Gossip (18 page)

We sat silently for a while before I said, “I know it isn't your style, but this is too much for you to carry alone. Don't you think you ought to talk to somebody?”

“You mean a
shrink
? Like every other fat lonely angry single woman in New York?”

That is of course what I meant, and since she knew very well that I and half the people we knew had not thought ourselves above such recourse, I chose not to answer.

I
saw less of Dinah for some months after that. Partly this was because I was able to spend most of my time with Gil, and because I was gradually beginning to accept that he and I had many more good years behind us than lay ahead. He was in most ways like a man twenty years younger than his chronological age, but not in all. I wanted to make the most of the time we had left, and whatever my fears in the small hours, Dinah was not my choice of confidante about them.

She rallied, of course, in time. A friend who writes for “On the Town,” the Web-based social blat read by everyone between Carnegie Hill and Bloomingdale's, did a column on Dinah's cooking classes with lots of pictures of Dinah tasting a sauce, Dinah spreading meringue, and attractive young people in
SOMEONE'S IN THE KITCHEN WITH DINAH
aprons chopping and stirring. She came into the shop one afternoon to crow that she had just signed a book contract. She even bought some large onyx earrings while she was there, at full price.

The nights she was not cooking, she seemed to be out On the Town herself a good deal, a fact I followed on the Web site along with everyone else. She was invited to gallery openings and press events of all sorts, and I began to think I recognized her touch in blind items and captions that ran with unflattering pictures of people at glamorous events. The photographer would catch someone with a mouthful of scalding hors d'oeuvre, or beaming for the camera unaware there was sauce on his nose, or a woman in an expensive dress whose corsetry was not what it should have been. The taglines that ran with these pictures became conversational shorthand all over town.
OH, THE GLAMOUR OF IT ALL!
was one, and
TOWN CLUB DOWAGER
was another.

I remember my grandmother, back in the 1970s, in a huff because a coed group of Princeton students had had a romp in the snow one night wearing only their ski boots. A jolly dustup about the whole thing had made its way to the national press. Working for Mme. Philomena and living on gruel while all my classmates were in college, I thought it sounded heavenly. Not my grandmother. “Something has gone wrong with the morals of your generation,” she declaimed, as if she were Walter Cronkite reporting the My Lai massacre. I ventured that it had nothing to do with morals—they hadn't robbed a bank or started a war, they simply had a new attitude about nakedness. As if I hadn't spoken she repeated her original sentence, and added witheringly, “Students at the Ivies and Seven Sisters used to be ladies and gentlemen.”

I'm a great deal more sympathetic now. I wanted to express my displeasure at the meanness of these items by ceasing to read the column, but of course I can't do that. I have to know who's out and about and what they are wearing.

G
race and Avis made an appointment and came into the shop together. This would have been around Lindy's second birthday. It was June. They had had lunch together at a sidewalk table on Madison, celebrating Grace's new teaching job.

“Look how little and cute she is!” said Avis. “She's been doing yoga. Buckram.”

“Bikram. You do it in a sweltering room, I am now strong like ox. You should try it, Mummy.” I hadn't heard her call Avis that since she was in Mary Janes.

“It sounds so daunting,” said Avis. But she was pleased.

It was a most successful afternoon for me. Grace was once again a perfect size four, and I had some dresses that looked better on her than they had on the showroom models. They took three of them. Then they thought Grace had better try a jacket or two. I showed them a beautiful boyfriend jacket, worn slightly long at the wrists and broad at the shoulders, in a dove-gray herringbone cashmere. Grace stood looking at her reflection as Mrs. Oba showed her how to turn back the cuffs to show the striped silk lining. She had a chic new gamine haircut, and the color of the jacket brought out the blue-slate shade of her eyes.

“It's really very practical,” said Avis, doing my job for me. “You can wear it with trousers or over the charcoal dress. It will wear, won't it, Lovie?”

“Like iron,” I said. Nothing as soft as that jacket wears like iron, but Avis knew that. They bought it, and also a slouchy little boiled wool blazer with midriff pockets.

“You will
live
in that,” said Avis. If all my customers had been like her, I wouldn't be spending half my life closeted with accountants these days.

Grace said, “Lovie, what size is that taffeta shirt in the window?”

“I think it's an eight—do you want to try it?”

“I want my mother to try it.”

“What taffeta shirt?” said Avis.

It was a double-breasted evening blouse in a burnt orange undershot with something slightly iridescent that made it gleam. It had a diagonal closing that hugged the rib cage, one of Avis's best features, and a wide collar that would hold whatever shape you put it in. Frankly, I had pictured Belinda in it; that's why I put it in the window. I miss her.

“I'd have to wear it closed across the chest,” said Avis, as if I'd forgotten her scars. You can hardly see them anymore, but
she
sees them.

All four of us were in the dressing room now. Mrs. Oba fastened the hidden closings at the midriff while I sculpted the collar so that it stood up framing her face, revealing just a slit of skin from collarbone to chest. Not a scar to be seen. She looked positively regal.

“If you don't buy that I'll never forgive you,” said Grace.

T
hat was the summer of Nicky's next vocation, the bar on Planet Ludlow. It was Toby's idea. He had found a former auto body shop next to a carver of Hebrew gravestones down in the Lower East Side neighborhood of Stanton, Orchard, and Ludlow streets, once home to Old Law tenements filled with refugees from the ghettos of Eastern Europe, now the haunt of recent graduates of Wesleyan and Vassar. The space seemed to Toby to cry out to be a watering hole cum literary salon, and Nicky seemed to him the perfect attraction to run the front of the house. He would make it the clubhouse for his Hollywood friends when they were in town, perhaps even convince them to make fools of themselves at the mike in back, where Toby would curate a slate of readings by their young literary pals, paired with monologists, a stand-up comic, or the occasional singer-songwriter.

Together they convinced a bunch of their old high school gang to put in sweat equity or money. Someone had an uncle who helped with the liquor license. Two of the girls reupholstered old car seats in red velvet to use as sofas, and they hung auto body parts like sculptures along the walls. Someone else donated bar stools found at a flea market upstate. Well over half the group had worked waiting tables or trained as chefs or both.

I was deeply skeptical. It takes a lot of attention and some very specific skills to manage employees and run a business, as I had learned myself the hard way. However, it appeared I had misjudged them, because the place opened with skillfully managed fanfare and was a hit almost immediately.

Dinah was all over it, of course. She'd consulted on the menu, a sort of tapas assortment of cleverly reimagined bar food. Nicky hired a bartender who made really delicious pear martinis. Toby's literary choices were rarely my taste, but of course I was not the target audience, and the demographic they were seeking, young bankers and hedge fund hoglets and others making fortunes in the booming markets, came in droves.

Nicky was as happy as a pig in a wallow. I went with Dinah to a couple of programs early on, but they tended to start about the time I needed to be in bed. The same was true for Grace. On weekends she sometimes got a sitter and went to have dinner at the bar with Nicky, but once again they were living in different time zones. Most nights after closing, Nicky and Toby played liar's poker at the bar with the staff until three or four in the morning, while Grace went to bed at ten and was up with Lindy at six.

At Christmastime that year, RJ's wife called from Pittsburgh to say she was coming to town and wanted to take me to lunch. She's a nice woman, very even tempered and loyal, but when we sat down together at the overpriced bôite she had chosen because some writer on a travel junket had written it up in the Pittsburgh paper, she had a head of steam up.

RJ, she said, was really hurt this time. He claimed he understood why he had had to go to boarding school but Nicky was allowed to stay home. Why he was never offered the engagement ring that Dinah had saved for Nicky to give to his bride. Why Dinah was always babysitting for Lindy when she had declined to take on that particular duty for RJ's boys.

I could have said that RJ could afford his own ring. That two active little boys are different from one tiny girl. But I knew what her point was, and knew she was right.

“He's really upset, though, about her putting all that money into Nicky's bar. Do you know what she gives RJ for his birthday? Fruit of the Month Club! The boys get gift cards to Barnes & Noble, not very big ones either! She's
their
grandmother too!”

“Laura, I really don't think she's put money into the bar. She's helped with the food and the PR . . .”

“Have you asked her?”

Of course I hadn't. And Richard would have to know if she'd taken substantial money from her accounts, and if it worried him, he would have told RJ.

“Would you talk to her?” Laura was saying.

“Me?”

“Yes. RJ won't. But she should know how it makes him feel!”

My smoked salmon omelet wasn't very good either. I should have known to dodge this invitation in the first place. But I'd been curious.

I
n the end, I did talk with Dinah about it. Probably not the smartest thing I ever did. It let me in for a good grilling about what Richard had said, what Laura had said, and how I'd gotten in the middle of it in the first place.

Finally she said, “Of course I put money in. It's a loan, and he's paying me back.”

“But, Dinah, you can't afford to lose that kind of money.”

“I'm not going to lose it.”

“But you could have. Nicky's a grown-up . . .”

“Exactly. That's exactly why it was the right thing to do.”

It was so obvious that borrowing money from your mother for a crapshoot is not exactly grown-up that I didn't even answer. Dinah wouldn't have listened anyway. The fact that the bar was succeeding completely justified her.

And the bar was succeeding. Unfortunately, Nicky wasn't.

None of us really knows what happened. One rumor was that he and Toby quarreled over Nicky grandly giving away the most expensive bottles of red in the cellar, or drinking them himself. Another was that the bartender was dealing coke from behind the bar and that Nicky knew it and didn't stop it. What we do know is that the bartender was fired, Nicky and Toby don't speak anymore, and Toby paid back all but a few thousand of Dinah's loan before the economy tanked and the bar closed.

A
vis took a house on Nantucket for August that year so she could have Grace and Nicky and the baby with her. If she mourned the loss of her quiet island life in Maine, she didn't say so. The Nantucket house she rented was a huge shingled affair, with gables, on Hulbert Avenue right on the sound where you could watch the ferry come and go. There was even a little cottage out back, originally for the staff, that she offered to me, and which I gratefully accepted, since Gil was with Althea for the month.

I tried to remember how long it had been since I had visited the island, as I stood on the sunny top deck of the ferry going over from Woods Hole. Decades. The ferry was full of day-trippers with their bicycles, and young families going to the island for the weekend, the week, or the month. On my first visit, I remember thinking that someday I too would be making this crossing with my husband and our happy children, eager for the warm surf and glowing beaches. I watched the seagulls following our wake, screaming and diving into the white froth when someone threw a bread crust or a handful of Cracker Jacks for them. Sunlight flashed on their gray wings, and someone near me was using sunscreen that smelled of coconut oil. Summer.

Oddly, what it made me think of most was my grandfather, describing the overnight trip on the coasting packet ship from Boston to Maine when he was a boy and the family moved bag and baggage from Philadelphia to Great Spruce Bay in the summers. He and his brother Calvin would tie two chunks of bread together with string and throw it for the gulls. He used to laugh to tears at the mirthful thought of how the birds struggled once they ate the bread and then found themselves soaring but shackled. He urged me to try it. And my grandfather was a complete gentleman. I would have said otherwise that he hadn't a mean bone in his body.

Maybe the peanut butter dog opera wasn't funny either, however much the dog seemed to enjoy it. Maybe none of us recognize cruelty in ourselves.

What a thing to be thinking about under a blazing blue sky on a glorious day of creation. Houseguests have to sing for their suppers more cheerfully than that.

The men on the ferry who wished to declare themselves old Nantucket hands wore baseball hats or shorts in a color that looks weather-beaten even when new, called Nantucket red. The tourists would all have hats in this color by the time they made the return trip. We all want either to belong somewhere or for others to think we do. I myself possess a Nantucket lightship basket handbag with a scrimshaw ivory whale on the lid. It was my grandmother's; they cost a fortune now. None of my siblings knew what it was or cared about it, so I preempted it from the sale of her belongings. I even had it with me on this trip, but only because I needed to have the hinge repaired.