The Stork Club (36 page)

If she had to change it back to a bedroom it would mean renting storage space for the contents. But turning the office back into a bedroom would be the least of it. Heidi hadn't lived at home for anything but school vacations in six years. Even a few of the summers during her four college years were spent away from home. One year she waitressed in Santa Barbara where she took a summer course, and another year she attended a work-study program at UC Davis. It had been a long time since she and Barbara had had extended day-to-day contact, and Barbara was worried about how that would work out.

I'll make it good, she thought. It won't be the way it was when she was a teenager, because she'll have a job to go to every morning so I won't see her until the end of the day. Most of the time not even then, because she'll be dating. Dating. What would it be like for Heidi to be living at home and going out with some man and
not coming home for a day or two? Now she was dating thirty-five-year-old men. One of the group leaders at the hospital was Barbara's age and she was
married
to a thirty-five-year-old man. Not a good idea, Heidi's living at home. Though she had to admit it had cozy overtones. If she did decide to move to Los Angeles, Barbara and Stan would have to encourage her to find her own place without making her feel as if they didn't want her in the house.

Mothers and daughters. Why was it so complicated? Tonight while she was helping Gracie, practically lifting her from the chair to the bed so she could change the bedclothes on which her mother had spilled some of her dinner, she wondered if Heidi would someday have to do this for her. And suddenly the idea of being the aging mother seemed appealing and she had an urge to crawl into the newly made bed and ask Gracie to please feed her some soup.

"My new group is really working out well," she said. "They've really connected with one another. They have a great sense of humor about themselves. And probably because they went through so much to get these babies, they don't let anything get in the way of their happiness. It's a real lesson, watching them."

"Well I'm delighted to hear it's going well, I knew it would, but I don't know how the hell you're going to do all that you do and ever have time to make a wedding too."

"Make a what?"

"I talked to my granddaughter today," Gracie said, smiling, then pushing her spoon hard into a matzoh ball and breaking it into bite-size pieces. "And she told me we're going to have a wedding."

"What?" Barbara asked, stunned.

"Ooops, did I spill the proverbial beans?" Gracie asked with a guilty look. "Didn't she tell you yet that
the errant boyfriend showed up and said he's decided he can't live without her?"

"Mother, you're not serious."

"I'm sure she'll call you tonight and tell you herself," Gracie said and tucked her napkin into the high collar of her flannel nightgown. "For whatever it's worth, she sounded deliriously happy."

Bad news, Barbara thought. Probably a ploy from the guy to get Heidi back into bed, but it would never last until a wedding. "I won't chop the liver or devil any eggs yet, Mother," she said.

"You had two kids when you were her age."

"I also had Stan. This guy Ryan is a flake. She told me so herself. Not exactly a gentleman of strong character, shall we say?"

"Well, Mother dear," Gracie said to her with irony, "as you always used to say to me . . . you don't get to pick." Then she laughed a big hearty laugh, which should have cheered Barbara since it was an indication that Gracie was on the mend, but Barbara didn't notice.

Ronald Levine was waiting outside the door of her Wilshire Boulevard office when she arrived in the morning. His face was ashen and his eyes were filled with rage. He didn't have an appointment but he'd come to tell her that his estranged wife had left a message on his answering machine saying she and their son, Scottie, were off to Hawaii. She didn't tell him where in Hawaii or for how long. He was seething, and when Barbara opened the back door to her office he strode in behind her.

She was early because she'd planned to make some phone calls before her first appointment, but Ronald Levine's pain filled the room. His broken posture looked wrong for the smart Armani suit he wore as he paced in front of her desk, cursing Joan and blaming Barbara.
Barbara listened without saying a word, letting him get it all out. Finally he collapsed in the chair across from her desk and wept, his face on his arm on her desk, his body heaving with agonized sobs.

"Look what we do to one another in the name of love," he choked out between his sobs, and after a while he raised his face to her and asked, "Have you ever been divorced?"

"No," Barbara said.

"Can you imagine what it feels like to have to share your child with someone you hate? Who's acting despicable, trying to turn the child, the only creature on this earth you can love and relate to unconditionally, against you? No, you can't." He spoke in a small voice.

"It must feel awful."

His eyes were angry as he stood. "Don't give me the sympathetic-psychiatrist talk, you supercilious bitch," he screamed. "It feels
worse
than awful. I want a life with my son, and I don't even know where he is. Why did I come here in the first place? To pay you to say inane shit to me like 'It must feel awful.' " For an instant Barbara thought he was going to leap across the desk and grab her. "You have to help me get full custody. You have to tell the court, the judge, the powers that be that I'm the sane one. That his crazy mother spends every waking minute trying to drive him crazy. Will you say that?"

"I'll say whatever I think is best for Scottie,'' Barbara answered as evenly as she could. Ron Levine stormed out of the office and the phone rang. Barbara answered it numbly. "This is Barbara Singer."

"Hi, Mom."

It was Heidi, calling to break the news Barbara already knew. She was engaged. Ryan had presented her with a ring, she told Barbara, with a glow in her voice when she said his name as if he was and always had
been a great guy. They were looking at apartments big enough to contain at-home offices for each of them. One of which, Heidi confided to her mother, could "maybe become the um . . . you know." And Barbara felt a stab to the chest because she
did
know that the "you know" meant a nursery.

The words "you don't get to pick" scurried again and again through her brain the way the messages of lights moved letter by letter across the Goodyear blimp, and she tried to let it go.

"I think we may want to ask you and Dad to consider the Bel-Air Hotel," Heidi told her.

Barbara had never priced the making of a wedding before, but she knew the Bel-Air Hotel, with its lush gardens and swan-filled lagoons, would be top of the line. She wondered if the future son-in-law had been someone she respected, someone who treated her daughter well and made her happy, if she would have relished the idea of making a wedding at the Bel-Air Hotel, of doing whatever the kids wanted, instead of feeling defensive and worried and annoyed by this news.

Why is it, she thought, the one area we're certain about with every ounce of our intuition, our intellect, and our years of wisdom happens to be, ironically, the one area in which we are completely powerless. "Insight doesn't mean a thing, and criticism is the kiss of death," Gracie had warned her.

"We'll come down in a few weeks so you can meet one another, and then we can talk more about the date and the place and all. Love you, Mom," Heidi said, signing off.

Barbara sighed as she hung up the phone, closed the back door through which Ron Levine had made his thunderous exit, and opened the front door for her first family of the morning.

31

D
AVID REISMAN had a demanding personality, and though he put up with being taken care of by the nurse during the day, he was only completely happy when his daddy was home. He loved the nights when they roughhoused on the bed, then as Rick after a long day's work snored away, David used him as a pillow while he watched a "Sesame Street" video.

Of course they both loved playing in the pool with Rick holding David on the surface of the water, urging him to kick, kick, kick his chubby little feet. Patty was right, Rick thought when he held his son in his arms and the scent of the Desitin he had spread on his little bottom wafted up through the baseball pajamas. This baby owns me. I'd throw myself in front of a truck to save him, and every time he grins one of those little impish grins, I could weep.

Tonight David climbed into his lap. After they read a few of his favorite books, Rick picked up the scrap
book he'd been working to complete any time he had a spare minute. He had searched his drawers and filing cabinets and come up with a treasure trove of photos of his own family to include, so that David would know about his adopted family's history too. Pictures of the Cobbs, pictures of the Reismans. Rick mixed them on the pages, using his gift for the visual to juxtapose and combine them, and the album became David's favorite before-bed picture book.

Rick loved it too. Each image of his family brought memories tumbling into his head of his Hollywood boyhood in the big home in Bel-Air, of his father and his uncle, two handsome, dashing young Hollywood rakes, of his incomparable parents whose perfection might have tarnished had he known them when he was more than an adolescent. But he hadn't, and he was finally realizing at age fifty that the memory of their relationship, probably vastly rewritten to be perfect, contributed to making each relationship in his own life pale by comparison.

"If the shoe fits, honey," was what Patty had said to him when they talked about people who couldn't find love because they had some unshakable idea in their heads about how it should be.

"Uncle Bobo, Grandpa Jake," David recited, pointing at all his favorite photos. "Ooooh, Grandmama Jane, Grandpa Jake."

Rick looked at the picture, which was David's favorite. It was an old studio publicity shot of Jane Grant and Jake Reisman, so beautiful and elegant. And the way they looked at each other made it easy to see they were completely in love. Tonight, looking at the photo filled him with regret about his own wasted years, and he said a silent prayer to the two of them.

Help me, he thought, looking at their image, still missing them as much as he did thirty years ago. Help
me so I can change, really change, and make a connection with a woman in this lifetime. Being a father has taught me I know how to love and feel and hurt, and put someone else's needs before my own. This little heavenly creature has raised my consciousness almost too high, so that some days the sky is almost bluer than I can stand it, the music sweeter than I've ever heard it before, and I know now that I want to share that with a woman.

David was squealing over every photo, reciting the names of each person, remembering who they were. "Birfmuvver" was how he said birth mother, "Birfmuvver Doreen, Grandma Bea, Auntie Trish and lots of carrot tops," he shouted, pointing at Trish's children and her husband, Don. Rick looked closely, very closely at the photo now, and felt a surge of sickness pour into his stomach.

The next morning Patty stopped at Rick's office toting a Saks Fifth Avenue shopping bag. When Rick peeked out of a meeting to ask Andrea a question he saw the back of a blonde with a great ass and was surprised when the blonde turned and it was Patty. She looked like a kid dressed in her faded jeans and funky sweatshirt.

"Hi," she said, her pretty smile brightening the room. "There was a sale in the boys' department, and since you always dress David in outfits that look like polyester leisure suits, I thought I'd take the liberty of my status as his unofficial aunt and buy him a few little items."

Rick walked over for a Hollywood kiss, a kind of touching of the sides of faces, and for an instant he wasn't sure if it was Patty's scent, somewhere between suntan lotion and Sea Breeze, that made him want to take her in his arms, or if the reason was his protracted absence from sex. "What's wrong with leisure suits?" he asked, backing up. Andrea was reaching into the bag
pulling out the various shorts, T-shirts, and pants Patty had bought for David.

"Nothing if you're dressing Uncle Bobo," Andrea said. "And by the way, shouldn't you be on your way there now?"

Rick looked at his watch.

"I should. I'm going to close this meeting in my office, and then go get David and head out there."

Patty looked disappointed. "Ohh, too bad," she said, "I was going to ask you to come have a quick lunch with me and help me figure out some questions I have about Charlie's estate."

"Why don't I give you a call," he asked, "and we'll do it over the weekend?"

"Great," Patty said.

On his way to Calabassas, Rick thought maybe he should have invited Patty to join them for lunch out at the Motion Picture Home. Bobo was crazy for her. "A woman and a half," he said about Patty. "If I was a little younger I'd sweep her off her feet." Bobo no longer waited outside the entrance of the home the way he used to, because the journey from his room to the front was now too long and too arduous. He had a walker, which he refused to use at all except when Rick and the baby came to visit. And only every now and then would he agree to be helped out of bed to his feet and work his way down the corridor, just so he could show off Rick and David, whom he called "my boys." His enfeebled body used everything he had to move along beside Rick and behind David, who found the long carpeted corridor the perfect place to toddle.

But though Bobo's body was failing, his mind was still on full throttle. One day last week he shook his head watching the baby, and said, "My life has been full of surprises. If anyone would have told me, a man who has seen as many years in this century as I have,
that I would approve of such a thing as you and that baby—no, I take back 'approve,' and change it to 'give my blessing'—I would have said 'completely
meshugge
,' but you know what? It's a hell of a good thing.''

Today as Rick walked with David on his shoulders through the hospital corridor past the nurses' station on the way to Bobo's room, the nurse who was sitting there looked up at the two of them and said, "These visits with that baby are keeping him alive."