The Three Weissmanns of Westport (30 page)

Henry looked curiously at her belly.

"I'm free," Miranda said.

They followed the steep path to a leafy spot closely sheltered by tall skinny birch trees. Miranda put her hand on the white trunk of one of them. "The most beautiful tree." She felt a surge of emotion, this same surge she felt so often now. Maybe it was menopause.

"I wonder if I'm starting menopause. Everything makes me want to . . ."

"What?" Leanne asked.

Miranda threw herself to the ground and rolled in the leaves, breathing in the damp of spring, the dust of last autumn. She lay on her back staring up at the blue sky just beyond the lacy canopy.

"Everything makes me want to weep with happiness," she said.

Would that it were menopause, she thought. She could sweat it out and emerge in a few years a calmer person with somewhat brittle bones. But this? This calm, deep satisfaction?
This
was madness. This sharp, painful sense of joy, of gratitude that felt like an inhalation of fresh, cool air. This soft exhalation that felt like peace.

Leanne swept a leaf from Miranda's face.

Peace? Miranda bit her lip. If peace burns, this is peace, she thought. If peace makes you tremble, this is definitely peace. If peace is feeling calm one minute, tortured the next, if peace is war, then, then, and only then is this peace.

She stared up at the canopy of leaves, the sun drifting down in dappled warmth. Why couldn't she just have a friend like everyone else? Maybe Annie was right--she was just a drama queen, couldn't live without it.

"Randa?"

She turned to Leanne and opened an eye. Oh, what a mess. "Yeah?"

Leanne twisted a stick in her hands as if she were about to start a fire. "Oh, nothing," she said.

Miranda rolled onto her back again. Leanne had called her Randa.

Suddenly a large little face hung over Miranda, its cheeks streaked with dirt.

"
Now
you're belly up," the little face explained.

When Miranda got back to the cottage late that afternoon, she found her mother writhing in pain on the couch.

"I can't turn my neck," Betty whispered. "My head is exploding. It keeps exploding."

The EMTs were volunteers. She recognized one--a blond girl she sometimes saw running on the beach. She followed the ambulance in the Mercedes, though later she had no memory of the drive.

"It's meningitis," Miranda told Annie over the phone.

"What?"

"No, it's okay, it's not the kind that kills you."

"Just the kind that makes you wish you were dead," Betty whispered from her hospital bed. "Please stop talking, darling."

But she did not want to be dead at all. She wanted to go back in time, not very far, not to when she was young, not to when she was still happily married to Joseph, just back to that afternoon before she went for a walk on the beach, to that moment when she stood looking out the kitchen window and saw the goldfinch fluttering through the maple leaves. She had been so unfair. She wanted to go back in time, to look out her kitchen window, to see the movement of the little bird, the flash of yellow and flash of black, as it rustled among the leaves, and she wanted to apologize. To the bird. It had been a pretty bird on a pretty day. She should never have doubted either one.

"I will never take another day for granted," she told Annie the next day when the antibiotics had begun to take effect and the pain had lessened, "and neither should you."

"Have you suddenly seen God?" Annie asked.

"Goodness, no. Why, have you?"

When Annie called Josie to tell him that Betty was sick, she had to fight off an irrational sense of I-told-you-so justification. How awful to celebrate your mother's pain because it shamed someone, even if that person deserved to be shamed. Yet when she said to Josie, "Mom is in the hospital with meningitis," she felt a distinct shiver of satisfaction.

Betty came home after six days, but she was very weak. After a few days in the cottage, she was even weaker, and Annie and Miranda took her to the doctor's office, each holding an arm.

"What a fuss," Betty said. "I just need rest."

But the doctor said she had caught a staph infection when she was in the hospital, and he put her on heavy doses of various antibiotics.

She insisted on getting out of bed each morning, however, and her daughters would settle her, in her sunglasses, on the living room couch when it was chilly and on the sunporch chaise, in her sunglasses, when it was warm. The sunglasses helped with the headaches.

"You look very glamorous," said Cousin Lou on one visit.

"It's my own private sanitorium." Her legs were covered with a blanket, a cup of broth in her hands.

Lou caught sight of the broom in the corner, grabbed it, and began to sweep absentmindedly.

"How is Mr. Shpuntov?" Betty asked.

"He hit his caregiver yesterday."

"Uh-oh."

"She hit him back. So that was fine. I wonder when the word went from caretaker to caregiver." He stood at the foot of Betty's chaise. She looked chalky and thin--her wrists protruded from her sweater, tight veined sinews. "How are you?" he said, suddenly serious.

Betty said, "I never hit my caregivers. Or my caretakers."

Annie came out with her mother's pills.

"Do I, Annie?"

"Hardly ever."

"Sit down, Lou," Betty said. "It's very pleasant, just sitting. I had no idea I would like being a patient so much. I highly recommend it. I think I have found the career at which I excel. Of course, I am still a widow. I won't give that up."

"Multitasking," Annie said. She was worried. Betty really did seem to like reclining on her chaise, staring out at the trees and the sky. She was dreamy and faraway, preoccupied.

"There's a goldfinch here," Betty was telling Cousin Lou as if it explained everything. "A goldfinch I see when I'm very quiet and patient."

Roberts came that evening and brought bunches of daffodils for Betty.

"This one is for you," he said, handing a stem to Annie.

He came almost every day now. Poor man, Annie thought. Miranda was hardly ever there, yet he sat so patiently, entertaining Betty with stories of some of his greediest clients and their twisted estates, often staying for dinner.

"Do you miss it? Do you mind being retired?" Betty asked. "Because we can get another chaise and you can come to my sanitorium. It keeps me busy."

"Oh, I keep my hand in. I have a few clients still."

"Like Charlotte Maybank? She seems very excited about her posthumous financial dealing."

Betty expected Roberts to smile as he did when regaling her with the eccentricities of clients and the absurdities of cases over the years. Instead, he set his jaw and said nothing. Betty said, "Sorry. None of my business."

Annie often came home from work to find them sitting in silence, the lengthening day casting a pale light on their faces. How tiny and frail her mother looked in her wispy black outfits beside Roberts, who was tan, almost ruddy, a tall, lean man in a tall, lean suit.

His face would crease into a smile when he saw her. He would rise from the invalid's side and lean over to kiss Annie's cheek. She would compliment his bow tie. And they would have cocktails.

"Miranda didn't pick you up at the station?" he asked on the first of these evenings, when Annie arrived alone.

Poor Roberts, she thought. "No Miranda. Just us chickens tonight, I'm afraid."

"Ah." He took a martini from her. "Did you walk from the station? You know, I could always come and get you, Annie, if Miranda's busy."

Annie smiled. Gallant Roberts. Very old-school. Like me, she thought. "I dropped Miranda off after she picked me up. At Leanne's. But how thoughtful of you."

He nodded. "Miranda's been a blessing to Leanne. Charlotte is a handful. But . . ." He paused here, then said, "Well, Charlotte's been going through so much."

Miranda was not coming home until much later, so Annie didn't ask him to stay for dinner. He joined them anyway.

Lonely, she thought. Not like me. What was the opposite of "lonely"? The word to describe someone who could not stand to be around people? "Togetherly"? "Loneless," she decided. Yet she found that he was one of the few people she did not feel like running away from. No hiding in the attic from Roberts. In fact, he rather reminded her of an attic, the air soft, the light filtered, the contents dusted with recognition or obscurity or gentle surprise.

Felicity decided to treat the girls, by which she meant Gwen, Amber, and Crystal, to lunch at Cafe des Artistes. Amber was such a . . . she smiled . . . she had been about to use the word "treasure," as if Amber were an exceptional maid of long service. There
was
something a little servile about the girl, in an ambitious way that Felicity recognized. Crystal was a silly nonentity, but Amber . . . even with her aging teenager slang . . . there was something about her. She was so attentive, and yet one felt the steel behind her acquiescence. She reminded Felicity of . . . Felicity. Which intrigued her. And then, all those free massages. Felicity was the envy of her friends.

She had never been to Cafe des Artistes, but it was an Upper West Side institution, and as she planned on becoming a proper Upper West Side institution herself, she thought she and Cafe des Artistes should meet. She had made a reservation for 1:00, and she left the office with plenty of time to get there, even with traffic. Taking cabs was a new luxury, taking cabs even when the subway ran directly to her destination. Her life had changed in many small ways like that, she thought with satisfaction. She had worked hard for these little luxuries, worked hard at the office, worked hard at making Joe happy. She did not begrudge either the office or Joe her sweat equity, she loved both her work and Joe, but sweat equity it was, and now she was getting her returns.

She walked into the richly dim restaurant, and a courtly man led her to her table. The silver glistened, the napkins and tablecloths were stiff and formal and white, like dress shirts, she thought. She looked up at the murals. They were famous, she knew. Redheaded women, nude, swinging from vines. Those redheads never had to work in an office, she thought. They didn't have to save and save to buy a boxy one-bedroom apartment in an unfashionable building in a huge unfashionable complex that might just as well have been in New Jersey as on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Felicity pursed her lips, then smiled. The fleshy naked women in the old-fashioned paintings would be scrawny ancient crones by now. Not to mention dead.

Rich soil for a rich house, Miranda thought, digging in the rose garden behind the Beachside Avenue house. House? It really was a mansion, there just was no other name that fit. It had been built as a show of wealth, not as a shelter. The rose garden had been neglected for years, but the tendrils and vines still crawled vigorously over the trellises. Miranda pulled at the weeds. Henry was taking his nap inside, Leanne was working on the paper she would soon have to present at some epidemiology conference. Miranda, who had no paper to write, no nap to take, was weeding. She did not know how to garden. But she could weed. Anyone could weed. Even a failure, even a bankrupt, even a woman who was silently, odiously betraying her best friend.

Miranda had fallen in love so many times, each of them a dizzying ascent of need and a sickening drop of disappointment. But this was Leanne, Henry's mother, her new friend, this person to whom she confided everything. Except one thing. The most important thing.

How odd, how private, how intimate to keep quiet about your feelings. Miranda cherished her secret. It sickened her, literally, leaving her breathless and queasy, but she somehow didn't mind. She reveled in her misery. Ironic, this Romantic extravaganza all bottled up inside.

It began to rain, hard. Perhaps she would catch pneumonia and die. That would be very Romantic.

Miranda had read plenty of books about women falling in love with women. They were a niche part of her business, a popular subgenre, a little out-of-date now but very big in the nineties. She had sold two of them herself, one to Knopf, a huge advance, quite a coup, she had to admit. The women discovered their real selves, etc. Could no longer live a lie, etc. She had felt some sympathy, yet the whole business had always seemed so unnecessary, extravagant even. An act of excessive imagination, if not sheer will. She had been far too busy falling in love with unsatisfying men to think very much about it, much more than: What would be the point?

You're the point, Miranda thought. Now I know.

She watched Leanne, dry and warm and shuffling papers inside. The rain fell dramatically, and the Long Island Sound waves, waves that had caused so much mischief months ago at this very spot, splashed behind her. She didn't really know how she had gotten from there to here, and she didn't really care. As long as she could stay.

From her vantage point of rain and rose stalks, Miranda saw Roberts enter the room and speak to Leanne. She saw Leanne run her hands through her hair, a gesture of despair. Roberts was showing her a sheaf of legal-looking papers. Leanne threw her head back, staring at the ceiling. She stood and made helpless, questioning gestures, her arms wide and flailing. Her hands became fists, and her mouth opened and closed. Miranda walked through the rain to the window. She gestured weakly at Leanne: Should she come in? Leanne, shouting and waving the papers at Roberts, did not even see her, and Miranda slogged her way to the car and drove to the station to wait for Annie.

Felicity marched through the same downpour. The trees in Central Park, budding but black in the rain, rattled their branches ominously. The doorman held his umbrella for Felicity, and she walked beneath it with as much dignity as she could muster under the circumstances. She was soaked, her mink coat matted and limp, a sad family of vermin drowned and slung across her body. Her hair was drenched, her umbrella blown inside out and abandoned long ago. She had been walking and walking and walking. Her shoes were ruined, of course. In the elevator she could smell the wet fur, musky and animalistic, reeking like a dripping dog.

"Joe!" Her shoes squelched on the marble she'd had installed in the entrance hall. "Joe!"

He came out of the kitchen looking warm and unruffled, a glass of Scotch in his hand. In general, she approved of his meticulous clothing, his careful grooming, his unchanging habits. Now his smooth comfort infuriated her.

"Can't you see I'm soaking wet?"

He took her coat and held it away from him. "Towel?" he said, walking toward the bathroom. He wondered if he would always be supplying towels for hysterical women. At least Felicity had not thrown a glass of good whiskey at him the way Betty had. He had just phoned Miranda. He called every day. She hung up on him every day. The girls did not bother to hide their contempt for him. But he had to find out how Betty was. Meningitis. Betty rarely got even a cold. How had she gotten this terrible infection? Somehow he knew it was his fault. Miranda and Annie obviously felt the same way. At least she was out of the hospital now. They never let him speak to her. He was sure Betty would want to talk to him if they let her. After all these years together. But they were no longer together, Annie had reminded him. She has cut the cord, Annie had said. She's recuperating physically and emotionally. Do you want to make her feel worse? Are you that selfish and self-centered? I don't care how guilty you feel, she had said, you are not going to upset my mother.

"It's Frederick," Felicity was saying, squelching behind him.

He pulled an enormous white bath towel from a shelf. "Here, darling."

"I'm speaking to you! Didn't you hear me? Frederick!"

The wet coat hung heavily at the end of his outstretched arm, dripping. He dropped it in the bathtub, half expecting damp revengeful minks to rise up from its folds. He hated that coat. Why was she wearing it in April anyway? If Miranda had ever seen it, she would have been furious. Of course, she was furious anyway. He threw the towel around Felicity's shoulders. "What about Frederick, darling?"