Wreathed (7 page)

There was more to the story, and I knew I would hear the rest of it. We were still an hour away from Cape May, and I had the choice of either listening to her tell the story of how their marriage fell apart or having her quiz me more about my love life. I knew which I preferred.

I pulled the car back onto the expressway. I’d decided on espresso and a biscotti to fortify myself against the rigors of the final leg of the drive. I took a sip of hot coffee and initiated the next section of the conversation. “So what was it about the obituary that was a big lie?” I asked.

“The bit about refusing all romantic entreaties, dear, for one thing.”

“Oh, no,” I said. “He didn’t cheat on you, did he? The rat.”

“Not at first. We were too busy at first—I was still in school, and he had a job. We hardly had time to see each other, and what time we did have, we didn’t waste. The problem was that he needed to get an education, but he didn’t know what he wanted to do. He said he wanted to get an engineering degree, but he didn’t have the math aptitude for it.”

“You could have had your grandfather get him a job, though, right?”

I glanced over at her as I said this, and she looked mildly embarrassed. “Your great-grandfather was a rich and powerful man, and rich and powerful men, in that era, were paternalistic like you would not believe. Your great-grandfather could have given him a job, of course. But he decided that a couple of years in uniform would be just what Sheldon needed—to toughen him up. So he convinced Sheldon that the best way for him to start his career was to enlist in the Air Force. The idea was that Sheldon would be assigned to McGuire Air Force Base after he got out of basic training, so as to be close to both our parents.”

“Who thought that was a good idea?” I asked.

“Grandfather Borden did, and Sheldon’s parents did, and my parents did,” she said, not bothering to hide the acid in her voice. “I thought it was a stupid plan, and I said so, and nobody listened to me. But I wasn’t the one holding the purse strings. So Sheldon went to basic training in San Antonio, and I stayed behind and finished up my last semester of prep school. They let me fly down to Texas for his graduation—it was like a second honeymoon, almost. I thought we were going to go back to New Jersey and be happy together, but we reckoned without the whimsical ways of the United States Air Force. Instead of sending him to McGuire, like we thought they would, the bastards sent him to Elmendorf.”

“I saw that in the obituary, but I didn’t look up where it was.”

“Elmendorf is in Alaska, dear. Just outside Anchorage. Cold, lonely, and far away.”

I tried to picture Mother in snowshoes and a parka, and wasn’t coming up with anything. Then I tried picturing me following someone to Alaska, and I started shivering. “So what did you do?” I asked. “You didn’t just go with him, did you?”

“Of course not. I was not about to leave my family, and ruin any opportunity I had to get an education, to live in on-base housing in the Arctic. It was simply unreasonable, and I told Sheldon so. He understood. It was a tough situation, he said, but as long as we loved each other, we could work it out.”

“But it didn’t work out,” I said. I knew, from the obituary, that there had not been a happy ending, at least not for poor Sheldon. I hadn’t thought at the time that the relationship had been sad for Mother, although obviously it must have been.

“I wanted it to,” she said. “I did. But I wanted an education more. I hated to do it, but I went to your great-grandfather and asked him to pull some strings. He made a couple of phone calls and managed to get me into Bryn Mawr. I worked hard and studied and wrote Sheldon a letter every day. I thought I was being wholesome and virtuous for my husband, who was, after all, serving our country in a lonely, faraway outpost.”

“That sounds very noble of you.”

”I do not need your sarcasm, young lady. I thought I was being noble. It turns out, as it so often does, that what I thought was nobility was actually foolishness. It turned out that Elmendorf, although a far-away outpost, was not as lonely as it appeared. Sheldon, the rat, wasn’t there three weeks before he started cheating on me. And it wasn’t three months before he filed for divorce. No letter, no explanation, no anything, just divorce papers that an Air Force lawyer drew up for him.” The bitterness in her voice had an edge to it that fifty years hadn’t dulled.

“You are kidding,” I said. I didn’t have a worse breakup story than that one, and I’d been dumped by more guys than Taylor Swift and Adele put together. I felt real sympathy for my mother for the first time in years. “I hope you made him pay for that.”

“I did, quite literally. I sent them back, unsigned, postage due. In a box with two cinder blocks.”

“Nicely done.”

“I wrote on them, with spray paint. One of them said ROT, and the other one was supposed to say IN HELL, but it got a little runny. Still. It got the point across to the little bum.”

“What did he do?”

“I got a letter back from him a week later. He tried to tell me, if you can believe it, that it was a mistake. He said he’d asked for the lawyer to put the paperwork together, but the lawyer went ahead and sent it to me accidentally. As if I would believe anything that foolish. He admitted he was having an affair, and he said that he wanted a divorce—he just hadn’t meant to tell me that abruptly and heartlessly.”

“Who was the girl?” I asked.

“Oh, I never bothered to find out. It didn’t seem worth it. The issue wasn’t even the girl, whoever she was. Sheldon thought that my family was keeping me away from him—which was totally irrational; there was no way I was ever going to Alaska with him or anyone else. And he thought that once he left the Air Force, my family would be running his life forever.”

“Well, when you put it that way, it makes sense.”

“If he had been able to get a decent education and a decent job, we could have made our own way and thumbed our noses at our families. It didn’t work out that way. I’ve always regretted that. It would have been nice to have that independence.”

I decided not to comment on this particular point, having gotten through undergrad at Temple through as a recipient of the Arthur S. Borden Endowed Scholarship. Independence is nice and all, but dependence has its good points, too.

“Don’t get me wrong,” she said. “I love your father; still do, despite everything. I am glad we had the chance to be together and have a family together. I just wonder, sometimes, how things would have been if I had stayed with Sheldon. He must have thought that, too, when he was drafting that wretched obituary. To think that we were both thinking that, at the same time, but neither of us acted on it. And now it’s too late.”

“I’m sorry, Mom,” I said, and I meant it.

“Is that the exit for the Parkway up there?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“I don’t know why you didn’t take the Parkway the whole way.”

“Less traffic coming down 295, now that the construction has worked itself out. Not as many toll booths, either.”

“How much farther?”

“We’ll be there in twenty minutes. Just in time for dinner.”

“That’s fine,” she said.

We rode in silence all the way to the last exit, which led to the little peninsula of Cape May. A chill March wind was blowing in off the Delaware Bay. Most of the bed-and-breakfast places were still closed down for the season. We’d gotten two rooms in a touristy beach hotel, which I was surprised to find came attached to a respectable-sized liquor store.

“I see you looking at the inventory,” Mother said. “Don’t think that I don’t.”

“It’s an unusual setup,” I said, because it would have been impolite to explain just how much I needed something cold and sweet and alcoholic just then. It had been a long, emotionally draining day and if there was a better cure than a cocktail, I could not imagine what it might be.

“It is convenient. But it can wait until after the funeral. We’re going to walk in and out of that church like Kennedy widows, if you know what I mean. Dry-eyed and stoic and stone-cold sober.”

“So, does that mean no wine with dinner?” I asked.

“I don’t think,” she said, “that we need to do anything quite so radical.”

Chapter 9

We had a quiet dinner in the hotel’s restaurant and went straight to our respective rooms for the evening. I hadn’t brought a big bag, but I still took my time unpacking. I got all my makeup out and lined it up in a row on the bathroom counter. I shook the wrinkles out of my suit and hung it up so it would be ready to go in the morning. I set the alarm on the little clock-radio, and set an alarm on my phone, and called downstairs for a wake-up call. I knew that I would never hear the end of criticism from my mother if I made her late for the funeral, especially if it was because I had been up too late the night before.

I wasn’t planning on getting drunk. I’d had a glass of chardonnay with dinner, and it had tasted wonderful, and all I wanted was one more tiny little drop. I didn’t need alcohol to help me sleep, or that’s what I told myself to keep me from feeling that I had a problem and needed help. Of course, they don’t sell chardonnay by the drop, but it wasn’t my fault.

I waited until I was reasonably sure that Mother had gone to sleep—she was in the adjoining room—and walked softly down the corridor to the elevator. I would get a small glass of wine, sip it carefully, and head straight to bed. That was my plan, and it was a good one. Except that they say that the best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry, and they say that no plan survives first contact with the enemy, and they say these things for a reason.

The woman sliding onto the barstool next to me had jet-black hair, which she wore in chopped-off bangs. She had a silver skull-and-crossbones pendant on her necklace, which didn’t do anything for her dead-white skin. She was wearing a black, shapeless jacket over a tight black T-shirt. I ignored her, and I thought I was doing a good job of it.

“Well, hello there,” she said.

I looked up.

“Hi,” I said. I am normally a friendly drinker when I’m in a bar, but all I wanted to do just then was finish the last yummy dregs of my wineglass and head back to bed.

“You don’t recognize me, do you,” she said.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

She looked doubtful for a moment. “Just checking—you are Wendy Jarrett, right? From Temple?”

Take away the Goth necklace and the glossy black fingernail polish, add a little weight and a Villanova hoodie, and she could have been maybe familiar, maybe someone I’d seen in a bar once. Or in a lot of bars.

“It’s the hair, isn’t it,” she said. “You’d recognize me if I were wearing my natural color.”

I took a close look at her face, and imagined it wreathed in loose red ringlets. “You’re not Vanessa Sullivan, are you?”

“The same,” she said.

“You used to drink Long Island iced teas,” I said.

“Well, that hasn’t changed, at least.”

I drank the last bit of my wine and signaled the bartender, who was sulking in the corner of the bar, playing
Peggle
on his phone. “Two Long Island iced teas,” I ordered.

“Much obliged,” she said. “It’s been a thirsty day. So what else do you remember?”

“You used to date Bad Boy Tommy Killebrew,” I said.

“That name,” she said. “Oh, my God, you said that name. Of all the men I dated in college, you had to bring up Bad Boy Tommy Killebrew.”

“You asked me what I remembered, and I only remembered it because you dated him more than once. You must have seen something in him that nobody else did.” My experience of dating Bad Boy Tommy Killebrew was limited to fending off some overly aggressive groping in the alley behind a Race Street dive.

“You know what he’s doing now? You’ll never guess.”

“He’s either in jail, or he’s an orthodontist in New Rochelle,” I said.

“He’s doing drug and alcohol counseling.”

The bartender dropped off the Long Island iced teas. “Unbelievable,” I said, as I took my first sip.

“He’s doing drug and alcohol counseling for Eric Clapton’s rehab center in Antigua.”

“Seriously?”

“And he’s married to a Japanese ex-porn star,” Vanessa said. “Before you start booking a flight down there to visit, I mean.”

“Perish the thought,” I said, although just saying that didn’t, in fact, stop me from thinking about Bad Boy Tommy Killebrew, shirtless on a Caribbean beach. “So what are you up to?” I asked, in a desperate attempt to change the subject.

“Freelancing,” she said.

I knew I’d put my foot in it. The one question that people of my generation learn not to ask each other is where they’re working, because so many of us aren’t working, or at least not doing anything important. “I hope that’s turning out well for you,” I said, and I meant it.

“It’s kind of dodgy right at the moment,” she said.

“Sorry about that.”

“Oh, don’t be. You seem to be doing very well, though.”

“I scrape by,” I said, taking a long sip of my drink.

“You do better than that,” Vanessa said. “You have a nice job doing estate planning for a mid-sized law firm in North Jersey. You have a downtown condo and a red convertible. You’re single and unattached, and you spent a week last November at a luxury resort in the Dominican Republic. You’re the great-granddaughter of one of the five richest men in Philadelphia, with a good-sized trust fund that vests when you turn thirty-five. And tomorrow, you and your mother are going to get up early and go to the funeral of one Sheldon Berkman.”

I put my glass down on the bar, resisting the impulse to see how well it would fit jammed into Vanessa’s eye socket. “I could never make up my mind whether you were just a bitch, or a whore pretending to be a bitch. Now I know.”

“Oh, that’s a great comeback,” she said. “I am going to have to write that one down. Do you mind if I use it? I can think of
so
many people that statement applies to.”

“The trust fund thing is bullshit, anyway. My older brother had his fund vest, and he said that he had to pay out almost all of it in taxes.”