You Should Have Known (35 page)

“I remember him!” Grace said, because she did, or thought she did. “He had this big droopy sweater, right? Sort of light green?”

“Ah…” Leo nodded. “The bane of my mother's existence. For years she'd hide it, hoping he'd forget about it and find something else to wear that didn't come down to his knees. But he had like a sense about it. He always went right to the cupboard or the shelf or wherever she put it. But you know, after my mom died he just threw it out. I saw it in the garbage one day. I didn't even ask him why.”

Grace nodded. She was thinking about her father and the jewelry, the ziplock bag of jewelry, so toxic that he couldn't look at it anymore.

“My mother died, too,” she said. She wasn't sure that it followed, really. Leo nodded.

“I'm sorry.”

“I'm sorry, too. About yours.”

“Thanks.”

They sat in silence for another minute. But it was actually less uncomfortable than it might have been.

“Never gets old, does it?” Leo said. “The death of your mother.”

“Nope. Never does.”

He took a sip of his coffee, then wiped his mouth, unthinkingly, on the back of his hand. “My mother died up here at the lake, actually. She stayed a few days after my father and brother left, to close up the house. This was eleven years ago. We're not sure what happened—probably carbon monoxide poisoning, but the autopsy was inconclusive. My dad replaced the heater anyway. It made him feel better.”

“That's terrible,” Grace said. She could not remember what Leo's mother looked like.

“What about yours?”

She told him about returning to Cambridge after the spring break of her junior year, and how the phone was ringing and ringing in her dormitory room as she fumbled with her key in the hallway, and how she knew—even in that prehistory before cell phones—that this call was going to mean something large and something bad. And it did: Her mother had had a stroke back in New York, no more than an hour after Grace had left for the train station. Grace had turned around and gone back, and over the next few weeks, in which her mother had never regained consciousness, and the possible futures had been of steadily diminishing returns, she had stayed and fluttered around both her parents in the hospital, until she knew she had to either withdraw for the term or go back. So she went back, and—incredibly, horribly, surreally—the exact same thing had happened. The ringing phone through the thick oak door in Kirkland House, the scramble for the key, the something large and something bad news. She had gone back to New York again, this time for the rest of the term, and was only able to make up her course work over the summer.

That fall, she had moved off campus to live with Vita, and then, almost immediately, she had met Jonathan. It would have been a nice time to still have a mother, she thought now. How would Marjorie Wells Pierce Reinhart—who had met and fallen in love with her own husband over the course of a single blind date in 1961, and whose marriage had not been happy—have responded when her only child phoned, elated, soaring, to describe the young man, ambitious, compassionate, tender, a little disheveled, and thoroughly in love with her?

She would have said:
Be careful. Slow down
.

She would have said:
Grace, please. I'm delighted, but be smart
.

Be
smarter
, in other words.

“I'm sorry I didn't get to know her as an adult,” Leo said suddenly. “I mean: me as an adult. I know she didn't like me very much when I was a teenager.”

“Oh…,” Grace heard herself say, “it wasn't you. She wasn't a very happy person, I don't think.”

It was the first time she had said anything remotely like this.
Ever.
She listened to the silence those words left behind and was amazed at herself. She felt terrible. She felt she had let something terrible out into the world. Her mother had been
unhappy
. She had just
said so
. What a horrible thing to have done.

“Sometimes things happen so…untidily,” said Leo, “that we have to make up a narrative. I think it happens with death a lot, actually.”

“What?” said Grace.

“The narrative. You came back to school. The phone rang. You came back to school again. The phone rang again. The way you tell the story, you've almost made yourself responsible for her death.”

“You think I'm being narcissistic?” Grace asked. She was trying to decide whether or not to be offended.

“Oh no, I don't mean that. Well, there is narcissism in all of us, of course. I mean, we are the protagonists of our own lives, so naturally it feels like we're at the wheel. But we're not at the wheel. That just happens to be where the window is located.”

She laughed. Then, when she realized that she was actually laughing about this, she laughed again.

“Sorry,” Leo said. “Chronic failing of professorial types.
Always. Be. Professing.
To misquote Mamet.”

“That's okay,” said Grace. “I never thought of it. And I'm supposed to be a therapist.”

He looked at her. “What do you mean, supposed to be?”

But she didn't answer him, because she didn't know. Weeks had passed since Grace had even thought of a patient. It had been even longer since she'd last felt she was in a position to instruct another human being on how to better live his or her life.

“My profession,” she said instead. “I'd rather not discuss it.”

“That's fine,” he said carefully.

“I appear to be on sabbatical, too,” she said.

“Okay. Not that we're discussing it.”

“No,” Grace said, and they left it at that and went on to other things. Leo's father had not remarried, but he had a lady friend named, of all things, Prudie. Leo's brother, Peter, was an attorney in Oakland. Leo had a daughter.

“Well, sort of,” he clarified unsuccessfully.

“You sort of have a daughter.”

“I was involved with a woman who had a daughter already. Ramona. The daughter, not the woman. We decided to have the best of all possible breakups, and that meant Ramona stayed in my life, which was a big relief to me, because I adore her.”

“The best of all possible breakups…” Grace said it wonderingly. “That sounds nice. Voltairean!”

He shrugged. “It's an ideal, of course. But I can't think of a better reason for trying. When you have kids. Even a sort-of kid.” He looked over at her. She could tell he was wondering if he should ask. She was here on the lake, in other words. Her son was here. She had to look down at her own left hand to check whether she was still wearing her wedding ring. She appeared to be still wearing her wedding ring. All these weeks, this had failed to make an impact on her.

“So…do you see her often?”

“About one weekend a month. Her mother lives in Boston, so it's tricky but doable. Then she comes up for a few weeks in the summer, but that's getting complicated, too. Because of
boys
,” he said sarcastically.

Grace smiled.

“Yes, I said
boys!
Apparently, this matters to a fourteen-year-old girl. The lack of
boys
on a beautiful little lake in the country. I have tried to tell her that boys are not worth anything, but she is determined to go to summer camp with the disgusting creatures anyway, and I'm supposed to be content with picking her up in Vermont and taking her to Cape Cod for a week.”

Grace laughed and drank the last bit of her coffee. “And so you shall be, if you know what's good for you,” she instructed him. “The fourteen-year-old girl is a very tricky bit of ectoplasm. Be happy she wants to see you at all.”

“I'm happy,” he grumbled. “Don't I look happy?”

He asked them over again, for dinner, and again Grace demurred, but perhaps not as energetically as the last time and the time before. She attributed this, afterward, to Henry, and the notion that Henry would probably not dislike Leo, and that Leo might not be a problematic person for Henry to know, seeing that they all three lived on the same lake in the middle of the woods. And he—Leo—had said that it would be a nice thing if Henry could bring his fiddle (he called it a fiddle, not a violin) when they came, because he—Leo—would love to hear Henry play, or would Henry like to bring his fiddle (violin) over sometime at the weekend to sit in with the band? And Grace had very nearly said that Henry didn't really “sit in,” that wasn't really the way he'd been taught to play, and actually just imagining a student of Vitaly Rosenbaum “sitting in” with other musicians (though the grim Hungarian might not even have deigned to consider Leo and the others in Windhouse musicians at all) was pretty hard to do. But she didn't. On the other hand, she didn't accept the invitation, either. Instead, she found herself inquiring—with an irreverence in her voice that was supposed to make him forget all about having asked—what the difference was, anyway, between a violin and a fiddle, and he told her, simply: Attitude.

“Attitude,” she repeated, very skeptical. “Really.”

“Simple as that,” he said, looking pleased with himself.

“But…attitude toward what?”

“Oh, I could tell you, but then I couldn't be responsible for what happened next. Shall we leave it for a few weeks?”

Yes, she told him, nodding soberly. A few weeks.

Then they got up and left the café together, Leo waving back at the woman behind the counter, and Grace, who at the very least had been able to spend the past hour not thinking about what was going to happen next, went back to her car and got inside and drove north.

Her brief conversation with Vita had taken place a few days earlier, on the phone at the lake house, which Grace had plugged back in for the occasion. Vita's office number had taken all of thirty seconds at a keyboard in the David M. Hunt Library to procure, but the courage to use it had been far harder to come by. The talk had been…well, a little formal under the circumstances, but when the invitation came—to meet in Vita's office in Pittsfield, of all places, she had said yes right away.

It was not what she had wanted, exactly.

Well, she did not know what she wanted.

Grace leaned forward, reflexively searching for black ice on Route 7, especially when it curved. The road was familiar by now. She had assigned Great Barrington the newly vacant role of “metropolis” in her life and had gotten into the habit of coming here for anything Canaan or Lakeville couldn't handle, which was most things. (Her attachment to the Berkshire Co-Op alone was now so potentially dangerous that it made her former penchant for Eli's on the Upper East Side seem benign—and very economical—in comparison.) She had also managed to lose time in a couple of the better restaurants, the butcher shop, and a shop that sold only antique china, including a complete set of the Haviland now officially promised to her.

It was a pretty town; she had always thought that. It had one of those utterly American Main Streets, but the town itself bent like a hairpin through a couple of areas that—if they were not actual “downtowns”—at least felt like places you might want to park your car and walk around. There were plenty of her own memories here: the long-gone general store where her mother liked the service and the shoes, the Bookloft on Stockbridge Road, where she had spent dusty afternoons ferreting out early psychology tomes, and a massive antiques store where she and Jonathan had bought the landscape of men haying that now hung in their dining room on 81st Street.

Or was it still
their
painting? In
their
dining room? Like everything else in that site-specific museum of the installation previously known as her marriage, she wasn't sure she ever wanted to see it again.

It was steely gray overhead by the time she cleared Lenox and headed northwest to the address Vita had given her. The road left the affluent Berkshire world of Tanglewood and Edith Wharton behind and succumbed to scattered farms and the industrial edges of Pittsfield (home—who could forget?—of a Superfund cleanup site) and the extreme northern boundary of Grace's own childhood territories, if only because she had been taken to the Colonial Theatre here once or twice as a child, and at least once a summer, on stormy days, to the Berkshire Museum. Quite possibly Vita had come with her on one of those expeditions while staying with Grace at the lake house, and how strange it was to think that a place she herself had once introduced her friend to was now the place Vita worked and had made a life. Pittsfield was one of those old towns you drove through to get to somewhere else, or because that's where the train or the bus actually let you off. It was a place in headlong decline: full of formerly grand homes, now in slightly scary neighborhoods, and formerly sylvan parks you might want to think twice about entering at night.

The Porter Center was located in some former Stanley Electric Manufacturing Company buildings, distinctively redbrick, forming a kind of campus, but the sign at the entry (and the guard who emerged as she slowed to read it) directed Grace to a converted residential house in classic white and green, with its own, smaller,
ADMINISTRATION
sign. She parked her car and took another moment to steady herself. Vita, according to the tagline on her e-mail, was the executive director of this place, which seemed to exist not only here on its own postindustrial campus, but in a kind of root system of programs all over the county, as far north as Williamstown and as far south as Great Barrington. According to the website Grace had pored over in the library, it did everything: drug treatment intervention, programs for teen mothers, individual therapy, anxiety and depression groups, and court-mandated courses for substance abusers and sex offenders.
One-stop shopping for mental health
, she thought, taking in the long brick buildings from her own front seat. Years earlier, at the time of her wedding, when she and Vita had both been about to enter graduate school (Vita for social work, Grace in psychology, but with the common goal of becoming therapists specializing in individual therapy), this was not the outcome she had envisioned for her friend.