The Three Weissmanns of Westport Read online

  "Infantile grandiosity. I've always liked the sound of that. Rolls off the tongue."

  "But real children aren't grandiose. They're actually grand. Look at Henry, for example."

  Annie pictured Henry on the floor of the living room, four adults gazing adoringly at him as he pushed a car in circles. She remembered, too, a moment later in that same day. Henry had fallen asleep with Betty on the couch. Kit and Miranda, returning from a walk, had just come up the battered cement steps, leaving the door from the outside to the sunporch open. Annie was at the window facing the sunporch, picking dead roses from a bunch Kit had brought them a week earlier, and she was just aware of them, in the corner of her vision. They stood, one on each side of the door. Kit put out his hand and touched Miranda on the shoulder, a gentle, single, petting motion, like the soft swat of a cat. And they had both laughed softly and privately.

  Annie wished she had not witnessed this scene. It meant that much more worry. She had always worried about Miranda. Even when Miranda was riding high, Annie had kept an eye on her younger sister. It was a remnant of childhood--a wariness of her sister, who demanded so much and seemed to devour the bulk of their parents' attention. It was also a source of power for Annie, a self-protective self-importance that translated into an almost prim protectiveness of Miranda. She had understood this even as a little girl. If Annie did not look after Miranda, what other role was there for her? Only resentment, and resentment was such an uncomfortable sentiment. Annie loved Miranda, found her impossible not to love, and very early on she had discovered a way to love her with dignity: worry.

  Such good friends, Annie told herself when she saw Kit and Miranda that day from the sunporch. Friends, she thought again, trying to convince herself. And then, unable to hold out against her own eyes, the admission: lovers. She'd felt suddenly envious of Miranda and sorry for her all at once.

  But as soon as Kit and Miranda came into the living room, it was as if the handsome young man at her side vanished. Miranda stood before the sofa, her face, that lively, determined face, shifting, suddenly and beautifully. A transformation, Annie thought at the time. Peace, she thought. Miranda at peace. And she had followed her sister's gaze, an almost palpable emanation of simple, complete happiness, to its destination, a small child, blinking, sucking his thumb, his pretty mouth curling in a smile around his little fist.

  "How is little Henry, anyway?" Annie asked now as they drove against the shimmer of the setting sun.

  Miranda said nothing.

  Perhaps she had not heard. Annie glanced at her silent sister, profiled against the window, her sunglasses hiding her eyes.

  Impassive, wordless, Miranda turned to face the window and the passing prickly November woods beyond.

  Annie did not repeat the question.

  Josie was meeting them at a tiny bistro they had all liked "when the family was intact," as Miranda put it. "He could have chosen a more neutral place."

  "I don't think he wants to be neutral."

  "Fat chance," Miranda said.

  "That he can be or that he wants to be?"

  "I don't know, Annie. Why do you always have to make so much sense? You know what I mean."

  And Annie, after a moment of reflexive annoyance, had to admit that, yes, she did know exactly what her sister meant.

  Josie had not yet arrived, but their table was ready, their usual table; he must have requested it, for the restaurant was busy. They sat and waited, neither of them sure what her feelings were. Then he walked in, and they were overcome by waves of love, embarrassment, and penetrating anger.

  He looked older and younger at the same time. What is that about? Annie wondered. She had not seen him in months, and here he was, her Josie, smaller somehow, grayer, thinner, but his step was so jaunty, the way he moved his arms, so light and carefree. How dare he be carefree when her mother could barely walk beneath her load of care?

  "I miss you girls," he said.

  "Whose fault is that?" Miranda said.

  Joseph stared at his two daughters, his little girls. Miranda sat with crossed arms, her lower lip jutting out, the way she had when she was truly a little girl. She glared at him, which was on the whole less unsettling than Annie, who did not even look at him. Oh, what had he done? His whole life was gone, just like that. Betty was gone, Betty and her picnics. It had been their joke, that she turned everything into a picnic. She turned everything into an outing, even a trip to the motor vehicles bureau to turn in the license plates of their old car. Oh, we'll go together, she had said. Let's go to the one downtown! We'll take a walk along the water, see the ships like the tourists. It's not a picnic, he had said, as he so often did. They could have had such a nice old age, an old age full of unlikely picnics. But picnics were old-fashioned entertainments, and he wasn't ready for his old age. Felicity had reached down a firm young hand and fished him out of that murky bog.

  "I don't think it's legal to lock Mom out of the apartment," Annie said. "And if it is legal, it's not ethical, Josie. It really isn't."

  "But your mother agreed to it," Joseph said. "I discussed it with her."

  "I beg your pardon?" Annie was really shocked. Betty had never mentioned it.

  "What possessed her to do that?" Miranda said. "And why do you want the locks changed anyway? It's not like we're going in there to ransack the place. The place that is her home, by the way."

  "Oh," Joseph said vaguely. "It's just protocol. Anyway, I'm living there, and I need my privacy. I'm entitled to my privacy, aren't I?" He looked at them, hurt.

  "Well, you're entitled, anyway," Miranda muttered.

  "I just want to have a nice dinner," he said. "That's all. A nice dinner."

  They had always come to this restaurant for their birthdays, ever since Annie was ten years old and Miranda eight. It was a grown-up restaurant, and they were each allowed a sip of wine.

  "A bottle?" Josie said. "White, right?"

  Yes, white wine, Josie, Annie thought. They would come with their mother and settle into their seats, order their pretend cocktails with jolly red cherries floating on top. Then the doors of the restaurant would fly open and there would be Josie, his overcoat and briefcase, artifacts from that exalted, distant place, the office. And he would bring Annie a bouquet of anemones for her birthday, white roses for Miranda. The waiter would fetch a pitcher of water, and the flowers would adorn the table, bright and important.

  What would Josie do this year? Send flowers? Forget that he had ever gotten the anemones and roses? Either way, it would be heartbreaking.

  Next to Annie, Miranda sighed, wiped away a tear. "Fuck," she said softly.

  The food came and the girls picked at their moules frites.

  "That's your favorite," he reminded them. He felt sick and barely touched his steak. He ordered another bottle of wine and wondered what he could do to make them understand. It was something that had just happened. One day he had been laughing at one of Betty's comments, walking to Columbus Avenue to get Tasti D-Lite with her, the next he was so in love with Felicity he could hardly speak. He had fallen in love in a way he could barely credit, a heart-pounding, urgent, hopeless way. If they really loved him, these daughters of his, they would rejoice for him, rejoice with him. I am reborn, he wanted to cry out. He wanted to drink champagne and celebrate. He wanted Miranda and Annie to join him in a toast. A toast to life. His life.

  But he looked at the girls, and he saw he would have to drink that toast alone. They loved their mother and he had hurt her. But he loved their mother, too. That's what they didn't get. He noted that it was much easier for him to say, even to think, that he loved her when he referred to her as "their mother," rather than Betty, but he did love her, their mother. He would always love their mother. But things change.

  He sighed, and both girls glared at him. Well, he didn't really expect them to forgive him. Not in this lifetime. They were hurt, they were angry. Fine. He got it.

  "I understand that you're angry," he said. "I'm not a fool. And
I'm not perfect. I understand that, too. But I love you both, and I'll always be here for you."

  His voice was shaking with emotion. There were tears in his eyes.

  Annie shook her head in disbelief. Was he kidding? "You threw our mother onto the street," she said loudly. "With no money. None. Do you understand that, too?"

  Joseph looked nervously at the surrounding diners.

  "Look," he said, lowering his voice. "There are steps. Steps you take. You know . . . in a"--he lowered his voice even more--"divorce."

  "You can't even say the word? Divorce. Divorce, divorce. Ugly cruel mean-spirited divorce. There. Okay? Clear?"

  Annie's face was hard and furious. Joseph glared at her. She had always been so sensible, a calm, rational person--like him. But being reasonable obviously had a cold side to it, too.

  Miranda, on the other hand--there had never been anything reasonable or cold about her. She was a flurry of impetuous emotion. She understood love. So he tried his other daughter, he tried Miranda: "It's just unavoidable, honey. I can't help it. It doesn't mean I don't love you both." He attempted a conspiratorial smile. "It will all work out in the end." That was Miranda's saying, her mantra.

  "You think so?" Miranda said.

  She pushed her chair back violently as she stood up.

  The wrath of women, he thought. There was a downside to heat, it seemed, as well as cold. They could all go to hell. He watched Miranda's napkin, which she had thrown from her lap, falling like a white gliding gull. He heard the clatter of Annie's chair echoing Miranda's. He heard his daughters' footsteps. A waiter's hand reached down and whisked the napkin off the floor. When he looked up, Miranda and Annie were gone and he was alone.

  One morning shortly after the disastrous dinner with Joseph, Betty waited until both Miranda and Annie arrived at the breakfast table before surprising them with the news that she had received an offer from Joseph's lawyer the evening before.

  "You mean our dinner with Josie did some good?" Miranda asked. "I knew it would!"

  "Thank God," Annie said. "It's about time he stepped up to the plate."

  "Yes," Betty said. "Of course, I can't possibly accept it." She shook her head sadly. "Generous as Joseph is being . . . Well, it's just that he's offered a settlement of three hundred thousand dollars."

  "Oh brother," Annie said.

  "Over ten years."

  "That's a joke, right?" Miranda said. Then she added thoughtfully, "Except you still have the apartment. That must be what he's thinking. You could sell it and invest, what, three million dollars? Even in this market. And live really comfortably. Not the way you've been living, but . . ."

  "Oh no, dear, the three hundred thousand dollars paid over ten years would be his payment for my share of the apartment. Now that is a decent return on my five-thousand-dollar investment, I guess, although it has been almost fifty years. However, there's an argument to be made for it, I'm sure. But I just don't feel comfortable having Joseph live there with that woman."

  Annie and Miranda stood dumbfounded.

  "That woman?" Miranda said after a long, uncomfortable silence. "What woman?"

  "Vivacity?" Betty said, looking thoughtful. "Something like that. Joseph's middle-aged young woman. Capacity! That's it."

  Miranda and Annie never did learn how their mother found out about Felicity. She never mentioned the incident. She had said her piece, made her decision, and the subject of how she learned of the intruder need never be raised. It had been a shock to her when she had called Joseph at the apartment the night before and the woman who worked in his office answered. Betty had recognized the voice--it was quite distinctive, a high, strong voice still carrying a trace of Boston. She saw the woman's face in her imagination, a pale, heart-shaped face with sharp but not unpleasant features and big, unnerving, round blue eyes. She heard the woman's confusion when she recognized Betty's voice. And she knew. She had known all along, she realized. She had known all along.

  "Is Joseph in?" she asked.

  "Joe!" she heard the woman call.

  Joe. It was as if Joseph had cut off not only half his name but half his life. Her half.

  "Betty!" he said. "What a surprise."

  "I won't do it, Josie," she said, using the children's name for him.

  "Won't do what?" he asked.

  But she knew he understood.

  "Life is not a picnic," she said. "You were right about that." And she hung up.

  12

  In the following weeks, it was as if the spirit of the three women had faded with the leaves. It rained day after day, and with the bad weather, the cottage began to feel as small and damp and rundown as it was. Miranda forced herself to make useless phone calls and write useless letters to people in the world of publishing who would have preferred to forget she ever existed. Annie slid into an ennui of routine, terrified that the order of this methodical, meaningless existence would turn out to be her future as far as the eye could see. Betty tried to cheer them up by claiming they were all suffering from cabin fever, a term redolent of the pioneering West, yet even she had to admit the days were long and tempers were short in the Weissmann household. She ordered an infomercial triangular sponge on a stick called the "Point 'n Paint" and began to slather her bedroom walls a modish but vaguely funereal gray.

  It was at this time, when the weather was dismal and the sky dingy and mean, that Cousin Lou and Rosalyn made their yearly migration to Palm Springs, bringing a peevish Mr. Shpuntov along with them. Betty and her daughters stood in the light rain beneath their umbrellas as the Cousin Lous, as everyone called that family, followed a large number of suitcases into the Escalade and decamped for the dry, sunny heat of California, where Lou and Rosalyn had a house on a golf course.

  "The desert beckons," Rosalyn said from the car as her cousins stood in the driveway beneath their umbrellas. She threw the three women a magnanimous kiss. "We must follow the sun!"

  "That's French for 'So long, suckers!'" cried Cousin Lou.

  Mr. Shpuntov, his voice harsh and unnaturally high, said, "What's going on? What's going on here?" He was in the front seat beside the ancient driver, a retired police officer, who would bring the car back and lock it up in the garage. The retired police officer's hand trembled as he adjusted the rearview mirror. Annie wondered if it wouldn't be safer to let Mr. Shpuntov drive.

  "You'll have to visit," Lou was saying.

  "Of course, our house there is much smaller," Rosalyn quickly added.

  "Always room for family," Lou said, and the car backed down the long driveway.

  The Cousin Lous planned to be gone until April. To her surprise, Annie found that she missed them. The dinners at their house had often been tedious, it was true. And after a long day at work and a bumpy commute home, making small talk was the last thing she wanted to do. She looked forward to getting into her pajamas and watching American Idol or Project Runway or the show about the family with dwarfism. Annie had never been a social person, and over the years she had gotten used to filling up the blanks of her evenings. But surprisingly quickly she had also gotten used to Lou and Rosalyn's dinners. Now her cousins were gone, and the nights in the cottage were long and disagreeable. She stayed in town to have dinner with friends once a week or so, but she didn't like to leave Betty and Miranda too much. Her mother and her sister both seemed so fragile, so bare, stripped of everything that had given them joy, like two gray brittle branches rattled by the wintry beach winds.

  In New York, Joseph walked from his apartment to the office in the morning, from the office to the apartment in the evening, every day just as he had always done, except now, Felicity walked beside him. She was such a vigorous woman, breathing in the cold air with such determination, exhaling like a thoroughbred about to thunder down the track. Just standing next to her on the elevator thrilled Joseph. His routine was no longer routine. The elevator man who had gathered him up from his apartment for decades now gathered him up with this sturdy little blonde by his side. Good mornin
g, Mr. Weissmann, the elevator man said, as he always had. But it was all different now. All new. Good morning, Miss Barrow, the elevator man added.

  Felicity had formally moved into the Central Park West apartment a few weeks before Betty's call. On her first proprietary tour, she saw that the sofa from the study and the chairs and coffee table from the living room were gone and said, "I hope all that furniture won't be a burden for poor Betty, out there in her cozy little hideout." She walked through the rooms noting empty spaces and lighter patches on the walls that told of former household treasures now relocated to Connecticut. "So much stuff," she said. "Material things . . . people get so attached . . ." She wandered into the kitchen, opening and closing drawers. "Still, I don't think taking the silver was a good idea. There's absolutely no security in those little beach places."

  They had come straight from the office, and it was six o'clock. She pulled out the bottle of Scotch and thought, I am giving Joseph his drink in our apartment. She filled a glass with ice. "Lucky Betty, living in a resort," she said as she handed Joseph his drink. She rubbed his tense, tired shoulders. "A permanent vacation. Not like us wage slaves!" Then she laughed and settled in next to Joseph on the living room sofa, which Betty had, remarkably, left behind. That beach cottage must be the size of Versailles, she thought, judging from how few things remained in the apartment.

  "Here we are," Joseph said. He put his arm around her. Here we are, he thought uncomfortably. Here we are.

  "Home at last," said Felicity. She turned her round blue eyes to his.

  Unblinking, Joseph thought. He kissed her head. She was a tough little nut. "Here we are," he said again, more cheerfully.

  "She started out being pretty reasonable," he told Felicity the night Betty called. Why had Felicity answered the phone? he wondered. It made everything so much more complicated.

  They sat at the dining room table eating Chinese takeout with plastic forks. Felicity, still a little shook up after hearing Betty's voice, eyed the bare wood floor (hadn't there been a gorgeous Oriental here?) with grim neutrality.