The Widow Waltz (17 page)

“It’s Naomi.” Neither the tone nor the hour suggests burbling sympathy, though the green lights of the digital clock announce 9:55, which barely makes the cut of the respectable bewitching hour for courteous conversation. “You called,” she says, matter of fact.

“I was returning your call,” I say, bleary.

“You seem very determined.”

“Excuse me?”

“Coming to my house, pursuing my daughter.”

Now I am awake. “Mrs. DeAngelo, please.”

“McCann,” she says. “Naomi McCann.”

“Naomi, I wouldn’t have called you if I realized who you were.” I immediately regret this candor.

At this, she laughs. “I appreciate your honesty, but it’s just as well,” she says. “Clementine . . . . unfinished business.”

I hear a cough while she speaks. “Clementine, is that you?” I ask.

“My daughter is sitting across from me,” Naomi says. “Someone’s on the line at your end.”

“Luey?” I ask, shrill. She clicks off.

“I have nothing to hide,” Naomi says. “I’m willing to talk. When will you be out here?”

We pick a time in three days. “Shall I come to your home?” I ask.

“I’ll go to yours,” she says.

I skip the pretense of asking if she knows where I live.

“‘G
ood night room,’” Luey says.

“‘Good night moon,’” Nicola continues. “‘Good night cow jumping over the moon.’”

“‘Good night light and the red balloon,’” they sing together as they load the car.

A phase of our moon is ending. I pushed my daughters’ strollers across the street, roaming for hours in the park, which I considered our front yard. This apartment is where they learned to balance on two legs, on stilettos, and, to a certain degree, on their own; where I still see my girls in swirly tutus, missing front teeth and sarcasm. Inside the front hall closet Ben recorded their height on every birthday, when I’d start the day with cupcakes for Nicola and pizza for Luey, and ended with a teddy bear cake snowed in coconut to hide icing slapped on far too much in the spirit of Picasso.

The apartment is the only true home my daughters have known. Our house in the country may have sun puddling through floor-to-ceiling windows and whitewashed walls, but it’s a destination equally light on family gravitas. Ben and I bought it eleven years ago, when our children were half grown. The two of us visited as much as possible—stealing hunks of July and August and most weekends—but Nicola and Luey spent some of each summer at pampered programs on manicured campuses and do-gooder excursions to beef up college applications, or simply stayed in town so they could sleep with guys I hope were boyfriends.

Home is where I can recite the contents of the pantry and know my neighbors. The country has the kitchen with sour milk, three full jars of stale cumin, and people down the street who are strangers. The beach house is a frill. The city is where Ben paid bills and taxes and thought I paid attention.

New York has always made me feel smart, or at least smarter. I can pass a newsstand and be reminded that the world is a big place with problems that I should help solve. At the beach, my mind never fully wakes up, and the pressing issue of the day becomes whether the lobsters are fresh, how many clams to buy for dinner, and if the deer will dine on the hydrangeas. The dense, crowded city has the grander horizon.

I’m leaving not just my home but abandoning urban life, which I always told myself I needed for its electricity, though it comes with subways clogged by commuters and, every winter, mountains of garbage under snow as dirty as dishwater. I have been willing to overlook flaws of the megalopolis, knowing that whenever I walk outside, even past midnight, I see other dog owners along with hand-in-hand lovers and migrating posses of back-slapping teenagers puffing weed. Most people imagine city life as cold. That’s not been my experience. In the city I am never alone.

What will it be like to power walk along empty roads? To wake every day to birdsong? To pass a day without seeing another human being besides Luey? I have given little thought to quotidian country life. Maybe I’ll take to it, kibitzing with new pals at the post office, people who manage to be content without coveting thirteen-hundred-dollar red-soled Christian Louboutin suede, fringed ankle boots, which they wouldn’t be able to identify if one kicked them in the butt. I could volunteer at the food pantry, sell peach pies by the side of the road, or become the recluse with the chin whiskers whose trees always get toilet-papered at Halloween.

Perhaps Chip Sharkey will sell the house quickly, although so far it’s seen less traffic than he predicted, and I’ll move on to one of those cities touted as edgy and affordable—Ithaca, Cheyenne, either Portland. Or change my name and go underground like a gangster’s girlfriend. I haven’t thought of what’s ahead as footloose freedom, but between twitches of fury, fear, agita, petulance, testiness, and disbelief I prickle with glimmers of whatever condition proceeds hopefulness.

“Ma, what’s left up there?” Luey shouts from the car, as I make yet another trip down to the curb.

“Just a few bags,” I say.

The bulk of our belongings departed this morning. What’s traveling with us now are artifacts of a once-shared life too intimate to go to the highest bidder or too precious to put in the dark cavern of All the Right Moves’ monster truck. There are boxes of books and albums, my grandmother’s silver, the Gien china collected plate by plate—a set completed by Ben as a surprise for our ten-year anniversary—and orchids, many orchids. I wave away Nicola and Daniel, who are going ahead in order to meet the movers. Luey and I will take off in a few minutes. Tomorrow Stephan will hand over the keys at the real estate closing. It takes a village to move to one.

In the fridge I’ve left champagne for the new owners, our neighbors, Mr. and Mrs. Shepard, who, I’m told, will start a massive overhaul next week; the thirty-three-year-old female half of the couple has informed me they will “reengineer” the bathrooms, the plumbing, and the wiring. There will be air conditioning that doesn’t cough from window units and music controlled by an iPod in every room. Purloining two precious parking spaces in front of the building on the Fifty-eighth Street side is an empty Dumpster. This is where my glass-fronted antique white kitchen cabinets, custom-built, will wind up along with the Tuscan tile backsplash the color of apricots and the soapstone countertop I drove to Vermont to select.

Good-bye room.

I take a valedictory march through each room, searching behind doors and in every crack and cranny. From the floor of our bedroom closet I confiscate a dry cleaner bag. In the kitchen, a wooden spoon stows away under the stove and the bulletin board is thick with paper. I pull off poison control alerts, a list of the holidays when alternate side of the street parking rules will be suspended—you get a pass on the Chinese lunar new year—and at least a dozen menus, a United Nations of cuisines. Under Plump Dumpling, whose
shu mai
became a family staple, is a small, dog-eared photograph. I gently remove it.

I am carrying Cola in a Snugli, Ben’s arm is around me in a gesture of pride and protection as we stand in front of the Guggenheim. We look improbably young, with long hair and giddy smiles, immunized from threats to future happiness. This was the day I discovered I was pregnant with Luey. After years of infertility and dashed hopes, that morning we found out that we could look forward to becoming a family of four.

For three years we’d tried to make a baby, our lovemaking taking on the romance of boot camp. After a year, Ben was tested and declared as good a sperm machine as any. This led to me being poked, prodded, and invaded, which led to a fiesta of injections, which led to nothing but my period every month, whose arrival I met with cascading despair, and Ben’s forced cheer failing to mask disappointment.

According to our infertility specialist, I was a fine female specimen. She couldn’t explain our failure to conceive and encouraged us to keep trying for at least twelve more months and—worst-case scenario—in the face of no conception, to explore in vitro. Dr. Stork, as we called her, told us all this calmly. She hadn’t progressed to a mayday alert.

Patience, however, was never a virtue Ben Silver could claim. One day he arrived home and seemed ready to erupt with news. He’d been talking to adoption agencies—for months—he confessed, and handed me a photograph of a tiny rosebud that couldn’t be more than ten months old. Her eyes were chocolate-covered almonds peering out of a round face, and her hair was drawn to the top of her small head in a delicate pom-pom. She wore a white onesie trimmed with pink that matched her plump cheeks. It was a picture calculated to break a heart and it was working, though part of me felt betrayed by the stealth and complexity of Ben’s roadmap.

“There are more babies like this one,” he said. “These kids are in foster care. They need homes. They need love. They need families. I want to be a dad, and I see you as a mother.” He drew me to him and switched from campaign rhetoric to a whisper. “Think about it, George. We’d be great parents. Mommy and Daddy. What do you say?”

I said, “I feel like you’re pushing me over a cliff. It’s way too soon for this kind of a huge step. We haven’t been trying to have our own baby for that long.” With each protest, I shivered and my voice rose. “And we’ve never discussed adoption.”

“We are now.”

I recalled then that when Ben asked me to marry him, I didn’t feel ready, though every pinpoint within me was in love with the sweet talker whom I met when my roommates and I hit a local bar. My friends, all alpha types, knew who he was and referred to him simply as Handsome. To his face. I was both appalled and in awe of their barefaced flirting. But I, the girl who missed the seminar on becoming a collegiate enchantress, was the one Handsome asked out. When he approached me, I thought someone had put him up to it, but on our first date, an awkward lasagna dinner in an “authentic”—Ben’s term—part of Providence I’d never visited, he told me he’d noticed me on campus for months, and he proceeded to rattle off my class schedule. A cynic would have thought
Whoa
. I thought
Wow
.

From our first date on, not a day passed when we weren’t together in the eggs-over-easy fashion common to undergrads—studying, sharing meals, walking to class holding hands, going to small movies in hole-in-the-wall theaters, and sleeping at his off-campus apartment, which became all both of us thought about during any of the former. Whenever we were together, we were touching. We were the
couple who made others want to retch.

Yet nine months later when Ben proposed, I was as panicked as I’d been when a shark was sighted the previous summer at the shore. He wasn’t my first boyfriend, but I felt far too young to consider marriage. I’d fantasized about moving to New York City and sharing an apartment in the Village with my best friend, Betsy, since for both of us returning to the big small-town of inbred Philadelphia was as appealing as eating calcified meatloaf. But Ben Silver was nothing if not persuasive. He always had enough bravado for both of us.

When I told my parents about the proposal, expecting them to echo my instinct to decline it, my dad sold Ben an engagement ring with the friends-and-family discount. Camille booked their country club and we were married the August after we graduated.

Hurtling ahead with adoption was more of the same. We completed forms and arranged for a home visit, but the steps were as removed from parenthood as applying for a loan. I thought the process would take years, as we were warned that it often does. Then one day I returned from teaching to find a phone message saying that a baby was waiting for us in Seoul. We had seventy-two hours in which to decide whether we wanted a particular female infant, three months old, in perfect health. We were told she was abandoned by the unwed university students who were her parents, a brilliant couple passionately in love but with parents who forbade a marriage. There might have been a violin score.

Later, when I met other parents who’d adopted through the same agency, their child’s bio was identical. Not that it mattered, for any of us. Once I met Nicola, she became my daughter, no looking back.

We bought the apartment after we learned we were expecting a second child, baptizing every room by making love in it. We adored that it had enough space for a baby swing, a double stroller, and a block corner as good as any that you’d find in a nursery school. Until they became teenagers, and Luey’s increasing belligerence started discomfiting her demure older sister, our daughters insisted on sharing a bedroom. They told people they were twins.

The apartment is where we had movie night every Saturday when the girls were small, and where they gathered their friends in gowns and tuxedoes before each prom; where I hosted Thanksgiving and Seders and fund-raising cocktail parties for candidates whose politics we applauded; where . . .

“Ma, chop-chop. You’ve been here for ten minutes,” Luey says. I’d been so deep into the History Channel vortex that I hadn’t heard her enter the room. “We’ve got to get a move on. What’s up?”

Nothing. Everything.

She sees the photograph in my hand and takes it from me. “You weren’t much older than I am in this picture, were you?” she says, though I was, by a few years. “Did you feel ready to be someone’s mother?”

As much trepidation as I had about becoming a mom the first time—for three months I was afraid to give Nicola a bath, a task I left to Ben each evening when he came home—the second time, I never blinked.

“I did, darling,” I said. “And if I can do it, anyone can.”

“Even me?”

“You, especially.” If I say it, maybe she—and I—will believe it.

Luey looks skeptical. “We really need to get cracking, Mom.” As if she is leading me away from a crime scene, she takes my hand and starts walking out of the kitchen, through the living room—too big and too empty—toward the front door. Both of us stop to look at the small brass mezuzah, which my parents bought for us in Israel. Luey’s research on jewfaq.org told us to leave this religious symbol in place, in case the new owners were Jewish, and with a name like Shepard, how could you tell? Please, let the mezuzah not wind up in the Dumpster.

I pass through the door, turn, and lock it. Downstairs I say one last good-bye to the doormen. The car is packed as if by masters of Tetris. Sadie squeezes between a box of plants and Luey’s printer. I’d like to say I got in and didn’t look back, but I did until we turned the corner, training my eye on our bedroom window until it was out of sight, and the memory of Ben became a prayer, not a shout.