And Sons (32 page)

Past Chappaqua, past Valhalla, Tuckahoe, Bronxville, Fleetwood, the train growing more crowded the closer Grand Central came and
now a young black woman sat beside Isabel, two shopping bags crowding her feet, either recent purchases or soon-to-be returns. Isabel spotted a toaster oven. Before she could prove herself nosy she went back to “The Beauty Abishag.” The title seemed familiar to Isabel, though her thoughts tripped from beauty to the hard edge of old age and how she was quite proud of her untouched face, a true face, she thought, her friends blaming her luck on genetics, having never seen her mother’s post-op smile. The young black woman was full of argument on her phone. “You Tell Keesha I Do Not Appreciate Her Efforts On My Behalf As I Can Take Care Of Myself Especially In Circumstances Regarding Ronnie And His Love Life With Or Without Me Thank You Very Much.” Isabel wished she didn’t notice the voice, didn’t hear the stereotype that was tinged with almost unavoidable racism. Maybe this girl was a lawyer. But probably not. From the window towns gave way to more concrete, the city glimpsed in the curve of the track, like a feudal past rising. “But Now You Are Making Just About As Much Sense As Keesha Who As I Have Said Has No Fucking Sense.” Isabel turned to the photo of Alice Munro on the back flap. How old was she now? Roughly her age? They sported the same short haircut, though Alice had more of a shag while Isabel edged closer to pixie, a style she denied herself when she was younger, thinking it might be too mannish on her build. But she liked it. Anything to avoid the matron class. Perhaps that was why these new Alice Munro stories were more violent and lurid, like Hitchcock pushing Chekhov down the stairs. When she saw the book at Barnidge & McEnroe, Isabel muttered, Christ, another Alice Munro collection I should probably read, but these stories had nothing to do with dust and everything to do with blood. Browsing the bookstore Isabel drifted past the D’s—DeLillo, Dickens, Dreiser—and noticed the snazzy edition of Andrew’s books, a strange red slash on every spine. She tipped down
Ampersand
. For the new cover they used an early Diane Arbus photograph of a young man in a plaid overcoat, perhaps in Grand Central, and while the image was striking and it seemed a nice marriage of artist, writer, and era, she wondered why they would ever change the original with its Rothkoesque door. She opened the book to the dedication page:

In photographs Andrew was a dead ringer for his dad. They had the same dark eyes, repentant yet powerless to change, the smile, or lack of smile, a matter of contention. Isabel’s mother called Andrew “the WASP,” as in What A Smug Prick, though sometimes she amended it to What A Spectacular Prince, depending on her mood. At their wedding she gave a toast that began
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation
, figuring if you had to give a speech you might as well make it a great speech. Isabel’s father cried, but he was a Lincoln buff. What a disaster the whole thing was. Her brothers left a trail of broken bridesmaids, and Charlie Topping, oh so soused, sang them a song, tottering forward and gripping the microphone like it was the only piece of balance in the entire Waldorf, a couple of whoops from old classmates, hardly in support but in praise of humiliation, as Charlie sweated, positively defrosted back to his adolescence, his voice breaking against his choirboy training.
If I ruled the night, stars and moon so bright, still I’d turn for light to you.…
Thirty seconds in and people had to look away. Andrew dedicated
Tiro’s Corruption
to him.

Isabel turned
Ampersand
over. Despite everything, she was glad her photograph remained, right there on the upper left corner, no longer the entire back cover but the size of a postage stamp: Andrew posing in the middle of Sheep Meadow in Central Park.

“Now try smiling,” Isabel remembered telling him.

“This is smiling.”

“Very funny. Move your chin up a little.”

“I don’t want to come across as a buffoon.”

“By smiling?”

“I want to look serious. A serious author.”

Isabel lowered the camera. “Maybe you should get a professional to do this.”

“No, I want you to do this. Plus you’ll get paid.”

“Keep it in the family, huh.”

“The WASP thing to do, as your mother might say.”

“What A Stingy Peter. Make your mouth less stern.”

“Peter?”

“I couldn’t come up with a good
P
word. Just smile.”

“Pantywaist, Prig, Pissant.”

“Please.”

“Not even close,” he said.

“Pretty please.”

“This is what you get, Writer AS Peevish.”

“Want A Sucked Penis?”

The shutter clicked, and Isabel had her picture, dissected by readers for the next half century, nobody ever guessing what had just passed through those ears. Andrew dedicated three books to her, starting with his second,
Pink Eye:

And then his sixth,
The Bend of Light:

And finally his eighth,
Eastern Time:

By then she had accepted his faults, understood where his weaknesses lay, focused on the flow rather than the specific debris that came to the surface, and if she was often unsatisfied, sometimes downright depressed,
she did this for the sake of the backward view, of seeing her younger self all those years married to the same man.

The train tunneled for the final stretch into Grand Central. Cellphones lost their hold and a dozen conversations ended in B-movie dialogue—“Are you there?” “Can you hear me?” “Hello, hello, hello?” Passengers collected themselves around the newfound dark. Isabel closed her book. Suddenly she was interested in the world outside, which was black except for the reflection of her face. Her mother once told her she was too handsome to be beautiful. “But I’m not worried,” she added. “You’ve got a sharpness that will outlast the beauties in your grade. Trust me, doll, nobody cares how you slayed them at fourteen.” It took almost twenty years for this slight to redshift into a compliment, for Isabel to stare into the distancing past and see her mother’s drawn eyebrows as anything but desperate.

When did my life become a series of failed men? This thought came to her without specific ownership, and not terribly true, either, since she was more than her collective male parts, having done extensive volunteer work for various nonprofits and charities and sat on a handful of boards, including the ICP, and for close to fifteen years in her forties and fifties pulled down a mostly symbolic salary in the planning and development office of the NRDC. If this didn’t add up to a career, it was good enough for Isabel and allowed her time to read and go to the movies—true passions—and to take long walks, whether in the city or in the woods, and let her mind wander its corners. The train doors opened and from platform into station toward the subway Isabel moved with the precision of a former urban athlete, eyes gauging the best path, chin balanced between no-nonsense and courteous, as though somewhere in the bowels of Manhattan a stopwatch ticked and a voice whispered “faster,” and she continued to turn this thought in her head about men, her men, fathers, brothers, husbands, sons, how they all disappointed her even if she loved them with all her heart and suffered a deeper version of their own failure, right down to the roots of her teeth. The sleeplessness from last night came back into view. How would Andrew look? She hoped clean and well fed. But she had fears of long yellow fingernails. Thin white hair. Eyes so shrunken a
blink might tear the skin. Later during that night he had transformed into a creature feeding on scraps of the past, reaching for her hand, famished. Toward dawn he became the last time she saw him seventeen years ago.

“I have a room at the Wales,” he said, peeking in from the hall.

“Just until I find a rental,” she answered from the living room couch.

“I should be the one moving out.”

“I have no desire to stay here,” she said. “In your mother’s crypt.”

“I didn’t think this would happen.”

“Really?”

“I’ve already told you how sorry I am.”

“Yes you have.”

“Ten thousand times sorry. I did a stupid thing. I made a terrible mistake. But it was just once, Isabel, after all these years just once. A single moment of weakness repeated only a few times. Just once.”

“It doesn’t matter,” she said.

“It must matter a little.”

“Your single moment of weakness wears diapers.”

“I know, I know.”

“And I’m not going to raise this child, not going to be reminded of it every day. I’ve put up with a lot but I won’t put up with that.”

“What can I do?”

“The gossip is already thick.”

“I know.”

“In the newspapers of all things. With pictures too.”

“I have no idea why they care. There must be something I can do, something that’ll bring you back to me, something I can say.”

“And I’m left playing the fool,” she said. “There goes Isabel Dyer, the fool.”

“I don’t think that’s what people are saying.”

“It doesn’t matter,” she said.

“If anything they’re talking about me. I’m the fool, the old fool.”

“It doesn’t matter,” she said again.

“I should have known better, me in particular. I got caught in the trap of youth, the desire for change without thinking about what’s
being changed. And now this absurd trope is a father again, ill-equipped, that’s for sure. But”—and he tried to smile here—“the boy has a nice face. He’s rather sweet and quiet, hardly cries, just stares and takes things in. For some reason I see you in his face. You have been nothing but an angel, Isabel Isles. I always loved your name, like a paradise somewhere between the Marshalls and the Gilberts, out in the tranquil Pacific. A shame to have ever mucked it up with Dyer.”

Listening to this, Isabel wondered if actual sentiment was involved or if this was another extension of his fiction, something she would read a few years later and cringe, knowing what was real and guessing what was possible and being unnerved by the rest. She hoped he would remember that his zipper was down (though that memory broke her heart a little). But was she so blameless in this sense, feet propped on the couch, reading a fashion magazine? She played brittle cool to perfection, hardly a wet eye in the house. The injured wife of a writer. The hidden neurotic rage. Talk about cliché. And while she hoped this masked her sadness—and she was sad and hurt and humiliated and scared—beneath those core emotions present since childhood was an unexpected reaction: she was free to escape with her good manners intact, the wounded instead of the wielder of the axe.

“You should go,” she said.

His last words to her: “You look lovely on that sofa.”

Isabel surfaced from the subway at 68th and Lexington. She still had plenty of friends in the city and visited almost once a week, Roger and her going to dinner with other couples, the movies, the theater, spending the night at the Cosmopolitan Club. There was nothing wistful about crossing Park, crossing Madison. The number of strollers and limousines was always a surprise. And the construction. The city seemed to be pushing up a new set of teeth. The sly, enigmatic grin of New York with its cross section of stylishness, its promise of every stranger being something special, something unexpected, their passing light tempting your shadow, now simply mumbled math. Isabel realized she was being a crank—Manhattan from the beginning had been about money—but it seemed less fun nowadays, less sexy. Isabel had a peculiar relationship with money anyway. Her father was on the
Havemeyer tree but on a far less leafy branch, and he boomed but mostly busted throughout her childhood before hitting on the Acorn Press in the late fifties and publishing the I Can Draw That series, the Skedaddle books, the ever-popular Conrad Janus Mysteries, after which he divorced her mother and became spiteful of every cent, to the point where he actively ran the business into the ground. But it was during one of those early lean periods that Isabel was shipped to Southampton for July to stay with her cousin Polly. Isabel was fourteen.

“Fifteen in October,” she told the boy swimming with her in the ocean. Polly was already back on the beach, complaining about the water being too cold, and the waves too choppy, and really they should go up soon and have lunch at the Little Place because she was starving and she had tennis at two-thirty and she needed her stomach to settle before running after a stupid ball all because her father was the constant runner-up to the ten-time club champ. Two days in and Isabel was already sick of Polly. “How old are you?” she asked the boy, glad for the new company.

“Seven-um, seventeen,” he said.

“Oh.” An older boy. He seemed younger except for the acne, which was well established, like a drought in its third year. She tried to glimpse his armpits for evidence of full-born puberty and perhaps as revenge against the obviousness of her breasts, which were small yet persistent in that sixty-five-degree water. But the boy was not a confident swimmer and Isabel felt bad for even looking.

“Can you, um, ah, touch?” he asked.

“Barely.”

“Yeah, me neither, but you’re a good-um, you’re a good swim-swimmer.”

“Thanks.”

“I’m obviously not,” he said.

“Well you’re not sinking.”

“Give me time. Trying to get used to-ah, to-ah rough water.”

“It’s not that rough.” Isabel regretted the possible jab.

“Hence the trying-to-get-used-to part,” he said.

She smiled and he smiled in return.

“Crazy thing is, I come from-ah, a family of fish,” he said.