The Sixteenth of June (7 page)

How is what you do work? This is the unsaid question people direct Stephen's way. He isn't a coal miner or a surgeon. His father had an impressive career in finance. His mother, for all her faults, bore children. What is Stephen's contribution?

“You don't feel you are accomplished?” Grandma Portman had asked, listening to these questions and peering at him.

“I don't feel like what I do matters.”

“Ah. Well. I was a housewife. When we compare, no one holds up. ‘So what' is an annihilating question.”

That was the thing about his grandmother. She could hit you with a line like that and stop you cold.

“You give yourself too hard of a time,” Nora says beside him. “If you find something you love, that's enough.”

“
I
give myself a hard time?”

Nora smiles.

Soon, the synagogue basement will empty. He and Nora had snuck out. She had a spare set of keys for the car in her purse.

He didn't need to give Nora an excuse to leave, but the trays of cold cuts and the two-liter bottles of soda had done it. The tacky supermarket food. He knew his parents were preoccupied with the party. But when he saw that afterthought of a spread—which they would never have permitted for something that mattered to them—he understood their heartlessness.

“Life is strange,” he says, folding his arms across his chest. “I bet my grandmother never imagined ending up in Pennsylvania, of all places. How does it happen? You have such dreams when you're a kid. And then you find yourself teaching some idiotic composition class, grading papers on the train.”

He recalls that book of proverbs with its blue cloth. The sayings it tracked weren't necessarily elegant or clever; they were simply what had pervaded. “Do people end up doing what they love? I'm not so sure. And why is that? It's as if life comes preprogrammed. We seem to go with the defaults, even if it means being miserable.” As though when reaching for words, we can only grasp at what's already there: grasp at straws, offer pennies for thoughts. As though life would not meet us if we were to leap.

But Stephen cannot bring himself to say more, to follow the path of his thoughts. Not today.

The idea had come to him after his last visit with his grandmother. He could go to New York.

It was a preposterous idea, but it had taken up residence, and he found himself returning to it. He began to wonder about writing his dissertation from afar. You can write anywhere, he realized. It was such an obvious thought, but it had never occurred to him before. He could email Stuart his chapters, take the train in for meetings. Why not? What was keeping him in Philly? The only person he would miss was Nora.

Then another, more dangerous thought entered his mind. She could come, too.

Oh, it was unthinkable. He could never do such a thing, could never even suggest it jokingly. But it has become a daydream, one that's startlingly vivid. He can picture the two of them in a small apartment, more cramped than the one he is already in, but somehow more charming for it. He imagines clacking away at a typewriter with a mug of tea, a scarf around his neck. He imagines Nora coming home from auditions. He imagines her practicing with her sheet music, a pencil behind her ear.

“It's better not to think too much,” Nora remarks. He turns to look at her. “I know how that sounds. Maybe it's Leo's influence, what he would say. But me and you—we think everything to death. You can sit around contemplating life forever, but meanwhile it continues. So you might as well have chosen something and made the best of it.”

A ringing endorsement for marriage. But Stephen has vowed since the engagement to keep his mouth shut.

He knows he will lose her, too. She will go out to Ardmore or Gladwyne, one of those bucolic suburbs Leo loves. She will end up locked away in her “might as well.”

When Leo lays out his visions for them, Nora never frowns or looks away uncomfortably; they never fight over their future, so far as Stephen can tell. It is endearing to hear Leo describe it: the house, the oaks, the hairless limbs of toddlers in a blur of motion. He speaks of it with a grin, knowing that he is signing them up for a certain kind of chaos. “Three kids?” June had said, stricken. “Really?”

But Nora doesn't see that the vision rests on her back. Leo will continue with his job, continue bathing his beloved car. His commute will be easier, his life generally improved for the addition of wife and house and kids. He'll watch sports and hang out with the guys. Nora will be the one forced to sacrifice, subtly at first, the water getting incrementally warmer until it is at a boil.

We stake our place in this world. Isn't that what Grandma Portman had been trying to tell him? “To be a housewife is to become the result of everyone else's decisions,” she had said.

It is what he feels happening around him, their choices narrowing. It all got decided somehow, fate urging you along, daring you to accept its nudge.

When he tries to hint at some of his doubts to Stuart, his adviser merely nods and says, “Just so, Stephen. Just so.” Just once, Stephen wants Stuart to pause, to clear his throat. To say, “Well, of course, you don't mean that now, do you?” He wants Stuart to remove his glasses and look at him, frowning. Instead, Stephen's every concern is deemed proof that he's in the right place. Stuart often had a nostalgic smile playing about his lips, as though recalling his own similar frustrations. If Stephen were to tell Stuart tonight that he wants to drop out, Stuart would probably nod, bemused, and say, “Well said, Stephen. That's exactly
it
.”

Hannah Portman had never set foot in Pine Grove before living there. She was shown a brochure; her tour of the place had been on move-in day. Had it felt like this? As if the person assuring you your doubts were for nothing didn't know you at all?

It is difficult to heed the warning bells. How much easier to just go along and agree. To watch the trajectory of the ball long ago set in motion and see where it will land, as though you are not the product of its outcome. To watch as though you have no hand in your own life. As though the only words we have available to us were written long ago in a blue book. As though we cannot make our own stories, decide our own fates.

Nora has already given up auditions. Occasionally the audience at Manning catches a glimpse of her soaring vocals. They freeze, startled, before whooping and clapping. Stephen has come to hate these moments. That's a world-class voice, he wants to yell. Meanwhile, Leo beams, proud of his girl. It isn't Leo's fault. He's always been clear about what he wants. No one can accuse him of disguising his desires. But Stephen has come to understand the lure of complacency. And there Leo is, encouraging Nora to settle down. Encouraging her to settle.

It all starts with a choice. “A girl, a girl. What did I know?” his grandmother used to say. Regret was a luxury. She didn't have time to question her decisions. It was Poland. It was 1939. She and her new husband fled, embracing each other instead of their doubts.

His grandfather came to America first, securing them a house. God, Stephen thinks. Did she ever pick out a place of her own? That house. Then the nursing home. Probably the coffin. Did she ever have a say?

Once it starts, it's hard to choose differently. His grandmother had made a decision, a choice that probably felt harmless at the time. A kiss, nothing more, a girl wanting to see how it felt. Hannah Portman had stepped up and closed her eyes, perhaps not so much choosing as giving in.

He looks at Nora beside him. It's not the future we should fear, he wants to tell her. It's ourselves.

It almost makes him laugh. I too, he thinks. I too am a reluctant bride.

Seven

A
t least the wind's died down,” June observes. “I was worried at the cemetery I'd come undone!”

Nora takes in June's blond helmet, streaked with highlights of ash and honey. That chignon could probably survive gale-force winds. June tilts the Escalade's side mirror to survey herself while Leo winces.

The family had converged around the SUV. “There you are,” Leo said lightly, coming over to Nora's side of the car. She ducked to put her shoes back on, telling herself there was no reason to feel guilty. It wasn't as if she and Stephen had been making out in the backseat. When she straightened, Leo gave her an inquisitorial look. Any luck? his eyes asked. Nora raised her mouth to his ear. “I tried the dental tools. Even the bamboo splinters. But nothing! He's not talking.”

“We have to remember to save the paper,” June adds.

“For the obituary?” Stephen asks. “It was in yesterday's
Inquirer
. I already clipped it.”

Nora had spotted it, too, scanning the paper over breakfast. There was Hannah Portman's name, the serifed font skeletal and scythe-wielding. Nora's eyes lingered on it, thinking how strange it was to have a person's life reduced to a few words.

“No, I mean for the feature.” June unfastens her clutch. “We talked to Tom.”

“The feature?” Stephen repeats.

“Tom?” Leo inquires.

June brings out a tube of lipstick.
YSL
, the letters say, gleaming in gold script.

“Thursday was just the obit,” Michael explains. “This will be a longer piece memorializing her. They're running it in the Sunday paper.”

“An article? There will be an
article
about her?” Stephen stares at his parents.

“It's a profile,” Michael says calmly. “We wanted to pay tribute.”

“A shame it comes too late for the party,” Stephen mutters. “Would've made a lovely favor.”

June glances up from her application of lipstick. “We thought you'd be pleased.” Her lips are rubies, glistening and red. Stephen looks away from her, shoving his hands into his pockets.

“Tom Laughlin,” Michael says to Leo. “He heads the Arts and Culture section. Great guy.”

They have a few minutes before they need to head back to the city. Michael and June's gray sedan sits several spaces over, its hue the same color as the sky: luminous, mercurial. “What a waste,” Nora's mother would have admonished. “What good is an SUV if you don't fill it?” Nora imagines June sandwiched in the back of the Escalade, straddling the hump and looking put out, her black heel tapping.

“We've been thinking about placing an ad in the
Inquirer
at work,” Leo comments. “Reaching out to more local companies.”

“Talk to Tom tonight,” Michael suggests. “He was saying it's been a record year for ads.”

“Good for them.” Leo nods. “It's the ads that sell a paper. That's their whole revenue stream.”

That and weddings. Leo has a special “Weddings” edition from the
Inquirer
hidden under his side of the bed, tucked away like a dirty magazine. Nora had flipped through its lists of vendors and pointed advice for couples. “Dear Philly Bride,” she imagined Leo writing, chewing on his pen. “My fiancée has a bald spot and is in protracted mourning for her dead mother. Is there a veil you'd recommend?”

“The whole family can be in the paper!” Stephen chimes in brightly. “Parties, deaths, software. A cornucopia of Portman news.”

They ignore him, but Nora wouldn't be surprised if it actually came to pass. She can envision a write-up of the party: “Bloomsday Celebration Draws Elite Crowd.” Delancey had once been photographed for an article on interior design. Maybe the newspaper would recycle the handsome photograph they had on file, Michael and June standing by the staircase, looking elegant and refined.

“Those two are like celebrities,” Nora's mom once commented. Nora had laughed, but it was true in a way. Michael and June were so accustomed to a life of glamour that a tribute to Grandma Portman in the paper probably felt sincere to them. Nora can picture them in their master bedroom, June applying face cream. “We should commemorate her somehow,” she would say to her reflection. “Maybe a piece in the paper?” “Perfect,” Michael would reply. “I'll call Tom.”

It would never have occurred to them to mourn privately, as Stephen wished. Michael was probably relieved to call Tom, to have a to-do list, spreading his grief outward. Maybe this is Nora's problem, that she holds her grief in, internalizing it, rather than distributing its weight.

“The new book is coming out,” she remembers suddenly. “Is that next week, already?”

“Tuesday,” June affirms, capping her lipstick.

“Sweet of you to remember, Nora,” Michael says. “It's an exciting moment for the author. Nothing like that first big review!”

Nora sees a defiant pride break across his face. One day his company will make the front page: “Local Press Makes Waves.”

Michael was formerly a funds manager in New York. Nora doesn't understand these financial jobs, all so abstract and vague. “What exactly is a hedge fund?” she once asked him cautiously. But she was lost immediately in Michael's explanation, the terms dizzying. “He stayed away from the shrubs,” Stephen liked to joke. “Avoided the trellis.”

His specialty had been selling short. Which, if she understands correctly, meant that he bet against the market, anticipated declines. “But how does that work?” she persisted. “How do you profit from a decline?” “You can profit from anything,” Leo told her. “My dad just saw things that other people didn't.” “But isn't there an ethics to it, a problem of conscience?” “How do you mean?” Leo asked. “Because if you think something's going to go down, you're betting on people losing money.” Leo had smiled. “A lot of it is through derivatives, love,” he said reassuringly. “Meaning what?” “Meaning that it's all Monopoly money anyway.”

It makes Nora's head hurt to think about such abstractions: buying and selling not objects, or even slices of companies making those objects, but
ideas
,
all of it speculative, notions and forecasts factored into algorithms. What was it like to trade in intangibles?

When Nora sings, she feels it in her body. People treat the arts as if they are obscure, finance as though it is concrete, but she has always thought it is just the opposite. Music is visceral. People respond to it right away. “You were so moving,” people will say after a performance, and Nora likes to think she has actually moved them, the sound waves traveling from her mouth into their bodies and causing an internal shift.

“It's not so complicated,” Michael told her of his work. “I just looked the other way. It's hard to stand out when you're all looking at the same data. So I started looking down when everyone else was looking up.” He shrugged, as though describing something simple.

All she knows for sure is that he had done spectacularly well. He'd made enough that he could purchase the town house on Delancey, that dignified strip of privilege, and have his wife renovate it extravagantly. Enough that he could start his publishing house without worrying over whether it would be profitable. “Small presses usually aren't,” he said, his eyes twinkling.

Dubliner Books had put out a few chapbooks of poetry, some experimental fiction, and now this biography. “You should have an online presence,” Leo urged. “Not just company information, but actual content, like online poems or whatever. People could read this stuff from their phones.”

Michael smiled tolerantly at the idea, but Nora senses a different a side of him is nurtured by publishing. He often appears at brunch with ink stains on his fingers. “You're just getting in the way over there!” June chastises. “As if you're a tradesman!” After the table is cleared of dishes, he spreads sample layouts across its surface. “Which one do you think, Nora?” he asks, indicating with a tilt of his head for her to come over. The surprise of his kindness never wears off.

Nora suspects that Michael thrills to the tangible nature of publishing. He is like a farmer, cultivating books in lieu of crops. He shares stories of his labors on Sundays, regaling them with tales of the printing machines and drawers of type.

“Wait, they do it by hand?” Leopold once asked, incredulous. “Surely there's a better way.”

But Michael had chosen to work with that particular letterpress company because he was charmed by its approach, its dedication to the art of printing. The company is owned by a woman, Helen, in her twenties. “Just out of art school, all on her own,” Michael marveled. He was filled with admiration when he described her. “How quickly she does that job. Practice makes perfect. Seems to see with her fingers.” Leo sulked when Michael sang her praises, a jealous pet forced to watch another animal get rewarded.

The printing company operates out of an old warehouse down by the river. “You should hear the racket!” Michael likes to crow. Nora imagines it is the great clang of productivity—people making actual
things
—that he fell for, so different from the hustle of Wall Street.

Michael gazes at his finished products reverently, a boy beaming over his latest creation. The first chapbook of poetry was an eyesore, a ghastly shade of gray with a dark-purple font. “I now have a say in color,” June says airily whenever the books are brought out.

“You'd think you'd have more sympathy for the guy,” Nora once remarked to Stephen. “He clearly loves books.”

“You clearly love
him
,” Stephen returned. “Don't let his labor of love fool you, Nora. The business of books is still very much a business.”

It's true that Michael's sense of ambition is palpable. His imprint will probably be purchased by a top publisher one day; if anyone could find a way to make poetry profitable, it is Michael. June, by contrast, exudes ennui as she floats through Delancey's rooms, led by nothing more than her whims.

June dabbles in pet projects, keeping their social calendar filled with museum galas and black-tie benefits. She periodically sets out her watercolors and easel in her immaculate white office and then shrugs nonchalantly when friends coo, “June! My goodness. How do you find the time?” while gazing at her drippy abstractions.

Meanwhile, the groceries get delivered, the dry cleaning dropped off, the pillows plumped by strange hands. June hands out keys like she is the mayor. Nora wonders how many of them must be circulating through the city, in various pockets, dangling from key chains.

Strangers handle the most intimate details at Delancey—walking the dog, swapping hydrangeas for peonies in the thick, crystal globes. All June ever sees of them is their bill. Maybe that's the whole point of hiring someone. If you start wondering about the people fingering your underwear, arranging it in lacy rows, you might as well be doing it yourself.

“Girl, she be havin' a
closet organizer
,” Carol declared in her Trinidadian accent, the words lilting. Carol keeps her own key around her neck on a cord of silk. She and Nora had become fast friends when they discovered they had singing in common.

“A closet organizer!” Carol bellowed. “How can you be organizin' somethin'—” Carol paused, clutching her sides.

“—that doesn't exist!” Nora completed, and the two of them howled with laughter.

June had insisted on removing the house's closets, a notion she had learned about in one of her classes. “A lifestyle class,” Stephen scoffed. “Taught by some pseudospiritual wonk for Rittenhouse wives. She tries to pass it off as an architecture seminar.”

It wasn't merely that the closet doors had been removed. The framing had been pulled, whole walls blown open. “But where do you hide things?” Nora whispered to Stephen as they went from room to room. The pre-company ritual in her own house had been to stuff everything behind doors and then pray no one opened them. “The whole point is that you don't,” he muttered.

Delancey had a feeling of openness that you couldn't quite place, like going to a city with no visible power lines. Nora delighted in pointing out the house's salient feature to guests. She watched as comprehension dawned on their faces. “A house without closets!” they exclaimed, shaking their heads.

Stephen and Leo must have detested it—two teenage boys, unable to be messy. Every item in Delancey has a place, exact and perfect. “When you put things out of sight, you invite disorder,” June liked to say.

For Michael, his wife's vision of bright rooms thrown open to the light was perhaps a comfort after all those years in New York. Not just because he'd worked long hours in dark offices, but because he had stuffed away his passions. Perhaps he felt liberated, freed of the pressure to accomplish and earn, able to do what he loves.
No more skeletons!
Delancey trumpeted. Michael had dusted off his dreams and brought them out of hiding.

Leo had been glad to leave New York. “Wasn't it hard, being the new kid?” Nora asked him. She couldn't imagine starting school in a new place, walking the halls that first day. Leo shrugged his trademark shrug, one shoulder tossed up in the air, his jaw tilting to meet it. On balance, no big deal, his upper torso declared.

Leo's upbringing was so different from her own in New Jersey. The girls at Union High smacked their gum and did each other's nails in homeroom. The guys were smart alecks. She had been the freak for doing well, the honor roll a place of shame. What saved her from being an outcast was her voice. “Well, well,” the music teacher had said, looking at her appraisingly. That was in the fifth grade, Mr. Granato. Everyone thought he was a pedophile, spreading the rumor even though they had no basis for it. And why? Why on earth had they done that? She later wondered if he had some inkling of it, poor Mr. Granato, the kids jeering behind his back.