Commonwealth (24 page)

He was in the office when his mother called to tell him about Cal. He jumped in his car and broke every speed limit, making the two-hour drive to the hospital in Charlottesville in just under one and a half like any parent would do. There wasn't time to go home and straighten up the house. He never thought of it.

Sometimes it was hard for Beverly and Bert to remember what had destroyed them. When Beverly wept over the affair, the unfamiliar red panties surfacing in her unmade bed, Bert was aghast. The death of a child trumped infidelity. The death of a child trumped everything. It was a logic Beverly could nearly embrace. If pain and loss could be ranked then surely Bert had won and this was the time for them to pull together, for the sake of their marriage, or their remaining children. But accepting the circumstances didn't turn out to be the same as forgiveness. They bound themselves together with a little tape and soldiered on, and even though their marriage held for nearly six years after Cal's death, neither of them would remember it
that way. They would say that their separate griefs had broken them apart much earlier.

If the end of Beverly and Bert's marriage could not rightfully be attributed to Cal, neither could it be pinned on Albie, though the couple's emotional resources were so depleted by the time Albie arrived from California that he didn't have to do much of anything but watch them go over the cliff. The mere fact that he had come turned out to be enough. Five years, two months, and twenty-seven days after Cal died, Albie had dropped a lit book of matches in the trash can of the art room of Shery High, in Torrance. Teresa called Bert and told him about the fire, told him through her exhausted tears that Albie was being held in Juvenile. Bert hung up and had Beverly call her ex-husband to get the kid out. With that behind them, Bert called Teresa back to tell her what an incompetent parent she was. Saturday morning and she didn't even know where their only son had gone to on his bike? He told her the home she provided was unfit, unsafe, and she had no choice but to send Albie to him. Bert had this conversation on the phone in the kitchen where Beverly was sautéeing onions to start a Stroganoff for dinner. She turned off the fire beneath the pan and walked slowly up the stairs to Caroline's bedroom. She often hid in Caroline's room now that her older daughter had gone to college. Bert never thought to look for her there.

Of course there were many things Teresa could have volleyed back, but at the heart of her ex-husband's bombastic cruelty was one simple truth: she couldn't keep Albie safe. She didn't necessarily think Bert could do it either, but different friends, a different school, the other side of the country, might afford Albie a better chance. On Monday morning the principal called to say that Albie and the other boys were suspended pending investigation, and if the investigation found them guilty (which was likely considering
they had been seen running out of the burning building on a Saturday morning and had confessed to starting the fire) they would be expelled. On Tuesday she called Bert back. She was putting Albie on a plane.

Albie, nearly fifteen, walked as far as the back patio, dropped his suitcase, sat down in a white wrought-iron chair, and lit a cigarette. His father was still trying to wrestle the giant sheets of cardboard that had been taped together to form a sort of box around the bicycle from the back of the station wagon. Bert had already told him on the ride in from Dulles that Beverly wouldn't be home for dinner tonight. On Thursday nights Beverly took a French class at the community college and after that went to dinner with her school friends where they practiced conversational French. “She's trying to find herself,” his father said, and Albie looked out the window.

“How is he getting home from the airport then?” Bert had asked her when Beverly announced she wasn't going to be there. He walked right into that one.

When he got the bike unwrapped, Bert wheeled it out of the garage like it was Christmas morning. He had meant to say,
Look at this! Good as new!
but instead he saw the pack of cigarettes and, more distressingly, the red Bic lighter sitting on the table in front of his son. The bike didn't seem to have a kickstand so he leaned it against one of the patio chairs.

“You aren't allowed to have a lighter,” Bert said, though it came out as more of a question than he'd meant it to.

Albie looked at him, puzzled. “Why not?”

“Because you burned down your goddamn school. Are you telling me your mother didn't ground you from fire?”

Albie smiled at the sheer expansiveness of his father's stupidity.
“I didn't burn down the school. I set a fire in the art room. It was an accident, and they needed a new art room. The school is already open again.”

“I'll say it then: You're grounded from fire. That means no arson and no cigarettes.”

Albie took a long draw on his cigarette. He turned his head respectfully and blew the smoke to the side. He was respectfully smoking the cigarette outside the house in the first place. “Fire is an element. It's like water or air.”

“So you're grounded from an element.”

“Can I use the gas stove?”

They were both looking at the lighter on the table. When Bert reached down to take it Albie swept it into his hand, looking right at him. That was the moment: either Bert would hit his son or he would not. Albie held his cigarette down and lifted his face, eyes wide open. Bert straightened up, stepped back. He had never hit his children. He would not hit them now. The few times he'd ever smacked Cal played in his daydreams on a continuous loop.

“Don't smoke in the house,” Bert said, and went inside.

Albie stared up at the house. It was not the one he'd come to as a child. It wasn't any house he'd ever seen before. At some point between the last time he was in Virginia and now, Bert and Beverly had moved and failed to mention that fact to Holly or Albie or Jeanette. And why should they, when no one thought that Holly or Albie or Jeanette would ever visit again? But his father hadn't mentioned the new house at the airport either. Did he forget? Did he think Albie wouldn't notice? This place was bloodred brick with fluted white columns in the front, a junior relation of the house his grandparents lived in outside Charlottesville. It was heavily landscaped with plants and trees he didn't recognize, everything orderly and neat. He could see the edge of a swimming pool already
covered in tarp for the winter. He could look in the window from the patio and see the kitchen, see the fancy copper pots that hung from a rack on the ceiling, but if he got up and opened the door and walked through the kitchen, he wouldn't know which way he was supposed to turn. He wouldn't know what bedroom he was supposed to sleep in.

Caroline would be off in college by now, and if Albie were to guess he would guess that she had plenty of friends who invited her to their houses for the holidays. She probably had some all-encompassing summer job as a camp counselor or government intern that prevented her from ever coming home or even using a pay phone. Caroline had always made it clear that once she got out of there she wasn't coming back. Caroline was a bitch by any standard, but she was also the one who had organized all the subversive acts of their childhood summers. She hated them all, especially her own sister, but Caroline got things done. When he thought of her cracking open the station wagon with a coat hanger and getting the gun out of the glove compartment, he shook his head. He had never in his life adored anyone the way he adored Caroline.

That meant it would just be Franny. He hadn't seen either of the girls since summer visits to Virginia had stopped five years ago, but Franny was harder for him to fix in his mind. It was weird since she was the person in the family closest to him in age. He remembered that she was always carrying the cat around, and in his memory the girl and the cat had merged: sweet and small, eager to please, quick to nap, always crawling into somebody's lap.

Albie stayed on the back patio and smoked while the light turned gold across the suburbs and the cold air pricked his arms. He didn't want to go in the house and ask his father where he'd be sleeping. He thought about rummaging through his suitcase and finding the generous bag of weed his friends had put together as a
going-away present but he figured he'd already pushed the limits of brazenness for one day. It would have been one thing if his lighter were confiscated in a world full of free matchbooks but he didn't want anyone taking his pot away. He could ride his bike around the new neighborhood, acquaint himself with what was there, but he stayed seated. Thinking about moving was as far as he'd gotten when Franny pulled into the driveway and parked.

She was wearing a white blouse with the sleeves rolled up and a blue plaid skirt, knee socks, saddle shoes, the universal attire of Catholic school girls. She was skinny and pale with her hair pulled back, and when he stood up and dropped his cigarette he had a split second of uncertainty as to whether or not there was good will between them. Franny dropped her backpack on the ground and came straight to him, arms out. Franny, not understanding that he lived on the other side of a thick wall and so no one could take him into their arms, took him into her arms and squeezed him hard. She was warm and strong and smelled slightly, pleasantly, of girl sweat.

“Welcome home,” she said. Two words.

He looked at her.

“Are they making you stay outside?” she asked, looking down at his suitcase. “Can you at least go in the garage?”

“I like it out here.”

Franny looked at the house. The light in Bert's study was on. “Then we'll stay out here. What can I get for you? You must be hungry.”

Albie looked hungry, not only in the unnerving thinness that all the Cousins children possessed, but in his hollow eyes. Albie looked like he could eat an entire pig, python-style, and it wouldn't begin to address the deficit. “To tell you the truth I could use a drink.”

“Name it,” Franny said. She was half-turned towards the house, her mind already considering the secret stash of 7-Up her mother disapproved of.

“Gin.”

She looked back at Albie and smiled. Gin on a Thursday night. “Did I tell you I'm glad you're here? Probably not yet. I'm glad you're here. Are you going to come with me?”

“I will in a minute,” he said.

While she was gone Albie looked at the sky. There were animals zipping around up there—sparrows? bats?—along with the near-deafening roar of something cricket-ish. He wasn't in Torrance anymore.

In a minute Franny came back with two glasses half-full of ice and gin, a bottle of 7-Up under her arm. She topped off her glass with the soda, used her finger to stir it around, and then looked at him, wagging the 7-Up back and forth.

“Pass,” he said.

“Very manly.” They tapped their glasses together the way people did in movies, the way her girlfriends did at slumber parties after siphoning off what could be taken discreetly from the family supply. Franny had had some drinks before, just not at home, not on a school night, not with Albie, but if ever there was a day to break the rules it was today. “Cheers.”

She made a little face at the taste while Albie just sipped and smiled. He lit another cigarette because it went so nicely with the gin. It felt like they were catching up just sitting there not talking. Too much had happened, too much time had passed, to try putting it into words now.

After a while Bert came back out. He seemed so happy to see Franny there. He kissed the side of her head, the cloud of cigarette smoke eradicating the smell of gin. “I didn't know you were home.”

“Both of us,” Franny said, smiling.

Bert jingled his car keys. “I'm going to get a pizza.”

Franny shook her head. “Mom made dinner. It's all in the fridge. I'll heat it up.”

Bert looked surprised, though it would be hard to say why. Beverly always made dinner. He picked up Albie's suitcase. “You kids come inside now. It's getting cold out here.”

The three of them went inside just as the deep darkness of night was setting in. Franny and Albie picked up their glasses, the cigarettes and the lighter, and followed Albie's father through the door.

7

“So Bert Cousins's kid was the one who broke you and the old Jew up?” Fix said. They were on their way to Santa Monica, the car windows down. They were going to the movies. Caroline was driving. Franny was in the back, leaning forward between the two seats.

“How have I never heard that part of the story?” Caroline asked.

“Would you please not call him ‘the old Jew'?” Franny said to her father.

“Sorry.” Fix covered his heart with his hand. “The old drunk. May God rest his soul in Zion. Hats off to the kid is my point. He's finally earned my respect.”

Franny imagined calling Albie with that bit of news. “It wasn't like I left the house that night and never went back. We stayed in Amagansett all summer.” There was still Ariel and her intolerable Dutch boyfriend and sad little Button to deal with, the entire long, horrible summer of houseguests to endure. The end of Leo and Franny's relationship played to a full house. It was more than twenty years ago and still the complete misery of that time was fully accessible to her.

“But essentially that was that, right?” Fix said. “The kid put the nail in the tire.”

Caroline shook her head. “Albie identified the fact that the tire had a nail in it,” she said, and Franny, surprised by the accuracy of her sister's assessment, laughed.

“I should have stayed in law school,” Franny said. “Then I'd have been as smart as you.”

Caroline shook her head. “Not possible.”

“Get over a lane,” Fix said, pointing. “You're taking a left at the light.” Fix had his Thomas Brothers street guide in his lap. He refused to let Franny put the theater's address into her phone.

“Do you have any idea how it could have taken this long to make the movie?” Caroline glanced in the rearview mirror then accelerated deftly to get the better of an oncoming Porsche. As with so many other things in life, Caroline was the superior driver.

“It happens. Leo wouldn't sell the film rights so nothing could have started until after he died. I can't imagine his wife was easy to work with.” Natalie Posen. They were, miraculously, still married when Leo died fifteen years ago, still battling it out. All those years his wife and now his widow. Franny saw her just that one time at the funeral, so much smaller than she would have imagined, sitting in the front row of the synagogue flanked by two sons who looked like Leo—one from the nose up and the other from the nose down—as if each had inherited half his father's head. Ariel was on the other side of the synagogue with a very grown-up Button and her own mother, the first Mrs. Leon Posen. Eric was listed in the program as an honorary pall bearer, too old himself to lift one sixth of the casket's weight by that point. He'd been the one to call Franny with the news of Leo's death, thoughtful considering all the time that had passed. She asked about the next book, the one
of the long-ago advance that he was always supposed to be writing. Eric said no, sadly, it wasn't there.

They were all there, time having run them down: Eric and Marisol, Astrid, the Hollingers, a dozen more—all the summer guests come to claim him along with the rest of the world. Franny stayed at the back, standing against the wall in the peanut gallery of former students and devoted fans and old girlfriends. Natalie Posen had chosen to bury her husband in Los Angeles, giving her spite the air of the eternal.

“The wife,” Fix said. “As long as we're thinking of things to feel good about, let's thank the wife.”

“Leo's wife?”

Fix nodded. “She's the unsung hero in all this.”

“How do you figure?” It was Fix's birthday, eighty-three, with metastases to the brain. Franny was making her best effort.

“If she hadn't hung in there like a pit bull to get more money, Leo Posen would have been a free man.”

“Ah.” Caroline nodded. She colored her hair the warm reddish shade of brown it had been when they were children, she went to Pilates three times a week. She had followed their mother's example, kept herself up. Caroline had become the younger sister.

“I'm not seeing your point,” Franny said.

Fix smiled. Caroline, as far as he was concerned, had never missed a trick.

“If Leo had ever gotten a divorce,” her sister explained, “he would have married you.”

“Franny girl,” their father said, turning with difficulty to look at her, “that may have been the only bullet you ever dodged.”

Franny and Caroline had long agreed it was a waste of resources for them to visit either parent at the same time. With divorced
parents on opposite sides of the country, and husbands whose parents also required a certain number of family holidays, Franny and Caroline divided their burden in order to conquer it. There were only so many vacation days, personal leave days, plane tickets, missed school plays, and unexcused absences between them. Whatever affection the two sisters had found for each other later in life would not be manifesting itself in visits. Los Angeles was as close as Franny ever got to the Bay Area, though she meant to go. Albie lived there now, two hours away from Caroline. Caroline's oldest son, Nick, was a senior at Northwestern, so at least when Caroline and Wharton came out for parents' weekend Franny could drive up to Evanston to see the three of them. Caroline's other two children, the girls, Franny had missed out on entirely, much the same way Caroline had missed out on Franny's two boys. But Ravi and Amit, no matter how long she'd had them, were not actually Franny's. They had come with the marriage, and Caroline, try as she might to feel otherwise, could never grant full citizenship to stepchildren.

All of which was to say that under normal circumstances neither Franny nor Caroline would necessarily have traveled to Los Angeles to celebrate Fix's birthday, but since Fix had already exceeded the outer limits of his oncologist's predictions, they both stepped up their game. This birthday was going to be his last, a quick glance over to the passenger seat confirmed this, and in honor of the occasion the two sisters broke their own arrangement and met in California.

“So what are we going to do for the big day?” Caroline had asked the night before. “Sky's the limit.”

They were sitting in the den, the four of them, in the house in Santa Monica that Fix and Marjorie had moved to when they finally left Downey after retirement. It was something of a miracle,
that house, in no way splendid except that it was two blocks from the beach. It was forty years ago that Fix had known a cop who played poker with a bankruptcy judge. He had a tip the place was coming up at auction. That was when Fix finally told Marjorie he'd marry her. They would use her recent inheritance from her aunt in Ohio as the down payment. They would buy it, rent it out for twenty years or so, and by the time they were ready to retire they'd practically own it.

“That's your proposal?” Marjorie had said, but she took the offer.

“But what was Dad's part in all of it?” Franny had asked her years later when she finally heard the full story. Fix and Marjorie had driven the girls by the Santa Monica house every time they came to visit. They would point it out from the car, saying they owned it, saying one day they were going to live there. “If you were the one with the money then why did you have to marry him? You could have just bought the place yourself and rented it.”

“Your father wanted a house at the beach, and I wanted to marry your father.” Marjorie laughed when she heard how that sounded. She tried again. “He wanted to marry me. He was just slower to figure it out. I like to think that in the end everybody won.”

Marjorie had just finished pushing the nutritional supplement into Fix's PEG tube. She was a young seventy-five to his old eighty-three, but it seemed that Marjorie had stopped eating about the same time her husband did. Her shoulder blades pushed out like a wire rack beneath her sweater.

“Let's go to the show,” Fix said. “We'll see a matinee of Franny's movie.”

“Fix,” Marjorie said, her voice tired. “We talked about this.”

“My movie?” Franny asked, but of course she knew what he was talking about. He'd called it her book.

“The one your boyfriend wrote about us. I figure I've got one
chance to see a movie about my life.” Fix appeared wonderfully satisfied by the thought. “I never read the book, you know. I wasn't going to give the son of a bitch my money. But now that he's dead and the money will go to his wife, it's fine by me. Plus I read the review in the paper that said the woman who plays your mother wasn't any good. I'm thinking that must really burn her up.”

Marjorie raised a slender hand. “I'm out. You and the girls make a day of it. I'll be here with cupcakes when you get back.” A few free hours were worth a month of pension checks.

“Oh, Dad,” Caroline said. “Wouldn't it be more fun to stay home and pull our toenails out with pliers?”

Franny had her share of guilt and dread when
Commonwealth
was published, but still, she would never deny that those were glorious days: the publisher's luncheon at La Grenouille, the award ceremony in which Leo was called to the stage, the never-ending book tour where night after night he read to the spellbound crowds and then waited while the crowds formed a line at a table, supplicants come to tell him how his work had changed their lives. He was famous again, back in the light of the world, and every night in a different hotel room he gave her full credit, cradling her head in his hands while they made love. He could not look away from her. He loved her and thanked her and needed her, Leo Posen did. So for all the many costs she had been rewarded.

But seeing the movie now would bring back more than just her betrayal of her family. The movie also spoke to the failure of her long-ago relationship and the lonely death of the man she had loved, as sold by his second wife.

Franny hadn't understood what it would be like to live with
Commonwealth
when Leo was writing the book, and once she'd read the
book it was too late to do anything about it. The movie, however, was another matter. The movie had yet to be made. Franny begged Leo to keep the rights. She understood that such a promise would constitute a significant financial loss, and still, with the manuscript in her hands, she begged him.

Leo gave them to her on a three-by-five card, because Franny was the sun, the moon, and every last glittering star.

To Frances Xavier Keating,

on the occasion of her twenty-seventh birthday,

I give you the film rights to Commonwealth,

for now and forever,

as a token of my enduring love and gratitude.

LEON ARIEL POSEN

He honored it, even later when they rarely spoke and she suspected he needed the money. She didn't mention his promise to anyone after he died. Who would she have told? His wife? She knew an index card didn't stand a chance against the flotilla of lawyers. Irrationally, she had gotten it in her head that they might try and take the card away from her.

“No,” Franny said. No, it wasn't a movie she wanted to see, especially not with her father and sister and a hundred strangers packed into the Santa Monica AMC 3, eating popcorn.

Fix laughed and smacked his hands flat against the arms of his recliner. “Boy, did you two turn out to be a couple of little girls. There's nothing in that movie that's going to hurt you. You should be able to see how a dying man stuck in this rattrap frame might want to see himself portrayed by a handsome movie star. And anyway, this story is ancient history. You've got until tomorrow
to pull yourselves together. It's my birthday and we're going to the show.”

Caroline parked and Franny got the wheelchair out of the trunk. Fix had long since stopped driving but he wouldn't sell the car. There was always the chance that fate could reverse itself, that a cure could be found in the latter part of the eleventh hour and the parts of himself that had been devoured by cancer could be restored. Hope, Fix said, was the blood of life, and the car could never be replaced. It was a Crown Victoria, a former unmarked police car he'd bought from the department. Franny called it the Batmobile for its ability to go a hundred and forty miles per hour if need be. Not that he'd ever driven it at a hundred and forty, but he liked to say he felt better just knowing what was possible.

Franny opened the car door and picked up her father's feet from the floorboard, swinging them gently out and then taking his arm. “Count of three,” she said, and together they counted while he rocked back and forth to gain momentum. The car that could catch a stolen Ferrari could not help him up. Franny pulled him out and Caroline caught him in the chair the moment he stood. Even a month ago Fix had fought this. A month ago he wouldn't use the walker, insisting instead on holding on to Marjorie, even after the falls. But that was behind them now. Now he let Franny put his feet on the paddles. He said thank you.

The actress who owned the house in Amagansett had wanted to play Julia in the movie, which was to say she wanted to play Franny's mother. She didn't know, of course, that Franny was a real person who would be sleeping in her bed on her Egyptian cotton sheets. Leo had blamed Albie for the end of their affair. He believed that had Albie never found them they would have gone on happily together. But Caroline was right: Albie didn't put the nail in the
tire, the nail was already there. Still, as long as Leo got to blame their personal problems on an innocent party, Franny would like the chance to blame the actress and her ridiculous goddamn house. No one should have so much money that they could own a house like that and then not even bother to live in it. The swimming pool was long and deep and looked nothing like a swimming pool at all. It looked like the foundation of a shotgun house that had been built in the 1800s and then blown away in a storm. The swimming pool was fed by a spring. No one knew exactly where it came from, not the spring, not the pool, both having been there longer than the actress's house. And that was just the beginning: there were climbing roses that covered the east wall and then sprawled in a giant tangle over the sloping roof, a miraculous profusion of blooms. It was a storm of roses, white and red, a half a dozen shades of pink, that piled over themselves all summer long, one breed dying out just as another was peaking. A carpet of blown petals covered the lawn throughout the summer. And there was a Klimt in her bedroom, small but unarguably real, a painting of a woman who bore an almost ancestral resemblance to the actress. Who kept the Klimt in their summer house? It was the house, Franny believed, that had done them in. No one could stay away from it except the actress herself. Leo had called Franny one night long after their relationship was over to tell her the actress had invited him back to Amagansett for dinner. She said she wanted to talk about the movie, even though he told her there wasn't any movie.