The Three Weissmanns of Westport Read online

  Miranda had greeted these developments with her typical high-volume, inefficient ferocity, berating the press and the world in general; and simultaneously with a quick, irritable tenderness for her clients. When the scandals first broke, six months ago, she had busied herself arranging lawyers and interviews and excuses. She had been indefatigable. Now the publishers were after their advances, her other writers had fled, and the lawyers, interviews, and excuses were as much for herself as for the fraudulent memoirists.

  Before the scandals came, Miranda had been the agent who could spot the flash of memoir gold in the barren hills of anecdote, who could meet someone on an airplane one day and sign a deal on the book they had never before thought of writing the next. She found talent and excitement everywhere. In the beginning, there had been two beautifully written, deeply moving memoirs--the Rhodesian childhood, the Egyptian one--that won prizes. Miranda had discovered them, had cherished them and shepherded them into their rightful place in the world, had made a great deal of money from them, too.

  In the following years, she uncovered originality and authenticity with such regularity that her little agency was dubbed the Memoir Mill on Gawker. Now, suddenly, some of those authentic and original stories Miranda uncovered turned out to be fraudulent and recycled lies.

  She had been deceived. She had been lied to. She had been abandoned by the stories she had nurtured with such love and care. When she saw her mother suffering from the divorce, from Josie's deception and treachery, Miranda sometimes had trouble keeping herself from gasping in intimate recognition. There is divorce and there is divorce, she told herself. And for me, there is both.

  When Felicity said that Annie did not have scandals, she was right about that, too. Annie was a hardworking, even-tempered person who tried to take life as it presented itself without making a fuss. If Miranda was swept up in the waves of successive Lite Victories, Annie was comfortably dug in to her burrow of books. She read the same ones over and over--the classic novels of nineteenth-century England, the minor novels of twentieth-century England. Annie was matter-of-fact, but the facts were never hers. The light of real life, which to Miranda meant the busy melodrama of everyday scandal, never penetrated this soft, dappled world. Miranda sometimes thought of Annie as a kind of desiccated opium addict, stretched out in a smoky, sweet-smelling den with her fictional strangers, cut off from the noisy circus of life, uncaring, inaccessible, eyes closed in someone else's dream. By the book, Miranda always said of Annie, trying to describe what she considered to be the literalism of her sister's imagination. Perhaps it was this quality that made it a surprise to Miranda when she discovered that with this divorce Annie, too, was sad and disoriented and, most of all, angry.

  "I miss him," Annie said. "And I hate him. Hate. Hate. Hate. Loathe. And hate."

  "Life," Miranda replied, rather triumphantly, "is wracked by tragic contradictions."

  This was one of Miranda's core beliefs: Life was wracked by tragic contradictions . . . that would all come out right in the end. At this moment, however, with regard to Josie's treatment of her mother, she could not bring herself to pronounce the second half of her sentence.

  Annie noticed the omission and was about to comment on it when Miranda's cell phone rang. In the past, Miranda would have answered and carried on, with great gusto, a conversation full of personal details from the sordid stories Miranda's authors specialized in. But this time Miranda said, "I guess that will have to do," in a tired voice.

  "Business?" Annie said when she hung up.

  "What's left of it." Miranda took a deep breath. Failure: it was like having a fatal disease. People pretended it didn't exist, turned away quickly with an embarrassed look of pity, stopped talking when you came up to them unexpectedly. People pretended it didn't exist, and so did she; yet it was always there, the air she breathed.

  Annie, apparently sensing some of this, said, "Sorry," looking embarrassed in a way that proved Miranda's point.

  "Not your fault."

  "Still, sorry."

  Miranda took her sister's arm, walked a few steps that way; then, hoping that was enough reassurance for Annie, dropped it.

  In the contested apartment, Betty Weissmann took some satisfaction in finishing a bottle of Joseph's favorite single malt. Some satisfaction, though not much, for Betty did not like single malt whiskey.

  And where was Joseph now? Off with some woman, no doubt. Some other woman. She had his horrid whiskey that tasted like damp and dirt. This other woman, whoever she was, had him. It was enough to make you cry. Betty did not have the energy to cry. She had already cried far too much. She would tie up her belongings in a handkerchief, hang it from a stick, put the stick over her shoulder like one of the three little pigs, and go on the train to the cottage in Westport to seek her fortune. Her fortune did not include a wolf to blow her house down, for that had already been done. But she knew the fortune of an elderly divorcee; she knew her fortune, and it was dark.

  I have an idea.

  Annie heard Miranda announce that she had an idea the way she heard the sound of traffic. It was ceaseless, and so it barely existed. Annie heard her sister, and she did not hear. She continued mentally adding up the retirement funds that Joseph had long ago put in her mother's name for tax purposes. Betty could take out enough of a distribution to pay for some of her food and gas. Even the new Josie with his brain tumor--there really could be no other explanation for his ugly behavior--would continue to pay for the AARP supplement to Betty's Medicare. And the car insurance was all paid up for the year. She had checked with Josie's secretary, who, though loyal to her employer, was not unsympathetic to Betty's plight. If Annie and Miranda helped out, Betty might be able to just scrape by.

  "Mmmhmm," Annie said to Miranda.

  She would pay for the movers with her tax rebate. A shame to dismantle her mother's beautiful apartment. She wondered how much of Betty's furniture would fit in the little house.

  "We'll all move to Westport," Miranda said.

  The chairs from the living room would probably work. The image of those chairs in a new setting suddenly made her angry.

  "That's my idea," Miranda was saying.

  Annie said, "Oh, Miranda," as she so often did.

  But Miranda had it all worked out by the time they reached their mother's apartment building, and when Betty heard the plan, she was ecstatic.

  "I know you're not serious," Annie said.

  "It's so practical, dear," Betty said. "You girls sublet your places and make lots of money on them."

  Miranda's cell phone was ringing. She looked at it but did not answer. One of the publishers who were suing her. That seemed to be the reason she had no money, or so her lawyer had tried to explain. Everything was tied up until the lawsuits were settled. She was living on credit cards. She had always lived on credit cards, though in the past she had employed a business manager to pay off the credit cards. Now there was no money to pay the business manager to pay off the credit cards. "Lots of money," she said, echoing her mother's words hopefully.

  "Mom," Annie was saying, "you just called us girls. We're women in our fifties. You guys are having one of your fantasies."

  "I'm forty-nine," Miranda said. "And I'm not a guy."

  "It will be like the Great Depression, when everyone lived together," Betty said. "Oh, I can't wait."

  Annie knew that voice. It was the picnic voice. "This is not a picnic," she said desperately.

  Betty looked at her, stricken. "That's what Josie always says." Her eyes filled with tears.

  "A hideous experiment," Annie said to her son Charlie when he called a few days later. "Three grown women grafted onto the memory of a nuclear family. Like Frankenstein's monster. There will be mobs of violent peasants. And torches."

  "You don't have to go, you know."

  "If you think you and your brother can get out of taking care of me when I'm old by giving me permission to abandon my mother in this her hour of need, you have another think coming.
"

  He laughed. "What about your job?"

  "I'll commute. I'll buy a gray flannel suit."

  But Charlie was too young to get the reference.

  "Right," he said uncertainly.

  "I can't believe I let them talk me into this," she said.

  "Aunt Miranda could talk anyone into anything."

  The packing was what delayed them, though at first Betty was willing to leave with nothing but a toothbrush. After all, what was keeping her? What was left?

  "Your life?" Annie ventured.

  "My life is over."

  "That's very dramatic, Mother."

  "Just some saltines for the trip," Betty said. "And a cardigan."

  But one sweater led to another, which led to matching skirts and trousers, jackets, shoes, and handbags. "And of course I'll need these," Betty said, gathering photos and several large paintings. "And something to sit on. And sleep on. And cook in. And plates and the teapot . . . And I'm certainly not leaving the good crystal or the silver . . ."

  In the weeks that followed, the three of them met at the Central Park West apartment to tag furniture and sift through linens and pots and pans.

  "It's not as if I'm really moving out," Betty could be heard murmuring. "I'll bring it back again when all this is sorted out."

  "If I had a backyard," she said one day, "I could just bury it until I returned."

  "After the guns stop? In spite of what Cousin Lou thinks, you're not really a refugee, Mother." Annie was immediately sorry she'd spoken. If her mother could read her tawdry divorce as a heroic wartime thriller, who was she to deprive her of that pleasure? At the same time, though, Annie was exhausted by the giddy self-pity of both her mother and her sister. They seemed to consider this miserable move to be a grand and tragic adventure. Annie envied them, at some level--how could anyone find such heady satisfaction in defeat? But at another level, she had no patience for an attitude that she knew would mean all the decidedly unexciting details, like organizing the mover and ordering packing materials and figuring out how to pay for the unexciting details like the mover and the packing materials, would fall, inevitably, like dead leaves in autumn, to her.

  "It's a metaphor," Betty was saying. "You've heard of those, Miss Librarian."

  Miranda, who had jammed a straw hat from deep in the closet on top of her head and wrapped herself in a lace tablecloth mantilla, placed herself between the two of them. "Don't fight. The Gypsy family has to stick together."

  "The Joad family is more like it," said Annie.

  And she could envision them clearly, their mattresses lashed to the roof of the jalopy, making their trek along the dusty roads to labor in the fields of Westport, Connecticut. But she was mollified now, smiling at the thought, for "jalopy" was a word she had always loved.

  But even as they packed for their neo-Depression life together, money was in shorter and shorter supply for the three Weissmanns. Joseph and Betty had long ago become accustomed to the bountiful solidity of the upper reaches of the upper middle class. They were, by the standards of any but the rich, rich, and money was a comfort for them, rather than a concern. Betty's shock, now, was real and showed itself primarily in a tendency to undertip.

  Things no longer cost what they had when she was young, which was the last time she had taken much notice. She had never paid for anything when living with Joseph. Though not extravagant, considering her age and her class and her economic reality, she had been careless: literally without care. And because she wanted only what was reasonable for someone in her position, there had always been enough to buy what she wanted. Now there was no reason. Or rhyme. Or money.

  "You take care of it, dear," she said to Annie.

  For many years, for her entire professional life, Miranda had delegated the payment of her bills to her business manager. But now, with the coming of the scandals and their aftermath, the business manager had noticed that there was no money to pay him to pay her bills. He had gently informed Miranda of this fact and gone on his way to pay the bills of more solvent clients. Unfortunately, the bills did not leave with him. Miranda gave up her office, but even then the bills did not stop appearing, following her to her home. Finally, Miranda brought this dogged, insistent pile of bills, this reminder of her failure, these dunning, demeaning messages from a life she had lost, to her mother's apartment on Central Park West. She exiled the depressing long white envelopes, unopened, to Betty's little antique desk in the living room, and there they sat, until Annie could stand it no longer and went through them herself.

  It was Annie, then, who worried about money. But Annie was far better at worrying in general, and worrying about money was one of her specialties. She did not resent her mother and sister for dumping their financial load on her back. In fact, she felt better when she was organizing them than when she was taking care of her own insistently precarious business, for her finances, always a juggling act, the nonprofit world seeming to take its mandate seriously and to apply it rigorously to its employees, were now more than ever the stuff of nightmares. And nightmares are what Annie had, some while she was asleep, some while she sat at her desk at the library, some on the subway. The worry would rise, like a damp rotten smell, and she would try to quicken her step, to hurry past it. She would talk herself back to the letter she was answering regarding the library's acquisition of a collection of correspondence, or she would amuse herself with a quote from the man she had chosen as her new role model, Mr. Micawber, and the odor of insolvency would temporarily recede. But later, invariably, the ugly stench would creep back into her consciousness: Nick still in college, Charlie in medical school, all those loans--she tried to help them as much as she could--the maintenance on the apartment up 10 percent, her Con Ed bill through the roof, her phone bills--how could there be so many phone bills for one person--and then the cable bill and the Internet, and every time she went out to dinner, could it really cost fifty dollars for pasta and a glass of wine, and as for retirement, did people really save? How? She had always assumed she would inherit a little something that would help her along in her old age, but no more. Old age was now, too, caught up in the stink of financial worry. She was a successful woman in her early fifties and cutting corners the way she had as a graduate student. She had mortgaged her apartment up to its nostrils and had been living off that money and the home-equity line of credit she was able to get. She had always assumed she could sell her apartment as a last resort. That would be difficult in this market, but even if she did manage to sell it, what then? Where would she go? A person had to live someplace. The way her friends filled out Sudoku grids, in an obsessive attempt to make the numbers come out right and thereby exercise and protect their already failing memories, Annie drew her own grids, adding up mortgage and loan payments and maintenance checks, comparing the total to what she would have to pay in rent, trying to take into account the tax deductions she received because of her mortgage. This was how she put herself to sleep at night, too, or how she kept herself awake, adding, subtracting, sighing, twisting, grimacing in the dark.

  Then one evening, when she was packing up her own apartment, boxing all her personal items so that the people coming to sublet it could not snoop through her papers, though why they would want to or what of interest they would find there she really couldn't imagine, Annie found a letter from her grandmother, Betty's mother, who had died ten years earlier.

  Darling Annie, it said. Here is a birthday check to celebrate this wonderful day when you turn eleven years old! Use it wisely. Grandpa worked hard so that I would have a cushion to lie back upon. Always remember, dear Annie, these wise words that your grandmother told you: When you have enough money, you can thumb your nose at the world!

  It was signed Your Loving Grandma.

  4

  They made their exodus from New York to Westport on a beautiful August day.

  "It will be just like the commune," said Miranda, who, though her youth had caused her to miss out on the fun of the sixties by a sc
ant couple of years, harbored a rich nostalgia for the period.

  "Right. The one in the French Revolution." Had she really agreed to this? Although, when Annie allowed herself to do so, she did have to admit that with both boys gone, she was as lonely as she had ever been in her life.

  The three Little Bo Peeps who have lost their sheeps, she thought. Betty minus Josie, Miranda minus the Awful Authors, Annie minus her children. Three minus everything equaled three zeroes. Three zeroes equaled pathos; emptiness; fear. Zero at the bone, she thought. The Emily Dickinson poem made her feel better for a moment. A transport of cordiality. Emily Dickinson made even fear feel rich and full and active.

  From the backseat, she looked at her mother's profile as Betty drove her old Mercedes along the Merritt Parkway, exclaiming at the beauty of every stone bridge, remembering when this quaint, narrow, twisting road was new and modern, and Annie felt a wave of respect. Her mother was her own poet. Betty didn't need Emily Dickinson to tell her that seeing a snake dividing the grass like a comb was a shiver of mortality and that mortality was a sign of life. Betty could take pleasure in anything, even this exile. She could make her devastating divorce into a picnic, that word that had made her cry. That is what Josie had always said about Betty's excursions into unlikely optimism. "It's not a picnic," he would say, his voice full of exasperated love, and he and Betty would look at each other and smile. Annie leaned forward, the seat belt tight across her chest, and kissed her mother's cheek.

  Betty made a loud kissing noise in response, but kept her eyes on the road. She and her parents had visited Westport frequently in her youth--whenever Aunt Millie checked herself in to the Westport Sanitarium, a large white mansion on the Post Road that then housed wealthy alcoholics and manic-depressives, both of which diagnoses described Aunt Millie. The sanitarium had been torn down years ago and turned into a park.