The Three Weissmanns of Westport Read online

  "The co-op is in his name. Legally, it's his. So he just has to straighten things out--legally. Then we'll work it out between us. Until then, he's not really free to let me have the apartment. Legally."

  "Mother, you know that makes no sense, don't you? I mean, you do know that?"

  "And of course I don't have the money to keep it up just now. Do you know what it costs to maintain a place like this? I'm sure it's a fortune. But I don't really know. Joseph always took care of that part of it. He's always taken such good care of me . . ." she said with a wistful sigh that was soft with gratitude and comfortable memories.

  Annie thought of the little bag with money in it her great-grandmother had always kept hanging around her neck, for emergencies. "Don't you have anything in your own name?" she asked.

  "A little knipple like my grandmother? Why should I?"

  "Well, in case something like this happened."

  "Something like this was supposed to happen thirty years ago, when you girls went off to college, when women were unprepared for something like this."

  "But you're unprepared now."

  "But it wasn't supposed to happen now," Betty patiently explained yet again.

  It was soon after Joseph left that Betty heard from her cousin Lou. Cousin Lou was an elegantly dressed man with a pink face for whom the description open-handed might have been invented. He had, to begin with, disproportionately large hands that burst from his sleeves and were constantly slapping the backs and patting the cheeks and enfolding the helpless smaller hands of the many people he liked to have around him. Lou had come to the United States as an evacuee in 1939, an eight-year-old boy from Austria bringing nothing with him but his eiderdown and a copy of Karl May's first Winnetou novel. Betty's uncle and aunt had taken him in for the duration of the war, but he stayed on after the war ended, for he had lost everyone in the camps. The loss of his family was something he never mentioned. In fact, the only topic from that time that he did talk about was someone named Mrs. James Houghteling.

  Mrs. H., as he called her, had been the wife of the Commissioner of Immigration when the eight-year-old refugee had arrived at Ellis Island.

  "Now, that same year there was a bill before Congress," he said, the first time he discussed Mrs. H. with the little Weissmann girls. "Do you know what Congress is?"

  They nodded yes, though they had only the vaguest idea of men seated in a horseshoe arrangement from a poster in school.

  "Then what, Cousin Lou?" Annie said, adding, "Don't worry," for in spite of the parties he always gave, Cousin Lou always did look a little worried.

  "That same year," Cousin Lou continued, "someone thought it would be a good idea to allow twenty thousand refugee children to come here, to the United States. Children just like me. Did you know I came here on a boat when I was little?"

  Annie nodded again. Annie knew about World War II. She knew about the Holocaust. She had seen a terrifying documentary on Channel 13.

  Miranda began to rock on her heels.

  "Twenty thousand! That's a lot of little boys and girls, isn't it? So they asked the Congress, which is in charge of things like that. But the Congress, it said, No, we don't want those twenty thousand children. What would we do with twenty thousand children? We have our own children!"

  At this point in the story, Annie took Miranda's hand. What if Miranda had heard of the Holocaust, too? Was that why she was rocking back and forth?

  "Their own children," Annie repeated, trying to move things along.

  "Now, I never actually met Mrs. H., but I feel as if we're old friends. And one night Mrs. H. was at a party, and at this party she said that the trouble with the Wagner-Rogers bill--that's what it was called--the trouble with bringing in these twenty thousand children was that they would all too soon grow up into twenty thousand ugly adults!"

  Miranda began to sob, not because she knew of the Holocaust as Annie feared, but at the thought of so many ugly people. She had nightmares for a week afterward, but no one blamed Cousin Lou. It was impossible to blame Cousin Lou for anything. And in time the story of Mrs. H. became a welcome ritual for the girls whenever they visited Cousin Lou or he visited them.

  Lou would pause on those later occasions. He would narrow his eyes and purse his lips, as if he were thinking, thinking, thinking. "Mrs. Houghteling," he would then say, pronouncing both the H and the gh with a hard, exaggerated Yiddish ch, as if he were clearing a hairball from his throat. It was only years later that Annie and Miranda discovered the proper pronunciation was Hefftling. "Mrs. Chechtling," the girls would chant back at him, feeling the word, an ugly word for an ugly soul, vibrating deliciously in their throats. Then Lou would shrug and say, "Well, I must have been a beautiful baby." And Miranda and Annie would always respond, like good congregants, "'Cause, baby, look at you now."

  They had heard the story so many times that "chechtling" had become a Weissmann family verb for snobbish behavior. "Stop chechtling, you big prig," Miranda would say if Annie turned up her nose at some outlandish adolescent style Miranda was affecting. "You're just a selfish bourgeois chechtler," Annie would say when Miranda made fun of her brief eighth-grade Maoist phase.

  Cousin Lou, who insisted that everyone call him Cousin Lou, was not a subtle man, but he was a sincere one. He had made a great deal of money as a real estate developer, but his true business seemed to be providing food and drink for as large a number of guests as he could manage. Passionately devoted to his adoptive American family, his definition of that family had grown so prodigiously over the years that he could no longer fit all of his family into his house at one time, or even two. "You're like family!" he would say, embracing freeloaders, friends, hangers-on, acquaintances, in-laws, and stray children from the neighborhood. Like many immigrants, he was a patriot, and the frenetic magnanimity of his social activity was, as he saw it, his patriotic duty.

  His first solution to convivial overpopulation had been to build ever bigger houses for himself. He now lived in a sprawling modern house of glass on a steep hill overlooking Long Island Sound. But even this would not accommodate his guest list. The teeming friends who were "like family" multiplied like fruit flies in a jar, and Lou had finally begun to rotate them in shifts, one swarm at a time.

  One of Betty's times, an exalted one, was Labor Day. When Lou called this year to invite her and Joe and the girls to his usual Labor Day party in Westport, Betty said, "Oh, what a shame. Joseph would have loved to come, but he's divorcing me. Well, maybe next year," and hung up.

  It was this kind of behavior, fey and satirical and so unlike their normally open, cheerful mother, that filled Annie and Miranda with despair and, when they were honest with themselves, outrage not just at Josie but at Betty as well.

  "She's insane," Annie said when Lou called to ask what was going on. "He's driven her mad. You can't tell her anything. She won't listen. All she does is watch black-and-white movies all night and quote them all day. She's paralyzed, she's broke, she sits by the phone and waits for him to call. I know she does. She answers on the first ring. Did you notice? And she might have been drunk, too. My mother! Drunk! Was she? God, I hope not. Was she?"

  "Well now, let me think--"

  "--and I had to force her to get a lawyer--she wasn't even going to get a lawyer! She can't pay the bills. The bastard has somehow cut her off, and he says nothing can go forward until the apartment is empty and . . ."

  But by now Cousin Lou had gotten the picture, and to him it was a picture of a refugee, and he never could resist a refugee. Within minutes he had called Betty and invited her to come and stay in Westport, as long as she liked, in a cottage he owned at Compo Beach.

  Betty knew the property was extremely valuable. It stood in a little cluster of little streets among what had once been other little beach cottages. Small, cheek-by-jowl, with tiny front yards, no garages, the cottages had not been fashionable during the heyday of the suburban house and showy green lawn, when she and Joseph and the children had briefly lived in t
he town. Schoolteachers rented them in those days. A few divorced mothers or widows fallen on hard times. Like me, Betty thought. Somewhere in the late 1980s all this changed and the cottages were snapped up and vigorously renovated. They were now a huddle of self-consciously and charmingly designed "vacation homes"--McCottages, Annie called them. Lou's bungalow was the sole survivor from the old days. He had been renting the place out to the same woman and her son for years--"They're like family!" But now the son had grown up and moved away, and the old lady had finally died.

  "Don't you want to beautify it?" Betty asked, using Cousin Lou's code for demolition.

  "Time enough for beautification," he assured Betty. "Just your presence will be beautification."

  Betty tried to remember Lou's cottage. A little boy had been swinging from a rope swing, she was sure. From an apple tree in bloom. Or was that in a movie she'd seen? Well, never mind. It was a charming place, it had to be; it was a cottage, after all. Cottage. Such a charming word. She imagined rose-patterned wallpaper. She would take long, lonely walks by the sea. It was only Long Island Sound, not the sea, really, but there were sure to be gray, windy days nevertheless. She stared out the window at the nighttime view she'd known for so long. The park was black and deep, the yellow pool of a streetlight puffing out of the darkness here and there, a taxi's red taillights just visible, then gone. Could Joseph really mean for her to abandon her life, just as he had abandoned her? Well, then. What did she have to lose? It was all gone already.

  "You're very generous," she said. She shook off an uncomfortable echo of Joseph's voice--I'll be very generous . . . very generous . . . "Thank you, Cousin Lou. What would I do without you?"

  "Ha!" cried Cousin Lou. "I think we should ask Mrs. James Houghteling that one!" And he chuckled, invoking that long-gone lady's name three more times before hanging up.

  And so it was, against the advice of the divorce lawyer Annie insisted her mother hire, and in direct refugee defiance of the spirit of the wife of the former Commissioner of Immigration, that Betty Weissmann decided to emigrate to what Cousin Lou newly dubbed Houghteling Cottage.

  3

  Miranda Weissmann was terrifying. This judgment had been passed in an earlier time when, following a briefly fashionable craze for eye exercises, she refused to wear either glasses or contact lenses, consequently sweeping past people she knew without recognizing them. When this seemingly aloof, grand manner was added to a tendency to ask her assistant to retrieve various items that were sitting right in front of her and a habit of inviting editors out to lunch and then not noticing when the bill came and so leaving them with the tab, her reputation was complete. Myopia had established Miranda as irrational, high-handed, sly, and demanding. Myopia made her reputation.

  This was at the beginning of her career. A year later, her interests switched first to inversion therapy and then marathon running, at which point she popped in contact lenses and her warmth toward newly visible old friends and acquaintances, so sudden, was that much more pronounced. People were flattered, they were touched. The word around town among young writers was that Miranda Weissmann was unpredictable, but once she turned her attention to you, she would never turn away. The word around town was surprisingly accurate, and the Miranda Weissmann Literary Agency was on its way.

  "I am a nightmare," Miranda had always said to her latest assistant, smiling innocently.

  And it was quite true. Her bullying was both caustic and disarmingly kindhearted. Half the time, she was harsh toward her assistants, demanding order and obedience to compensate for her own natural disorder and rebellious confusion. The other half, she spoiled them like a coddling mother. They never knew if she would snap or stroke. Her assistants trembled, preened, adored and loathed her. They came and then went as quickly as they could extract themselves, but it was she who always made certain they got wonderful new jobs. People called Miranda many things--a horror, a wild woman, and, following her example, a nightmare--but never in all the annals of gossip and slander in her small world had anyone ever doubted her loyalty or, finally, her goodwill. She specialized in melodrama, in her life and in her work, but in both areas, Miranda Weissmann insisted on a happy ending.

  For the members of Miranda's family, her unpredictability had become predictable. There were tantrums when she was young; when she was older, a combative dedication to whatever it was to which she was dedicated at the moment, and, at every age, the demands and the drama. But with Miranda's bombast and theatricality, always, came an almost fanatical tenderness. Miranda was manipulative, Josie once whispered to Betty, late at night in bed when he'd been thinking about how lucky he was to have inherited his little family: Miranda was manipulative, but who better to be manipulated by?

  Manipulanda, Annie called her.

  Now Manipulanda was terrified. Betty and Josie's divorce was shattering, far removed from any conceivable happy ending for anyone involved. Miranda knew her mother needed her now--an unnerving realization for the baby of the family. Worse, she knew that she also needed her mother more than she ever had before.

  Sometimes Miranda could not sleep at night, staring in rigid fear at the ceiling as she had as a child after a bad dream.

  But she was forty-nine years old. That ought to have made the divorce easier to accept. Or so she was told.

  "It's like that old joke, the old Jewish couple in Miami, they go to the rabbi and say we want a divorce, and he says you've been married for seventy-five years, why now? And they say, We were waiting for the children to die." That was what Miranda's current beau, the day trader, had said a week or so before the Oprah debacle.

  "I'm not dead," Miranda replied. She'd looked at the day trader with distaste and realized what she had always known but somehow hadn't seen: he was actually a retired professor of economics who now spent his days in front of the computer losing money in the stock market. "I'm not dead," she repeated. And why, really, should the long marriage and her age make it any easier to accept this divorce? Surely that made it worse. She was going to be fifty, a traumatic moment for any woman. Joseph and her mother had been together for as long as she could remember. Another way of saying forever. And Joseph was her father, she had always considered him her father--the only father she had ever known.

  Sometimes she cried at night. She wanted to be near her mother: to comfort and to be comforted.

  That night, the night the day trader told her the joke, she tossed and turned, unable to sleep. When she finally drifted off, the day trader poked her and asked her to stop snoring. She didn't like his unsympathetic tone of voice and snapped, "Why don't you stop being a fucking asshole?" The next morning, he left in a huff, never to return, and Miranda cried and flung herself around her loft for the rest of the day, then took two Ativan and went back to bed.

  She began to refer to herself as the product of a broken home.

  "Don't be ridiculous," Annie said. "Your expiration date has expired, Miranda."

  Separation is a positive thing, Felicity explained to Joseph. He heard her, but pretended not to. He waved the waiter over. He was tired of getting divorced. If everyone would just get down to business and do what was right, it would all be taken care of. When he thought of Betty, he thought of her in the apartment. That was where she belonged. For him, Betty was suddenly but utterly in the past, but so was the apartment, parts of the same memories, a different life, a life he was leaving behind. So, yes, separation was a positive thing. Yes, yes. But now it appeared he would not only have to separate from Betty, he would also have to separate Betty from her apartment.

  "How are the stepdaughters doing?" Felicity asked when they'd ordered.

  Joseph never called them his stepdaughters. They were his daughters. He must have shown his distaste for the word. Felicity's wide eyes opened just a bit wider. Her lips parted. She said quickly, "I haven't seen them around the office. I miss them."

  "So do I."

  "Poor Miranda. What a scandal."

  "Double whammy."


  "It's no wonder she doesn't come around. The poor woman is probably afraid to leave the house."

  For a moment, Joseph did not connect the word "woman" with Miranda. She was a girl, always had been, always would be. If she were a woman, what did that make him?

  "Time flies," he said, pouring himself another glass of wine. "I used to read them their bedtime stories. Now they're women with scandals."

  "Well, not Annie. Nothing scandalous about that one."

  Felicity was right about Miranda being afraid to leave her apartment. She had always spent as little time as possible in her loft, an overpriced, underfurnished rental, always at her office or out to dinner or just out. Now she ordered her meals from every Tribeca restaurant that delivered, answered the door in her nightgown, paid with a credit card, and shuffled back to bed. Her slippers slapped disconsolately against the highly polished wood floors. The world droned on, uninterested and uninspiring, beyond her tall windows. She did not hear the car horns or the shouts of the drivers stuck behind double-parked delivery vans. She did not hear the helicopters. She did not have the energy. She heard only what followed her closely--her slippers and the murmur of the television, the creak of the platform as she settled back into bed, the sickly clatter of the plastic tops hitting the floor as she opened her containers of gummy food, her strong, unhappy heartbeat.

  Felicity was right about another thing: it had been a bad year for the Miranda Weissmann Literary Agency, a terrible year, a year of queenly annus horribilis proportions. The Scandal of the Scandals, the blogs called it. All involving Miranda's highest-profile clients. First, Rudy Lake, whose best-selling, wrenching prison memoir had won him a parole for the murder of his first wife, turned out to have plagiarized the better part of his book from an obscure Hungarian novel of the 1950s; then the elusive Bongo Ffrancis had turned out to be a middle-aged Midwestern housewife, not the seventeen-year-old Welsh heroin addict his memoir had described; and finally, the Midwestern housewife Sarah-Gail Laney, who wrote about her painful search for normality after being raised by sexually abusive missionaries who poisoned each other in Uganda, had actually been raised in Hoboken, where her parents, sharing in the profits of her book, still lived in the quiet two-bedroom apartment in which she'd grown up.