Commonwealth (13 page)

“Eight twelve.”

The doors opened again. Hello, twenty-three. Franny pushed eight. “You said before you didn't know.”

“Before I didn't know,” he said, looking away. The ride wasn't agreeing with him. There was that little jostle with every stop and start, two fast inches up and then down again to remind the passenger of the cable from which the box hung. He may have come up with a number just so she would take them back onto solid ground. The doors opened again and he struggled forward as if trying to leave without her. She draped his arm around her shoulders again. It was hot inside her coat, which had been designed to sustain human life at twenty degrees below zero. A sheen of sweat brightened her face. Sweat ran down the backs of her legs and into her shoes.

“You wouldn't lose your job,” he said. He kept his voice down and for this Franny was grateful. Not all drunks were capable of such restraint. “I'll tell them we're friends. That's what we are.”

“I'm not sure they would appreciate our friendship,” she said. The halls, like the elevator banks, were very wide. So much wasted space was an Old World luxury. She had never been upstairs before, and what she was feeling she imagined must be akin to breaking and entering. The halls were endless, seemingly without a vanishing point, and were lined with black-and-white photographs of famous people at the height of their beauty: Dorothy Dandridge, Frank Sinatra, Judy Garland. They went on and on. Franny kept her eyes on them. Hello, Jerry Lewis. The carpet was dizzying, a mash-up of peacock feathers in yellow and peach and pink and
green. It was hard to look down for very long, and she was sober. It couldn't have been a good match for scotch. There was a room-service table in the hall, a half-eaten Reuben sandwich, scattered fries, a single rose in a bud vase, the bottle of wine upended in its silver bucket . . . 806, 808, 810, 812. Home. She shifted her hip into Leo Posen to balance his weight, then dipped the key in the lock. A small red light flashed twice and then disappeared.

“Fuck,” she said quietly, and tried again. Red light.

“What if I came home with you?”

“That wouldn't work.”

“I could sleep on the couch.”

“
I
sleep on the couch,” she said, except for the nights she slept with Kumar, which weren't many because that was not the nature of their relationship. He was a friend. She needed a place to stay.

“Eighteen twelve,” he said, straightening himself imperceptibly. “That's what it is.”

She could take him back to that lovely lozenge-shaped sofa; a place to relax if the wait for the elevator became too strenuous. It was plenty big enough. She could leave him there. She could go downstairs and call the front desk from the house phone, explain that she had seen a man sleeping on the eighth-floor sofa.

“Eighteen twelve.”

Franny shook her head. “You're thinking of the overture, or you're thinking of the war. You're not staying in room 1812.”

He considered this, still looking at the locked door in front of them. “I could be thinking of the war,” he said. “Could we stop for a while? I need a little rest.”

“I do too,” Franny said. She had clocked in for her shift at four-thirty. She wasn't going to the eighteenth floor. They might as well start on two and dip the key in every lock in the hotel.

“You seem nervous,” he said, his voice coming up as if from
sleep. “Have you been in trouble before?” He was getting more comfortable with the transference of his weight across her shoulders, and he wasn't doing as good a job picking up his feet, which made it feel like she was dragging him over an uneven path of rocks. Franny passed the elevator bank and kept going.

“I'm in trouble right now,” she said. She would give him one more chance and then she would leave him. He wouldn't blame her. He wouldn't even remember her. Were they to fall in the hallway that would be it for both of them. He was ten inches taller, eighty pounds heavier. She would be pinned beneath him, broken ankle, broken wrist, until the kid who slid the bills beneath the doors at three a.m. came down the hall and found them there. She didn't have health insurance. When they got to room 821 she took the key out of her coat pocket and dipped it. It flashed red, red, then green. The lock clicked and she turned the handle. Eight twenty-one. She was thrilled that at the very least she understood the nature of mistakes.

Leo Posen hadn't thought to leave a light on. Franny walk-dragged him over to the bed and sat him down on the edge while she clicked on the lamp. A pretty room, padded headboard, heavy drapes, an imitation of a fine desk where a famous novelist might sit and write a novel. All in all too nice a room if its only purpose was to sleep off a drunk. There was an overnight bag on the overstuffed chair with a topcoat draped over the back. The good and merciful turn-down service had come before them and folded back the bedspread, exposing the white pillows, white sheets, the deep envelope of sleep so inviting that she wondered if she were to lie down on the far side of the king-sized mattress for an hour whether anyone would know the difference. It would make the case much harder for legal aid after she'd been fired for solicitation, finding her hair on the pillow. “Help me with your arm.”

Leo Posen leaned forward and held his arm back, and with that adjustment she was able to work him out of his suit jacket. He was a man who had been helped out of a suit jacket before. He gave a long, tired sigh, as if the world's weight had finally caught up with him.

She laid the jacket on top of his coat and then leaned down for his shoes. Leo Posen had lovely lace-up shoes, polished and worn soft as gloves. She put them far enough away from the bed that he wouldn't trip on them in the night. Then she picked his feet up off the floor and put them in the bed with the rest of him, turning him around in the process. The pants, the belt, she didn't even consider them.

“Next time I'll know,” he said, sinking into all that softness, cool sheets, warm blankets.

She put her hand on his shoulder just to call him back for a moment. “Sleep well,” she said. She made her voice as soft as the pillows because now that this was over and he was safely in bed she could love him again. She covered him up.

“You can stay for a while, can't you?” There was no embarrassment there, only peace, only enough time left to ask for one more favor, which Franny thought was the deepest difference between women and men. His eyes were closed and by the end of the sentence he was asleep, and so she said nothing. She pulled the spread over him and turned off the lamp, then she sat down on the edge of the bed in the dark, on the far far side, and changed her shoes. She kept a pair of flats in her bag. The soles of her work shoes had only touched the carpet of the hotel and so they were as good as new. She would have them for years.

* * *

Had anyone asked Fix Keating and Bert Cousins what they agreed on, neither man would have been able to come up with much of a list. Still, without ever having discussed the matter
(without ever having discussed any matter) they had both decided that Caroline and Franny should go to law school. The girls were very young when this idea first took hold, Caroline was in middle school and Franny still sleeping with dolls, but Fix and Bert had mapped out the future like generals in their separate camps. Neither Caroline nor Franny exhibited any interest in American history. They were not particularly given to rational thought. They showed no skills at debate, though their energy for screaming at one another was limitless. But then again it wasn't about what either man had seen in Caroline or Franny. It was about what each had seen in himself.

Bert held similar expectations for all the children in the family, even Jeanette, who he thought could at least do title searches if she ever made it through school. By expecting the same thing of everyone he saw himself as fair-minded and devoid of favoritism, and by coming up with a plan so many years before it would need to be implemented he figured he was bound to have at least some measure of success. The law, after all, was what Cousinses did. Bert's great-grandfather had been a lawyer for the Pennsylvania Railroad, and his grandfather had been a circuit court judge. Bert's father, William Cousins, called Bill, had practiced a gentleman's version of real estate law out of substantial offices in downtown Charlottesville, mostly drawing up contracts for friends who bought swaths of Virginia farmland, waited for the zoning to change, and then turned the land into strip malls. It was a good source of income from which Bill retired early, his wife having come into the Coca-Cola bottling rights for half of the commonwealth through the bequest of her childless uncle. Bill Cousins liked to stand in his living room and look out the front window, down the allée of noble sycamores that lined the drive, and think the world was beautiful and should never change.

Bert held a Jeffersonian belief that a basic understanding of the law was the foundation for any successful life, so even if one of the children wanted to be a nurse or teach school he expected they should secure law degrees first. His belief that a person without an understanding of the law could actually be intelligent or interesting had been a problem in both of his marriages.

Fix's take on the law was more straightforward: he wanted his girls to be lawyers because lawyers made money. If Caroline and Franny made money themselves there would be a smaller chance that they would one day leave the guy they were married to for a guy who was rich. Fix was a great believer in history repeating itself, and he never tried to dress it up as anything else. If it happened once, it could damn well happen again.

The year that Caroline was thirteen and Franny was ten, Fix bought them each a Kaplan study guide to the LSAT. He wrapped them up in red foil paper and mailed them to Virginia for Christmas along with the regular presents that Marjorie had picked out: board games, a stuffed rabbit, a watercolor set, a sweater, two music boxes.

“It's a little crazy but it's not a bad idea,” Bert said, picking up Franny's copy while she scratched around in the piles of crumpled wrapping paper, searching for some overlooked present that might have gotten lost under the tree.

“Are you serious?” Beverly said. She was wearing a zip-up floor-length robe of dark-green velour, a homemade Christmas present from her own mother. On any other mother in the world it would have looked dumpy, but on their mother it was startlingly chic.

“If they read one chapter a month,” Bert said, flipping through to the index, “that wouldn't be too much. They don't have to understand it. At this point it would just be a matter of familiarizing themselves with the vocabulary, but if they really stuck with the
program they'd wind up with perfect scores someday.” He had yet to articulate his own plans to raise up an entire firm of lawyers, but he saw Fix's initiative as a good place to start.

Caroline, in her red-flannel reindeer pajamas and fluffy socks, was torn between the desire to tell Bert to go fuck himself and remembering that the gift was from her father. She decided she would look at the book later when Bert wasn't around to take any pleasure in seeing her do it. Franny on the other hand was just now opening the hardback copy of
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
from her grandmother. Even from the first sentence, from the look of the words on the page, she could tell that that was what she would be reading over Christmas vacation, not an LSAT prep book. But when their father called later that morning to wish them a merry Christmas and to tell them he missed them more than anything in the world and wished that they could all be together (which made the girls cry on their separate extension phones, Caroline in the kitchen, Franny sitting on the floor beside the bed in Bert and her mother's room), he also broke the news that he had gotten into law school. Starting in January, Fix Keating would be attending Southwestern College of Law at night. Going at night meant it would take four years instead of three, but that was okay, that was the way Dick Spencer had done it. He wished he'd started earlier, the way Dick had, but you can't spend your life regretting things.

“If I'd started when I was your age I'd be a senior partner by now,” he said to the girls.
When I was a boy I took a turn, as an office boy in an attorney's firm
their father liked to sing in the morning. “You two have all the time in the world to study. If you start now and I start now then we could all study together when you come out next summer.”

It was Christmas vacation and Franny didn't want to study, nor did she want to commit to studying in the summer. He had already
told them he'd take them to Lake Tahoe that summer and rent a pontoon boat they could swim off of. She wasn't about to trade that in for all of them sitting around the kitchen table quizzing each other for what amounted to a giant spelling test.

But when Caroline hung up the phone she might as well have already filled out her application. She went to her room, the Kaplan guide under her arm, and closed the door. She was going to law school with her father.

Franny blew her nose and wiped her eyes and went back to the living room. Her mother was gathering the trampled paper scraps and dazzling end-bits of curled ribbon into a Hefty bag while Bert sat on the couch with a cup of coffee and gazed at the holiday tableau: Christmas tree, beautiful wife, fire in the fireplace, sweet stepdaughter.

“Daddy's going to law school,” Franny said, making herself comfortable with her novel in the blue armchair. “That's why he wants us to study. He wants us to go to school with him.”

Beverly stood up, her leaf bag overstuffed and featherweight. “Fix is going to law school?”

Bert shook his head. “He's too old for that.”

“He isn't,” Franny said, glad to be able to explain. “He's going like Dick Spencer.” Franny liked the Spencers, who took them all to lunch at Lawry's every summer when they were in Los Angeles.