Saving Grace (19 page)

“But why now, for Chrissake? We need to conserve our energy, not waste it settling old scores. Why now?” he repeated angrily.

Lily’s face was strained. “I don’t know. It just seems necessary.”

“No. Uh-uh. When it
was
necessary, you wouldn’t talk about it. Now, in this context, it’s like picking up a baseball bat and swinging at my head.”

Back then he could have explained it simply, made her see how insignificant the affair was: a one-night stand that Lily through the sheerest bad luck had discovered. He hadn’t planned it when he took his secretary with him to Washington for a three-day conference. They had dinner together, a few drinks; she flirted with him, he flirted back. Melanie was an attractive woman, thirty, divorced...
 
she knew he was happily married. Jonathan never asked her to come to his room that night, dressed in nothing but high heels and a trench coat; but she did, and what was he supposed to do about it, throw her out? It would have been like throwing out good food, a cardinal sin in any household of Clara’s. Nothing at all would have come of it if he hadn’t made the lethal mistake of letting her stay the night. When the phone rang at seven in the morning, they were sound asleep. Melanie picked it up and said sleepily, “Hello?”

There was a long silence, during which Melanie realized what she’d done and elbowed Jonathan awake. He saw the phone in her hand and grabbed it. “Hello?”

He heard his wife breathing. Lily hung up without a word.

When Jonathan returned home to Highview the next day, he found her in the den, alone, sitting in the old oak rocker with an open book on her lap. He entered carrying a dozen long-stemmed yellow roses. Lily lifted her head and gazed just past his left ear. Said nothing, didn’t smile, only looked blankly in his general direction. The clock on the mantel ticked loudly.

“How are the kids?” Jonathan asked.

“Fine.”

“Good.” He held out the flowers. “These are for you.”

She shifted her gaze to his face but said nothing.

“Where should I put them?”

“In the trash,” she said, and went back to her book. Jonathan stood awhile longer, feeling like a fool. Then he went upstairs.

That was all. She never brought it up, and cut him off when he tried to. Even when he told her, several days later, that Melanie had left his employ, she said nothing.

From then on, Lily talked as if nothing had happened but acted as if everything had. Jonathan could not bridge the gap. Several times he alluded to his trip to Washington, but these oblique references deflected off the glass of her Mona Lisa smile.

Her anger spoke through silence. The long, voiceless dialogues that were once the mainstay of their intimacy were now saturated with suspicion and anxiety. When they sat silently together, he watched her thoughts butterfly across her face and tremble at her lips. To restrain them, she pressed her lips together with such force that sharp little lines appeared in the corners of her mouth. This unwonted severity gave her face a whole new look, not one he particularly admired.

Given half a chance, he would have made her see that a loveless affair was no betrayal. Men of a certain age have affairs: it’s a fact of life, required, almost, as a rite of passage, a tunnel through which one must pass in order to come out the other side.

It was not, after all, as if he made a habit of it. Compared to Michael Kavin, who cheated on Martha every chance he got, Jonathan was a monk; though in fairness, it had to be allowed that he had come out far ahead of Michael in the marriage sweepstakes. Martha Kavin was an untamed shrew who’d grown worse with age.

If Jonathan were allowed a harem of five hundred women, Martha wouldn’t have made the waiting list; whereas Lily was more beautiful and desirable now than on the day he married her.

Lily gave him no credit for temptations resisted. It wasn’t, after all, lack of opportunity that had kept him faithful. It was love. If a man was resolutely faithful, despite many temptations and opportunities, was it fair that he be condemned for a single indiscretion? Condemned, moreover, without a hearing?

And, having condemned him years ago, was she now entitled to throw the thing in his face?

These past few weeks had been hard on Lily too; he realized that. The tension of not knowing how the cards would fall, the feeling of having lost control, surely afflicted her as well as him. She did not say so, but he saw it for himself in the way she wandered through the walled garden of the Highview estate like a prisoner taking exercise. Several times he’d come upon her standing with unnatural stillness, as if listening to something he could not hear.

Her intention, he knew, was to be a loyal, warm, supportive wife in their time of trouble. She had come to Highview expressly to appear at his side, and in public she was pure grace under pressure. The problem lay in the private realm. When they were alone together, another side of Lily emerged, one not even remotely familiar to Jonathan.

Jonathan was not blind to her suffering, but he perceived it through a cloud of resentment. His pity for her did not dispel his hurt and surprise at the fact that at the time when he needed her most, his wife had turned against him.

They lay side by side in the master bedroom of the Highview house, a room larger than the apartment in which Jonathan had grown up. Lily wore makeup and a pink silk negligee. She’d had her hair done.

He hadn’t expected to see her that evening. Clara kept calling from East Hampton, where she had stayed with the children. Gracie wouldn’t talk, wouldn’t eat, wouldn’t even come out of her room. Clara made some delicious chicken soup and Gracie wouldn’t touch it. “I’m an old woman,” she said. “I can’t take the aggravation. She’s your daughter; you come home and deal with her.”

Since Jonathan couldn’t leave, they’d decided that Lily would return to East Hampton alone. Never mind that Lily was the last person in whom Gracie would confide; better to blame their separation on Gracie’s problems than to admit that these days, it was easier for them to be apart than to be together.

But when he drove up the circular drive to the house that evening, Lily opened the door to him. Gracie could wait another day, she said. That evening she was her old self, and as they lay in bed waiting for the eleven-o’clock news, Jonathan felt a stirring of desire. He ignored it. Potency had never been a problem; lately, however, so many things that had never been problems turned out to be problems, that he dared not open up another front.

The top story on the news was a cop killed while making a drug bust. Then a blown-up photo of Jonathan flashed onto the screen behind the announcer. “U.S. Attorney Lucas Rayburn isn’t talking, but NBC has learned from prosecution sources that the grand jury investigating charges of corruption in Eastborough has handed down a sealed indictment against Jonathan Fleishman, the borough’s powerful Democratic leader. Mr. Rayburn refused to comment on this report; however, well-informed political sources note that the U.S. attorney, a longtime friend of Jonathan Fleishman’s, has recused himself from involvement in the case.

“In a related development, the city’s Department of Investigation today confirmed that they are investigating Mr. Fleishman in connection with recent published reports of widespread corruption in Eastborough’s set-aside program. NBC’s attempts to reach Mr. Fleishman were unsuccessful. He did not return repeated phone calls.”

The station switched to a commercial. A man sat at a desk piled high with bills, his head in his hands. His wife stood behind him, massaging his shoulders. “I think,” she murmured tenderly, “it’s time to call a lawyer.”

Lily switched off the television with the remote control. They sat without speaking, staring at the blank screen.

Lily said, “Jonathan, we have to talk.”

“Not now.”

“Please, darling. Look at me.”

The face he turned toward her was taut with anger. “What?”

“Everyone in the world will have seen that.”

“That’s what concerns you? That your friends will see, and you’ll be embarrassed?”

“Jonathan, please. We’re on the same side.”

“Are we?” A spasm passed over his face and he pressed his hands to his temples. “I’m sorry, Lily. It’s just that sometimes I wonder.”

“We have to do something.”

“Do what? What can I do? They’re assassinating me. They’re killing me slowly.”

“Fight back. Hire a lawyer. Sue the
Probe.
Do
something.
We can’t just lie here waiting for the steamroller to crush us.”

He shook his head. “It’s all talk. Nothing’s happened. Nothing will.”

“Wake up and smell the coffee, darling. It’s happening now.”

There was a long silence. Jonathan rubbed his eyes. “What do you want me to do?”

“Hire the best goddamn lawyer you know. We should have done it sooner, the minute Lucas subpoenaed our accounts.”

The “we” was generous. He knew she was right. Somehow, though, hiring a lawyer meant accepting the reality of this nightmare, admitting the possibility that he could actually be indicted, finally giving up the hope, which Jonathan still harbored, that one morning he would wake to find the whole mess evaporated, everything back to the way it used to be.

“It’s terrible not knowing what’s going on. Just waiting to find out, like everybody else.”

His wife’s voice was so sad, so terribly resigned, it frightened him out of his self-absorption. He reached out to her. Lily came into his arms, buried her head in his shoulder.

“It will be all right,” he said, stroking her hair.

“No, Jonathan.”

“We just have to stick together, that’s all. I promise you, sweetheart, it will be all right.”

He held her tight. Lily didn’t say anything. Her mother’s song was running through her head: “All the king’s horses and all the king’s men/ Couldn’t put Humpty together again.”

13

COME IN,” JONATHAN SAID. “THIS IS MY wife, Lily. Lily, Christopher Leeds.”

“A pleasure, Mrs. Fleishman.”

“May we offer you some supper, Mr. Leeds?”

“No, thank you. I’ve just come from a dinner.”

“Very good of you to come to us, and on such short notice,” said Jonathan, who was in fact wondering what this house call would cost him. What did a lawyer like Christopher Leeds charge? Even with professional courtesy, he was bound to be expensive.

“I’m honored that you thought of me,” Leeds said.

Lily led the way into the living room. “Lovely,” said the visitor, looking about with appreciation. Leeds was a man of indeterminate middle age, with a round, smooth face, thick steel-rimmed glasses that magnified his eyes, and a circle of tonsured hair surrounding a bald pate. He looked more like a doctor than a lawyer, and more like a priest than a doctor. Indeed one could easily imagine him in brown robes, a cloistered monk with a boyish enthusiasm for Aquinas or St. Anselm.

Jonathan had numerous lawyer friends, including several renowned litigators, but when he finally brought himself to hire an attorney, he went to none of them. Years ago he had seen Christopher Leeds in action, and since then, with the respect of a journeyman craftsman for an artist, he’d taken every opportunity to watch him. He’d always known that if he ever found himself in serious difficulties, this was the man he’d go to.

Prosecutors feared him, judges walked gingerly in his presence. Leeds was known to have turned down dozens of proffered judgeships for the sheer joy of exercising his art. His forte was cross-examination. Unlike many of his colleagues, who ranted at and bullied opposing witnesses, Christopher Leeds never got angry. Instead, he got sad. The more the witness lied, the more sorrowful he became. To the jury he appeared a kindly old Gepetto, watching dolefully as the nose on Pinocchio’s face grew longer with each lie. They felt for him and, by extension, for his client. The oddity was that when you read the transcripts, you saw that Leeds’s questions acted quite separately from his gentle demeanor: innocent in isolation until, like Hitchcock’s birds, they flocked together to fly at witnesses and peck their testimony to shreds.

The men sat on facing sofas in front of the fireplace. Lily placed herself in an oversize armchair in a corner of the room, out of their line of vision.

Seeing Leeds in his living room, Jonathan was suddenly acutely embarrassed. He felt as if he had exaggerated his peril, called in a top neurosurgeon to treat a minor headache. Lily’s presence was paralyzing. He’d asked her to stay out of this meeting, but she’d refused; the echoes of that quarrel were still in the room.

Jonathan spread his hands. “I’ve admired your work for years, but I never thought the day would come...
 
I’m not sure even now... ”

Leeds’s understanding smile sent shafts of comfort through Jonathan’s soul. “It takes time to shift gears,” he said. “This kind of thing is like an unexpected bereavement or a sudden accident. It takes a while till you even realize you’ve been hurt.”

“Oh, I know I’ve been hurt, all right. There’s a gaping hole in my belly, and money is pouring out.”

Christopher Leeds laughed. He had a surprising laugh, giggly and a bit high, like a kid who knows he’s going to get punished for laughing in class but can’t help it.