The Inseparables (31 page)

“That was the big mistake,” Lydia went on. “Then you could have had your characters fucking twice as many people in hot-air balloons. It wouldn't have bothered anyone, or violated any inherited social taboos.”

“Listen to you,” Henrietta said.

“What?” Lydia said defensively.

“Clearly Hartwell has done wonders for your critical acumen.”

Lydia shrugged. “I was the stupidest person there.”

“I can't see how that was possible.”

“Aside from the politicians' kids, who were practically illiterate.” She put her hand out in front of her and pantomimed a ladder. “Senators' kids were at the bottom. Then there was me.”

“I hope you decide to go back,” Henrietta said.

“Of all people, I'd expect you to have the opposite opinion,” Lydia said.

She had yet to decide whether or not to go back. At home, Henrietta knew, Lydia had her things packed for Hartwell, her navy uniform laundered and pressed, her course work completed. But she had also made inquiries about going back to the school in her town, the regular school where they taught regular math and literature. Henrietta saw it both ways. Why return to a place full of boys who had anonymously harassed her, and with an administration that had reacted so tepidly? But why give them the satisfaction, and the victory, of allowing that harassment to keep her away?

“You have to move forward,” Henrietta said. “That's my opinion.”

“I've considered it,” Lydia said. “Shame is a choice. Isn't that what you said?”

“Did I say that?”

“You did.”

“It's not as unrealistic as it sounds.”

“I've also considered hiding out. Getting full-body plastic surgery. Moving to Brazil. Living on the beach. That seems potentially rewarding.”

Henrietta pointed to the book. “I looked into that once, too.”

They were quiet awhile. The line out the door grew longer, wrapping itself down the block. For the briefest instant, it was easy to forget that she had ever been in this room before. Buildings go up and buildings come down. Maybe this was a good thing.

Lydia put her purse on the table. “I almost forgot,” she said. They had already negotiated the handoff of the weathervane. Spencer had called, and then Oona had called, and finally Lydia had done so as well, which was, as far as Henrietta could remember, the first time Lydia had ever called her on the telephone. In a way, this was the real reason they were having lunch—so that Lydia could hand it over, which she did, with a chastened grin. Henrietta wanted to take a moment to savor having it again, but, holding it in her hands finally, she wasn't sure whether the money to be garnered from selling it would be worth all of the past few days. She wanted to say to Lydia,
Do you know how much this is worth?,
but she knew that a fifteen-year-old had no concept of money, and that Lydia would very likely assume that she meant emotional worth or psychic worth or anything apart from what some person in an auction house might pay for this. She held it in her hands for a moment and then quickly put it away in her bag on the seat beside her.

Light glimmered on Lydia's forehead. Henrietta took her granddaughter's hands, which were cold and soft.

“We have done this before, you know,” Henrietta said. “You were just very young.”

“That doesn't count.”

“It was you. And it was me. We actually were together. On earth. Alone. At the same moment. I think that counts.”

Lydia leaned forward. “When was this?”

“The day after you were born.”

“Oh, that definitely does not count!”

“It most certainly does count.”

Lydia shook her head.

“I came down to New York to your parents' apartment. You've probably heard them talking about it. I'm sure they make it sound like the Ritz. But it was the most cramped, awful place. They'd filled it with all these cookbooks. It was always so dusty. Your mother had been telling me before you were born,
Don't come, I can manage.
Or,
Don't come, I need time to be with my husband and my new baby and adjust.
”

“Sounds like her.”

“The closer you got the more colorful she got.
If you dare show up I'll get a warrant served on you.
Delightful things. She was so charming when she was young. So this is why I wasn't there when you were born. I wanted to be there in the hospital with your mom. But Harold and I just walked all around the farm that whole morning. We looked like maniacs, I'm sure. Regardless, the first night, four in the morning, your mother calls. This is the first night you're alive. I sit up in bed. We think that you're dead. Well, not we.
I
think you're dead. That's where my mind tends to go when it worries.”

“Death?”

“Yes. Death.”

“That's productive.”

“It keeps me sharp, I think,” Henrietta said. “Anyway, your mother calls from her apartment, breathing heavy, clearly in a panic, having realized, I'm sure, that you were not a dog.”

“A dog?”

“You see, they had looked after a friend's dog a few weeks before you were born, thinking that it was a practice human. And she was convinced that because they'd kept the dog alive they could keep you alive, too.”

“So you came,” Lydia said.

“I show up right away. Your mother is sleepless. Your father is sleepless. I put them both to bed. Like they're children themselves. I tucked your mother in. Kissed her on the forehead. Then it's you and me.”

Lydia smiled. “Basically a party.”

“This goes on for a week. I would take over when your mom and dad needed to sleep. That whole time, though, my mother is calling. She wants to see you. She wants me to bring you down to the old building. She refuses to go that far uptown because the walk to Riverside Drive from the subway at 86th is too far. The walk, my mother claims, will actually kill her. I didn't want to wake your parents up. So one day I take a chance while they're asleep, grab some diapers and breast milk, and take you out.”

“This is not a true story.”

“You're practically a hundred and fifty hours old.”

“This seems so unlikely.”

“I swear this is true.”

“If it is, if you're not lying, I bet she adored you for this.”

“I show up downtown. My mother's weeping, holding you up like you're an offering to the gods. You know: two hands, above her head, right up to the heavens.
Another generation! Life! We've survived!
Soon the whole place is filled with my family. My uncles and my aunts. My cousins. The tiny kitchen is packed. My mother is making everyone terrible wine spritzers. Someone brought in sandwiches. It's eleven in the morning. We're drunk. Aside from some minor crying, you're the happiest little thing. More people come over. I have family upstairs on the fifth floor. They come down. I have family in the building next door, they come over. My aunt Essie, she's holding you, kissing your little head, rubbing your tiny feet, talking gibberish to you in Yiddish. Everyone wants to hold you. My cousins Ruthie and Seymour and Morton. Everyone's gawking at you, saying you look like so-and-so, some great-uncle dead for a hundred years. Or everyone thinks you look like some ancient aunt murdered centuries ago by some marauding gang on horseback. Oh, it was very special and wonderful.”

“And then my mother woke up and freaked out that you exposed her one-week-old child to all these old-world germs?”

“Oh no,” Henrietta said. “I eventually took you back uptown. I hired the two of us a very fancy town car. We were up and back in ninety minutes. You sat on my lap. I hugged you tight to me. It was my old route to high school, actually. It was nice to be back in the city. I had missed it. You were very good. And by ‘good' I mean you were asleep. And we came back and your parents were still out. They never knew about it.”

“Really?”

“I never told them.”

“Oh, I'm not good with secrets,” said Lydia. “Everything gets out once I get ahold of it.”

“You should know it, though. Your family. You should know that they knew you.”

“That they drank wine spritzers over my infant body and held me up to the heavens as an offering?”

Henrietta smiled. “They're all dead, those people. Every person in that kitchen but me.”

“Oh good, a nice story with a happy ending.”

“I'm almost positive that you never saw any of them ever again. Your mother never liked them. They were old and she thought they were mean people. Petty, mean people full of outmoded ideas and ugliness. Which is true to a certain extent. She worried, I think, that she had those people in her. Their ugliness. And she worried that you'd have it, too. As if these things were communicable. She never understood that they were people who lived their whole life in these tiny rooms that were too hot and too cold and too crowded. That they had no money. They lived their whole life in the neighborhood, never got out. They were very rough people. Happy people, but rough. But they met you—you should know. All of them. Your family. They picked you up and kissed you and it was wonderful watching them passing you around, every one of them taking pictures. Your little baby face was on all of their refrigerator doors.”

Lydia leaned forward wordlessly. The crowd in the restaurant had grown so large that it had become difficult to hear. For Henrietta, it was an old memory of what it was like to have this place so full of life. The sign on the front window pulsed.
T-A-C-O-S. Fast, Good, Eat.
Neon off, neon on, oil-slick, making prisms in the puddles outside. The window had fogged. Henrietta smiled at her granddaughter.

“What else can you tell me?” Lydia said. “What other important things do I need to know?”

“Life is tough,” Henrietta said. “A bird could come through the window right this instant and impale you.”

On the first of March, Henrietta surrendered the keys to her house in a lawyer's office forty stories above Boston. She made the exchange in a conference room with a view of the whitecaps on Boston Harbor. The attorney who took the keys and approved the final stack of papers was sipping heartily on a diet soda, and for weeks afterward Henrietta would associate the loss of her house with that awful but appropriate sucking noise that a straw makes when there's nothing left in the can.

Afterward, she went back to the house that Oona had rented for the two of them. It was a small place, painted white, with a fenced-in yard where she kept Harold's rooster. It was close to the old house, close enough that she could walk there without much difficulty, and close enough that when the construction crews were taking it down, months afterward, in the dead heat of summer, she could hear the thrumming of the engines on the front loaders as they passed by on the way to tear apart her roof. For weeks afterward, before the new buildings went up and when the meadow was full of goldenrod, she would walk up to the top of the hill to see the view that she'd had from her kitchen window.

This was where she finally opened Harold's suitcase, in the middle of July, having pulled it behind her on the mile walk from the house, through the woods and up the hill. It was late and near dusk. The lights were on in town. Behind her, where the house had stood, there was new grass. Fruit hung in the trees. A year from now there would be an entirely new neighborhood here, dozens of homes, everything different, everything changed. But at that moment she was alone.

There was a story she remembered reading once about the men who opened Tutankhamen's tomb. Before Howard Carter's men broke the rope-tied seal on the doors to the burial chamber in the Valley of the Kings, it had been closed for three thousand years. As the story went, immediately after they lifted the lid on the gold coffin, Carter's men saw that a garland of flowers lay wrapped around the neck of the boy king. Olive leaves and blue cornflowers and poppies, still colorful and intact. For a moment they all stood over it—the gold box, the tiny wrapped body, and this ornate string of flowers placed around his neck, maybe by his mother. When Carter finally reached to touch the flowers, they disintegrated into dust in his hands.

She thought of this when she opened Harold's suitcase. Because it smelled of him. Not of his cologne, which she had sprayed everywhere these last months, or his aftershave, which she had also, in a fit of olfactory mawkishness, splashed on her cheeks occasionally this last year, but of whatever it was that had made him. It took her a moment to register this. She stayed out on the hill and in the high grass until the sun set. Oona was mostly right. Inside was the clothing for the trip they did not take. And the books about Spain they did not read. And the tickets for the flight they did not take. Then, at the bottom, she found the note. If she was being honest, she'd admit that this was what she wanted all this time. A small white envelope, sealed shut.
To you,
it said,
from me.

When she smelled him, she immediately shut the suitcase. Surely some essence of him remained in this small, cheap thing, and it was getting out. She hugged it close to her, and then, to herself, out loud, she said,
This is just a suitcase I am hugging. Nothing more.

A minute passed. The sound of the river grew loud. She took everything out then, piece by piece, and stacked it beside her on the grass, all his clothing, the books, the tickets, everything in two equal stacks. A gust came across the valley, and she left the suitcase open and empty and let the air come and rush in and clean it out.

Before she got up to go, she turned to see it again. The flat earth. The hills. All the good acres and the wind in the trees.

Remember this.

For his wisdom and friendship and for his general constant excellence, I remain continually indebted to PJ Mark, who helped with this book in so many thousands of ways, and whose good humor and belief made it all possible. I owe a great deal to Stephanie Koven for her advice, for her encouragement, and for being such a great reader. Thank you to Marya Spence for seeing what this book was before I did. Thank you to Reagan Arthur for your patience and insight and for making this book better. Thank you to Laura Tisdel for your help pushing me across the finish line. To everyone at Little, Brown who helped in ways big and small: thank you. Thank you to Megan Mayhew Bergman for your friendship and for reading this book when it needed reading. And thank you to Nell Beram and Karen Landry for catching everything I missed.

And to my wife, who is the most brilliant person I know, and who makes everything so much better: I love you.