You Should Have Known (6 page)

“I think,” Sally said firmly, “that may be it. I don't have anything else. Sylvia? Do you have anything else?”

“Nope,” Sylvia said, shutting her leather-encased folder with a smack.

Amanda was already getting to her feet, gathering the papers before her as she did. She wasn't wasting time. Malaga, having jostled the infant into a more or less vertical position, had still not shown the smallest inclination to cover herself.

“It was nice to meet you. I think your little boy is in my daughter Piper's class. Miss Levin? Fourth grade?”

The woman nodded.

“I haven't gotten to meet any of the new parents this year,” Amanda said, shoving the papers into her pale green Birkin. “We ought to have a get-together, just Miss Levin's class.”

“How is Miguel doing?” Sally asked. “He's a sweet little boy.”

Malaga, in response, showed the slightest animation, offering a brief smile as she patted her infant on the back. “Yes. He doing well. The teacher, she working with him.”

“Piper said she played a game with him on the roof,” said Amanda.

The roof was where the elementary students went for recess. It was covered in safe, rubbery flooring and full of primary-colored playground equipment and a net, to prevent the children from flying away.

“Okay,” Malaga said. The baby emitted a deep, unladylike burp. Suddenly, Grace wanted desperately to leave.

“Well, bye, all,” she said cheerily. “Sally, if you think of anything else, please call. But obviously we're in great shape. I can't believe you've pulled this all together in such a short time.”

“Well, with a little help from Suki Spenser.” Sally laughed. “It doesn't take a village if you have a multizillionaire with a ballroom and a winery.”

“So that's what I'm missing,” Grace said with practiced goodwill. “Good-bye, Malaga,” she said, noting that the woman was finally putting her heavy breasts back into the bra. Grace lifted her leather briefcase by its shoulder strap and placed it squarely on her shoulder.

“You going back to work?” Sylvia said.

“No. Taking Henry to his violin lesson.”

“Oh, of course. Is he doing Suzuki still?” Sylvia asked.

“No, not really. After Book Eight or Book Nine, somewhere around there, they sort of head away from all that.”

“You still take him to his lessons?” said Sally, with the faintest whiff of disapproval. “God, if I took my kids everywhere myself, I'd never do anything else. Two of them do gymnastics, and there's piano and ballet and fencing. Plus Djuna, of course. She only does Music Together and Gymboree, but you know, the fourth go-round with Gymboree? I couldn't take it anymore, so Hilda goes. The moms were like, ‘Oh, my baby's so special because she slid down the slide!' I keep wanting to say, ‘This is my fourth kid, and I hate to tell you, but gravity makes them
all
slide down the slide.' And I almost lost it so many times in Music Together, I finally told Hilda she had to do that one, too. I feel like I've been shaking the same egg maraca for a decade.”

“I'm sure if I had more than just Henry, I'd have stopped a long time ago,” Grace assured her. “It's not that hard when it's just one.”

“I've been thinking of starting Celia on the violin,” said Amanda. Celia was Daphne's twin, a sturdy girl, at least a head taller than her sister, with an overbite that was going to be very expensive. “Where is his teacher?”

Grace wanted very much to say that it didn't matter where Henry's teacher was, since Henry's teacher would not possibly consider taking an eleven-year-old beginning violin student, no matter who his parents were or how much money they had. Henry's teacher, an acerbic and depressive Hungarian in his seventies, had become Henry's teacher only after a hair-raising audition and an exhaustive assessment of his musicality. And though it was clear to all involved that Henry was headed for university, not conservatory (a state of affairs that suited Grace and Jonathan, and certainly Henry, just fine), it was also true that his talent was sufficient to keep Henry's place on his teacher's very small and very precisely maintained roster of students. She might have answered Amanda's question by saying that Vitaly Rosenbaum taught at “Juilliard” (which had until recently been true) or even “Columbia” (which was also somewhat true, since a few of his students, who had similarly departed the conservatory track, were now undergraduates and graduate students there, and everyone came to his Morningside Heights apartment for instruction), but it was necessary only to answer with a third truth to make the entire conversation evaporate, so she opted for that.

“He's on West 114th Street,” she said.

“Oh,” said Amanda. “Well, never mind.”

“I love Henry,” said Sally. “So polite, every single time I see him. And oh, my God, is he good-looking. I'd kill for his eyelashes. Have you noticed his eyelashes?” she said to Sylvia.

“I…don't think so.” Sylvia smiled.

“It's so unfair, boys get the best eyelashes. I mean, I'm spending a fortune on that eyelash-growing stuff, and Henry Sachs walks down the corridor and blinks and you practically feel a breeze.”

“Well…,” Grace said. She was fairly sure that Sally meant to compliment Henry, or more probably Grace herself, but she found the observation of her son's beauty distasteful. “I guess they are a little on the long side,” she managed finally. “I haven't thought about them in a while. When he was a baby, I remember noticing they were long.”

“She have long lashes,” Malaga Alves said suddenly. She nodded at the baby in her lap, who was sleeping now and whose eyelashes were indeed quite long.

“She's beautiful,” Grace said, grateful for the shift in focus. It wasn't difficult to endorse the beauty of an infant. “What is her name?”

“Her name Elena,” said Malaga. “My mother name.”

“Beautiful,” Grace said again. “Oh dear, I'd better leave. My kid with the long eyelashes gets upset when I make him late for violin. Good-bye, everyone,” she said, already turning. “I'll see you at school, or…on Saturday! It's going to be great.”

With her bag slung over her shoulder, she made for the kitchen.

“Hang on a sec, I'll walk out with you,” Sylvia said. Grace, who at least preferred Sylvia to anyone else in the room, paused unenthusiastically in the front hall. After the door shut behind them, they stood for a moment on the town house steps and looked at each other. “Wow,” said Sylvia.

Grace, who didn't want to agree until she knew exactly what she was wowing, said nothing. “You going to school now?” she asked.

“Yeah. I have another meeting with Robert. One in my long, long series of meetings with Robert. I'm surprised they're not gossiping about us.”

Grace smiled. Robert was Rearden's headmaster. His marriage to his long-term partner, the artistic director of a major off-Broadway theater company, had been one of the first gay weddings featured in the
Times
“Vows” column. “About Daisy?” she asked.

“Yes, always Daisy. Do we move her ahead or do we keep her back? Is it better for her to do trigonometry with the tenth graders or hygiene with the fifth graders? Can she skip introductory biology and go ahead to advanced chemistry, or is it more important for her to keep taking seventh-grade social studies with her class? It's exhausting. I know I shouldn't complain. I understand I'm supposed to support her academically, but at the same time, I want her to be a seventh grader, you know? I don't want her to go tearing through her childhood. She only gets one, like the rest of us,” Sylvia said. Together, the two walked east to Lexington and turned uptown.

This little truth, offered so nonchalantly, gave Grace an unexpected sting. Henry, like Daisy, was an only child, and she had also sighted the far shore of his childhood. He was still recognizable as the child-Henry (even, to his mother, at least, as the toddler-Henry), but it was all going too fast, and she knew it. The fact that there had been no other children made this looming transition more fraught still. When he left her embrace she would become, in a real sense, childless again.

Of course, it had not been their plan to have only one child, and now she understood that she had squandered precious time when Henry was little worrying over when (
if
) the next one would come (Jonathan, who had seen too much cancer to let her go very far down the infertility treatment road, put a stop to it after a half dozen rounds of Clomid, which had not been successful). In time she had settled into this Henry-centric configuration of her family, but like any other family configuration in New York City, this one came with baggage. If families with two children were modestly procreating and families with three and more were displaying entitlement, parents of single offspring possessed an inverse arrogance all their own. A single, perfect child, they seemed to suggest, was worthy of their full attention, effort, and nurturing. A single child, so remarkable in himself or herself, negated the need to reproduce repeatedly, since he or she was obviously capable of contributing more to the world than any number of lesser children. The parents of only children had an annoying way of offering their children to the world as if they were doing the world a big favor. It was a phenomenon Grace had long been familiar with. She and her closest friend, her childhood friend Vita, had once made up a song about this type of parent, to the tune of a song from
Bye Bye Birdie
:

Grace, of course, had been an only child herself. She hadn't exactly been inflated to world-saving stature by her mother and father, and she had often been lonely. Or—she corrected herself now—not exactly lonely, but alone. Alone at home or at the lake in the summer. Alone with Mom. Alone with Dad. The power and messy intricacies of sibling relationships fascinated her. Sometimes, at Vita's labyrinthine apartment on East 96th Street, she had stood out in the hallway and just let the sounds of movement and argument (usually argument) among Vita's three brothers wash over her. That, in a complete negation of her own family, had become what family was supposed to be. She had wanted it for Henry and had not been able to give it to him.

Vita was gone. Of course, not
gone
. Not
dead
. But gone nonetheless. Vita had hung in there—confidante, companion, roommate in a dilapidated (actually slanting) house in Central Square when they were seniors in college, Grace at Harvard and Vita at Tufts, and climactically maid of honor—until Grace married. And then she had just…evaporated, removed herself from Grace's life, leaving her with only facsimiles of friends. And precious few of those. Grace, even all these years later, was too bereft about it to be angry, and too angry to be sad.

“Did you know she was coming?” Sylvia asked after a moment.

“Who?” said Grace. “That woman who came late?”

“Yeah. Did Sally say anything to you?”

Grace shook her head. “I don't know Sally very well. Just at school.”

Then again, the same could almost as easily be said of Sylvia, despite the fact that Grace and Sylvia had actually been students at Rearden at the same time (Grace two years behind) and that she did sort of like Sylvia, now as well as back then. Certainly, she admired Sylvia. It couldn't be easy to raise a daughter alone, work full-time (Sylvia was an attorney specializing in labor disputes), and care for first one parent and then the other as they had taken ill and died over the past couple of years. She supposed what she respected most about Sylvia was the fact that she had not married herself off to a man who wouldn't make her happy, solely for the purpose of having the child she'd obviously wanted. In fact, when Grace explained to her clients—her female clients—that forgoing marriage to the wrong man did not mean they couldn't have children, it was sometimes Sylvia who passed through her thoughts. Sylvia and her brilliant daughter from China.

Once, at morning drop-off, another mother had praised Daisy Steinmetz's obvious and astounding intelligence, and Sylvia had shrugged it off. “I know,” Grace had heard her say. “But it has nothing to do with me. These are not my genes. Daisy never heard English until she was nearly a year old, but she was chattering away a month or two after I brought her home to New York, and she read before she was three. Of course, I'm delighted for her, that she's smart. I think it will make her life easier. And I'm a good mom, but I'm not responsible for that.”

This, to say the least, had been a highly unusual thing to hear in the marble entry foyer of the Rearden School.

“She's very odd,” said Sylvia.

“Sally?”

“No.” Sylvia allowed herself the briefest laugh. “That woman, Malaga. She sits across the street on one of those benches in the park, you know? After she drops the son off. She just stays.”

“With the baby?” Grace frowned.

“Now with the baby. Before she came when she was pregnant. She doesn't even read a book. Doesn't she have anything to do all day?”

“I guess not,” said Grace. For her, as for Sylvia and probably for every person they knew on the island of Manhattan, not having anything to do—indeed, not being frantically busy at all times—was an unfathomable state of being. It was also, for women like themselves, the most supreme New York put-down possible. “Maybe she was worried about her kid. Miguel?” Grace asked.

“Miguel, yeah.”

“You know, and wanted to stay nearby in case he needed her.”

“Hm.”

They walked a block or so in mutual silence.

“It was just bizarre,” said Sylvia, finally. “I mean, sitting there like that.”