Good-bye and Amen (2 page)

 

Eleanor Applegate
I didn't know what to do. So I said, “I'll take Mother's silver.”

“I thought you wanted the other set,” Jimmy says. He was right, but I couldn't stand the look on Monica's face.

 

Monica Faithful, e-mail to Jeannie Israel
El said, “I can use the bigger set,” and it's true, there is more of it, although a lot of it is Victorian weirdness, like marrow spoons or oyster forks. They can afford to entertain well, and they do.

 

Eleanor Applegate
Monica can't entertain in a fancy way, and Norman wouldn't let her even if money weren't an issue. It is Monica's job, one of her very many unpaid jobs as rector's wife, to do nothing that would make her parishioners uncomfortable, like appearing rich or poor. Bobby says her job description appears to be “Wear Beige and Shut Up.” But that doesn't mean she shouldn't have any nice things. Norman does, by the way. He's got a very spiffy Rolex Oyster watch, I notice.

 

Monica Faithful, e-mail to Jeannie Israel
So I took the Art Deco silver. Then I had TWO things I couldn't use and didn't want. I might have taken it to sell, but now I can't even do that, since Eleanor left the one she wanted for me.

 

Eleanor Applegate
Why would Josslyn want that piano? She never even
knew
Aunt Nina.

Everyone needs to be somebody's favorite. Monica was
Nina's. When Nina came to visit, rare as that was, since Mother couldn't bear her, she would play the piano for hours while Monica sat on the bench beside her and sang in her little piping voice. They went right through the
Fireside Book of American Folk Songs
; Aunt Nina could play anything at sight, and Monica loves to sing. Too bad she didn't get Mother's voice. Fortunately Norman's ear is worse than Monica's, so he doesn't notice that she's probably only welcome in the choir loft because she's the rector's wife. Well, also because they like her.

 

Monica Faithful, e-mail to Jeannie Israel
So the next time it was my turn, I asked if I had to burn one of my turns to take Papa's car. It was a total foregone conclusion that it was mine. Norman and I had bought one-way airline tickets because we were going to drive it home. But Jimmy says, “Of course,” as if this was all too amusing. “I was thinking we could keep it in Dundee to teach the kids to drive in. It gets better mileage than a Hummer…”

 

Eleanor Applegate
What was he thinking?
Was
he thinking? It just was
not
the moment for teasing.

 

Monica Faithful, e-mail to Jeannie Israel
So I said, “FINE, I take Papa's car,” and then I had three things I didn't want. It's Norman who wants the Volvo. Then Ellie said, “I'll take the
Rolling Stone
.” Papa's sailboat. And I lost it.

 

Jeannie Israel
They're so polite with each other most of the time, you might not know how important these three are to each other. But with the parents dead and everything
in the system shifting, they were beginning to sense that things could break that never had before. And none of them knew how their connections worked, so if they broke, how would they fix them?

You'd have had to see their mother playing them off against each other to understand how they learned to communicate by gesture, by indirection. If Sydney saw an alliance forming she'd attack; she loved a good game of “Let's You and Him Fight.”

Growing up together makes you
familiar
, but that's a different thing from understanding each other.

 

Eleanor Applegate
Monica said, “
What?
I didn't think we were doing Maine things until summer!” in this voice that didn't sound like her at all. I was totally confused. I said, “Did you
want
it?” Keeping a boat is expensive and Norman hates sailing.

She got up and ran out of the room. Jimmy and I were just looking at each other. Here we were with our pads, our pencils, and our lists.

We've seen enough of Mother rushing from the table in storms of tears to last a lifetime. If Monica's going to start turning into Sydney, I don't think I can take it.

Finally Jimmy said to me, “Well, do you have any idea why she married Norman in the first place?”

And what did
that
have to do with the price of eggs?

 

Moral stages. We're unclear who invented them. It's amazing how much less we care here about things like who gets credit. Anyway, so useful. Stage one is infantile. I'm the center of the universe and
everything flows to me or from me. Stage two: you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours. Or, I'll be good if I can see what's in it for me. Stage three: the group. I travel in a tribe, I want to fit in, I'll go along with what the group thinks is right. Stage four: Pharisees, Sadducees, and lawyers. The hegemony of the Rule Book. I am saved because I follow the rules, and if you don't, you're not. Stage five: outside the box. Stage fives think for themselves and you can't tell what they're going to do. Saints, suicides, Hitler, the Buddha, and Jesus Christ are all stage five, unless they're insane. Behaving without thinking doesn't count as a moral stage, or else it's stage one. Hard to explain perhaps, but to us it seems simple.

 

Jeannie Israel
Very tall men live longer. They run companies and countries out of all proportion to how many there are of them. A very tall man makes you feel safe, because unconsciously you remember a time in your life when people taller than you had to make all the hard decisions. I had a boyfriend once who was six feet five. He was very shy and always wondered why people looked to him when there was confusion or people needed a decision. Then he met a guy who was six seven and he said he suddenly understood.

 

Kim Colwin
I started dating Monica Moss when we were juniors in college. She was at Sarah Lawrence and I was at Princeton. Looking back, I think it was a little too easy for her. Our parents liked each other. The sociology was right. We looked great together. It was wonderful, like being in a bath that's exactly the right temperature. I thought, What's not to like about this? Slam dunk, you know?

 

Jeannie Israel
In college Nika and I didn't see each other as much, but we wrote a lot, and saw each other every summer. I was very involved with campus politics, SNCC and SDS, and all that kind of washed right over Monica. I guess she had her own war going on the home front. But I thought Kim was great for her. He was maybe a little conventional, plus Monica's parents liked him and Kim's parents liked her. Nineteen sixty-nine wasn't really the year for young people doing what their parents hoped they would. Monica's sister Eleanor had eloped instead of letting Big Syd plan a fancy wedding for her. Jimmy, when he was home, had dirty hair down to his shoulders and was usually facedown in his soup plate, stoned to the gills, as Big Syd cooed and burbled about him. Monica's style in those days was mostly black leotards, shiny clean hair, no makeup. My father once said to her that she looked like a Jules Feiffer cartoon, and she did
not
think it was funny. I don't guess I would have either; we all felt very original. Monica's hair was long and straight, which I envied. I had to iron mine. This all drove Sydney crazy. She thought if her daughters didn't go to the hair parlor once a week like her and have permanents they were just wrong wrong wrong and people would talk behind her back about
her
. Sometimes Sydney would stop us at the door and forcibly paint her own lipstick on Monica. I don't know how Monica stood it; but she'd stand there quietly, and when we were outside the door, she scraped it off.

I'll never forget that actually, what it was like to have Mrs. Moss bearing down on us, holding the uncapped red lipstick like a weapon. To this day I can't wear Elizabeth Arden. It felt like assault, it really did.

 

Leonard Rashbaum
I first met Monica and Kim at Harvard Law School. Monica was taking an ed degree. She wanted to teach first grade. To teach people to read. She
loved
reading. One winter weekend right before our first exams, which was a really terrifying time for One Ls, Monica came and sat in the library with us. While we studied, she read Dickens. I think she read three novels in one weekend, two thousand pages or something. She sat with her chin in her hand and didn't move except to turn pages. I'd never seen anything like it.

Kim was a really nice guy. Maybe not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but kind. Which you didn't get a lot of at the law school in those days. Monica was living on Garden Street, in a rented room in some lady's house, so she spent a lot of time with us. She'd bring her books over and study with us in the evenings at Langdell Hall. We'd go for coffee and talk about saving the world.

We were all going to open storefront offices in Harlem or the East Village and rescue the downtrodden; that was how we justified taking elite degrees while denouncing elitism. Of course when the time came, the job offers from Davis Polk and Milbank Tweed were just so rich and flattering, we began to say maybe we could do more good by changing the power structure from within. But that's another story.

 

Kim Colwin
One evening in October, Monica came into the reading room really upset. She'd been wandering alone in the law school quad, thinking her thoughts, enjoying the smell of fall, the way you do, and when she came into Langdell she let the door drop closed behind her. We were
all still at the stage of being kind of knocked out to be in that building where so many brilliant men had taught and learned. So there she was in the marble halls, minding her own business, thinking about Justice Frankfurter or something, when this voice behind her booms, “That was
incredibly
rude!” It was some guy she'd never seen before, in the usual law school mufti, blue jeans, a tweed jacket, wire-rimmed glasses.
Glaring
at her. She was shocked.

He said, “You knew I was behind you!” But she hadn't, she'd had no idea. He said, “Of course you did. You deliberately dropped the door in my face. Where were you raised, in a barn?”

Then he stomped off and Monica ran up to find us. She was undone.

 

Leonard Rashbaum
I wanted to know who he was. She kept saying, “I had no idea he was there!” as if we might doubt her. She'd never even seen him before. I pointed out that
he
knew
her
perfectly well, even if he didn't know her name. Every guy who studied at Langdell knew the girls at least by sight. There weren't very many of them. I said, “He's probably in love with you.”

We told her to tell us when she saw him again so we could tell him he was an asshole.

 

Kim Colwin
She was always watching for him after that whenever she came to study with us, keeping an eye out for the Manners Police. It was as if a total stranger had said to her, “You have no idea who you are.
I
know who you are, and the news is not good.” I'd never seen that side of her before. Why did she care?

Finally, at Harkness one evening we were having coffee when she leaned across to us and said, “There he is.”

I said, “Who?”

She said, “The ‘Raised in a Barn' guy. The tall guy at the cash register.”

By the end of the week we knew his name was Norman Faithful, that he was a Two L, that he was married with children. He was supposed to be very smart on his feet, a hot litigator, but he lived off campus and no one seemed to know more about him than that. A cat who walked by himself.

 

Jeannie Israel
As I understand it, Monica was out in the sun one afternoon in the spring, waiting for Kim, when she saw Norman Faithful coming toward her. He always looked as if he'd gotten some special map of the universe at birth, that everyone else had to put together piecemeal. Once she knew who he was, she had seen him fairly often. They always pretended not to see each other. This time he walked right up to her. He said, “Excuse me. I think I owe you an apology.”

Instead of thinking, I'll say you do, asshole, she said she felt this wave of gratitude. He said, “Do you know what I'm talking about?”

And she thought that seemed like a reasonable question. He hadn't raped her or stabbed her or run over her dog. He'd spoken harshly to her when she didn't deserve it. It had probably never had anything to do with her. She figured she
might
have forgotten all about it, especially if she hadn't already been trained from childhood to expect to be suddenly found guilty and bad at the most random moments.

So she said then she noticed he had these very beautiful eyes, like shards of blue and green glass.

 

Kim Colwin
They were sitting together over coffee in the Harkness cafeteria when I found them. Norman unfolded from the chair and towered over me. He introduced himself. I was seriously surprised. He said, “Join us?”

I didn't really think it was up to him to issue the invitation. I said I already had a caffeine headache, and he said, “Contracts exam coming up?” Which was kind of obvious, since I was holding the textbook and five pounds of notes. I said yes, and Norman said, “Good luck. You'll need it.” Very pleasantly. I waited a minute to see if Monica would come with me but she didn't move. So I left.

Good luck—you'll need it? What kind of thing is that to say?