The Three Weissmanns of Westport Page 13

  Annie was on the other side of the long table, toward the head, sitting in what she hoped was quiet, self-contained dignity. She could sense Frederick across from her, near the foot of the table, but she did not look up to see. If he had not been intimate when they spoke, he had been warm. But at the arrival of Gwen and her entourage, he had become suddenly quite solemn and had melted away with them as if he had never been there at all.

  "You shouldn't have," she heard him say, and looked up to see one of the girls--Annie could not tell if it was Juliet or Ophelia, or Medea, for that matter, she thought irritably--press a honey-soaked piece of challah into his hand.

  Miranda came up behind him and pointed to the empty chair beside Annie.

  Annie quickly looked away.

  "There's a seat beside Annie," Miranda said shrilly to Frederick. "Go, go!" She put her hand in the small of his back and gave him a little shove.

  What is wrong with her? Annie thought, coloring.

  What is wrong with him? Miranda wondered. Carpe diem, carpe, carpe, carpe! she wanted to cry out. She felt quite heroic, facilitating her sister's romance when she herself was so leaden and alone. She had checked her cell phone several times, retreating to the powder room to do so, but Kit had not so much as texted her. Of course, he was still on the plane, she knew that, but that did not make her sense of abandonment any less painful. She would have thought he could send her just a few words from the airport before he left, or e-mail a picture of Henry strapped into his seat. She longed to check her phone again, but would have to wait until they were sitting down. Then she would surreptitiously remove it from her jacket pocket, hold it on her lap, and glance at it, the way Annie's boys were always doing, the way she had done when she still had a real life with real work. The thought of her smashed career came back, after leaving her alone for the last few peaceful weeks, searing and bitter, rising like bile. Furious, she nudged Frederick again. If she had lost everything and everyone, then at least Annie should have her novelist.

  Frederick hesitated, then murmured that he ought to stay close to his granddaughters, and slid into the nearest chair. Juliet and Ophelia, the smocking of their red velvet dresses now smeared with a layer of golden honey that was studded with yellow challah crumbs, smiled at Miranda and licked their fingers.

  In the background Annie heard a man's voice, a singsong voice mottled with static. It was Rosalyn's father, Mr. Shpuntov. He was in his room now, his words reaching the dining room through the intercom that had been installed to keep track of him and was kept on at all times.

  "He sold bananas," said the voice. "Hung them in the basement to ripen. Have you ever seen bananas in the Bronx, Mr. Eight-o-seven? A basement full of bananas in the Bronx . . ."

  Mr. Eight-o-seven? Annie looked at her watch. Ah. Mr. Shpuntov was telling stories to the clock.

  "It was wonderful seeing all of you ladies," Frederick said to Annie and Miranda and Betty at the end of the evening.

  Miranda looked at him scornfully.

  "Oh dear! Mother!" she then said. "Mr. Shpuntov is drinking the dregs." And she purposefully dragged her mother off to stop Rosalyn's father in his procession down one side of the table and then up the other, raising half-finished glasses of wine to his lips and draining them.

  But she saw, as she relieved Mr. Shpuntov of a goblet, that Frederick had not lingered to exchange an intimate goodbye with Annie as Miranda had hoped. He had simply nodded his head, said, "Well, bye," turned on his heel, and walked out the door to wait while Gwen held up the girls, one by one, to be kissed by Cousin Lou.

  "What was wrong with Frederick?" she asked Annie as they walked home.

  "How do you mean?"

  "How do I mean? You know perfectly well how I mean. He was so odd and cold and standoffish."

  "Frederick was perfectly pleasant," Annie said. But in her room, later, she silently echoed her sister's words: What was wrong with Frederick?

  11

  The mornings came later, and the air grew colder. The beauty of Westport shrank and drew back from the eye. What had been lush and green was stalky and irrelevant. Where the roads had been lined with trees swaying in the breeze there were now just bare, rigid trunks. Behind them, stripped of their leafy veils, colossal facades of houses meant to look like mansions were revealed to resemble nothing so much as the better chains of New England motor inns. Annie surreptitiously phoned the professor subletting her apartment to see if he might want to leave early, which he did not. Betty stood for hours staring out her bedroom window, her widow's walk, and mused bitterly that she was neither walking nor a widow, yet there she was, in Westport, in purgatory. And Miranda? She was quiet, quieter than the other two had ever seen her.

  Miranda knew she was making a sullen spectacle of herself, but she didn't seem to be able to stop. It was very much like having a tantrum--she felt that herself. There was that same fatigued momentum. But she could not talk to either her mother or her sister about Kit and Henry, and Kit and Henry were all she could think about. Sometimes she felt herself storing up affection for them, hiding it, protecting it, like a squirrel burying nuts. It was a kind of treasure, this burrowed cache of emotional heat and urgency. Other times, she felt herself losing them, as if they were long dead and she could no longer remember their features.

  What the hell had happened? She felt again the shiver beneath her hand as Kit drew back, on the day he left, like a horse who'd been spooked.

  Annie's emotional schedule took on an almost heartening regularity: days of work, nights of worry, mornings of icy aquatic contemplation leading nowhere. On one of these faded, dun-colored mornings, Annie was slapping through the icy water of Long Island Sound, engaged in her morning swim. The clarity of the cold, the obscurity of the dark water, the sincerity of true solitude: these were things she cherished. As she lost herself in the rhythm of her exertion, as she exhaled into the freezing water, then turned her face to the sky and gulped in the dawn air, she worried about money and her mother's manic widowhood and Miranda's sullen silence; then, what she always somehow came around to thinking about was Frederick. She recalled his appreciative laugh at some remark she had made, the remark itself lost, the laugh clear and ringing in her memory. His eyes, dark and mischievous, looked into her eyes, and they were full of feeling. Or were they? Had she misread his eyes, his feelings? Had she gotten it so wrong? No. No, in spite of the fact that he had not called, in spite of his cool treatment of her on Rosh Hashanah, in spite of this, in spite of that, Annie was somehow sure she had been right about him. Of course, it made no difference. Right or wrong, the facts remained the same: he hadn't called, he had treated her with mere civility the last time they met, he was as far from her as if he had never had any feelings at all.

  Miranda had stopped teasing her about Frederick, which was both a relief and a morbid confirmation of her own conviction that the affair was indeed over. But Miranda was so uncommunicative about everything lately. Her new reticence was just as showy as everything Miranda did, Annie thought irritably.

  Inside the cottage, Miranda sat in the kitchen, her arms resting on the table. She held a large orange in her hands. She stared at it.

  "Honey," Betty said, shuffling in and standing behind her. She watched her daughter listlessly roll the orange back and forth from one hand to the other. "Honey, maybe you need a hobby."

  Miranda laughed. "A nobby?" It was part of a joke Josie used to like, about retirement.

  An old man who's just retired to Florida asks another old guy, "How do you stand it? After two days already I'm bored."

  "Simple," says the guy in a heavy Yiddish accent. "I have a nobby."

  "A nobby?" says the first old man. "What's a nobby?"

  "A nobby, a nobby--like collecting stemps."

  "You collect stamps?" the first one asks.

  "Stemps? No. I keep bees. In mine condo."

  He takes the newcomer up the elevator, into his condo, takes a shoe box from the closet, and lifts the lid. "There!"


  "But they're all dead! This is just a box full of dead bees! What kind of a beekeeper are you?"

  "Hey," says the guy. "It's just a nobby."

  "Want me to keep bees, Mother?"

  "If it would make you happy," Betty said. She paused. "Would it?"

  "I'm okay," Miranda said, and turned back to the orange, making it clear the interview was over. The citrus scent drifted up. She waited for the thud of the newspaper on the muddy drive, then went out to lift the gritty blue plastic bag and carry it inside. By the time Annie returned in her lumpy wet suit and showered and dressed for work, Miranda had riffled through all the sections.

  "I wish you wouldn't always crumple it up like that," Annie said, picking up sheets of the Times and smoothing them out.

  "Just get another paper at the station if you don't like it."

  "Typical."

  "Of what?"

  "Now, girls," Betty said abstractedly. But her heart wasn't in it, and Annie and Miranda, sensing it wasn't, scowled at each other like spoiled children until it was time for Miranda to drive Annie to the station. They left their mother staring blankly out the window, holding a coffee mug against her cheek, where her sinuses hurt.

  "I'm sorry," Annie forced herself to say when they got in the car. "It's just a newspaper. I'm too old to act like this." She did not add that Miranda was also too old. "I've lived alone too long."

  "You?" Miranda said. "What about me? Talk about living alone too long . . ."

  Annie felt sororal rage rising. Was she not even able to apologize, to apologize so delicately, without it becoming a competition? "Green," she said in retaliation, when the traffic light turned and Miranda did not instantly gun the engine.

  Miranda dropped her sister at the station, roared off in the noisy old Mercedes to the parking lot at Compo Beach, then walked along the road in the gloom until she reached Burying Hill beach. She did this every day. It would have been easier to drop Annie at the Greenfield Hill station, which was so much closer to Burying Hill, but she did not want Annie or anyone else to know where she was headed. She stared eastward, in the direction of Kit Maybank's aunt's house. It made her feel closer to Henry and Kit somehow, as if they were just around that rocky bit of coast ahead. She had called Kit several times. Once, she even spoke to Henry. Then Kit stopped answering her calls. Miranda had e-mailed him and gotten a quick, apologetic note in response--so busy, just impossible, soon . . . Of course, she had not heard from him again. It was as if Kit, and so Henry, had dropped off the face of the earth, her earth at least. She wondered who was looking after Henry. Kit had said one of his college roommates had a nanny who had a cousin. This didn't sound reassuring to Miranda. Poor Henry. She had offered to come to L.A. to look after him, but Kit had not really taken her suggestion seriously. And so they were gone, beyond her reach, out of earshot and out of sight, and she was here gazing eastward in the early November drizzle.

  "Hi," someone said, coming up beside her.

  Miranda jumped, hoping for a fraction of an instant that it was Kit, then stared at Roberts as if she didn't recognize him.

  "Sorry. I didn't mean to startle you. But it's really starting to rain. Can I give you a ride home?" he asked, looking back at the beach's parking lot and seeing Miranda's car was not there. "Or did you paddle here in your trusty kayak?"

  Miranda did not smile. She could not summon the social will on this her private, solitary walk. She just managed to mutter a thank you and decline the offer.

  "I like to walk," she said.

  "Okay," said Roberts.

  After that morning, she would occasionally run into Roberts, who also seemed to like to walk. He never presumed to join her, for which she was grateful. He would pass her, going in the other direction, or come upon her as she stood silently admiring some somber moment of landscape. And he would incline his head in greeting. No more. Yet even that she found intrusive and jarring. Although she knew she was being unreasonable, she often varied the time of her walks in order to avoid him.

  It did not help that he found his way to the cottage now and then for dinner. He's certainly made himself at home, she thought as she came in one evening and found him mulling wine in the kitchen.

  "Doesn't the house smell delicious?" Betty said.

  Annie threw Miranda an anxious glance. She hoped her sister would not insult Roberts. He stood at the stove looking so proud of his concoction. She moved toward him protectively, and stood beside him, as if her presence could shield him from the cold indifference of her sister.

  Miranda sniffed the sweetened air and could not help but smile.

  Relieved, Annie took a mug from Roberts. She wondered why Miranda thought he was so old. He was probably in his mid-, possibly late sixties, she realized. His face was creased, but not from age. It was a hearty, weather-beaten face. Miranda's aversion to him was a mystery to Annie. And an irritant. He was so much more suitable than Kit Maybank. It enraged Annie that Miranda was mourning so ostentatiously for someone who had treated her so badly.

  "Roberts is such a lovely man. And, by the way, I am very disappointed in Kit Maybank," Betty said to Annie that night when Roberts had gone and Miranda was out taking a final solitary walk. "Has she heard from him at all?"

  Annie shrugged. Miranda had certainly not confided in her. "Maybe he'll come back for Thanksgiving to spend it with his aunt. But, Mother, I don't think we should make too much of this friendship. I mean, Miranda has her enthusiasms, that's what makes her Miranda, but she's about to turn fifty, for God's sake. She can't just keep pining for, well, you know, a kid half her age."

  "You're so literal-minded, Annie. She isn't pining for Kit. I mean, really! She's not a teenager."

  "That's what I just said. That's my point."

  "You and your points," Betty said indulgently. "Anyway, it's the child she wants. I would have thought that was obvious, poor thing."

  Not for the first time, Annie wondered at her mother's acuity. And at her own lack of it.

  Ever since they had come to Westport, a little over three months ago, Miranda and Annie had been avoiding Josie's calls. At first, when they were still willing to speak to him, they had tried to point out the error of his ways. He had answered that this was how things had to be, in a tone of such firm resignation that he might just as easily have been saying it was God's will.

  "The roof leaks," Miranda screamed into her cell phone. "There are mouse droppings on the sunporch."

  "You've beggared our mother, your wife," Annie yelled into her office phone. "Have you no shame?"

  "Josie, you have to help her," they both pleaded. "If you really understood what was going on, you wouldn't do this. Please let Mommy come home."

  After a while they realized that Josie did not want to understand what was going on, and they stopped calling him. They stopped answering his calls, as well. It had been months since either of them had heard his voice on anything but an answering machine.

  Then Betty informed them that there was a standing lamp in the apartment that she absolutely had to have. Annie pointed out that there was no room in the cramped and cluttered cottage for another lamp. Miranda said Josie had probably sold the lamp anyway. But a few days later, Miranda and Annie found themselves driving their mother's old car into the city to pick up the lamp. It was Annie who had finally agreed to call Josie at his office to arrange the time.

  "Josie? It's Annie."

  "I know it's you, honey. How many people call me that?"

  Annie thought she heard a catch in his voice. Do not weaken, she told herself.

  "I've been calling you," Josie said, his voice hurt.

  "I know." She glanced at the three pink memos with his name on them sitting on her desk.

  "Well, never mind. Now you've called me back. How are you girls? How's your mother?"

  "Look, I just need to get into the apartment. Mom wants the standing lamp from the bedroom." Annie hesitated, then said, "From her bedroom."

  There was silence.

>   "Josie?"

  "Okay. Right. I'll have Ozzie bring it down for you. Any day you say."

  Ozzie was the handyman. Annie wondered if Ozzie missed her mother.

  "That's okay," she said. "I have a key. I just wanted to let you know."

  "Mmm," Josie said. "Well, actually, I had the locks changed."

  Annie said, "What?" but she had heard him.

  "It just seemed prudent," he said.

  "Jesus, Josie."

  "I know."

  "Prudent? Jesus."

  Then neither of them said anything. And neither one hung up.

  "I'm sorry, honey," Josie finally murmured. "I'm so sorry."

  Annie was in her office. It was a small room in the back of the building on the ground floor. There was a window that faced a wall covered with ivy. The window needed to be washed. Her back was aching. She hadn't gone swimming in a week. It was getting too cold, even with a wet suit. Maybe tomorrow she would go to the Y. She thought these things, noticed the shaft of thin city light that slanted in through the window and landed on her desk, but what she really thought was Oh, Josie. Josie, how could you?

  "When are you coming?" he asked.

  "Saturday."

  "Right. Okay."

  "Okay."

  "Okay."

  Annie thought, This is the man who brought me up, the man who was a father to me.

  "Look, have dinner with me, okay?" Josie said. "You and Miranda?"

  Annie was about to say no when he added in a truly pathetic voice, "Please?"

  Now she and Miranda were driving into the city to pick up a useless lamp and have dinner with a useless father-manque.

  "I hate him," Miranda said. "Why are we doing this?"

  "Beats me. I weakened, I guess. His voice . . . it was heartbreaking."

  "Hmmph." Miranda crossed her arms and held them against her chest, pouting. "I think men are big babies."