Half the Kingdom (11 page)

She carried the bag down the stairs and took a cab to Maurie’s. His daughter, Shari, answered the door. “Dad’s in Saint Petersburg with a bunch of writers and people.”

“Writers and people, of course. In Saint Petersburg. Your mother went with him?”

“Mom? Good god no. Mom wouldn’t be caught dead on one of Daddy’s junkets. The darling is giving me the afternoon off. Took both kids to little George Cameron’s birthday party.” Shari pointed across the street.

“And how old is …?”

“Max is going on six, in kindergarten. Cassy turned three.”

“Six! In kindergarten! Shari,” said Lucy, “do you have any memories of our summers on Shelter Island?
You
were six and Benedict was all of three and fell into the sixteen-foot goldfish pond?”

“I do! I remember the baby wrapped in a big old towel and people telling me it wasn’t my fault, which had never occurred to me! You want to sit down?”

“For just a moment.”

“Coffee?”

“No no no no. Thanks.”

“How
is
Benedict?”

“Fine. Good. Living with his Viennese girl. I like Gretel. Did you know Benedict and I are colleagues, working in the same office?”

“Cool!”

“Shari, you remember the Bernstines—Joe and Jenny? They were away for years running the Concordance Institute in Connecticut?”

“Sure. With a daughter who was angry at everything and everybody?”

“Still is. Poor Bethy. Curious, isn’t it, how we used to live in each other’s pockets! How do friends get divorced?”

Shari said, “Did you know I divorced Alex?”

Did I know that? wondered Lucy. “That’s sad.”

“Yes, well,” said Shari, “not really.”

Lucy knew that a single mom with children six and three must be wanting to have her free afternoon to herself. “I remember I’d throw Benedict a ball and think, I have my head to myself for the time it takes him to run, retrieve the ball, and roll it back to me …”

“Yes!” said Shari and laughed. “Yes, yes!”

“What apartment number did you say the birthday party was at?”

“The apartment number?”

“Of the birthday party. What’s the number of the apartment?”

“The Camerons’ apartment? It’s Eleven-B.”

“Dear Shari, lovely to see you, really it is!” The two women, the old one and the young one, embraced.

“Somebody at the door for you,” the birthday boy’s mother said to little Max’s grandmother.

“Can’t be. Who knows I’m here?”

“She’s asking for you.”

“Who is?” Ulla followed Eileen Cameron into the foyer where the woman standing in the door with the birthday party rampaging and hallooing around her would have been Lucy Friedgold if Lucy could be imagined to be standing in the Camerons’ foyer holding a very large plastic bag. The bag had weight, judging from the angle at which her body leaned to create the counterbalance.

“Hello, Ulla,” said Lucy. “Shari said I’d find you here.”

“Oh, I see,” said Ulla, but didn’t.

“Is there somewhere we might talk?”

The birthday boy’s mother said, “The magician is about to do his thing.” It puzzled her good manners: Was it the hostess’s business to welcome the elderly newcomer with the oversize bag who was advancing into her foyer, or was she supposed to protect little Max’s grandmother from her?

“This won’t take five minutes.” With the hand that was not holding the bag, the intruder opened a random door. It happened to lead into the dining room. The table was covered with crimson crinkle-paper, slices of ruined chocolate cake on clown-face paper plates, birthday candles with
blackened wicks, blasted party favors, rags of exploded balloons. The old woman with the bag seated herself on one of the dining chairs, obliging Max’s grandmother to sit down also. “Five minutes, I promise!” The urbane smile, a certain distinction of face and dress partly reassured Eileen Cameron; she walked out but left the door open.

Lucy and Ulla had a clear view of the magician in a purple shirt and comical green tie that hung to his knees. He said, “Is there anybody here who can count to ten?”

“Me-e-e,” shouted the little boys and girls.

The magician said, “Everybody, all together: One. Two. Three. Thursday. Friday. Saturday …”

“No-o-o!” shouted the children: The magician, who was a grown-up, had made a mistake! That was funny!

“That’s the days of the week,” a girl in a frilly blue dress explained to him.

“Oops!” The magician hit himself on the forehead.

Lucy said, “I sent Maurie the story I wrote after Bertie died, which Maurie has neither accepted nor rejected. It’s called ‘Rumpelstiltskin in Emergency.’ ”

“Maurie is in Saint Petersburg,” Ulla said.

“Try again! Everybody, all together,” the magician said: “One. Two. Three. April. May. June …”

“I sent it to him in October,” Lucy said. “This is July!”

The children were laughing. It broke them up: The magician had made another mistake! Only the child in the blue frills frowned.

“Those are the
months
of the
year
!” she told him. She walked toward the magician, who hit himself on the forehead.

“Another Oops! Anybody counting the oopses? What’s your name?” he asked the little girl. Her name was Jennifer.

“Lucy!” Ulla said, “What do you want from me?”

“I want you to give this to Maurie.” Lucy hoisted
PATIENTS PROPERTY
onto Ulla’s lap—surprising, always, the weight of paper.

“Christ, Lucy! Send it to him at
The Magazine
!”

“Which neither accepts, nor rejects, Ulla! Which doesn’t so much as acknowledge receipt.”

“Would somebody come up here and hold my magic stick for me?” The magician held the instrument high out of little Jennifer’s reach. “Birthday boy, I need you to come right up here. Tell everybody your name.”

“George,” said the blissful child.

“George is going to hold my magic stick for me, but not like
that
! Hold it straight!” But that stick kept folding away from the little boy, who laughed. All the girls and boys laughed their high, happy, silver laughter and wriggled and got up and sat down and got up again, except for Jennifer who said, “
You’re
doing that.” She turned the giant green tie around to expose a pack of cards! A nest of little balls! A white mouse, and the fraudulent string! “You were pulling this!” Jennifer accused the magician, who whipped his tie smartly out of her hand and said, “Do we have any jugglers?”

“Me-e-e,” shouted all the children.

“Lucy! Who acknowledges receipt? Who has the staff? Remember Freddy Wells saying publishing
The Reader
is like having a retarded child that’s never going to grow up, is never going to take itself off your mind?”

“Freddy Wells! A sweet man,” Lucy said. “Haven’t seen Freddy in—I don’t know how long! Does Freddy still say ‘Ah, well,’ as if it were a sigh?”

“Who can keep two balls in the air at the same time?” asked the magician.

Lucy said, “Shari and I were remembering Shelter Island. Croquet, Scrabble. What a lot of cooking everybody used to do.”

Ulla said, “And in every room there was always somebody writing something. What was the name of the old pest—the old poet—who used to call and read Maurie her latest in the middle, always, of a dinner party—Olivia …?”

“Liebeskind,” said Lucy. “Olivia Liebeskind!”

“Didn’t Maurie publish the story you wrote about her …”

“ ‘The Poet on the Telephone,’ ” said Lucy. “She wasn’t a bad poet.”

“Maurie says it isn’t bad writing that’s the problem, it’s the perfectly good writing that never stops coming down the pike.”

“A nightmare!” said Lucy. “What time is it? I have a meeting in the Cedars of Lebanon cafeteria.” The two old friends kissed each other good-bye. Lucy picked up
PATIENTS PROPERTY
, called, “Thank you so much!” to the birthday boy’s mother, and went out the door.

The cafeteria had been done over. It had been reconfigured into a horseshoe-shaped food court with ethnic food bars since Lucy had sat here with her cup of coffee and her
sandwich waiting for them to bring Bertie back from a test, from another procedure, a procedure gone wrong that had to be done over. Not to worry, said the doctor, We do two or three of these a day. Sometimes Benedict sat with her.

Lucy tried to identify the table at which she had sat writing “Rumpelstiltskin.” Curious not to be able to figure out in which direction she had faced. She was early, was the first. None of the Compendium people had arrived, neither had the Haddads. Lucy didn’t know Salman Haddad by sight and couldn’t, for the moment, remember the Chief of Emergency’s name. She used
PATIENTS PROPERTY
to bag a table large enough for their number before going to find something to eat.

Where there are so many choices, you tend to eat what you always eat. Lucy got a cup of coffee and a cheese sandwich and sat down and watched the couple standing and waiting for the short Mexican waitress—she was hardly taller than a dwarf—to wipe down the table for them. He held the tray, she carried his jacket. What was it about them that told Lucy the patient they had come to visit was close to neither—her aunt, maybe, or his elderly cousin; that they had decided, without the need for discussion, to eat before getting back into their car? Lucy was never going to cross the space between herself and them to ask, “Excuse me, but am I correct in being so certain that you are in your late fifties and you’re not Manhattanites?” Her certainties were reinforced entirely by her certainties.

She watched them eat in silence, their eyes on their plates. What was there to see in each other’s faces, or to say
that had not been seen or said long ago, and often? He lowered his head to shorten the spoon’s passage from the bowl to his mouth. Escarole and bean soup from the Italian Bar.

“Taste?” she asked him.

“Hm,” he said, and opened his mouth into which she guided a careful forkful of pasta in tomato.

“Hmm,” he said.

The apple pie, not from the Italian Bar, they ate with two forks from the same dish; she took care to leave him the larger half.

The short Mexican—
was
she a Mexican?—was clearing a table for a stout black dad in a business suit and his boy dressed in his best—not, hoped Lucy, to appease a sick mom. The dad took out a cell phone and dialed. The boy dripped ketchup on a fry in the front, a fry in the back, and this fry, and that one, creating a ketchup loop before picking up his burger. The dad finished his call, helped himself to one of the boy’s fries, and dialed another number.

Two blond young people moved the dishes from their two trays onto the table and took out their BlackBerrys.

The father finished his second call and asked the boy if he was going to want ice cream. The boy said, no, he didn’t. The dad was looking for a number on his cell, found it and dialed, a business call this, a professional laugh. The boy changed his mind. He wanted ice cream. When he returned with—it looked like vanilla and chocolate—the dad was on an extended call. In the melted brown sauce the boy drew loops that he accompanied with soft airplane noises.

Lucy waved to the tired young woman from the ER. The
red sweater was the right side out. Maggie brought over her cup of coffee and sat looking into it. She said, “We’re back. My mom seemed okay when we got her home yesterday. She was fine.”

Ilka Weiss

Ilka Weiss lay on the sofa with her legs up. She asked for a blanket. Little David helped, impatiently, to tuck it around his grandmother’s legs. He said, “So, go on.”

Maggie said, “Let Grandmother rest,” but Ilka said, “So the next time King David went down to fight those Philistines …” and Maggie said, “Mom, Jeff and I stay away from the fighting.”

“Mommy,” said little David, “you can go. And take Stevie. Stevie, stop it.” Baby Steven’s newest skill was turning pages and he was practicing on the King James Bible on Grandmother’s lap.

“Not to worry. I know the story in my head. But let’s let Mommy and Stevie stay, because we’re coming to the
baaaad
stuff.”

“Go
on
,” the little boy said.

“King David,” went on Ilka, “was a great soldier, the soldier of soldiers, only he was growing old. King David was tired. His spear was an encumbrance.” Grandmother Ilka demonstrated the difficulty with which the aging king raised his weapon. “His armor was too heavy for him. Climbing
the hill, he had to reach for one little low bush after another because his balance wasn’t what it used to be. He watched with a thrill of envy—with a thrill and with envy—how his young soldiers ran ahead while he stood and just breathed. Couldn’t tell if it was his hiatus hernia, his heart, or an attack of anxiety because they all three felt the same.”

“And,” little David prompted.

“And Ishbi-benob, a Philistine of the race of giants, was wearing his new armor.
His
spear weighed three hundred shekels.” Grandmother lightly swung the idea of its superhuman weight above her head, “and he was going to strike King David down when—Stevie, if you don’t leave King James alone, Grandmother can’t check the name of the fellow—here he is in verse 17: Abishai.
He
came and struck Ishbi-benob to death.”

“Mom!”

“Sorry,” Ilka said. “And King David’s men said to King David, ‘You’re becoming a liability. Next war, you’re staying home.’ And there was another war …” Ilka looked apologetically at her daughter, “and there was another giant. He had six fingers on each hand and six toes on each foot—which is how many digits, quick!”

“Twenty-four.”

“Very good. And this giant with his twenty-four digits just laughed at King David, and mocked him.”

“Why?” asked little David in a tone of strong disapproval.

“Why? Why indeed!” said his grandmother. “Because King David was old? Because he was a Hebrew? Just because
he was on the other team? But King David’s nephew—
his
name was Jonathan—came running, and Jonathan knocked that mocking, laughing giant down just a little bit. Knocked the wind out of him.”

Little David suggested, “They should have tried talking it out,” in which he was going to remember being reinforced by a hug from his mother, and his grandmother’s kiss on the top of his head, for both women were against striking people dead, and the younger believed there was something one could be doing about it.