The Widow Waltz (2 page)

“Of course,” I say, as I allow him to lead me to a black leather couch under the window. Nicola sits by my side, Luey on an Eames chair facing the taller wooden armchair where Wally takes a seat. “We have no secrets.” How can I make such a disingenuous remark? By not letting my glance drift toward the girls. “This is Nicola,” I say, and the two shake hands. “And Louisa.” She only nods and Wally doesn’t press it.

“Pleased to meet you, ladies. Coffee?” he asks. “Fiji water? Scone? Berries? Help yourself.” He gestures toward a platter on the coffee table as well as a bar against the wall.

Luey slathers what looks like cherry preserves on half of a scone as I say, “No thanks.”

Let the fun commence.

“So, Georgia, girls,” he says, puncturing the anticipation. “We’ll talk
tachlis.
”

My daughters look baffled.

“Getting down to brass tacks,” Wally, the portable Yiddish dictionary, explains. “And let me say, this is hard.”

Shame on me. I am forgetting that my loss extends to Wally, who also adored Ben. In his way, Wally, too, must be grieving. This time it is I who lean forward and put a hand on an arm, which feels far meatier than the sinewy male limb I am used to touching. Tufts of dark hair creep out from Wally’s pristine, monogrammed cuff.

He clears his throat. “What I mean is that this is going to be tough for you, Georgia.” Wally stares into my eyes. “Very tough. And I’m deeply sorry about that. I am.”

I shudder. There is finality to this protocol like nothing I have yet experienced. I have been so thoroughly focused on putting one foot in front of the other, day by endless day, I haven’t considered the future. I have no close contemporaries who are widows, only never-marrieds or divorcees, women who despite their careful, chirpy behavior, are marked by a
bindi
establishing that they are of a lesser caste of the lonely and needy, or so we think in condescending moments, as they walk amid the wedded. The thought of joining their ranks brings on the tears. My eyes fill and nose drips.

Wally is fast with a tissue. “Go ahead. Don’t mind me.” I succeed in smiling.

“Georgia, dear,” he says. “I’m so sorry, so truly sorry, but, well, here it is.” He takes a deep, audible breath. “I’ve found an account that contains, as of yesterday, $38,392.”

“Yes,” I say, waiting for the rest.

“And that’s it. From what I can tell, virtually all of the money—your money—is gone.” He spreads his palms.

Wally is speaking a language I do not understand. I say nothing.

“Georgia.” His tone as gentle as fingers caressing an infant’s skin.

“Excuse me?” I ask.

“Sweetheart,” he says, moving to the couch, wedging himself between me and Nicola, who leans away. Wally puts his arm on my shoulder and speaks slowly, as if I am deaf or dumb. “Let me explain this as simply as I can. I’m having a hell of a time finding assets. Your accounts appear to have been emptied.”

That can’t be. I know Ben’s will like I know
The Owl and the Pussycat.
“They took some honey and plenty of money / Wrapped up in a five-pound note.”
We reviewed the document every year, on the day before our anniversary. Ben always said that if he died first, he wanted me, the merry widow, to take a few years to travel, maybe sell the beach house and buy something cozy with shutters and an herb garden in the Berkshires, where I used to go to summer camp, a location that made him snore. “I’m going to provide for you, so promise me you’ll have some fun before you settle down with some other lucky schmuck,” he said. “But remember, I’m leaving you plenty. You won’t have to remarry unless you want to.” Half the point of his generosity was to make sure I never loved another man.

“I don’t understand,” I say to Wally. “This has to be a mistake.”

“Georgia,” he murmurs. “I wish it were.”

My tongue turns to cotton but my speech speeds up. “Was Ben losing cases? I thought things were going well at his firm. Did he make a bad investment?”

With each burst of words, my voice gets higher and Wally shakes his head
no
.

“Is something happening Ben thought I was too fragile or ignorant to understand?” Was my husband going through a hell from which he thought I needed to be protected? Darling Ben.

“None of that, from what I can tell.” Wally, too bulky to squirm, shifts uncomfortably in his seat.

Ben was a softie. “Did my husband give everything away?” Before Wally can answer that question, I zing another. “Where did all the money go?” Tough customers brought out Ben’s machismo, but maybe the last laugh was on Ben, who had tried to play in leagues where a code was spoken that he couldn’t understand.

Wally extends his hands and shakes his head. “Georgia, Jesus. I don’t know. I’ve been on the trail for weeks. God knows I hope I’m wrong, but I didn’t think it was ethical for me to keep this to myself any longer.” The edges of his mouth tremble and his inflection is that of a dentist saying,
You may feel some slight discomfort,
before he yanks a tooth without Novocain.

“I just can’t believe it. I can’t, I can’t. This is impossible. You can’t be telling the truth.”

I hide my eyes. I am whimpering, not unlike Sadie when I refuse to give her a third treat. What about life insurance? Ben had two policies, both borrowed against, Wally informs me. The accounts receivable at his firm? Not much there.

“Ma, don’t worry.” I glance up. Luey is streaming tears. “There’s my trust fund. I’ll take care of you.”

Wally turns in her direction. “Are you Louisa or Nicola?”

“Louisa.” She glares. “We met five minutes ago.”

“Sweetheart, I’m afraid your future portfolio is also, at the moment, compromised. You, too, Nicola. Your father managed your accounts, you see.”

“But Daddy said I’d be getting stipends until I’m thirty-five,” a peevish Nicola answers.

“That was then.” This is now.

Luey balls up her cloth napkin and shoots it across the room “So Daddy was just another dick?” Her face curdles into a grimace. “Why should he be different? Why didn’t I see this coming?”

Why didn’t
I
? But I snap, “Nicola! Louisa! Hush! I forbid you to defame your father this way. We’ll get to the bottom of this. There must be some grievous errors.” Please, please, please. I search Wally’s face.
That was then, this is now.
Maybe all I need is a different lawyer.

I feel like a moth batting against a wall.
That was then. This is
now.
But I am no fool. The investments may be gone, but we have other income. Surely, I cannot be poor. I have never been poor.

“What about our apartment. I could sell it. We own that free and clear.”

“Mortgaged—to the hilt. Though, of course, you’d still get a little if you sell.”

“The beach house?”

“Sorry. Same.”

“The cars?” Besides the Lincoln, we drive an SUV to the country, where we keep a Jeep.

“Leased. But the furniture, the antiques, your art, your silver, your furs, your jewelry—all that you still own.” He says this brightly, as if I could live in an armoire and auction off an earring at Sotheby’s whenever my stomach growled.

“The property I inherited from my father?” When Ben and I moved Mother to a nursing home, we sold her house in Chestnut Hill, but there’s a small office building in Philadelphia.

“Ben unloaded that last year. He forged your signature, I’m afraid.”

I pictured Ben signing my name, with a long, swishy tale on the uppercase G of
Georgia
. You can be sent to jail for that—if you’re alive. “Where did all this money go?” I could have asked the question fifty times, shrinking smaller as I repeated each word.

“At this point, I don’t know,” Wally says. “It’s going to take some heavy lifting to find out. This is a long story, with footnotes.”

To my surprise, I don’t want to kill the messenger. I sense that if Wally Fleigelman could have stopped Ben, he would have. What could Wally truly know?

Then a second Georgia rises within me, ready to blow. Am I simply transferring my naïveté to a different man? I search the room for a steady focal point, but the painting on the wall across the room, with its scramble of angry reds, taunts me. I am afraid that if I get up I’ll stumble, yet I find the courage to speak. “For today, Wally, just tell me what I absolutely have to know. What’s the next step?
”

He returns to confident sage. “If you’re careful and conservative, you have enough to live on for a couple of months. Providing you can pay your debt service, you won’t be foreclosed, and of course, in the worst-case scenario, you could eventually file bankruptcy. But none of this needs to or will happen instantly. I’m not saying you don’t have plenty to sort out, but for now, Georgia, as your attorney and your friend, what I want you to do is take a deep breath.”

You tell someone tottering on the edge of a cliff to take a deep breath?

“I wonder if I could have a minute . . . alone?” His eyes bounce from daughter to daughter.

All I have to say is, “Girls,” and the two of them flee the room, and perhaps the country.

After the door is shut behind them, Wally says, “Your daughters are young, with their own concerns. They might not be your best confidantes. Do you have a sister you can speak to?”

“Only a brother. Stephan. Perhaps Ben has mentioned him. We aren’t close.”

“Right, Stephan Waltz.” When Wally sees me shaking my head at the mention of Stephan’s name, he continues, “How about a parent?”

“My father is dead, my mother isn’t well.”

“A trusted woman friend?”

I have a phone loaded with email addresses and numbers. Yet among the first- and second-tier of women I see with regularity at meetings, the gym, or lunch, did I have any genuine cozy-beyond-cordial, for-richer-for-poorer friends? I’d ordered four hundred notes in delicate ivory—which read,
Your thoughtful presence and kindness have touched our family deeply and will always be remembered
with love
.
The family of Benjamin
T. Silver—
and planned to send them
to the hordes who’d shown up to mourn. Many people had made contributions. A shame they hadn’t started the Georgia Waltz discretionary fund.

Suddenly I’m emptied of emotion, milk poured down a drain. My posture caves, but somehow I am standing, and moving toward the door.

Wally blocks my way. He kisses me on the cheek, saying, “I know this is a lot to take in. We’ll talk. Next week is soon enough. Get some rest.”

I say nothing, as ghost-Georgia floats past the receptionist and finds her daughters, who are sitting demurely. “Ma—” Luey starts.

“Not now,” I say, surprised to see my own child.

“Shall we still have lunch?” Nicola asks. “Fred’s downstairs.”

I hadn’t yet thought about him, or Opal, virtual family members. Fred is young and could probably find another job, but Opal is five years older than I am. How do I explain? I pull my daughters close. I do not want to release them.

“We need to go home,” is all I can say.

In the sun, I feel illuminated as if by the light a bad detective has shined into the eyes of a crook. What is my crime? Trusting my husband while I played the dilettante? I slip into the car. Luey rests her head on my right shoulder, and on the other side, Nicola holds my hand. No one speaks for the length of the ride.

When we arrive, Opal takes my coat. I give her a hug and head straight to my bedroom and into my dressing room.

“Ben,” I say to his photograph. “Explain yourself, please. How could you do this to me? What were you thinking?”

The man I love has left me naked and exposed. My first impulse it to hurl his picture across the room. My second is to hope for an explanation, a flotation device I can hold on to because I don’t want to hate him, this boy who became my husband, this man I have loved for more than half my life.

I bury Ben’s picture under a mound of his sweaters, out of sight.

N
icola Silver-Waltz never knew when Luey would be as soft and yielding as a freshly baked sugar cookie or when she’d bubble into a blistering pot of crazy. “Put on a bra!” Nicola had shouted this morning at the closed door of Luey’s bedroom. “If you own one. The lawyer doesn’t need to size up your nipples.”

Luey had been blasting
Super Freak
. When this song had been hot, they were little girls in leotards doing crooked arabesques at ballet recitals or shaking their small, saucy booties for their parents, who thought everything they did or said was adorable. Their mother had gotten over this fiction, though they used to be able to count on their dad. If they’d shared their thoughts—which Nicola and Luey had done little of for the last decade—they’d both admit that they expected Ben Silver to sail through the door and swoop to spin them around in his long, strong arms. How could he be . . . Neither sister could get to
deceased,
let alone
dead
.

Luey had ultimately worn her most reactionary garment, a brown jersey skirt, knee-length but clingy. Still, Luey barked at Nicola as if she had admonished her choice. “We don’t all have trust funds and get to shop in Europe,” Luey said, as if that had anything to do with her clothing selection.

When Nicola turned twenty-one two years ago, she had achieved financial emancipation through no effort of her own. Luey continued on the parental dole and was often groveling for extra cash. She regretted that she and Nicola weren’t tightly braided, like some sisters.

Nicola had a nauseating feeling that Daddy was as tapped out as the lawyer claimed. She would have dismissed the story he told them about their dad’s money, had the lawyer not been so gaga over her mom. It was apparent to Nicola, who trusted her intuition on such matters, that Walter Fleigelman was smitten with Georgia Waltz. During the meeting, each time her mother glanced at the artwork assaulting the walls—garish paintings that Nicola guessed had been selected all at once by an interior decorator—the man feasted his beetle eyes on Mother as if she were a candy bar. Nicola had stopped telling her mom that men were always doing a looky-loo, because Georgia never noticed. If only she had half the appeal her mother had.

Not that Nicola lacked for admirers. Men of all kinds, she had discovered in high school, were drawn to Asian women, even if that woman had visited her native land only once on a teen tour. Just last month in Paris, she was juggling the attention of an understudy acrobat with Cirque du Soleil and, in the top position, a sous-chef who may or may not still be married whom she’d met in culinary school. He had helped her get a temporary job as a prep cook, coming in early to cut vegetables, break down meats, and fillet fish—culinary grunt work. Neither man was on this side of the Atlantic or, Nicola was certain, the One. She’d been holding out for a love like that of her parents, who were as drawn to each other as a bee to a rose, though she softly regretted that since she’d returned to the United States for her father’s funeral, she’d yet to hear from the chef, Emile. Not an email, not a text. She blinked away the image of him pulling her into one of the restaurant’s walk-in freezers, the act’s heat heightened by the possibility of discovery.

When they came home after a silent ride, she, their mother, and Luey each decamped to their respective bedroom and collapsed. Nicola sobbed. She thought first about how her father was her mother’s center of gravity, an indubitable fact, and that to lose him young and suddenly—this wasn’t fair. Then, like a swiftly moving weather system, her mind shifted squarely to herself, especially to how she’d gotten to love Paris and the small furnished flat she’d let not far from the Picasso Museum on the Place du Marché Sainte-Catherine. The city felt like one giant block party, as if the spirits of the world’s creative elite haunted the cobblestone streets and she belonged next to them, soaking up inspiration, stopping for a coffee at random cafés in the city’s misty mornings; reading in parks during the afternoon; drinking wine in the amethyst twilight. Paris might be her answer. But would she ever be able to make another deposit to the account she’d opened at Crédit Lyonnais—or even return? She chided herself for thinking this, but there it was.