“Don’t tell your mother you’re going with me. You can tell her once it’s over, but I don’t want to worry that you’re going to call her before I see you and then you’ll decide not to go.”
“You really are a Russian operative, aren’t you?”
“It’s a job,” he said.
“I’ll call my mother next week.”
“You were always a kind child, Daphne, and you grew up to be a kind adult.”
Eddie said he would hire a car and pick me up in Bronxville. I told him to pick me up at Leda’s. “That way I won’t have to go home if it’s late. I’ll spend the night in the city. I sleep there all the time.” I gave him the Has’ address at the Gallant Green. I told him I would see him tomorrow.
The whiff of betrayal where my mother was concerned did not trouble me. I called her faithfully once or twice a week, as did my sister, as did my brother Christopher’s wife, Paula, the favorite. My brother Matthew was married to a dentist named Lyle, and Lyle, like my brothers, was not held to the standards of regular calls, and of course Jonathan and Leda’s husband, Steve, were not expected to call at all. Such were the laws of patriarchy. Since my mother did not believe the phone worked both ways, there was no chance I would hear from her and be forced into a lie. I would simply tell her the next time we spoke that Jonathan and I had run into Eddie at the Met.
That I wouldn’t tell Jonathan I was going to the Century Club with Eddie was the more troubling omission. I didn’t want to lie to my husband, but I also didn’t want him packing boxes in Wisconsin while worrying that I was running off with my stepfather. He would never tell me not to go, but it would bother him, which would bother me. Whatever happened between me and Eddie this time around needed to be between the two of us.
Whenever the parents of one of my students got a divorce, or the parents of any of the girls at school, I made myself available.The first one was a sweet girl named Hannah, who, after being bright and talkative for nearly an entire semester of British literature survey, drifted to the far left-hand corner of the classroom, put her head on the desk, and fell asleep. After class I asked her if she was sick, and she said she wasn’t sick, only tired. Then she failed to hand in her next two papers. When I talked to her about that she said she was sorry but she was very, very tired. I told her she should talk to the nurse, but she declined. I told her that I would need to call her parents and she stood up and closed the door to my classroom. Her parents, she told me, were getting divorced.
Jonathan believes we all have our ministries. He would have said that his was metastatic melanoma, but in truth it was much larger than that. Jonathan’s ministry was loss, the loss of a spouse, sure, but he knew how to translate that into the loss of a friend, a parent, a child. He had been a brilliant hospital administrator because he never stayed in his office. When he walked the halls, he kept an eye out for suffering. Jonathan knew how to stand beside suffering, not only the patients and their families, but the nurses and the doctors and the housekeeping staff. He knew when to speak and when to say nothing, when to bring a glass of water or take a stranger in his arms. He believed it was his job to comfort people, and he never turned away from the responsibility. That’s the way it was for me and the girls whose parents were splitting up. I could repeat those platitudes that parents spit out about how it wasn’t the daughter’s fault because they were all true. It wasn’t her fault, but she was the one who’d have to live with it. Sometimes it was only one lunch we had, while other girls stayed close to me for months. It was a terrible loss for all of them, the end of their lives as they’d known it. Funny to thinkthat what I was drawing on was my experience with my father, who I didn’t know to miss until he was dead. The pain of missing Eddie was too much for me to contemplate, especially since I was the stated reason he’d been sent away.
I texted my sister and made plans to spend the next night at her apartment. Leda and Steve had plenty of empty beds. Neither of the girls were home from college yet. Only their son, Henry, was around, and Henry Ha was always glad to see me.
“Ask Eddie to come early and have a drink with us,” Leda said. “Do you think he’d do that?”
“I know he would.”
“Do you have any idea what he drinks?”
Leda had every last thing any guest could ever imagine, but this was for Eddie and she wanted to get it right. I told her he drank Chardonnay.
Jonathan called the next afternoon when I was folding mydress into an overnight bag. “Do we want a set of china for twelve?” he asked.
“China?”
“Bread plates, salad plates, dessert plates, luncheon plates, cream soup bowls, flat soup bowls, serving pieces including but not limited to a tureen and a turkey platter, all in zippered, quilted bags.”
“Well, we don’t need it,” I said, wondering where we would even put it. “We don’t use the china we have.” The china we had was the china Jonathan and Candy picked out for their wedding registry, back in the days of sterling flatware and stemmed water glasses and place-card holders that looked like tiny bouquetsof porcelain flowers. This, no doubt, was the china Jonathan’s mother had picked out when she got married, unless it washermother’s china. “Do you want it? Is it sentimental?” I went in the closet to look for my evening bag.
“Everything is sentimental. All of it matters and none of it matters. You can’t believe all the things I’m not asking you about. Bea said I should ask about the china.”
“Bea doesn’t want it?”
“Bea wants to hire a service that sells what they can and carts the rest to the dump.”
I felt a surge of fondness for my sister-in-law. “It’s not a bad plan.”
“We have to at least look through it all. This house is my mother’s archive—the history of an entire life as recorded in personal possessions.”
I found a black satin clutch and dropped it in the bag, then took out a box of jewelry from the bottom drawer of the dresser. I never wore my pearls. “I’m guessing the girls don’t want china.”
“I think Sydney came out here to make sure I didn’t send her anything. She keeps texting pictures to Rachel, but Rachel doesn’t want anything either.”
I sat down on the bed in an attempt to make myself pay attention to what he was saying. “I hope you don’t drive home in a moving van, but you should take what you want.”
“I don’t know what I want. You should see the Christmas tree ornaments, the ones she collected on trips, the ones Bea and I made when we were kids. But it’s not just Christmas tree ornaments, it’s Easter rabbits and Easter baskets and Thanksgiving napkins and Fourth of July hats, thirty years’ worth ofGourmetmagazine in binders, three giant boxes of loose photographs. We’re going through all my father’s stuff, too.”
“Your father’s stuff?” Jonathan’s father had died years before Jonathan and I met.
“She kept all of it. Handkerchiefs, belts, Rotary bulletins.”
