Close Relations (40 page)

“Idiot,” said Jerry.

“Fesso,” said Paterno.

I faced Paterno. “This is going to get Parker more attention than if he outspent Appel and outthought you. I’m telling you, Bill, it’s brilliant. It’s a typical LoBello grandstand play, taking a liability and turning it around.”

Jerry’s voice was stronger than mine. “Parker’s canceled himself out, Bill. It’s only you and Appel now.”

Paterno glanced from Jerry to me and back to Jerry again. He looked disgusted with both of us. Then he cleared his throat and announced, “I’m going to my sister’s for dinner. She’s making veal.”

A half hour later, as I was getting ready to leave my office, the telephone rang. It was my mother.

“Are you all right, Mom?”

“Yes.”

“How are you managing in all this heat?”

“Not very well. The elevator’s been broken for a few days.” My mother lived on the sixth floor. “It’s so hard climbing the stairs.”

“Don’t climb them, for God’s sake. This heat is killing. Listen, I’ll make a few calls and get you a room at a hotel. Someplace with air conditioning and—”

“I can’t afford things like that.”

“I’ll pay for it.”

“No, thank you.” She was being neither noble nor manipulative. She didn’t like taking anything from me. Since I had started working for Flaherty in Washington, I had sent her money from each paycheck I received. She said thank you the first time and never mentioned it again. “I’ll manage.” My cousin Barbara explained my mother to me by saying she was proud, that she did not want to concede her need. I might have accepted this, but at least once a month my mother would allude broadly to her poverty. “There are mice all over this building. I wish I could afford to move,” she’d tell me. Or “I had to stop buying coffee. Do you know what they want for a pound?” Each time I offered to help, she’d refuse brusquely. “I’ll get by.” I often felt that my father and I let her down, he by dying broke and me by not marrying someone who would set her up in lavish style. Alone, I could only ameliorate her poverty, not cure it.

“I tried to call you last night,” she said. “I heard there was a blackout in Greenwich Village. No one answered.”

“I wasn’t around.” Then I paused. “Look, Mom. Don’t call me there anymore.” Her answer was silence. “I’m not living there anymore. Well, I have some stuff there, but I’ve moved.”

“Oh. You hadn’t mentioned you were planning on moving.”

“I’m staying uptown.”

Again she said nothing, as though my telling her I had moved out of Jerry’s apartment was just a tidbit of ho-hum news in an otherwise scintillating day.

“I’ve moved in with David Hoffman.”

“What?” she whispered. “Why did you do that?”

“What do you mean? We’ve been seeing a lot of each other and—”

“How could you do anything so stupid?” she hissed.

“What’s wrong with you? Why are you talking to me like that?”

“You’re ruining it for yourself again. You’re taking a good thing and just throwing it away. Moving in with him. Do you know what he must think of you?”

“I know damned well what he thinks of me,” I yelled.

“You don’t care, do you? You don’t care if Barbara gets everything and you wind up with nothing.”

Only one thing made the last week of August tolerable. “I love you,” David whispered from the bed. I reached into a jar, took a gob of cream that smelled of spearmint and rubbed it between my hands, then massaged it into the back of his neck and his shoulders.

“I know,” I whispered back, even though we were alone in his apartment. “How does this feel?” I ran the heel of my hand along his spine.

“Wonderful. But lower, near the small of my back. Oh, Marcia. Paradise.”

While everything else fell apart, my life with David came together. One night when we were taking a shower together, he had shampooed my hair. Several nights later, announcing that he needed pampering, I had clipped his fingernails. We began to coddle each other, doing the small favors for each other that parents do for children. I scooped his soft-boiled egg from the shell. David read me bedtime stories, a chapter of the Lord of the Rings trilogy each night. Interspersed between bouts of rough adult sex, we nurtured each other, as if trying to fill in the blanks of our younger lives.

“The back of the legs. Press a little harder. Wonderful,” David whispered. “It’s better than being fanned by six Nubian slaves with palm fronds.” He turned his head to look at me. “Are you all right? Not too tired?”

“I’m fine.”

“No more dizziness?”

I rubbed some more cream between my hands and massaged his calves. “David?”

“Hmm?”

“I’m pregnant.”

T
he red needles on the gauges of David’s Italian sports car quivered in response to the slightest change in the engine’s mood. So did I. David, on the other hand, was in high gear, singing the score of
Oklahoma
and watching the dead turnpike scenery whiz by as we sped to his father’s country house in Pennsylvania. Finally, he finished with a booming rendition of the title song and then lifted his hand from the gearshift to my leg. “Ready to talk?”

“I’m still a little queasy. Give me five more minutes.”

The night before, right after I told him I was pregnant, I had frozen with terror at the audacity of sharing my secret with him.

“Marcia,” he said, “are you sure? Have you been to a doctor? Is everything all right? Please, talk to me.” I tried to get up and walk from the bed, but David grabbed onto my arm. “Are you sure?” he demanded. I nodded. “Please, Marcia. Don’t do this to me. Tell me what’s happening.”

My mouth was dry. I licked my lips. “I went to the doctor.”

“Well? What did he say?”

“She.”

“Excuse me. What did she say? Marcia, don’t make me interrogate you.”

“She said I was definitely pregnant.”

“And?”

“And what?”

“Are you all right? Is everything going well?”

“Yes. Everything’s fine. She said I have to have that amniocentesis and there’s a slightly increased chance of a miscarriage because I’ve already had one, but that was statistics and everything looks fine. Could you let go of my arm?”

He didn’t. “What are you planning on doing?”

“What do you mean?”

“Don’t be coy. Please, not at a time like this. You know I want to marry you, that I love you.”

“David, I’m so confused right now.”

“Please, just listen to me. I may not have any real rights in this matter, no legal rights, but I want this baby. Marcia, I don’t care if you don’t want pressure or if you’re confused. Right now I’m just asking you, please, please, don’t have an—”

“David!” I yanked my arm out of his hand.

“You want an abortion?” he whispered.

“No. No. I want this baby too. You don’t know how much. I’m not sure about anything else right now, but I know I want it.” I stood. “David, I’m going to sleep in one of your kids’ rooms. I need time to think.”

“No. Sleep here. I promise you, not another word. We’ll talk about it tomorrow, on the way to High Oaks.” He pointed to the bed. “Come on. You know you can’t sleep without me anymore.”

It was true. We’d sleep so near each other that we often wound up sharing a pillow. We nestled so close that several times we woke in the middle of the night in the middle of sex so pure and ardent that it seemed like the middle of a perfect dream. I lay down beside him.

The car crossed the border from New Jersey to Pennsylvania. “You know, I was shocked when I saw this car. Really, I pictured you with something solid and conservative, like the biggest Buick ever invented.” I glanced out the window at the trees heavy with the shadowy dark-green leaves of the end of summer. “Is High Oaks pretty?” I asked.

“Are you going to marry me?”

“If I like High Oaks. Do you think your father—”

“Marcia!”

“I want to marry you.”

High Oaks was a huge stone farmhouse set in the middle of acres of fields and forest. “Nice, isn’t it?” David observed, as we came to the end of the mile-long tree-lined drive that led to the house.

“Don’t give me understatement. It’s magnificent! I love it.”

“Unfortunately, my father is part of the package.”

Leo Hoffman walked to the car to meet us, taking the slow, mincing steps of the old and sick who are afraid of tripping. “David,” he said. They shook hands. “A new car, isn’t it?”

“I’ve had it for about six months.”

“I see.” There was little resemblance between father and son. While David was large-featured and big-boned, Leo Hoffman was small and thin to the point of delicacy. “And this must be Marcia,” he said. David put his arm around me. His father shook my hand. “How nice of you to come.”

“Thank you for inviting me.”

Leo Hoffman must have been heavier at one time because his face was full of excess tissue: floppy jowls and under-eye bags and a shaky wattle hung from him. Had he been younger, the extra flesh might have made him look unappealing and decadent, but at eighty-five he merely looked very old and wasted.

“Let me help you inside, Father.” David offered his arm and his father—hesitantly, I thought—took it. Even the walk from the car to the living room exhausted him; he breathed with difficulty and his ravaged heart did not beat hard enough to propel him smoothly. I walked behind them.

David treated his father politely, as if the older man were the parent of a remote acquaintance of his. His father was courteous too, although he shied away from his son, as if afraid of him. Later, we had tea. When David tapped his father’s shoulder to ask if he wanted one of the small sandwiches, the old man recoiled, as if he expected a slap across the face.

“Your father’s actually scared of you,” I said later. We were in David’s room, dressing for dinner. The housekeeper had put my suitcase in another bedroom, and David had picked it up and carried it into his.

“Well, it must be difficult for him. He’s completely dependent on me. I manage everything for him. He really can’t do anything except just hang on. His heart is so bad.”

“Aren’t you ever tempted to scream ‘boo’?”

“Stop that.” But he laughed. “No. There’s no score to even. He’s old and dying and helpless. What does he have? He bullied his sisters for so many years that they avoid him. He never remarried. I’m the only one who really bothers with him, and he knows I do it out of duty, not out of love. He’s afraid I’ll stop even that some day.”

“No. He fears you, David.”

“He fears himself. He fears his disinterest in me and his abandonment of my brother coming back to haunt him now.” He zipped up my dress. “You wore this that day at the Drexlers’, remember?”

“I remember.” I kissed him lightly.

“Look, I know this isn’t going to be a great weekend for you, especially since it’s your only vacation all summer, but I promised him I’d come. He sleeps most of the time, so we can go off by ourselves.”

“This kid of ours is going to have two terrific grandparents.” David sat on the edge of the bed, watching me put on my makeup. “I mean, it’s really not fair. What ever happened to all that Jewish warmth and love? My mother would rather be kicked to death than touch me. And your father.” I turned to him. “Do I have too much blusher?”

“You look fine.” He stretched out on the bed. “You know, neither of us conforms to stereotype, but at least you have the feeling of belonging to a community. You’re part of the Eastern European cultural tradition, the Yiddish humor, the food …”

“The insecurities, the nagging, the impossible goals …”

“Marcia, listen. I was never even certain what being Jewish meant. My parents certainly never discussed it. Until law school, when I became friendly with Philip Drexler, I thought of being Jewish as a minor social liability, like having a lisp or an alcoholic parent. Philip is such a proselytizer. He really converted me.”

“You think of yourself as a Jew?”

“Of course.”

“That’s interesting, because one of your attractions for me is that you’re so—I don’t know—so un-Jewish. It’s like marrying a Protestant without the guilt. You’re so American. You belong here.”

“So do you.”

“No. I think like an ethnic. I belong in New York, on a certain block in Queens with people who got off the same boat as my grandparents did. But with you, I can escape that. I can move out of the old neighborhood and feel decent about it. I’m not deserting anyone; no one will throw rocks at me in the new place. Do you understand?”

“I think so. But you shouldn’t cast off your background. It’s a niche, not a pigeonhole. That’s why I like your family, your Aunt Estelle—”

“David, come on.”

“At least she’s human.”

Leo Hoffman sat at the dinner table gazing at a platter of vegetables the maid held in front of him. “Let me see,” he said slowly. “Green beans tonight? Or broiled tomatoes?” The platter was silver and, from the arch of the woman’s back, looked heavy. “You know, Marcia,” he explained as she stood before him, “we grow our own vegetables here, and some of our own fruit too. Raspberries and strawberries. Oh, and plums—Burbank and Green Gage.” The woman’s shoulder muscles twitched slightly. I hoped she would drop the vegetables onto his lap. “We haven’t had much luck with figs, though. There’s a great deal of wind in this valley and the trees are so fragile. And in the fall we have our apples. Four different varieties. McIntosh, Paragon, Wealthy, and McCoun. I think I’ll just skip the vegetables tonight, June.”

For a while we ate in silence. Then David said, “The tomatoes are good, Father.”

“We’ve had a fine crop, David. A fine crop.”

I glanced across the table at David, hoping to exchange smiles. But he sat stiffly, clutching his fork so tight that his knuckles showed white. He barely ate. There was no pleasure for him when his father was around.

As we rose from the table, David said to his father, “The children did well at camp this summer.”

“Good. Fine children. When are they coming home?”

“They’re in Canada with Lynn and Arthur, fishing. They’re spending next weekend with us. Marcia hasn’t met them yet.”

“Fine children. Both of them.” David had two sons and a daughter.