The Family Man (9 page)
H
E PLANS TO CONFESS
all recent developments—paternal, romantic, tabloidesque—to Sheri Abrams, but when and in what order?
He is relieved of that decision when he and Thalia are shopping at Zabar's, country of coffee-bean origin under discussion, and he comes face to face with his therapist. Henry says, "Um. This is Thalia. Thalia, Sheri Abrams."
Sheri says stiffly, neutrally, "How do you do."
"Are we neighbors?" Thalia asks.
"Of a sort," Sheri answers.
"My therapist," says Henry.
"Does she know about ... the arrangement?" Thalia asks Henry.
Henry shakes his head, a very small arc to signal,
No, and let's leave it at that.
Thalia says, "Oops. Forget I ever said a word. I just assumed ... your shrink..." She takes a giant, balletic step backward. "End of topic. Nice to meet you," and pantomimes a key locking her lips. Then, in a stage whisper: "It's just that I think he'd like to bounce the whole thing off someone besides me."
Sheri doesn't answer, but Henry reads in her stare both curiosity and protectiveness: Will this putative daughter ultimately disappoint?
He doesn't tell Thalia to knock it off, to stop wearing her conversational heart on her sleeve and accosting strangers on the street, because more often than not he adores Thalia's Celestelike lack of self-consciousness. She is, he thinks, what he would have liked to have been at twenty-nine. At any age.
What big thing—so big that his stepdaughter brings it up at Zabar's—should Henry discuss on the couch? Sheri needs to know as soon as he crosses the threshold holding one latte less than usual the following week.
Which topic from his list of secrets shall he illuminate? Definitely not the legally protected Leif business, which Sheri Abrams would berate as shallow and exemplifying what's wrong with Hollywood, with the culture, with this country and century. Perhaps the fact that he's met a nice man and they've had two follow-up phone calls, one drop-in shopping trip to Gracious Home, and a date for the upcoming Thursday night. The answer that floats to the top is the least personal one:
Thalia has moved into my maisonette.
He pronounces that sentence, and the doctor sits up straighter. "So soon?"
"Only the time it took her to find a replacement roommate for her place in Chinatown."
"Minutes, by my count."
"They all do Craigslist now."
"Is your place furnished?" she asks.
Henry laughs. Sheri asks what about her question was humorous.
"It wasn't what I was expecting: more practical than psychiatric. Something my mother would have asked if I told her I was renting out the first floor."
Sheri, he knows, loves discussing his mother and his childhood as the unplanned and athletically disappointing fourth son. There were a few weeks during Williebelle's residency at West 75th Street when Sheri lobbied for family therapy. The one session he agreed to wasn't fruitful. Williebelle had never been in therapy, nor, apparently, had she absorbed much from cultural conditioning or TV as to what happens inside the four walls of a therapist's office. In advance Henry told his mother that the doctor would be asking them both questions about her adjustment to a new city and most likely about their relationship, all toward the goal of understanding Henry better. Williebelle swept in, complimented the exotic decor and what she called the "big old darlin' puppy." Once seated, she gave unsolicited testimonials to the city of New York: How she wished she'd moved here in her youth, or even in middle age. Or even five years ago when she was a zippy eighty-year-old. Bergdorf Goodman was her favorite store. And truth be told: She had discovered a secondhand designer consignment shop across the big park where some goods had their original tags still attached! Henry took her to plays but wouldn't tell her what the tickets cost.
"It sounds like a seamless adjustment," the doctor said.
Williebelle frowned. Well, there was one disappointment. All her life she'd heard about the Automat, and that was a letdown when she found out it had closed. But then again, Henry said that it had been all about the novelty and not the food.
Sheri had tried to bring the conversation back to Henry with, "You certainly appear to be happy living with that son of yours. I sense that he occupies a special place in your heart."
"I don't play favorites," Williebelle had said primly. "My other sons are busy with wives and children, so it's easier for a mother to be close to a bachelor son, especially one with extra bedrooms."
Henry said, "Mom, Sheri is a psychologist. You don't have to use words like
bachelor
if you
mean gay.
"
"He wasn't always gay," Williebelle had explained. "He was married for several years to a young widow."
"She knows the whole story and all the players in excruciating detail. That's when I started these visits, around the time of the divorce."
"To find his way," Sheri had amplified. "To make peace with his sexual orientation. To get support."
Mrs. Archer had said with a sigh, "Henry was an accident. I didn't mean to have a fourth child." She looked over at him fondly, adding a smile as if that truth had lost any power to smart. "I
might
have minded his becoming a homosexual if I didn't have other sons who
weren't
homosexuals. But I've got plenty of daughters-in-law and more than enough grandchildren. I'm closer to Henry, not just because I'm under his roof but because of his interests." She had turned to her son and said, "Would you mind if I said you were the daughter I never had?"
Henry did mind, but he didn't want to introduce grist for a maternal return visit. He had said, "For someone her age and background, I accept that as her way of saying we both read the arts section before the sports page."
"How does that make you feel—your mother saying you were an accident?" Sheri asked.
"Happy I made it," Henry had said. "Glad to be here."
"His brothers used to taunt him about that," Williebelle offered. "They'd say awful things like, 'You were an accident.'"
Henry smiled. His mother, in an adjacent chair, patted his nearest hand. "But I loved him to pieces the minute he came out. Did he ever tell you he was the first baby of the new year in the whole state? We were on the front page of the newspaper, and to this day people still remember it was one of my babies who won that award."
"He never told me that."
"He might not remember because he was only one day old when the picture came out. I was a little woozy myself. I didn't even mean to name him Henry, but it was my husband's father's name and we only had girls' names picked. Sometimes I wonder if that had something to do with the way he turned out, swimming around in there being called Claudia June. There was a gap—how many years, Henry? Five, six?—between him and his brothers. So he was my little companion. I knew he wasn't like other boys—well, not like
my
other boys. A mother knows these things."
"How is
your
mother?" Henry asked Sheri. "I'm sure mine would be interested in hearing how you two get along and about your siblings."
"Does she live nearby?" asked Williebelle.
And so forth, until the doctor's face registered what Henry had known all along, that this visit was unnecessary and pleasantly going nowhere.
"What's your new tenant doing for work?" Sheri Abrams asks him.
"Same."
"Checking coats at your salon?"
He says, "Actually, she's given two weeks' notice. After which, she's going to concentrate on her acting."
Is that a lie? He thinks not. He also thinks that life may be working out in such a way that weekly sessions with a therapist are beginning to intrude on his increasingly busy days. Would he be jinxing things to quit today? If he weren't spending an hour a week hooked up to the lie detector that is Sheri Abrams, he wouldn't have to feel quite so much a dissembler, a withholder, and a covert social operator. He says, "I'm thinking of taking a hiatus."
"Of what kind?"
"Therapeutic," he says. "You and I. I feel as if I'm torn in several different directions, all good. I'm busier than I've been in years."
He knows she won't cajole. He adds, "And this time, looking ahead, I might throw caution to the wind and say, 'Let's meet for dinner down the road.'"
Sheri says, "One thing I have to say: a twenty-nine-year-old whom you've only known for a few weeks, who is finding herself, who just lost her father—you see where this is going?—who has just found a most congenial and generous stand-in, may not be best-friend material. I'm guessing you two are in the honeymoon phase." She forces a tight smile. "But I'm sure you see all of this clearly."
Henry says, "I'm oddly happy. I think most therapists would be tickled to write those words on a client's chart."
"I am," she says. She taps her pen against her notes. "I'm also underlining the word
oddly.
"
"I met someone," he says, a farewell gift painless to bequeath because the wall clock is telling him that they have to stop.
He returns home to find Denise sitting on his front stoop, wearing blue jeans studded with grommets and holding a cake box on her lap. "Anything you want to tell me?" she asks with a matchmaker's triumphant smile.
"No. What's in the box?"
"Cupcakes. Two for you and one for me." She opens the box to display rather ordinary cupcakes, two yellow and one chocolate, not the high-fashion confections that are causing lines to form out the door of the specialist on Amsterdam Avenue.
He sits down next to her. "And let me guess: You were in the neighborhood, so it was easier to stop by than to pick up the phone?"
"Ha! Leaving Henry Archer a message is an invitation to be ignored."
He is about to say, "Don't take it personally. I don't like talking on the phone," when he remembers that Denise has a very high threshold for divorce- and infidelity-related punishment. "I'm not this way with everyone," he says. "I'm sure it has to do with old resentments."
"Of me?"
"Of you, of your late husband, of his lawyer the homophobe."
"I understand now," she says. "I really do. And over the years I was tempted to call you and ask if you wanted to get a drink or come to Thalia's birthday party or a graduation or a recital."
"Tempted? Until you remembered that I was an unfit parent?"
"But you didn't fight us! You folded! You just let Glenn steamroll over you and snatch Thalia away. I thought that you'd send a birthday present. A birthday card, for chrissakes. I thought you'd appeal. But it was as if you'd died. You moved. You changed your phone number. My Christmas card came back. My valentines came back—"
"Valentines? Is this to be believed?"
"From Thalia. Well, I bought them and she signed them. When she was six, seven, eight; when kids send valentines to the whole class. And when they came back 'Address Unknown,' that proved to Glenn that he was right: You were not interested in Thalia or fatherhood."
Henry jumps to his feet. "I resent that! You had no idea what she meant to me. None. You were too busy seducing other women's husbands to notice how I felt about that child! And, Jesus, you had my right address, unless quote-unquote
Nanny
didn't share it with you."
Denise is clearly stunned to hear insults hurled by the famously even-tempered Henry Archer. She pouts for a spell, eyes narrowed, fingernails clicking, before yelling back, "Maybe you'd like to form a club with Nanette, Glenn's ex. She'd be thrilled to hear from you. You two could picket my apartment building. You could call yourselves 'The Enemy of My Enemy Is My Friend Club.'"
In three long strides Henry is on the brick path that leads to the maisonette's front door. "Now it's my turn," he says. "And you know why? Because it's the will of the child. Not yours, not her stepfather's, not a judge's, or the state of New York's."
"What are you talking about?"
"This"—he gestures grandly—"is an apartment. It is the ground floor of my house. Where I live. I could rent it out, but I don't. I don't want to interview tenants and I don't want to be a landlord. I keep it for family and for friends in need."
Denise has risen to her feet and her expression has turned beatific. "Henry," she breathes. "I don't know. I'd have to see it. It looks small. And I'm so used to having a doorman."
"Not you! You wouldn't put your scullery maid in here. It's three dark rooms with linoleum on the kitchen floor. Jesus. It's too ridiculous to contemplate. Let alone the idea that you'd be sharing a house with me."
She joins him at the front door. "Then what are you babbling about? 'The will of the child' and 'friends in need.' Have you taken in one of those nieces or nephews? Or adopted someone?"
"I'm talking about Thalia. Thalia moved in here. Your estranged daughter and I are sharing a house. How does that strike you? As the arrangement of someone demonstrating inadequate and actionable noninterest in his child?"
He is not himself. He has lost his temper, yelled on the street in plain sight of his neighbors and dog walkers, and all but stamped his foot. And now he will have to explain to Thalia that, in a moment of pique and retribution, he has told her mother news that wasn't his to leak. He quickly adds, "Don't contact her. I'm not looking to be an arbitrator or a peacemaker. It slipped out."
"It didn't slip out! You were taking aim. Right here, between the eyes." She squeezes between two ornamental yews and peers into the front window.
"Jesus," says Henry. "Get away from there."
"Is she home?"
"She's at work."
"Do you have a key?"
"I certainly do not," he lies. "Nor would I let you in if I did." Denise says unconvincingly, "I only meant that I'd scribble a note."
"Saying what?"
"Something friendly. 'I'm sorry.' Or 'Please call.' Or 'You're all I've got.' Along those lines."
Henry reaches over and pinches an inch of sleeve to guide her away from the window. "Here's what I'm asking of you: Please just consider this, parent to parent, as confidential information. As my way of saying only that your daughter is well and has a roof over her head and a parental eye watching out for her. Let the rest happen organically."