The Divide (18 page)

Sarah would later find it hard to pinpoint the moment she warmed to the idea of the move. It was more a process of attrition, a growing unease about bringing up her children in Manhattan. Unlike Abbie, Josh was not an easy child. He was a magnet for any passing virus. After a terrifying weekend when he was unable to breathe and turned blue and they had to rush him to the hospital, he was diagnosed with asthma. He was a timid and clingy boy, unsuited to the rush and clamor of the city. He screamed for an hour every morning when she left for work. And after their babysitter found him too hard to handle and quit, Sarah started turning down work to spend more time at home.

On summer weekends at Martin and Beth’s, barbecuing under the trees and meeting their neighbors and watching Abbie and Josh run free and safe and happy with the other kids, Sarah came to believe that if she was going to become more of a full-time mother, this might not be such a bad place to do it.

The issue that clinched it—and over which Benjamin and her father had their first serious falling-out—was education. Although ICA was doing well, it wasn’t yielding enough to pay the fees of fancy Manhattan private schools. Her parents had reacted with a sort of condescending incredulity when Sarah first told them of the plan to move. Long Island, as far as her father was concerned, might be a good enough place to park a yacht, but it certainly wasn’t somewhere one should choose to
live.
He had never been to Syosset but didn’t need to in order to know the
sort
of place it was. And the fact that his daughter and grandchildren were being forced to migrate there was the long-anticipated proof of Benjamin’s inability to provide for them properly. If they wanted to move out of the city, why not come up to Bedford?

In what turned out to be a last-ditch attempt to preempt the move, he took them to lunch at his club, a fusty place in which women had only marginally higher status than an ill-trained gundog. Benjamin’s ego was already bruised and bristling before they so much as sat down. It was ninety degrees outside and he had turned up in an open-neck shirt only to be forced at the door to borrow a necktie and a blazer that was several sizes too big and smelled of cigar smoke. With more enthusiasm than she yet truly felt, Sarah had been telling her father all about the house they would build. He heard her out in silence, chewing grimly on his lamb chops.

“And the schools out there are amazing,” she concluded.

He peered at her over his half-moon horn-rims.

“You’re going to put Abbie and Josh through the public school system?”

“Yes.”

“I’m astounded.”

“Well, George,” Benjamin said genially. “It was good enough for me.”

Her father turned slowly and looked at him.

“Was it?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Was it good enough for you? I’m simply asking. I mean, I’m not meaning to be disrespectful. I’m sure the education you received was as good as the town of . . . I’m sorry, I forget . . .”

“Abilene.”

“. . . could provide. But have you ever thought what you might be doing today if your parents had been able to send you somewhere better?”

It was so stunningly rude, Benjamin looked at Sarah and grinned. Oblivious, her father went on.

“Let’s give them the best possible start in life, shall we? I’ll pay.”

Benjamin stood up.

“Thank you, George, but you won’t. They’re my children—and Sarah’s, of course—and we’ll do with them what we think best. Now, I’m sorry, but I have to go earn some money.”

It was a tense moment but Sarah would always admire him for the resolute but dignified restraint with which he handled it and many similar occasions to come.

Life in the suburbs turned out to be better than Sarah felt she had any right to expect. The house Benjamin eventually built for them, in three separate stages, was exquisite. And around it, letting the trees and rocks already there dictate its design, Sarah created the garden it deserved. The children thrived. Whether it was Saturday morning soccer or horseback riding, the school play or summer camp in the Adirondacks, Abbie was always the effortless star.

With Josh it took longer. When he was just three he lost the top part of his right index finger when Benjamin inadvertently slammed a car door on it. He had a series of operations to make it look neater and it never seemed to hinder him in his writing or drawing or anything else. But it made him even more self-conscious and shy. He found school hard and was slow to make friends and had Abbie not been at hand to protect him, he might well have fallen prey to bullies. But though constantly in his sister’s shadow, gradually he grew stronger and more confident, his asthma attacks less severe. He was a sensitive and loving child but with a kind of dogged resilience, doubtless born of so much early suffering. Benjamin, of course, never forgave himself for the accident, even after Josh started joking about it, holding up two fingers and saying in a dopey hippie voice
Almost peace, man,
which became a sort of private family greeting and farewell.

The price for shepherding her son through his tribulations—though she refused to so construe it—was Sarah’s career. She had let it dwindle and the phone had finally stopped ringing. And when he was at last happy and healthy and secure and she started making calls herself, she found the world had moved on. Television had become even more ruthlessly commercial and nobody seemed much interested in the kind of films she had made. Nor were they strictly even
films
anymore. A whole new technology had taken over. Everyone was shooting documentaries on lightweight video; cutting rooms had junked the old Steenbeck machines and gone electronic. It wouldn’t have taken Sarah long to learn how to adapt. But something held her back, a feeling that her life had moved on and that perhaps she should try something new.

It was Benjamin who came up with it. Arriving home one evening, he mentioned casually that he had just seen a
For Sale
sign outside the local bookstore. It wasn’t the most inspiring of places and though Sarah, along with many friends and neighbors, used it out of loyalty, everyone moaned about the woman who owned it, how unimaginative, inept, and sometimes downright rude she was. Running her own bookstore had always been one of Sarah’s fantasies, but until Benjamin suggested they buy it, she had always thought of it in much the same way that he had once dreamed of being Paul Newman.

“We can’t afford it,” she said.

“We can.”

“I wouldn’t know how to do it.”

“You know darned well you’d be brilliant at it.”

And she was. Within three years she had turned Village Books around and started to make a modest profit. She had Benjamin design an extension at the back and, long before anybody else was doing it, made it look like a den with floor lamps and comfy leather sofas and a little bar where you could get coffee and soda and homemade cookies. She turned one corner into a children’s area with toys and a low table where they could sit and read or doodle with crayons. She set up new and quicker ordering systems and shamelessly used her old contacts, flattering and begging any writer she could think of to come and talk and sell a few books.

Benjamin and Martin, meanwhile, went from strength to strength. In the derelict downtown bakery that they had converted into a state-of-the-art studio, they now employed more than fifty people. Gradually, almost imperceptibly, and without any formal decision ever being taken, Benjamin now ran the business while Martin was its driving creative force. And though Benjamin wasn’t altogether happy about this division of their labors and felt his fingers itch at the sight of some new design taking shape on the drawing board, he acknowledged that things seemed to work best this way.

“He’s the genius and I’m the fixer,” he would say.

And though Sarah would always contradict this, not just because she sensed he wanted her to but because she had always hoped that one day he would be a great architect, she came to accept that he was right. He was more an editor than a creator. If you showed him something, be it the draft of a letter or a newspaper ad for the bookstore or the design for some sensational new building that Martin was working on, he could immediately spot the weak points and know how to improve them. It was a rare talent but one he didn’t seem to value in himself. Now and again, just to keep his eye in, he would become more hands-on with a project or even design something himself. And when this happened, Sarah saw the change in him, in his spirits and his energy, how it seemed to galvanize and brighten him.

He was the finest father to Abbie and Josh that she could ever have wanted. Whether it was helping with math homework or shooting hoops in the yard, ferrying them around town to violin lessons or Little League or dressing up as Dracula to entertain twenty kids at Halloween, he was always there for them. Sometimes, particularly during those three years when she was working long hours trying to turn the bookstore around and hadn’t yet hired Jeffrey to help, Benjamin probably saw more of them than she did. She even found herself getting a little jealous when they turned to him for help with something rather than to her.

Her friends were always saying how great he was, how much more he did than their husbands, how lucky Sarah was to have him. But the remark that would always stick in her mind came from Iris. She and her stockbroker husband, Leo—who, when he wasn’t working, seemed to spend most of his time on the golf course—lived in Pittsburgh, though in a neighborhood much classier than the one where she grew up. Iris had gone into journalism and was now an assistant editor on the
Post-Gazette
. A couple of times a year, with their three rowdy children but no Leo, she would fly to New York for a long weekend with the Coopers.

During one such visit, on a sunny Saturday morning, the two women were sitting at the kitchen table, drinking coffee and catching up on news, while Benjamin, who had already cooked breakfast for everybody, stacked the dishwasher, sorted the laundry, compiled (without any reference to Sarah) a grocery list, then cheerily packed all five kids into the car and headed off to the mall.

“Isn’t that a little spooky?” Iris said.

“What?”

“He does everything. He
knows
everything. Men aren’t supposed to know how much butter there is in the fridge. I bet he even knows the kids’ shoe sizes.”

“He does.”

“And their friends’ phone numbers?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Leo doesn’t even know their names. Does Ben know your dress size?”

“Yes.”

“Your bra size?”

“I hate shopping. He buys most of my clothes.”

“Does he know when your period’s due?”

“Iris—”

“Does he?”

“Yes.”

“It’s not natural.”

“Iris, for heaven’s sake, it’s not the nineteen-fifties.”

“Don’t get me wrong. It’s fantastic—well, some of it—but it’s not natural.”

Not quite in the next breath, but soon enough afterward for it to be apparent that there was a connecting thought, she went on to tell Sarah something she had heard from a friend of hers in Pittsburgh, a hotshot divorce lawyer.

The gist of it was that there were two types of men who absconded from their marriages: the naughty and the needy. The naughty absconder was a simple, dick-driven creature who just couldn’t help himself. However much he might love his family, it always came second to his main object in life, namely, chasing women. The needy absconder was basically insecure and forever trying to prove to himself how much everybody loved him. His family was, in effect, one big love machine that needed his constant control and attention. When his kids grew older and got lives of their own and didn’t need him so much, he suddenly got scared and felt old and useless. So he ran off to look for a new love machine someplace else.

Iris relayed all this more as a joke than as a serious piece of social observation. But for days afterward, Sarah found herself thinking about it. And the more she did, the angrier she became at the implication.

She and Benjamin were happier than almost any couple she knew. Okay, maybe he was a little too fastidious, ever the architect. Everything in life had to be in the right place, at the appropriate angle, all balanced and neat and no rough edges. And she had to admit, he was a little needy. He liked to be liked. But didn’t most men?

The idea of his being the sort who suddenly upped and left, if this was indeed what Iris had been suggesting (though, even as the thought occurred, Sarah was aware she was probably being a little paranoid here), was preposterous. They loved and trusted each other. And even though their sex life wasn’t as exciting as he wanted and had for a long time been a source of some tension between them, she had never, not once in all the years they had been married, suspected him of cheating on her. He just wasn’t the type. Any more than she was.

And in just about every other department, they were great together. Weren’t they? So many wives and mothers were always going on about how dreadful their husbands were, how selfish and boorish and uncommunicative they were. But Sarah had never felt that way. She and Benjamin had always talked. About the people they knew, about their work, about all kinds of things. Mostly, of course, about Abbie and Josh. About their progress and problems and hopes, their triumphs at school, their disappointments. Their children were, she was proud to say, the center of their universe. Thank God they were. Surely, bringing up kids and doing all you could to make them happy and secure and fit for life was what marriage was all about. Could anything be more important?

Only much later, when the children were well into their teens and Sarah was starting to look forward to all the things she and Benjamin would soon be able to do, the places they would travel to, just the two of them, did she notice the shadow that sometimes seemed to fall on him. She would catch him staring at her or into the distance with a look of such desolation that she would think something terrible had happened, that he was about to tell her he had cancer or somebody they loved had died. She would ask him if he was all right and he would click on a smile and say of course he was, why?