Commonwealth (23 page)

Franny found a parking spot two blocks from the water and carried the six boxes down to the end of the pier, past the fishermen with their buckets and lines, past the tourists holding hands. She wanted the lobsters in deep water. Maybe they'd be stupid enough to crawl into someone else's pot tomorrow but she didn't want them walking straight up on the beach minutes after their exoneration. She set the six boxes out in a line and opened them up. Christmas at the pier. Christmas for crustaceans. They were a dappled black and green now, not the electric red they would have been after boiling. They were still frisky, energized by their proximity to salt water, waving their bound claws in impatience. They would never know what they had missed, though being lobsters, they would probably never know anything. She took the scissors and stuck them in the box, doing her best to cut off the wide rubber bands without nicking a claw or losing a finger. (The first band on each one was easy, the second a challenge.) When she finished, she tipped them one at a time out of their boxes and into the ocean, where they made a pleasing smack against the water and then sank from view.

By the time Franny had loaded down the car with all the necessary provisions and driven back to the house it was late in the afternoon. She caught a glimpse of Leo on the front porch talking to someone by the door (Nine for dinner? She had enough) while
the rest of them were off who knows where. There was a sleek silver Audi pulled to the back, the Hollingers must have arrived by now. Franny thought how nice it would have been to have taken a shower before she saw them but that wasn't going to happen. She started carrying the boxes and bags into the kitchen. She'd made three trips when Leo came in with a tall young man with a long black braid.

“Franny,” Leo said.

Franny put the heavy box she was holding down on the table, half liquor, half wine. There was a second case of wine still in the car. She kept her hands on top of the box to keep them steady. That first moment she saw him she knew exactly what it was she'd done, how serious and wrong it was to have given away what didn't belong to her. She had known it at the time, too, but she hadn't cared. It was the way Leo had listened to her, the way he had asked her so many questions and then told her to tell him everything again. There had been nothing in her life to equal the light of his attention.

“Christ,” Albie said. “You look exactly the same.”

He was taller and thinner than she could have ever imagined he would be. He wore a sleeveless T-shirt and some oversized pants covered in pockets. His arms were dark and muscled, his wrists tattooed. He was at once someone she knew as a brother and someone she had never met. “Not you,” Franny said.

Hadn't she thought he'd show up sooner or later? She had expected him around every corner in those first months after the book came out, but time passed. Did she forget about him then? “How did you find us?”

“I found him,” Albie said, motioning to Leo. “It turns out he's the easiest person in the world to find.”

“That's good to know,” Leo said.

“I wasn't thinking about you,” Albie said to Franny. “But I guess it makes sense. Somebody had to have told him.”

They had wanted to go to the barn and brush the horses. If they brushed the horses and mucked out a few of the stalls then usually Ned would let them take turns riding the mare for the afternoon. But Albie was driving them crazy. What was he doing that was so intolerable? Standing here in front of him now, Franny couldn't remember. Or maybe he wasn't doing anything wrong. Maybe it was just that someone had to watch him around the horses and none of them wanted to do it. He wasn't the monster they told him he was, in fact there wasn't anything so awful about him. It was only that he was a little kid.

“Albie has terrible breath,” Franny announced. Then she turned to him. “Didn't you brush your teeth this morning?”

That was how the ball got rolling. Holly leaned in and sniffed the air in front of her brother's face. She rolled her eyes. “Tic Tac, please.”

Caroline looked at Cal. “You might as well. You know he's never going to brush his teeth. I don't think he's brushed them since we got here.”

Cal pulled the little plastic bag out of his pocket. He had four in there and so he gave him four.

“All of them?” Albie asked.

“You stink,” Cal said. “If you don't you're going to scare the horses.”

Jeanette left the room then. She didn't say where she was going but the rest of them said they had to wait for her.

“I want to go!” Albie said.

Franny shook her head. “Ernestine told us we had to stay together.”

They waited until he fell asleep. It never took that long. Cal
carried Albie down to the laundry room and left him under a pile of towels on the floor. It was Sunday and Ernestine was making a big supper. She never did laundry on Sunday.

And now twenty years later here was Albie in the actress's summer house, having read about that day he had largely slept through in a novel written by someone he'd never met. Franny shook her head. Her hands were cold. She had never been so cold before. “I'm sorry,” she said. The words came without volume and so she said them again. “I know that isn't worth anything but I'm sorry. I made a terrible mistake.”

“How did you make a mistake?” Leo said. He reached into the box and took out the bottle of Beefeater. “I'm going to have a drink. Would anyone else like a drink?”

“Did you think I was never going to see it?” Albie asked. “I mean, maybe that was a good guess. It took me long enough.”

“I was trying to explain to him before you got here,” Leo said, pouring some gin in a glass. “Writers get their inspirations from a lot of places. It's never any one thing.”

Franny looked at Leo, willing him to pick up his glass and go back out to the porch to smoke with his guests. “Just give us a minute,” she said to him. “This isn't about you.”

“Of course it's about me,” Leo said. “It's my book.”

“I still don't understand this,” Albie said, pointing at Franny and then at Leo. “How did he wind up with my life?”

“It isn't your life,” Leo said. “That's what I'm trying to explain. It's my imagination.”

Albie swung around like a whip, his hands coming up to Leo's shoulders, pushing him back. Leo, startled, dropped his glass on the floor, and for a moment the room was suffused with the clean smell of gin.

“You don't understand why I'm here, do you?” Albie said. “You have no idea how hard I'm trying not to kill you. I really might. And if you made me up then you'll understand just how little there is at stake for me here.”

There was a clear case for stepping towards Leo then, for putting her hands on Leo's arm, but Franny turned to Albie instead. Albie was the one she had wronged. She and Leo had wronged him together.

“Listen to me, let's go and talk,” she said to Albie. “Come outside and talk to me.”

Leo stumbled back as if struck, his face flushed. Leo—shorter, heavier, more than twice Albie's age—would later swear there had been a blow. The highball glass rolled past his feet, miraculously unbroken. “I'm calling the police,” he said. He could hear the unevenness in his own breathing.

“Nobody's calling the police,” Franny said.

“What in the hell are you talking about?” Leo said.

Marisol came in the kitchen through the swinging door, Eric behind her. “Franny, where are my lobsters?” she said.

Franny couldn't think of what she was talking about at first or why she was even still in the house, but then she remembered. “Go,” she said. She kept her eyes on Albie.

“Do you even know what lobsters cost?”

Eric touched his wife's shoulder. “Come back to the living room,” he said. “They've got company.”

“We're the company!” Marisol had put on a silk shift dress of emerald green, a flat gold necklace. The Hollingers had come and she was dressed for dinner. Only Hollinger was a bigger name on the marquee than Posen, and some might disagree with that. Hollinger had been more consistent in his career, he'd had the
bigger wins. Dinner, unassembled, was on the table in the boxes, in the shopping bags. “Jonas told me you put them in the car. Was something wrong with them?”

Albie turned to Franny. “Do you work for them?”

Franny took her hand off Albie's arm and put her hand in his hand instead. “We have to go.”

“Who is this?” Marisol said. Marisol, who wasn't part of anything, who had never been invited.

“This is my brother,” Franny said.

“He is
not
your goddamn brother,” Leo said, his voice loud enough to go through the windows and out across the lawns.

Franny had made a mistake when she'd left the house that morning without taking her purse and she did not make the mistake again. “Stay here,” she said to Leo. “Everything's going to be fine.”

Albie picked up the bottle of gin.

“You're not leaving with him,” Leo said.

“If I don't leave here with him I'm going to invite him to dinner. I'm going to put him upstairs in the guest room, okay?”

“I'll tell you what,” Eric said. “Why don't we take some drinks out to our guests? Marisol, you get the corkscrew and some glasses. Maybe we should all sit down and have a drink. You've got the gin.” Eric nodded at Albie, then he turned to Franny. “The Hollingers are here. They came while you were in town. Just come out and say hello.”

Eric was trying to turn the evening back into a dinner party. It occurred to Franny then that of course he wouldn't know who Albie was, he wouldn't know who she was either, other than Leo's girlfriend. Because when Leo called her his inspiration, and he always did, no one thought he meant it literally. The story of two couples moving in next door to each other, their awful children,
that was nothing more than the plot of a novel as far as Eric was concerned. Franny wanted to go to Leo, to reassure him, but Marisol had opened the door from the kitchen. Everyone could hear the voices coming in from the front hallway, so many voices!
Hello! Hello!
the sound of car doors, of laughter, the sound of Ariel's voice calling out for her father.

* * *

If Beverly or Bert were to tell the story now, they would say they divorced after Cal died. And of course that was true, they had, but in this instance the word “after” would be misleading. It linked together the death and the divorce as if they were cause and effect, as if Beverly and Bert were one of those couples who, upon a child's death, are led down such separate paths of grief that they can no longer find their way back to one another. This was not the case.

Bert blamed Beverly for leaving the six children alone on the farm with Ernestine and his parents, for not telling anyone she was taking his mother's car into Charlottesville to sit through two back-to-back showings of
Harry & Tonto
. (She hadn't planned to see it twice, but the theater was so empty and quiet and cool. She had cried at the end of the picture and all through the credits, and rather than walk into the lobby with her mascara running she just decided to stay where she was.) Did he really think she supervised the children every minute? Did he think that had she stayed home that afternoon, after reading another book up in their room, another magazine, taking one more nap, after she had officially died of boredom she might have gone with them to the barn and curried the horses? The truth was she left the children alone in Arlington too, she left them in order to preserve her sanity. At least at the farm there was adult supervision. Did his parents bear no responsibility for what happened on their property? And what about
Ernestine? Beverly had left the children in Ernestine's care even if she hadn't told Ernestine that's what she was doing. Ernestine had more parental sense than Beverly and Bert and Bert's parents all combined, and Ernestine thought it was fine for them to walk the half a mile to the barn.

Bert should not have insisted that Beverly and the children stay at his parents' house in the country for the week while he took the station wagon back to Arlington for work. If he thought that the children needed an escort to the barn then he should have stuck around and escorted them himself. Beverly didn't want to be a guest in his parents' house. They were forever asking the children about their wonderful mother—
How's Teresa? What's Teresa doing now? I hope your mother knows she's always welcome to come and stay with us.

The children didn't want to stay with Bert's parents either. They had been much happier at the Pinecone, where they had stayed in summers past. At Bert's parents' house they had to take their shoes off at the back door and wipe their feet with a towel. Because they weren't allowed in the living room under any circumstances, they had inevitably made a game out of dashing through at top speed on dares whenever they heard someone coming down the hall. A porcelain figurine of an English gentleman and his wolfhound was knocked from an end table and smashed.

Bert's parents didn't want them there. They had made the offer of this extended and highly unusual visit in hopes of seeing their son, not his children or his second wife or her children. But then Bert left.

Ernestine didn't want them there. She couldn't have. It meant eight extra mouths to feed (seven after Bert decamped), piles of laundry, games to invent, fights to break up, employers to soothe.
The load fell heaviest on Ernestine's shoulders and yet she alone carried her burden without complaint.

Bert went back to Arlington because under the circumstances of a normal work week it was expensive, impractical, and stimulatingly dangerous to find a place to continue his affair with his paralegal. Linda Dale (two first names; she did not answer to Linda) said for once she would like to have dinner together in a restaurant like regular people, go to bed in a real bed, wake up in the middle of the night and make love while they were still half asleep, and then do it again in the shower the next morning. Bert was not crazy about Linda Dale, she was petulant and demanding and very young, but she talked like this on the phone when he called the office, so what was he supposed to do? Stay at the farm?