The Inseparables (7 page)

After his fall, Harold lived for days. His room at Mass General overlooked the cloverleaf of the Longfellow Bridge, and beyond that the gray crawling stripe of the Charles. Friends from his boyhood came. A chaplain sat with her. Suddenly the boundary between his body and his soul became necessary to negotiate. Her godlessness never felt so inconvenient. Where exactly were the boundaries, she wanted to know? Flowers arrived, and she measured his progress by the amount of blooms he outlasted. On the last morning, light over the river found its way through the scuffed glass to his forehead, a warm glimmering, maybe meaningless. The river moved outside. Then it froze.

His oldest friend was Jerry Stern. For weeks after the burial, he came to see her, brought her food, swept her porch. He arranged the funeral. She hadn't been able to clean out Harold's things, and he came and did it for her. When the house needed to be sold, he met the real estate agents with her, negotiated a lower commission. For decades he had sold aluminum siding and windows, and he talked down the price on everything with a huckster's ease. He was small and loud and he wore a necktie every time he came to see her. He and Harold had been boys together in West Aveline, on a street Henrietta could see from her back porch if the weather was clear. A whole life in the same spot.

In the afternoon, when the snow had let up and Juliet had gone, Jerry came in his black Mercedes. She watched from the window. He went to the barn, found the shovel, and after a few minutes had dug her out in his overcoat and leather gloves and his wool derby. He hadn't been here since she'd filled the front room with moving boxes, and, opening the door to find them, he stopped. Her leaving bothered him. He'd helped Harold replace the roof when it blew off. He loved this house. He wanted to give her the money to stay.

“Put the figure on a scrap of paper,” Jerry said from the doorway, banging snow from the soles of his boots. “You don't even need to say it out loud.” Since Jerry and Harold were both only children, they had considered themselves brothers, and Jerry saw it as his responsibility to take care of Henrietta. “Money embarrasses you. You're just like Harold. That's your problem. You're hung up on it.”

“I'm not hung up on money,” said Henrietta. “I just don't have enough to live here.”

“Sacrifice just a fraction of your pride,” he said.

“The chances of me taking money from you are nonexistent,” she said.

“You take my shoveling ability. My wonderful good humor. My sheer brute strength,” he said, trying and failing not to smile. “But not my dough. I don't get it.”

“Since when are you so loaded, Jerry? That's what
I
don't get.”

“I keep a low overhead.”

“Strippers only twice a week?”

He shook his head. “Sex work is a patriarchal tool of oppression and violence, Henrietta.”

“Look at you, learning from my old lectures,” she said. “How gratifying.”

Cleaning out a filing cabinet last month, they had come across a stack of her old class notes. For a few half-serious minutes he had read aloud from a lecture she'd given during her last year in Manhattan, notes on the violent, capitalistic, and patriarchal oppression of sex workers, and he'd pretended to regard her as if she had just admitted she'd come to earth atop a meteorite. “What are you?” he'd joked. “Some kind of left-wing wacko?” This was an old game Henrietta had played with Jerry and his wife, Shirley, who had been dead for a decade. Henrietta had loved her. The Sterns had lived together in a small apartment in Beacon Hill. Shirley Stern was the first real friend Henrietta had in Boston, the person who helped her weather the worst of the storm caused by
The Inseparables.
She was the first white woman Henrietta knew who made her own hummus. The first person she knew to use the phrase marriage equality. On her back terrace, she had grown adzuki beans. Henrietta often felt, searching Shirley's bookshelves, as if she had lived the life Henrietta would have if she'd stayed in New York. While Henrietta had the country and her chicken feed and her goats, Shirley possessed all the things that had gone extinct in the suburbs. Patience. Cultural literacy. Russian novels. Whole milk. She died from a fast-moving blood virus. On a Monday, she had a headache; by Friday, she was gone.

Jerry went across the room to the countertop stereo. He needed music playing. Or a pen to fiddle with. Or tobacco to put in his pipe. In a man like him, restlessness passed for personality. Not only did Jerry remind her of Harold—they talked with the same accent, used the same slang, shared the same childhood memories—but he also reminded her of the men she'd grown up with, men like her father, for whom every conversation was an argument, men with gruff Yiddish street smarts and unshakable superstitions. Jerry spun the radio dial until a rising wash of strings filled the kitchen. Out of nowhere these past few years he had discovered a love of the symphony. Harold had found this hilarious. Henrietta understood: Shirley had loved the symphony, and the music, quite simply, brought her back. He closed his eyes against a swell of violas.

“Mozart,” he said. Then: “You know, I think everything is Mozart. I honestly have no idea.”

Already this morning she'd told him about Juliet Lippincourt coming and about the missing weathervane. They talked daily. He had become her confidant. She showed him a copy of one of the more valuable examples Juliet had emailed over. He needed to squint to see the paper clearly. His eyes were bad but he refused glasses out of pride and vanity and some admitted stupidity. The downside to possibly getting his eyes fixed, he had always joked to Harold, was that with good vision he'd finally get a decent look at himself in the mirror.

“Is this the thing Harry risked his life for?” Jerry asked.

She smiled, both at the implicit exaggeration of her husband's storytelling and at hearing his old nickname.

“Rain and wind,” she said. “That's all. It wasn't exactly the end of the world.”

“The way he put it, it was the invasion of Normandy.”

“I'm sure he made it sound heroic.”

“He sprinted out amid lightning and hailstones.”

She nodded. “Well, that
is
true, actually.”

When Jerry saw how much the thing had sold for, he smacked the paper. “You're kidding me,” he said.

“I had the exact same reaction,” said Henrietta. “Believe me.”

“This is a weathervane you're talking about?” he asked. “Like, those Waspy metal things on your roof that go round and round in the wind?”

“Harold liked Waspy things,” she said.

“Except for you and me,” he said.

This made her laugh. On the stereo the song changed. More strings. Jerry took out his phone and dialed out for Chinese. Wind buffeted the living room windows. The casements had gone bad a decade ago and the cold air blew through. Downstairs the furnace struggled and vibrated the house. Henrietta pulled her sweater's collar up to her neck. Jerry had offered Harold new windows every winter, but Harold could never do with free things, or discounted things, especially from his friends. This was only part of the reason why the Feast had closed. And why the house needed to be sold.

“Why's this thing worth so much money, anyway?” Jerry asked. “Is it made of diamonds or something?”

“It's art, evidently.”

“Weathervanes are art now?” He put the report down.

“There are people who really care about weathervanes,” she said. “Who care about them a great deal.” She brightened. “I learned this.”

The last month had been a miniature education in folk art. This statue that had sat all this time on Henrietta's mantel was the Goddess of Liberty, a maudlin name for a token of nineteenth-century patriotic fervor. After the War of 1812, she became a very popular figure, so popular that craftsmen eventually started fashioning weathervanes in her image. Jerry's response to all this information was the same as Henrietta's when Juliet Lippincourt initially shared it with her: he offered a genuinely appreciative hum of approval.

Jerry took his pipe from his inside jacket pocket. He and Henrietta went to the living room. She had a fire on. Out in the yard, wind blew the snow sideways across the river. This was when Jerry saw the box of
The Inseparables
across the room.

“That what I think it is?”

“Change the subject, Jerry.”

He picked up a copy from the carton and flipped through it before looking up at her. “Can I ask about the diagrams? Harold never let me ask.”

“Can I ask you not to say the word diagram?”

“They're the best part, though.”

“I'm glad the book finally allowed you to see a vagina.”

This was the way they bantered these days. It did not escape Henrietta that she sounded just like her husband, which did not exactly feel awful.

“You must be making dough on that.”

“Not enough,” she said.

A week ago the people from Hubbard had sent along a proposal for a book tour. Who thought such things existed any longer? Fifteen cities, radio interviews, speeches at women's colleges. Her first reaction was to ask why they would send her to all these places if no one would come and see her. Just wait, they told her. You'll be surprised. They were trying to pass her off as some looked-over doyenne of sexual health. A soothsayer of a new collectively libidinous generation. Yes, the diagrams were still funny, and yes, the story itself was not exactly the work of a great master, and yes, certainly it was true that the new generations were generally sophisticated enough to accept the concept of female pleasure as something obvious and real and not at all worthy of scorn. Yet she felt like one of those ancient golden cities they discovered in the jungle by way of helicopter and thermodynamic imaging:
Look! These old people here liked to screw each other, too!
It was a shoehorn job, as far as she saw it. They were doing to her book what people had always done to her book, which was to see whatever they wanted to see. The way her editor and her publicist talked about
The Inseparables,
it occurred to Henrietta that they truly believed a reputation like hers could be amended retroactively. Then came Hubbard's other requests.
Cosmo
wanted the young Henrietta to interview the old Henrietta. To this she had merely said,
Now where do you suppose we get access to the young Henrietta?
More ideas: Would she do an interview with Chelsea Handler from the back of a hansom cab in Central Park? She did not know who Chelsea Handler was. Would she let Morley Safer interview her in a hot-air balloon? This, Henrietta needn't be reminded, was a nod to a regrettable sexual escapade in chapter 6 in which Eugenia is fulfilled by a balloon captain. Would she let Nigella Lawson cook the recipe—Harold's recipe—for
boeuf à l'orange
included in chapter 2? Again: Who exactly was Nigella Lawson? The list of requests felt endless, and at a certain point Henrietta found herself agreeing to it all. Yes, she found herself saying. Yes, yes, yes. Yes to the interview, yes to the hot-air balloon, yes to the teapot
and
the QVC special where she'd be hawking teapots. Yes to everything! Perhaps time had aged the book and everything would be better in the new century. Time had aged for the better many of the things Henrietta loved most in the world, like red wine and cheese and photographs of Paul Newman. She could, if she tried, imagine charming Morley Safer. She would wear a yellow chiffon scarf. She would be her most charming self. She could, if she wanted. Couldn't she?

Jerry dragged on his pipe. He preferred vanilla tobacco. She liked the smell better than the taste.

“You go to the grave lately?” he asked.

“Let's not talk about this. Pick another subject.”

“Death is the only good subject, Henrietta. As a writer, you should know that.”

She cringed. “I was never a real writer.”

“I was there last week while some guy was getting buried.”

“Jerry, please no burial talk.”

“This guy was a big baseball fan, I have to assume. His whole grave was filled with these little Red Sox pennants. I figured it was a little boy. Who else has that kind of enthusiasm for baseball? But it turns out the guy was ninety. It was charming the first day. Wind in the pennants and all. Two days later, there's a fucking million of these dumb flags everywhere.” He fiddled with his pipe. “And that stuff isn't biodegradable.”

“And this is coming from a guy who sold aluminum siding.”

“I took them off Harry,” he said, his voice dropping. “That way you don't have to.”

Harold's grave was a pedestrian thing. She wished she could have built a mausoleum for him. A big monument some future citizenry would need to contend with. She went daily at first. Swept the stone, talked to the stone, felt his insistent deadness. She repeated the words alone to her moving boxes. Widowing. Widowhood. Widow's walk. The inscription on his gravestone had felt so wholly insufficient the moment she saw it. Just a name and dates, carved by machine. Just the inadequate and impersonal
Loving father and husband,
like every other headstone there, whether it was true or not. This was the tasteful way to do it, she knew, even though it showed none of the true shape of the man. Nothing of his loyalty, his talent, his temper, his obsessions. None of the treacly stuff: his cooking breakfast for her every day for almost forty years, his dancing with her in the kitchen every Sunday after dinner. This was the stuff nobody ever really wanted to hear about anyway, she knew. Nor did anyone need to know the truly personal things: that when they were together he always held her; that he would trace out messages to her on her skin, slowly; that in a movie theater he would invariably want to kiss like a teenager or put his hand up her skirt; or that they had fucked on the same park bench in the Luxembourg Gardens forty years apart. These facts, she understood, would die with her. But his grave had no mention of the real stuff either. She had envisioned a list, like a recipe he might use.