You Should Have Known (34 page)

“We weren't happy,” her father said suddenly, with the kind of gulping, shallow breath that caught up with you after tears. “I wasn't. I know Marjorie wasn't. I tried to be. First I tried with her, and then I tried without her. I think I would have tried anything.”

“But…,” Grace heard herself say, “I never saw that. Never,” she insisted, as if he were wrong about his own life and she, the child, had a better grasp of things. “What about…” She thought frantically, looking for evidence to prove his mistake, and found herself remembering the jewelry in her mother's mirrored vanity, this piece or that, laid out on the desktop. “What about all those beautiful things you gave her? Those pins and bracelets. It was so loving, the way you brought her jewelry all the time.”

He shook his head quickly. “It wasn't. It wasn't about being loving. Not at all. I had a way of going off with people, and then I would decide that it wasn't the way I wanted to live, and I would come back and apologize, and bring her something.” He stopped to make sure she was still with him, but she wasn't with him. She was flying wildly overhead, careening around the room.

“You bought jewelry? For that?” She was sort of amazed that she could respond to this at all; the fact that these particular words were the ones to emerge was barely relevant.

Her father shrugged. “She never wore any of it. It was like poison to her. She told me once, when I asked about it—we were getting dressed for something. There was a pin, something with an emerald; I thought it would look nice with what she was wearing. She said it would make her feel like she was wearing Hester Prynne's letter A.”

Grace closed her eyes. She knew that pin. That pin had been taken away by Jonathan, to some unknown place. She hoped she would never see it again.

“I should have stopped.” He shook his head briefly. “I should have stopped a number of things. It didn't make me feel any better, and it certainly didn't make her feel any better. How could it, looking at those things and knowing what they meant? I'm not even sure I remember my own motives clearly. It's possible there came a point when I no longer intended them as a kindness. Sometimes I came home and she'd have left something out on that dressing table. I felt as if she was saying, ‘Remember this one? Or this one?' Why did she put herself through that? I understand why she'd want to put me through it, but herself?”

“You should have been in therapy,” Grace said tersely. “Did that occur to you?”

“To be honest? No. For my generation it didn't seem like an option. If you were in a good place, or you could at least live together, you just stayed put. If not, you called it quits. There wasn't much of this trying to figure things out. I don't know why not. We had analysis if we wanted it, but it just seemed crazy to me. Hours and hours, and all that money, lying on a couch and trying to remember some key code from when I was in diapers that would explain everything. The fact was, I didn't much care about my neuroses. I just wanted to leave.”

“Then why didn't you?” she demanded. She seemed to have located some speck of outrage after all.

He looked up and met her gaze, which must have shocked him, because he looked away quickly. “I asked for a divorce, but without at least a nominal consent I knew it wasn't worth separating that way.”

“And she said no, I take it.”

“She said absolutely not. I've never understood it. It made sense that she wouldn't advocate for my happiness, but what about her own? And I certainly didn't want to hurt her. Any more than I already had,” he said. Grace found that she was holding on to the table, pinching the wood between her thumbs and forefingers.

“So we just went on. After you went off to Radcliffe I tried again, and I think she might have been considering it, but then she had her stroke.”

They sat there for another few minutes. Grace, to her own surprise, discovered that she was still able to sip her wine, that the house hadn't fallen down. All systems continued nominally functional.  
What next?
she thought.

“This makes me incredibly sad,” she offered finally.

“Me too. For years I asked myself what I could have done better. Or at least differently. I would have liked to have more children, actually.”

“Wow,” said Grace, stunned. “Why?”

“I loved being a father. I loved watching you learn things. You were such a curious child. I don't mean academically—of course you were a fine student,” he corrected himself. “But you just looked and looked at something, and I used to say to your mother, ‘There's a lot going on in there. She looks at everything.'”

Looks at everything
, Grace thought.
And sees nothing.

“You could have started again when Mommy died,” she said, still not very kindly. “You were only in your fifties. You could have had another family.”

He shrugged. He seemed to be considering this for the first time. “I suppose so. But I met Eva and I felt this great comfort with her. And comfort was actually what I had been needing. It turned out to be a very basic need, not terribly complex after all. And then I had her kids and grandkids, and eventually I had Henry, and I've been very happy.” He looked across at her frankly. “The thought that you based your ideal of marriage on what your mother and I had is terribly upsetting, Grace. I should have talked to you about this many years ago.”

“I should have insisted on it,” Grace answered. “It was my job as a teenager to pillory my parents, and I never did it. There's a reason rebellion happens when it does. I must have thought I was above all that.” She swirled the last of her red wine around the base of her glass, following the sediment as it circled the stem. “Oh well, better late than never.”

“Eva admires you,” he told her. “She knows you resent her. It's been somewhat painful.”

Grace nodded. She was not quite ready to embrace Eva as a compassionate, loving soul. But she could try. And then she heard herself ask outright for her mother's china, which amazed her. Now—with the myth of her parents' marriage in pieces around her—that she still harbored a desire for its symbols made no sense whatsoever. But the symbols were tactile: They took up space in the world. Now, more than she thought possible, she wanted to surround herself with symbols that took up space in the world.

“I would like to have it,” she told her father plainly. “It means something to me.”

“Her what?” he said, mystified.

“Mommy's china. The Haviland, from your wedding. It's hard for me to see it used so casually. I know it's silly…,” she said.

“The plates and cups?” he asked, still unclear.

“Yes. It's very old-fashioned, I know. But those things, from your wedding, I felt they should have come to me. I know how this sounds,” she said, because she was hearing it out loud for the very first time, and she did, finally, know how it sounded, which wasn't very nice. “I'm not usually acquisitive, but she was my mother and I was her daughter. It felt wrong to me that they should have gone to your second wife and not to me. That's all,” she said. She wasn't entirely sure what “That's all” meant.

“But of course you can have the dishes. Whatever you like. Eva is always telling me we should get rid of things, and she has other sets of dishes. I was a little sentimental about them, I suppose. And I thought it would be nice for you to come for dinner and use the same dishes we used when you were a little girl. But of course. Of course. I'll bring them up here.”

“No, that's okay,” Grace said, feeling idiotic. “But when this is over, if it's ever over, I want Henry to be able to feel connected to things that have nothing to do with his father. I want to have things from my past to give to Henry. I want to
have
a past to give to Henry. I don't need it to be perfect, just to be real.”

And it occurred to her, as she heard these things spoken aloud, that she was a tiny bit closer to being almost ready for that herself.

A
s a product of private education from the first day of pre-kindergarten to the morning her crimson diploma was put into her hands, Grace was unprepared for the ease with which Henry came to be enrolled in the seventh grade of the Housatonic Valley Regional Middle School. There was no formal application required, let alone the terrifying Manhattan ritual of finding out how many openings the class was likely to have or whom she might know or have some vague connection to on the school's board of trustees or in the admissions office. And in fact, Grace's trepidatious call to the registrar a few days after the Christmas holiday yielded only a cheerful request for documents that seemed eminently reasonable and were no trouble at all: Henry's birth certificate, a utility bill for the lake house in his parent's or guardian's name, and a transcript from his prior school, which Robert Conover promptly e-mailed and which consisted of reassuringly unmitigated praise.

Still, she spent the first days of the new year nursing a private certainty that Henry was about to face a great ordeal, a rapid descent from the Parnassus of Manhattan education to some swamp of lowest-common-denominator institutions. Either the local school would lag so far behind Rearden—with addition and subtraction in seventh-grade math, for example, Dick and Jane in literature—or the other kids would be backwoods degenerates, glue-sniffing video game addicts who'd finger her son as an aesthete intellectual and loathe and shun him with the exquisite unity of seventh graders everywhere (except, that is, for places like Rearden, where school administrations claimed to be passionately vigilant against bullying of all kinds).

She kept these fears to herself, and it was a good thing she did, because Henry was eager to depart the isolation of their little home on the nearly abandoned lake and return to the world of twelve-year-olds. That first morning, she had driven him down the road in her own car, utterly ignorant of the fact that her son now attended public school and was entitled to pickup and delivery in a municipal school bus, and watched him walk inside. Then she went straight back home, climbed back under the covers, and fell apart.

Truly fell apart, in a way she had not really allowed herself to do since the first moment of the blinking light on her cell phone and the dismantling of her life and the escape to Connecticut and the practicalities of keeping them warm (enough) and fed and the distraction of Christmas and her father and the getting ready for Henry to go back to school. Through all of that she had remained her recognizable self: the small, capable person who kept things moving and seemed reasonable enough. Henry, whatever else had disappeared, still had his mother, that was obvious, who still took care of him and made sure there was breakfast and he had clean clothes when he got up in the morning. But Grace did not truly understand how much it had taken out of her just to appear functional until Henry began to leave the house and be, presumably, safe for a few hours at a time; and when she did understand it, that centrifugal force that had kept her upright began to slow, then creak to a halt. And then the surface of the earth just seemed to give way entirely.

In bed she lay mainly on her side, looking at nothing. She did this for hours, though it made her body actually ache, and she drifted into and out of wakefulness. Then, afraid that she would somehow miss the time when she had to go back and pick him up (because, again, she had not yet grasped that a school bus could bring Henry home), she forced herself upright long enough to set her alarm clock for two forty-five p.m. Then she went back to lying on her side, looking at nothing.

Days that way. It became like a job: Take him to school, go to bed, lie for hours, rise again, collect him from school. She was very diligent in carrying out her duties. She was very strict with her schedule. She felt nothing but the dull pinch of despair, and some dizziness, because she had to remember to eat, and sometimes she didn't remember very well. Occasionally she would think:
How long is this going to last?
But mainly she did not think. The emptiness in the place where her mind had once been was so vast. It was a big room with grimy windows and a dull, slippery floor. She lived there now, at least when he was out of the house. And when the alarm rang at two forty-five, Grace got up, changed her clothes, checked the refrigerator and made a shopping list, and went to pick up her son. It was all there was to her life. It was all she could tolerate. And it went on and on, the same every day. Or at least every school day.

Meanwhile, Henry's anticipated ordeal utterly failed to materialize. That first day, he had walked effortlessly into his new seventh-grade homeroom and been met by a cheerful lack of curiosity about what had brought him to deepest Connecticut in the middle of the school year. When he emerged at the end of the first day, it was with not one but two new friends, both of whom had been eager to know what he was “into” and both of whom were delighted to learn that he was “into” anime.

“Animation?” Grace had frowned. They were eating dinner at Smitty's, the pizza place in Lakeville.

“Anime. Japanese animation. You know, like
Spirited Away
.”

“Oh,” she had said. But she wasn't sure what he meant.

“Miyazaki?”

“I don't know that one.”

“No, he's the filmmaker. He's like the Walt Disney of Japan, but much better than Disney. Anyway, Danny has a DVD of
Castle in the Sky
, and he invited me over on Saturday to watch. I can go, right?”

“Of course,” she said, feigning delight, as if it wouldn't be an ordeal to let him out of her sight on a weekend. “Did you say…
Cabin in the Sky
?” She knew that one, but she couldn't imagine preteen boys being remotely interested in it, which was just as well.

“No,
Castle
. It's kind of based on Jonathan Swift and kind of on Hindu legend but also kind of set in Wales. There's a lot of ‘kind of' in Miyazaki.” Henry laughed at his own joke, if indeed it was a joke. Grace was already mystified. “But Danny has the Japanese version with English subtitles, which is always better.”

“Oh. Good. Okay.” She nodded. “So, anime. Since when? I mean, I haven't heard you mention it.”

“Dad took me to
Howl's Moving Castle
last year,” he said simply.

“Oh…” She nodded with great false cheer. “Fine.” And they moved swiftly on.

The next morning, he went back to seventh grade and she went back to bed.

The other surprise about the school was how strong it seemed to be, academically. Social studies was doing a unit on Margaret Mead's work in Samoa, and history had begun an intensive period on the Civil War, with, it transpired, lots of primary sources. In English, the reading list for the rest of the year featured most of the usual suspects—
The
Scarlet Letter
,
To Kill a Mockingbird
,
Of Mice and Men
—without any of the noncanon alternatives New York private schools had added over the past years to demonstrate their political correctness. And math was actually ahead of Rearden. She was not displeased to discover that Henry already had a French test to study for and a character study of Jem Finch due the following Friday.

And he wanted to try out for the baseball team.

What about violin? she asked him. It was the first time either of them had brought it up.

“Well, I'm supposed to choose between orchestra and band. Or chorus.”

Grace sighed. A roomful of reluctant violinists scratching out the theme from
Forrest Gump
was a very great distance from the dusty parlor of Vitaly Rosenbaum, but for now…

“I think orchestra. All right?”

Henry nodded glumly. And that, at least, was that difficult conversation over and done.

She still took him in the morning and went to collect him in the afternoon, and oddly enough he never objected, though he certainly saw his classmates exploding from the yellow buses in the morning and clomping back onto them each afternoon. Maybe, Grace thought, he somehow understood how necessary the drives had become for her, that these two brief but highly ritualized journeys were providing a crucial structure to her own days of lying beneath the covers, staring into the void just beyond the wall of the bedroom.

Later, she would have to go back and check the calendar to grasp exactly how long this had gone on, but on some morning at the end of January, after Grace dropped Henry off at school, she found herself turning the car not south to the lake and the house and the bed and the alarm clock, but north into Falls Village and the library, where she sat and read, in one of the formal high-backed armchairs beneath the ornately framed nineteenth-century portraits and floral studies, the
Berkshire Record
newspaper, with its helpful accounts of local teams and editorials about the local zoning board. Then, a few days later, she went back and did it again.

Sometimes she saw Leo Holland at the library, and one morning early in February Grace went for coffee with him at Toymakers Café, a short walk down Main Street. Leo was not quite a stranger anymore; he had progressed from a barely remembered character from her childhood summers, distinguished mainly by his noise-producing antics and their effect on Grace's mother. He had come by the house twice since their meeting at the mailbox—once with a large plastic tub of what he called chicken stew (probably because he wasn't pretentious enough—or didn't want her to think he was pretentious enough—to call it “coq au vin,” though it
was
coq au vin) and once with a loaf of homemade Anadama bread. Both items, he told her, had come from the dinners his “group” was holding in the house, every couple of weeks. “Group” was a term offered so nonchalantly that Grace didn't know what he meant by it. Study group? Therapy group? It might be a knitting group or an Amnesty International group for all the detail he offered, but she was curious enough, when he mentioned it over coffee that morning, to ask what kind of group he meant.

“Oh, the band,” Leo said. “Well, we prefer ‘group.' We're mainly just midlife string geeks. ‘Band' seems a little teenagers-in-the-basement, you know? Though the other fiddler actually is a teenager. He's my friend Lyric's son. Lyric plays mandolin.”

“Lyric,” Grace repeated. “That's a great name for a musician.”

“Hippie parents,” Leo said. “But it suits her. She teaches mandolin at Bard. I'm at Bard. I told you that, I think.”

“Actually, no.” She was stirring sugar into her cappuccino. “You said you were on sabbatical. You didn't say where you taught.”

“Oh. Bard. Great place to teach, not such a great place to be on sabbatical.” He laughed. The little café had a big wooden farm table in one corner, at which some mom-committee (Grace could not help thinking of her own former mom-committee at a similar wooden farm table) was conferring over yellow legal pads. Elsewhere, a stack of motorcycle picture books was actually topped with a signed photo of Liza Minnelli that had to be twenty years old.

“I'm less than an hour away here, but it's far enough to get them to stop calling. Otherwise I wouldn't be getting any work done. And the group, I mean, we've been playing together for more than five years, and they were not pleased about having to drive all this way, but after they came out the first time, they kind of loved it. They loved being alone at the lake. Almost alone,” he corrected. “Now we kind of make an evening of it. Or even an overnight if Rory doesn't have school in the morning. Rory's our other fiddle player. And we make these big meals.”

“Of which I am the grateful beneficiary,” she said kindly.

“Yes. Well, good.”

“Oh,” Grace said, realizing. “That's where the music is coming from. You can't always tell what direction. Sometimes it sounds like it's coming through the woods. That's a band? I mean, a group?”

“We have an extremely modest following around Annandale-on-Hudson,” Leo said with amiable sarcasm. “You know, significant others, co-workers. Students hoping for a good grade on the final. We have a name: Windhouse. It's a ruin in the Shetland Islands. Very haunted, according to Colum—he's another group member—he grew up in Scotland, used to go hiking in the Shetlands. Everyone asks,” he said a little lamely, because she hadn't asked. But she would have.

“Well, you sound great. What little I've heard.”

He seemed to have decided to stop talking about himself. For a moment, they sat rather awkwardly, contemplating their coffees. Across the room, the women—now Grace recognized one of them from Henry's school—began to wind up their meeting. When the door opened, two enormous men came in and the cook, a woman with long gray braids wound around her head, came rushing to the counter and leaned over to embrace them.

“You said you were writing a book?” Grace asked.

“Yeah. Hoping to finish by June. I have to teach summer session this year.”

“What's the book about?”

“Asher Levy,” said Leo. “Have you heard of him?”

She started to shake her head. Then she said: “Wait, is he the same as Asser Levy?”

“Yes!” Leo looked delighted, as if she had specifically indulged him by knowing even this much. “Asher, sometimes known as Asser. I forgot you're a New York Jew. Of course you know Asser Levy.”

“But I don't,” she protested. “Just the name. There's a school in the East Village named after him, I think.”

“And a park in Brooklyn. And a recreational center. And a street! The first Jewish landowner in New York and quite possibly the first Jew in America. That's something I'm trying to settle one way or the other.”

“I had no idea…” She laughed. “The first Jewish landowner in New York? You think he could ever have imagined the Harmonie Club or Temple Emanu-El?”

“What, you mean Our Lady of Emanu-El?” said Leo. “That's what my father always called it. He belonged for a while. Then he became a Quaker when he met my mother. He used to say half his bar mitzvah class became Quakers or Buddhists. He said he'd rather meditate on a bench in a meetinghouse than sitting on the floor, so he became a Quaker. Also they had better bumper stickers.”