The View From Penthouse B (2 page)

I don’t like to blame what pop psychologists call “birth order” for my situation and motivation. If I did, I’d have to accept that being the middle child has a major influence on how I approach the world and those gray areas that fall loosely under the heading “relations.” Still, I wonder if some of my professional dead ends had to do with my growing up between perfect Margot and formidable Betsy.

I majored in education in college, a safe and appealing concentration—until I got into the classroom. Even as a student teacher, I dreaded every minute, every smart-aleck eighth grader, the smoke-filled teachers’ room and its burned coffee, the married gym teacher who liked me and his guidance-counselor wife who did not.

I lived at home, in Hartford, which might have contributed to my less-than-amorous twenties. Like today, I helped around the house and read the classifieds. After my retirement from education at twenty-two, I took the summer off, sleeping late in my childhood bedroom, the empty parakeet cage and
The Partridge Family
poster reminding me that time had passed. I lunched with unemployed high school girlfriends who hadn’t moved away, either. My father, one of dozens of vice presidents at one of the city’s insurance company’s world headquarters, gave my anemic résumé to what in those days was called Personnel, despite my objection that I didn’t want a job because of nepotism or mercy.

Soon enough, when asked in a social setting what I did, I could answer “administrative assistant.” My boss wrote the magazine-size glossy annual report and I typed it all up, correcting his grammar and punctuation. Within six months, he told someone in Personnel, whether out of admiration or annoyance, about my eye for typos, and soon I had my own cubicle, dictionary, thesaurus, and pencil sharpener, proofreading insurance jargon all day long in what felt like solitary confinement.

I lunched with my father almost daily until there wasn’t a single cafeteria worker who hadn’t heard him say a half-dozen times, “This is my daughter, Gwen-Laura. She works here now.” I’d nudge him and add “His
favorite
daughter” in such a way that always elicited a chuckle and at the same time signaled to our audience that Jim Considine loved all his daughters equally. It was at one of our lunches that he asked if I had any desire to get my own place. Margot, for example, struggling to make ends meet, had nonetheless found that garret in the Bowery. And Betsy, too, was happy living with people her own age.

I reminded him that Betsy was still in college, living in a dorm, so I didn’t think she should be held up as a paragon of residential courage. I said that I
did
want to be on my own, a white lie I hoped would soon be the truth. Again, looking back, I wonder: birth order. Middle child. Brown-haired daughter between two hazel-eyed blonds. Maybe I needed extra parental attention to make up for . . . well, for nothing. Every one of the three Considine girls, we would discover after first my father’s death, then my mother’s, thought herself to be the favorite child.

As Margot contemplates various angles for a possible memoir, I’m thinking of writing something, too. My premise is good: A woman widowed relatively young moves from her small apartment into a choice piece of Manhattan real estate. It would be a retelling of
Little Orphan Annie,
updated and without the orphans. She would find companionship and eventually love, and along the way, travel the world through the good graces of her husband’s generous life insurance policies. I know I’d enjoy casting myself in a Cinderella story, fully recovered from my sorrows—which I guess makes it fiction. Margot and I often discuss our books; sometimes we pause midconversation and wonder aloud if the conjuring is half the fun, at which point we vow to start our respective works that very week.

We have updated résumés at the ready. Margot’s is livelier than mine. She even makes her first job (second-tier secretary in Obstetrics at Saint Vincent’s) sound consequential. What was actually socializing and flirting has become “mentored and liaised with interns and residents.” It was where Charles first spotted her, and possibly what reinforced his career choice. To test the relationship, to make her overscheduled and exhausted boyfriend miss her, she jumped ship to an AM radio station, putting up with the on-air banter of the two male drive-time deejays who soon worked her into their act. Her receptionist’s role on
The Mitch and Mike Show
expanded the morning they buzzed her on the intercom while on air and asked, “Margot? We were wondering what you had for supper last night?”

She answered casually, even lazily, “Spaghetti and tap water.” Hilarity ensued. After that, “Let’s Ask Margot” became an hourly sure bet. “Margot’s wearing a fetching—what is that called, doll?—a nearly see-through blouse today.” She would yell back, “It’s voile. And the bodice is lined so you cannot see through it one iota.” The guys would deliver a mock apology.
So sorry to offend her highness! Her bodice is lined! She’s rolling her eyes at us now. Wish you could see her!
Two words, guys: Bomb. Shell.

Off air, Mike and Mitch were kind and harmless, she maintained. They explained that it was called “shtick,” that their wives understood; and it came with a raise. She received fan letters and the occasional marriage proposal. Mike and Mitch read the cleanest ones on air, prompting even more letters—listeners trying to outdo, to empurple, to rhyme.

Even now her name occasionally rings a bell with a middle-aged commuter who asks, “You’re
that
Margot? From
The Mitch and Mike Show
?” I think it marked her—in a good way. Not that her self- esteem was ever low, but more than anything else, it was Mike and Mitch who gave her a feel for a pedestal beneath her feet. I am sure that one of the reasons she is relatively cheerful today is that this new Depression reminds her of her happy twenties, sleeping alone on a Murphy bed in what is now NoLiTa (but previously had neither nickname nor appeal) and making soup out of chicken backs and necks on a hot plate. “I used to walk my skinny little paycheck to my bank, deposit all of it, and keep forty dollars for spending money! For everything! For lunches and subway fare and maybe one movie a week. I never felt deprived because all my friends lived that way, too. Those were the days!”

Those were also the days when daughters married right out of college, especially when young doctors were doing the asking. Margot explained her ambivalence at Thanksgiving, with just the immediate family present, planned that way so she could explain why she’d turned down Charles’s proposal.

He didn’t understand who she was, Margot insisted. Or who she’d become. Margot Considine was something of a household name; well, at least she felt that way when Mitch or Mike teased and complimented her, and the station’s phone lines lit up. Our father paused in his carving mathematically precise slices of breast away from the bone and turned to our mother. “Did a daughter of ours just say that she didn’t want to marry a perfectly nice man from a good family, a physician no less, because he didn’t listen to her being teased by two buffoons?”

“I’m afraid so,” said our mother, still in her apron, a gift from me that was festooned with horns of plenty in honor of her November birthday. And then, borrowing his wry tone: “Let’s use psychology. Let’s agree that she is too important and famous to marry anyone, let alone a mere doctor in training. We’ll pretend we don’t want her to give Charles the time of day. That should help.”

Margot said, “What about the fact that he’s going to be a gynecologist?”

Dad said, “I owe most of what is great in my life to that honorable profession.”

“But would you want your favorite eldest daughter to be married to one?” Margot asked. “Aren’t you wondering if a man whose patient population will be 100 percent female is the best candidate for marriage? Or monogamy?”

We waited. Our mom said, “Jim?”

Margot continued. “Because it seems to me that one of two things would follow: either temptation or burnout.”

“Ask him,” our dad said. “He must already know if temptation goes along with the job.”

Charles insisted that the answer was no. He’d learned in his first week of residency, performing dozens of pelvic exams a day, to disassociate. How could she confuse the emotional with the clinical? He had eyes only for her.

Margot said she needed a week to think things over, then said yes. As befitting the beautiful eldest daughter, the wedding was large and formal, black tie and prime rib. I’d been fitted for contact lenses and wore an orchid behind one ear. Charles’s eight groomsmen danced with Betsy and me so obligingly that I now suspect it was a condition set down by the bride or her parents. But that night, it felt like popularity.

Although Margot appears strong and cynical, and is quick to joke about her divorce, I think she needs me here. I have assumed the task of accepting Charles’s collect calls, two a month, a frequency we negotiated despite her reluctance to accept even one. I argued for that small act of charity. “At least he didn’t die,” I remind her.

At first, his calls were heartbreaking. He told me how much he missed Edwin, his favorite brother-in-law, which I really shouldn’t have believed, but I’d so rather have heard that than the frequent questions about poor me, my state of mind, health, welfare, and rotten luck.

Whether it’s the group therapy in prison or just the hours and hours of boredom that have made him reflect on his life and marriage, he speaks in a new pop psychology idiom and in a new revelatory fashion. “I wasn’t emotionally available to Margot,” he announced, his greeting. “Which is so typical of a surgeon.”

I said, “But you’re not a surgeon,” which he corrects. What did I call hysterectomies and Caesarians if not surgery? He’d spent thousands of hours in the OR during his training. And his point was not his board certification but his surgical personality. He may have been a little robotic and selfish . . .

This sounded new. Apparently, at his particular prison, where alpha-male white-collar criminals of the CEO variety served time, many group therapy sessions turned to wives, girlfriends, mistresses, conjugal visits—what went wrong and how did felons woo when reintegrated into society?

“So you’re saying that your being robotic and surgical was the cause of your patient hanky-panky?” I asked him.

“You two are close,” he continued. “So I’m assuming you know that during the time that the unfortunate conception took place, Margot and I were separated.”

I said, “I would’ve known if you two were separated!”

“No one knew. I was sleeping on my office couch. It wasn’t that we were unhappy. I think it was just that Margot had bouts of romantic ambition, with those two deejays forwarding her fan letters for years;
love
letters from her commuter-suitors, real or imagined. I think any little argument we had, any little dry spell, made her wonder what if . . . ?”

I said, “We discuss you a lot. I’d have known about a separation, especially if it exiled you to a couch in your office—”

“You discuss me a lot?” he repeated, sounding pleased.

“That can’t surprise you! You get married and you feel secure and you think it’s forever, then suddenly your husband’s in prison! Gone. You’re alone. Of
course
we talk about you.”

Someone, presumably a guard, was telling Charles that his time was up. “Thirty seconds,” he negotiated. “This is important.” And then to me: “I don’t have time to be anything but blunt, so here goes: Aren’t you talking about yourself? About you and Edwin? Because if you substitute ‘in the ground’ for ‘in prison,’ you’re describing your own situation. He’s gone and you’re alone—”

I hung up without answering. I didn’t want bluntness or insight or analysis. And the news of a long-ago separation was confusing. Charles was one of our top two villains. If there had been mitigating emotional circumstances, I’d have to realign everything.

I had moved into the Batavia three months after Edwin died, as I was pondering whether to renew my lease. The teaming up was our sister Betsy’s idea, who asked calmly while she was treating us to our semimonthly dinner in her Upper East Side neighborhood, “Have either of you discussed the possibility of joining forces?”

I asked what she meant.

“Gwen moving into the Batavia.”

Margot asked, “Do you mean
buy?
”

I knew, embedded in that question, was her hope that Betsy the banker knew something she did not—that Edwin had left me previously undetected funds.

I said, “Oh, sure. I’d be just the one to spend a million or two on a one-bedroom.”

“I meant,” Betsy said, “
obviously,
beyond obviously, that Gwen could move into your outsized apartment.”

I said, “I think Margot would have asked me by now if that idea appealed.”

Margot was writing on the edge of her paper place mat featuring the Chinese Zodiac. “What are you scribbling over there?” Betsy asked.

“Math,” said Margot.

I said, “I know the second bedroom is your study . . .”

Betsy said, “What does she need a whole study for? One blog entry a week? She can move her laptop to the dining-room table.”

Margot looked up finally. She asked, “Can you afford . . . ?” and named a figure that was thirty dollars below my current rent.

I said yes, I could.

Betsy asked what percentage of the common charges and utilities did that figure represent. Half?

Margot said firmly, “It represents what I’m comfortable asking my widowed sister to put into the coffer.” She asked again if I could manage the figure she’d named.

“I can.”

“And do you want to?”

My first, unspoken answer was no. How could I abandon the apartment that still had Edwin’s voice on the answering machine and his DNA on the piano keys? But then I pictured the inlaid marble floors of the Batavia’s lobby, its frescoed walls, its bank of filigreed brass mailboxes, and its companionship. “Yes,” I said. “I want to.”

Margot said, “Then I can, too.”

Though I could talk about Edwin and even his death without getting choked up, I still lose my voice and composure in the face of unexpected acts of kindness.