You Should Have Known (33 page)

He did not seem mollified. He stood watching her put out the cheese on a board. She poured the soup into a stainless-steel pot and started to heat it up. “I'd really rather you weren't living like this,” he said seriously, as if this were a radical notion.

No shit.
She nearly laughed, but actually it was when she thought of her own home, her own life in the city, that she began to be frantic. This…there was stillness, and naturally isolation, and of course it was cold as hell, but it wasn't the screaming hell that came over her when she thought of back there. She couldn't go back there.

“And what are you going to do when the book comes out?” he asked her. “You'll have to come back then. Weren't you doing all those interviews? I know you mentioned one of the television shows.”

She stopped what she was doing and looked at her father. “Daddy,” she said, “that's all over. It's not happening.”

He looked stricken. He stood straight, looking down at her from his full height, his face lined and slack. “They told you that?” he asked her.

“They don't need to. They don't need to explain to me that the only questions anyone's going to want to ask me will be about my own marriage, and I can't talk about that. Not with anyone, certainly not on television. I know I'm being laughed at—”

He tried to deny this, but she waved him off. It wasn't much of an attempt.

“I thought my book could help someone. I thought I had something to say to people, about how they went about choosing a life partner, but I don't. Obviously, I don't. I'm a marriage counselor whose husband had a mistress. He might have killed his mistress.”

Her father's eyes widened a little. “Grace,” he said carefully. “‘Might have'?”

She shook her head. “I'm not trying to be difficult,” she said deliberately. “I just…I need to stop at ‘might have' for a moment. I'm not ready to go past it.” She looked around the kitchen. The light was all gone now. It had become another winter night outside.

“He had a baby with her,” she heard herself say. “Did you know?”

Her father looked down at the wooden floor. He didn't answer. From the next room came a thin rendition of
The Blue Danube
from the DVD player.

“I should have known something,” said Frederich Reinhart. “He came to me for money.”

She felt the now familiar ache of sudden bad news. Fresh, new, bad news.

“When?”

“Oh…” He thought. “May, perhaps? He said you were worried about paying for Rearden this year, you thought you might have to take Henry out.”

“That's not true,” she told him, amazed. “That was never an issue.”

“So I understand. Now. But he told me you were terribly concerned about money and would never come to me. Of course I told him that neither of you should worry. I only have one grandchild and luckily I'm able to help with his education. But he asked me not to say anything to you about it, so I didn't.”

She was holding on to the counter, trying to stop swaying. “Daddy, I'm sorry. I would never have asked. I didn't need to ask! We were fine!”

“I know. He was very persuasive. He reminded me that pediatric oncologists are not at the high end of the earning scale for doctors. He said he couldn't stand the idea that you and Henry might have to compromise because he hadn't been a good enough wage earner. That it wasn't fair to you.”

Grace shook her head. “In May…he wasn't even working then. They told me—the police told me—there was a disciplinary hearing last February, I think. They fired him. I had no idea.”

Her father was leaning forward on the kitchen table, arms braced, eyes closed. “I gave him a hundred thousand dollars,” he told her. “I didn't want him to have to ask me again. I didn't want you to have to come to me. I thought it was for tuition.”

“Well,” she said darkly, “it might have been, but not Henry's. Jonathan was paying the fees for another child. I worked that out, finally.”

“For…I don't understand. Wasn't it a very small baby?”

“The older child. He had been Jonathan's patient at Memorial. It's how they met. Then the boy became a Rearden student. The headmaster…I think he believed Jonathan and I were Miguel's benefactors. Maybe because this boy was a cancer survivor and Jonathan had been his doctor. But I didn't know anything about the boy. I just assumed he was on scholarship.” Grace sighed. “And I guess he was. But Jonathan paid for the scholarship. I mean, apparently, you paid for it. I'm so sorry.”

Her father shook his head. When Grace looked over at him again, it took her a moment to understand that he was shaking. “Daddy?”

“No, it's okay.”

“I'm sorry,” she said again.

“No. Don't be. I'm just…I'm so angry at myself. I'm angry at him, but mostly at myself. How could I have let him do that to you?”

Only then did she understand how wounded by this he, too, had been, and maybe not only at this, or maybe the “this” had begun long ago, and she had not been a bystander to it. For years, she had allowed her father to see her only as a very specific construct: securely partnered, professionally successful, the provider of an excellent grandchild. She had been technically available to her father but never warm, not really. Perhaps, if she was honest about it, she had not even been very interested in him, and what he cared about, and what his life was like—now and in the past. She had been available for dinner and strictly controlled conversation on a weekly basis, but she did not feel close to him at all, and she did not believe he could possibly feel close to her. Then again, this was the first time it had ever occurred to her that her father might actually want to be close.

What if she had been wrong? What if he had wanted—or indeed
needed
—something from her, and she had declined to provide it, declined even to see it? As if she herself had not needed her father. As if she didn't still need her mother! As if you got points for doing it all alone, and someone was keeping score to make sure you never cheated. How arrogant to assume that she could make up her own rules and had all the time in the world to play by them.

“You didn't let him,” she said. She put down her wineglass. “He did this all by himself.”

“I thought I was helping you and Henry,” her father said. “I thought, well, I know how private you are. You would never come to me for assistance. I don't know why. But I was actually grateful to him. I thanked him. For giving me the opportunity.” He shook his head in private, bitter distaste. Then sighed. “Eva loves to give her children things,” he said, as if it were something he needed to apologize for. “But you never wanted anything.”

“Oh, I wanted lots of things,” she corrected him. “But I had all of them. Or I thought I did. You know, wanting what you have is supposedly the secret of happiness.” She smiled. “Somebody said that. I forget who.” There was a sputtering sound from the stovetop. Grace took the wooden spoon from the drawer and gave the soup a stir.

“Having what you want?”

“No, wanting what you already have.”

“Ah! So simple,” her father said. He looked better now. It was a relief. So she put the spoon back down and hugged him.

A moment later, Henry appeared in the doorway, shaking his head. “This movie is so weird,” he told them. “There's all these colors. And the astronaut just turned into a baby. I don't get what's happening.”

“I never did either,” his grandfather said. “Maybe Stanley Kubrick was counting on the whole audience being high on drugs. But your grandmother and I just had a martini before we saw it in the movie theater. I don't think that was enough.”

She had the two of them set the table. It was the first time they'd used the dining room since arriving. It was the first time she and Henry had not eaten on the couch, off their laps, with a heavy flannel blanket across their shoulders. Actually, it was hardly any warmer now. But it felt warmer somehow.

They ate the soup and then salmon on bagels, because from the moment she saw the salmon and the bagels, she was struck with a convulsive longing for them. And she drank more wine, then started in on the dark chocolate, and it was all surprisingly not terrible. For a Christmas Eve in a freezing house, in flight from her life, and in the inescapable proximity of her father and her son, both of whom had been woefully harmed by Jonathan Sachs, the love of her life, it was surprisingly not terrible. And they talked about baseball, of all things, or at least Henry and her father did, and Grace was amazed to discover that her father had once regularly gone to games and had grown up supporting a team called the Montreal Expos and even knew how to keep score, which was something that sounded as if it ought to be completely straightforward but was in fact seriously complex, and which he promised to teach his grandson, perhaps as soon as tomorrow. And after Henry went up to bed, but before Grace got up to clear the table, they sat for a few moments in a not uncompanionable silence, until Frederich Reinhart asked whether she had any idea where Jonathan had gone or how he was managing to not be found by the police.

“God, no,” she said, surprised. “I have no idea. If I knew, I would tell them.”

“I have to say, I'm amazed he's managed it. I just think: Today, every time you make a move or spend a nickel, all kinds of people must see what you're doing. It's incredible no one has recognized him. He's been everywhere. His face has been everywhere, I mean.”

Grace took a breath. She was trying not to process the meaning of this.

“He might have thought beforehand, about what he would do. I mean, how to disappear. He had some time.”

Her father frowned. “Do you mean that he planned it? He planned what he was going to do to…” His voice trailed off. Perhaps he had forgotten the name. Perhaps he had simply been unable to say it.

It was another thing she had been incapable of considering. She shook her head. “I meant that he was losing control. It looks like things were falling apart for him long before the day he left. He could have thought about how to hide. Maybe he already had a place to go,” she said carefully. It was something she had been thinking about. Except that when she said “place,” what she really meant was “person.” Maybe he had a person, or maybe he
was
a person. Maybe today, tonight, somewhere, her husband was hiding inside another person. Maybe “Jonathan Sachs” had been another person he had hidden inside. The idea of it brought such suffering that she had to close her eyes and let it pass.

“Jonathan is very smart, you know,” Grace said finally. “That hasn't changed about him.”

It was one of the very few things about him that had not changed.

“But so are you,” her father insisted. “It's your job to be smart about other people. You wrote a book about it…” He stopped himself, though it hardly mattered now:
horse bolted, barn door closed.

“Go on,” she said tersely. “Don't worry, you're not telling me anything I don't know.”

He shook his head. He was rolling the wineglass between his long hands, back and forth. His face was slack with grief, and his hair, she noticed, had slipped the bounds of its usual precise cut. Was Eva growing careless? Grace wondered, but even as the question, with all its attendant unkindness, occurred to her, she understood that it wasn't that. It was, instead, her own cataclysm, so intense and destroying that even Eva was having trouble maintaining the customary duties and rituals, which was nothing for her to be petty about. She also owed her stepmother an apology, and to her own surprise she felt genuinely sorry. In fact, she was sorry about Eva in general. How many times had she suggested to resentful patients that when good marriages ended, surviving partners often sought to be married again, sometimes very quickly. Happily married people liked being married: It was as simple as that. And her father had been happy with Grace's mother, and he wanted to be happy again, and he had met Eva and seen at least a prospect of happiness with her, and wasn't that preferable to living in mourning? Would she have wanted him to go on living in mourning? So why had she felt so harmed by it?
Therapist, heal thyself!
she thought miserably.

“I think,” said Grace, “I just had an idea of what a good family, a strong family, looked like, from you and Mommy. And I tried to make my own family look like that. I did what Mommy did, and Jonathan seemed…” She was searching for what he had seemed like, but for the moment it evaded her. “And I thought that Henry was happy. I hope he was happy.” It all seemed so brutally past tense now. “I just wanted to be like you. I wanted to be happy like you.”

For a minute she thought that she had started to cry. She wouldn't put it past herself to start crying without even noticing—not now. It would take more than that to surprise her now. But in fact, the crying wasn't hers. It was Frederich Reinhart, attorney at law, who sat across from her at the pine table, weeping into his long hands. Her father: weeping. For the longest time, this simply did not compute. Then she reached across and took one of his thin wrists in her hand.

“Daddy?”

“No—” He shook his head. “Don't.”

Don't?
Grace wondered. Don't what?

He had to finish. It took a long while. And she couldn't do anything but wait for him.

Eventually he got up, went to the bathroom. Grace heard the toilet flush and the water run. When he returned, he had reassembled himself, more or less. He looked like his own father, a worn-out man Grace barely recalled, with rheumy eyes: an uncomfortable presence in the corner of the living room at her own birthday parties. Her father—like Grace, like Henry—had been an only child, and the relationship with his own father had not been particularly good. She knew almost nothing about her grandfather apart from a reverse trajectory of addresses (Lauderdale Lakes, Rye, Flushing, Eldridge Street, Montreal, Bukowsko) and a funeral she had furiously wanted not to attend, because it meant missing one of the grander bat mitzvahs in her Rearden class that year. Now she couldn't even remember whose bat mitzvah it was, but then they had seemed like such unequal claims on her attention.