A Playdate With Death (14 page)

“Instead, I went home to my mother in Pasadena and had the baby at Haverford Memorial Hospital. I registered as Susan Masters, and that was that. I gave the baby to Jewish Family Services and went home.”

“Why did you go through Jewish Family Services and not through one of the Catholic agencies?”

“My mother wanted me to go through a Catholic charity. In fact, she tried to convince me to go to Saint Anne’s Maternity Home, this home for unwed mothers in Los Angeles. But I wasn’t unwed. I didn’t belong there. And I had to give the baby to the Jews.”

“Why?” I asked again.

“The baby was half-Jewish, wasn’t he? It didn’t seem fair to try to give a half-Jewish baby to a Catholic family.”

“Fair?”

“Well, because they were sure to assume he was from a
Catholic family, because of me, because of my name. But he’d be part Jewish.”

I didn’t get it. “So what?”

“Well, they’d end up with a Jewish baby. That wouldn’t be right.”

I stared at her for a moment, not sure what to say. Was she really saying that she couldn’t stomach the idea of foisting off a Jewish baby on an unsuspecting Catholic family? As if they’d be getting inferior goods?

My discomfort didn’t seem to register on Susan in the slightest. She gave me the name of Bobby’s birth father, Dr. Reuben Nadelman, and told me that she’d given it to Bobby, too, but had never found out whether Bobby had contacted him.

While I was writing Bobby’s birth father’s name on a scrap of paper, I heard Isaac squeal. I looked up, and my heart caught in my throat. For a moment, I thought that the handsome blond young man pushing my son on the swing was Bobby. Susan Sullivan followed my gaze.

“My son, Matthew,” she said fondly. “I remember when he was small, like your boy. I used to push him on that very swing.”

“He and Bobby look so much alike,” I said.

She smiled faintly, and her lip trembled. “Like brothers,” she murmured.

“Well, I guess that only makes sense,” I said. I felt bad as soon as the words escaped my lips. It seemed cruel to remind her that Bobby had been hers, her son just like this man was. Something about Susan Sullivan inspired me to
want to protect her, she seemed so delicate, so fragile. And yet, this was a woman who felt such clear distaste for who I was.

As Isaac and I drove away from the Pacific Palisades, I felt a kind of listless disgust. As the most assimilated of Jews, married to an indeterminate Protestant of vaguely Anglo-Saxon heritage, I gave little thought in my life to anti-Semitism. I’d never been called a kike or a hebe. As far as I knew, I’d never failed to get a job or make a friend because I was a Jew. My life had been blessedly devoid of prejudice. So much so, in fact, that I’d sort of forgotten that there were people in my own country, my own city, for whom my status as a Jew meant something more than that I hung a few Stars of David on our Christmas tree. Susan Sullivan had given away her baby because his father was a Jew. Despite the fact that a conveniently scheduled leave in Japan meant that she might have been able to convince her husband and his family that he had impregnated her, she gave her baby up for adoption. She was
that
sure that his Jewish blood would give him away, that it would mark him, as surely as a pair of horns on the top of his head. I angled the rearview mirror so that Isaac’s sleeping face was reflected back at me. Did he look Jewish? Half the blood that flowed through his veins could be traced back to the Jewish Pale in Poland, and farther, if the biblical stories are true, to the rocky, desert sands of Israel. Did his face bear indelible traces of generations of hook-nosed moneylenders?

My son’s sand-colored hair stuck to his damp, sweaty forehead. His blue eyes were closed, and his thick lashes rested
on round, pink cheeks. His soft lips formed the shape of the nipple he was probably dreaming of. If I were totally honest, I would allow that his nose was perhaps a little large for his tiny face. But the fact was, he had inherited that from his father, whose own visage bore the craggy sail of an oversized schnoz that could easily have graced the pages of a Nazi caricature. And there wasn’t a Jewish bone in Peter’s body.

My grandmother, who’d lived long enough to see us married, had wept at our wedding. I’d assumed it was because Peter wasn’t Jewish, and I’d gone up to her after the ceremony at my mother’s urging, prepared to promise to raise our children Jewish.

“What a waste!” she’d cried, hugging me to her breast. “Your tiny
piskela
of a shiksa nose, all for nothing.”

I
SAAC
and I left the Palisades and drove crosstown to Ruby’s Jewish preschool. It was something of a relief to be back in the world I understood, where even the goyim knew when to call someone a schmuck and how to eat a pastrami sandwich.

On the way home, my cell phone rang. I fumbled for it, coming dangerously close to swerving into the next lane.

“Hello?” I shouted, over the freeway noise and the crackle of static.

“Hey! Mama! It’s dangerous to talk on the phone and drive. Daddy says so,” Ruby bellowed from the backseat.

I ignored both her voice and that of my conscience and continued my conversation.

“Hello?” I said again.

“Hi. This is Candace. You know, Bobby’s friend.”

That was something of a surprise. I hadn’t expected to hear from her again.

“How did you get this number?” I asked, sounding ruder than I’d intended.

“Your husband gave it to me. I called the number on your business card, and he told me you’d have your cell phone. I hope it’s all right. I can call back if it’s not a good time.”

“No. No. Now’s fine,” I said, quickly.

“I was just calling to see how you’re doing. I mean, with Bobby’s case and all.”

I flinched. I didn’t have a “case” or a client. All I had was a rather unhealthy curiosity.

“Okay. Fine. Is there anything
you
can tell me, Candace?”

“Me? No. I mean, I don’t really know anything. I was just wondering if you’d found out more about Bobby’s family. His mother. That kind of thing.”

I paused for a moment, trying to figure out exactly what the woman was getting at. The last time we’d spoken, she’d been unwilling to tell me anything other than the name of the hospital where Bobby was born, and that was only to keep me from mentioning her involvement to the police. What was she after now?

“I spoke to Bobby’s birth mother,” I said.

“Really? What’s she like? Did he talk to her before he died? Did she know anything about his death?” The questions poured out of her mouth in a frantic tumble.

I didn’t answer any of them.

“Candace, did Bobby mention anything to you about his birth father?” I asked.

“His father? No. Why? Did he find him, too? What is his name? Did Bobby contact him?”

I decided not to be forthcoming with her. “I’m not sure. Was there any other reason you called?”

“Actually, there was,” she said. The tone of her voice changed—it became conspiratorial. “I’ve been thinking a lot about Bobby and his suicide. At first I didn’t think it was possible that he’d killed himself, but the more I think about it, the more sense it makes to me.”

This caught my attention. This was the first time anyone who knew Bobby had said that it was possible that he’d want to kill himself.

“Really?” I asked. “What makes you say that?”

“Well, you know, Bobby and I were very close. Intimate really.” She giggled. It was an unpleasant sound. “He confided in me things that he’d never tell to anyone else.”

“Like what?” I asked.

“Like how unhappy he was in his relationship. Like how he wanted to leave Betsy but felt like he couldn’t.”

I slowed down, not wanting my piqued interest to cause me to get into an accident.

“Why couldn’t he leave her?”

“Because she was a junky. He felt like if he left her, she might start using again, or worse.”

“Worse?”

“You know, like kill herself or something.”

“But why would that make
Bobby
kill
himself
?”

“I don’t think you really knew Bobby. Not like I did,” she said, her voice oily.

“That’s probably true. So maybe you can explain to me why Bobby and Besty’s problems, if they were having any, would cause him to kill himself.”

“Bobby was a special soul. A sensitive soul. We were very alike in that way. That kind of emotional blackmail makes someone like us feel very . . . very trapped. And anxious. I’m sure that is what Bobby was seeing. He lost sight of himself. He lost sight of the others in his life who could give him peace and joy. So he killed himself.”

Everything about what Candace was saying rubbed me the wrong way. She and Bobby didn’t seem at all alike, and I doubted that their “special souls” had much in common. Furthermore, the woman was clearly in love with Bobby. Of course she would blame Bobby’s lover and fiancée for what had happened to him. But did she have a more nefarious motive for her phone call? Was she trying to steer me in the wrong direction? The E-mails she had sent to Bobby after his body was discovered seemed to absolve her from any knowledge of, or involvement in, his death. On the other hand, even though they’d had the ring of honesty to them, it wasn’t impossible that they were part of a ruse to establish her ignorance and innocence.

“So you think Bobby killed himself,” I said.

“I think it’s possible. Although, of course, there’s another possibility, too.”

“What’s that?”

“That Bobby finally decided to leave Betsy once and for all. And that she killed him rather than let him have his freedom.”

“D
O
you think cannibals would ever eat their own young, and if so, how would they reproduce?”

It’s a mark of the state of both my marriage and my husband’s career that Peter’s question didn’t faze me in the slightest. “I suppose the mama cannibal would only nosh on her own offspring if no other food sources were available,” I said after some thought.

“Hmm. Interesting idea. The possibility of a famine-inspired infanticide could lend the second act just that added level of tension that I’ve been looking for.”

We were lying with our legs tangled together on the couch, recuperating from the effort of putting our children to bed. I’d come close to strapping Ruby in with her jump rope or the utility belt from Isaac’s Batman costume, but she’d finally consented to lie still and listen to a tape. The
strains of “There’s No Business Like Show Business” from
Annie Get Your Gun
were just barely audible. She had a big thing for show tunes; her Ethel Merman imitation was almost as good as her dad’s.

“I could spend my entire career writing nothing but cannibal movies.” Peter sounded absolutely thrilled at the idea.

“Career. What’s that?” I said. He poked me in the side with his toe. I noticed that it was sticking out of his sock. “You need new socks.”

“I always need new socks. Are we going to have one of our biweekly, ‘I need to figure out what I’m doing with my life’ discussions? Because if we are, I’m going to need another cup of coffee.”

I kicked him back, making sure to dig a little into his side where I knew he was ticklish.

“No. We’re not going to have any kind of discussion at all. No talking allowed,” I said.

We amused ourselves for twenty minutes with an activity that had gotten entirely too rare once we’d had kids, then clicked on the television. We spent a vacant hour watching the end of a spy thriller we could just vaguely remember having seen not long before. One of the benefits of the exhaustion that accompanies parenting is the ability to watch a movie or read a book again and again without remembering a single important feature of the plot.

The next morning was Saturday, the one day of the week when Peter wakes up with the kids and I get the morning off. I briefly considered heading back to the gym—I hadn’t been there since the morning Bobby’s body had been discovered—but
I couldn’t bring myself to go. It was just too strange and sad to imagine working out there without Bobby. And I was too lazy to work out anywhere else.

I left my family involved in an elaborate game of hide and go seek, which consisted of the kids hiding and then shrieking out their locations while Peter looked for them. “We’re in the closet, Daddy! No, the
hall
closet!”

I’d found Dr. Reuben Nadelman in about four minutes on the web. He was an attending physician at Cedars Sinai Medical Center’s pediatric oncology unit, and he was in their staff directory. I also found a number of references to him in the
L.A. Times,
including an announcement of his marriage to a Dr. Larissa Greenbaum, a dermatologist. I couldn’t find a residential listing for the Nadelmans or for the Greenbaum-Nadelmans (and people wonder why I don’t bother to hyphenate) in the phone book. I launched Lexis, a legal search engine, and input the doctors’ names in the real estate database. They had purchased a home on Hollyhock Way in Brentwood four years before, the assessed value of which was $1.2 million dollars. I might not have had his phone number, but I’d easily found his address. The World Wide Web—a nosey Parker’s best friend.