There’s no law against sleeping with an eighteen-year- old woman, no matter how old you are. And there sure as hell wasn’t anything original about sleeping with a source, which sometimes seemed more the industry rule than the exception.
 

Half an hour after Barnaby arrived at Maxie’s, Brian Rossiter walked in and was greeted with much genuflection and uncovering of heads by the assembly. Never before had anyone from the
Times,
let alone one of its most powerful editors, been seen at Maxie’s, which was strictly a low-rent press tradition.

A portly Irishman of about sixty, Rossiter had recently suffered a heart attack and was rumored to be headed for early retirement. A fierce game of musical chairs was raging at the
Times;
the situation was fluid. Rossiter walked into the saloon, looked about purposefully, and headed straight for Barnaby, who stood in the center of a group at the bar.

A path parted before him like the Red Sea for Moses. “Fine story, Barnaby,” Rossiter said, shaking hands. “You sure as hell left us in the dust. Was that stuff true, or did you make it up?”

“Pure fiction, of course. What else is left when the
Times
monopolizes all the news that’s fit to print?”

Rossiter smiled without even trying to look like he meant it. “Got a minute?”

“Sure,” said Barnaby, who was wishing he’d gone a bit lighter on the free drinks. They took a corner table, and Max himself came over to take their orders—beer for Barnaby, bourbon for Rossiter.
 

“We’ll be playing catch-up for a while on this one, damn you,” Rossiter said.

“Glad to hear it,” Barnaby said.

“Of course, once the Kavin story broke, we started looking hard at Fleishman.”

“Not hard enough, considering you’ve got ten times my resources.”

“Not hard enough,” the editor conceded, “assuming your story checks out.”
 

“It checks out.”

“Sorry to hear it. I liked Fleishman. Respected him.”

“Me, too,” Barnaby said. “I’d have said he broke my heart, if I had one.”

“Just a shame so few people will read the piece. What’s your circulation at the
Probe,
around a hundred, hundred twenty thou?”

“Thereabouts.”

“Makes me wonder what a guy like you could do with some juice behind him.”

Barnaby’s heart fluttered like a girl whose boyfriend has just taken a knee. “Funny you should say that, because just this morning I was saying to myself, ‘Barnaby, a man with your talents is wasted on the
Probe.’
My very words.”

The editor smiled. Barnaby smiled back. Over Rossiter’s shoulder he saw the street door open. Ronnie Neidelman walked in.

Barnaby shifted his chair to put his back to her, forgetting that Ronnie knew his back better than his front, having seen rather more of it. She headed straight for his table

“Hey, sweetie,” she said, bussing his cheek. “Thought I’d find you here. How’s the nose?”

He could smell booze on her breath. “Not now, Ronnie.”
 

“Aren’t you going to introduce me, lover?”

“She calls everyone that,” Barnaby said to Rossiter
sotto voce.
“Brian Rossiter, Ronnie Neidelman. Ronnie’s one of our best and brightest, when she’s sober.”

Uninvited, Ronnie pulled up a chair from a neighboring table and squeezed between the two men. “I thought I recognized you,” she said to Rossiter. What’s the Times’ Metro editor doing slumming in Maxie’s?”

“Hardly slumming,” Rossiter replied; then, to Barnaby, “Maybe we should continue this another time.”

“Ronnie was just leaving.”
 

“Am I embarrassing you, Barnaby?” she cooed.

“No, you’re embarrassing yourself. Go home and sober up.”

Ronnie turned to face Rossiter. “Continue what? What are you boys up to?”

“I was just congratulating Barnaby on his Fleishman piece.”

“Speaking of Fleishman’s piece—”

Barnaby cut in hastily. “That’s enough!”

She ignored him. “You weren’t by any chance offering him a job, were you, Mr. Rossiter? Because if you were, there’s something you should know.”

Barnaby got to his feet and yanked Ronnie up with him. The clear-eyed malice of her smile told him that she wasn’t nearly as drunk as she pretended; instead she was laughing in his face, taunting him, daring him. He’d never hit a woman in his life, but now it was all he could do to refrain. He put his mouth to her ear. “Leave now, or I swear to God I’ll have you fired in the morning.”

“Relax, Barnaby,” she said loudly. “I’m on your side. I was just going to tell Mr. Rossiter that whatever he hears, it wasn’t your fault. That sort of problem usually starts very young. I wouldn’t be surprised if you yourself were abused as a child.”