The Widow Waltz (24 page)

On a triple-word score Daniel builds
dillydally
.

I carefully put the letters for
napery
on the board. Fifty-point bonus!

“You can’t play that,” he informs me.

“I most certainly can. It means table linen. You know, napkins, tablecloths. My mother always uses the word.” At least she used to.

“I know what it means, but there’s only one p. I’m going to challenge,” he says. “Where’s the Scrabble dictionary I gave you?”

“Luey’s room, probably,” I say. “She and Cola were playing a few weeks ago.” I go upstairs and begin to search but I can’t find it anywhere in the anarchy of her possessions. “We’ll have to check online,” I inform him.

“Isn’t it against the law to live in a house without a dictionary? It’s like not having a smoke detector. Next thing you’ll tell me you’ve never registered to vote.”

Now that he mentions it, I never did, out here. “You know, there may be a dictionary in the books I brought from the city,” I say in my defense. It would be in the box with the first gift Ben gave me, a book of Dylan Thomas poetry.

We go to the basement, which is damp and dim. Ben’s windsurfer fills one corner, a hulking monument to middle-aged denial that Luey plans to sell on Craiglist this summer. A refrigerator and freezer, circa 1985, handed down from my parents’ house, stand side-by-side, unplugged. The last time I used either one was for extra drinks and ice cream last summer when we gave our Labor Day barbecue.

Boxes brought from the city are in the corner, two labeled
KIDS’ BOOKS.
I start with one of the other boxes, where I find a complete set of Shakespeare, college art history texts, and many lavish tomes about home decorating and antiques. Daniel searches through a load of potboilers, Harry Potters, and reference books.

“Pay dirt,” he shouts, and pulls out a relic whose binding is dried and broken, a leather-bound
American Heritage College Dictionary
embossed in fading gold with the initials BTS, my gift to Ben when he graduated from college. I know its inscription. “To Benjy, with a heart of happiness. Please see page 819. I will love you forever. Georgia.” Page 819 features the definition of
love,
which I underlined and circled with a girlish red heart, faded to sienna.

I look over Daniel’s shoulder until he finds the page that begins with
nanofabrication
and ends with
narcotic.
When he gets there, a scrap torn from a yellow legal pad flutters to the floor. The paper is filled with handwriting that looks rushed and unmistakably Ben’s.

I pick up what appears to be the draft of a letter. “Darling,” it begins. But this isn’t meant for me. It’s filed under the page that includes, “Na-o-mi (ney-
oh-
me,) the mother-in-law of Ruth and the great-grandmother of David, from a Hebrew word meaning ‘pleasant.’”

“This is hard to write, but I will try. I realize I have been lying to myself. I despise when I lie,” he begins.

“Naomi, love, I thought I could leave Georgia, but I can’t. As harsh as this sounds, it doesn’t change how I feel about you. I adore you. Every moment we have shared is authentic, and I have felt that way since Hawaii.”

His Honolulu marathon was five years ago. I didn’t travel there with Ben because Luey was still in high school. I was the parent who remained on duty.

The next paragraph is slashed through, yet legible: “If I’d met you first, things might have been different. I will try to do right by you—by all of us—but I can’t find a way to you, because—there you have it—I am unable to leave my first family.”

I trip up at “first family.” I have known Ben to be more eloquent. Should I take solace in the banality, or is there another, smoother version of this letter somewhere? Did he even send it? How much of it is true?

“Georgia, Nicola, and Louisa—each one is tender in her own way. I say this not to hurt you or diminish what we have. I wish I could clone myself and be by your side as well as theirs, because you, too, are wrapped around my heart. You need to know and believe that, because it is true.”

He has a sense of humor, even in a love letter, because he writes, “I dream every man’s fantasy, that we could all live together.” It isn’t crossed out.

“This is torment, to disappoint you and to deceive Georgia. I don’t know what to do with the torture, which grows by the day.”

I
n the Tao of Nicola, a baseline tenet had been to always mistrust her sister. So when Luey spoke in breathy exclamation points, she did not rush to call back.

“I gather this isn’t the best time for you, with the necklace and all,” Luey said when they spoke. Nicola had been hoping Luey didn’t know. “About that . . .” Luey added. “What does it look like?”

“Eighteen-carat gold, pave diamonds—a heart. Why?”

“Do you have a picture?”

“Like, from a Web site? No. I’ve been telling Uncle Nineteenth Century how much we need one.”

“How about the kind of picture lovesick puppies take whenever they’re out in public?”

“Possibly,” Nicola said.

“Well, if your Michael T. has a picture, send it to me.”

“Why?”

“Just send it.”

Nicola did. In the picture, the necklace was clearly twinkling though her mouth was agape, mid-admonishment, telling Michael T. to get his phone out of her face.

“Meet me at the Astor Room at six,” Luey said when the picture arrived.

Nicola proudly took the subway to Astoria and found Luey at the restaurant, another achievement.

“I’m sorry, we’re booked,” the hostess informed them. Her sneer said,
It’s eight o’clock
on a Saturday night. What did you expect, losers?

Luey stepped forward. Before Nicola’s eyes, her pregnant sister transformed into their father, who with winning resolve had not only always been able to articulate his demands but generally enjoyed an 80-percent-and-above success record in having them met to his satisfaction. As Luey shook the hostess’s well-manicured hand, she held up Nicola’s picture. “We wondered if you’d seen this necklace?” The hostess smoothed her bob, as shiny as wet shoe polish, while Luey continued, “The stones are cubic zirconia and not worth a thing, but our dead father gave it to our mother so it has a lot of sentimental value.” Luey’s kick in the ankles told Nicola to shut up.

The hostess and Luey sized each other up. “Wait here,” she said. “And have a cocktail on us.”

“That would be lovely.” Nicola did not recall
lovely
being in Luey’s standard vocabulary and her tone was all breezy confidence. The hostess led the sisters to the bar and whispered in the bartender’s ear before she melted into the dark restaurant.

“I’ll have a Pink Lady,” Nicola said.

“Cranberry juice and seltzer with a twist,” Luey said.

Nicola wondered why her sister was knocking herself out. Was Luey on a mission initiated by their mother, or feeling guilty for being, until recently, a pain in the butt who at least once a month Nicola wanted to upgrade to a more user-friendly model? “This is pretty terrific of you to go to all this effort,” Nicola managed to say, “even if the necklace doesn’t show up.”

“I needed an adventure.” As if having a baby alone wasn’t adventure enough, Nicola thought.

“How’s the job?” Luey asked.

“Great til Uncle Stephan got pissy over . . .” Nicola searched for a word—who could blame him for getting angry? “This carelessness of mine, and decided I must be a thief.”

Her cocktail arrived and Nicola was impressed with its pinkness—like a carnation dancing with a salmon. She stirred the swizzler and took a sip. It tasted less demure than its name suggested.

“Tell me, does Michael T. have a chance?” Luey asked. “Seriously, Cola. After speaking to the guy for five minutes, I could tell he was nuts for you.”

“I like him, but he’s in Boston and my life feels too ragged right now to get serious anyway.” She considered how exposed she felt by what she said, every bit of which was true.

“When hasn’t your life been like that?” Luey asked.

“Ooh. Harsh.” Nicola said, though that was not true of the cocktail, which she decided might become her drink of choice.

“Don’t blow it with Michael T., Cola.” Luey’s voice had turned as uncharacteristically pacifying as elevator music.

Behind her, someone cleared their throat. Nicola turned. There was the hostess, who opened her hand and without ceremony placed the necklace in Nicola’s hand.

“What?” Nicola shrieked. “Oh my God! Where did you find it?”

Luey pushed herself off the bar stool, waving away Nicola’s question. “Okay, then,” she said. The hostess, her back already to them, was moving quickly away despite five-inch heels. “Let’s get out of here. I’ll drive you home.”

“How did you do that?” Nicola asked. “I called and—”

“Did you learn nothing from Daddy? Cola, I greased her palm.”

“M
other, I’m sorry it’s been so long.” I troop into The Oaks dripping guilt and perspiration. All is not right when it’s seventy-four degrees in March. My magnolia tree bloomed a month ahead of schedule, and now that I don’t employ Adam and Eve, I’ve been working outside in a T-shirt.

My mother doesn’t—or won’t—respond. It’s been three weeks since I was here, and in that time she seems to have shrunk into a satellite of herself. I rub her arm gently. “It’s Georgia,” I say. “I’m here.” She grits her teeth and shakes off my touch.

“Camille hasn’t been talking much,” Alice, her favorite caretaker, says, offering her ginger ale, which she pushes away.

“That’s what the head nurse told me when I called yesterday, but she didn’t know why,” I say.

“She might have asked me.” Alice sniffs. “Camille’s all clammed up and teary because Mr. Blumstein’s gone.”

“Morris? No! He didn’t . . .” I mouth the word
die.

“Oh no. Moved away last week. Such a shame. He was a grand bit of stuff, that fella. Everyone’s favorite.”

“My mother must miss him terribly.”

Alice clucks in agreement. “Camille here, she was his special bird. He already sent all the girls a big crate of oranges, but Camille got her own box and a letter. When I read it to her, she tore it up and flushed it down the loo. I tried to help her write back, but she refused.”

“Was he sick?”

Alice brushes away the thought. “What happens is the children, they get old, too. His daughter retired to Tampa and she didn’t want to leave him up north, all alone.”

“He wasn’t alone—he had me.” It’s my mother speaking, her head turning stiffly toward us, an animatronic figure coming to life, her voice croaky from disuse.

“Mother, I’m so sorry to hear about Morris leaving,” I say. “Maurice, excuse me.” Is there anyone else she’ll even talk to?

“Men!” she says. “Can’t trust the shits, can you?”

I usually second my mother’s motions, a habit I picked up when I realized my father considered this the path of least resistance to four-part Waltz harmony. But now I refuse to let myself become a woman whose knee-jerk response to Camille’s question is yes, because for every Ben on his worst day, there was a Ben on a better day. There are Nat and Daniel, always, and much of Stephan, at least lately. I hope I am never done with men.

“Morris moved to be with his family.”

“But he had me,” she frets, and sticks out her bottom lip. “He didn’t even say good-bye.”

“Now, Camille, that’s not true.” Alice’s brogue takes the edge off her upbraiding. “He came ’round special for you every dinner hour, and at his going-away tea you were seated by his side like the queen of the May. Your friend was in a tiff about it. She’s a mean old biddy, that Vera,” she adds, conspiratorially, her voice lowered.

I hope the mention of my mother’s loyal opposition will please her, but she frowns. “Maurice took off like a bat out of hell.” Her truth and she’s sticking to it.

Alice laughs. “Anything more I can do for you ladies?”

“Thanks for everything. We’ll see you later.”

I sit across from my mother and reach into my bag. Camille Waltz has never failed to light up at the sight of small boxes, silky ribbon, and shiny paper, though it has become difficult to find presents now that she can no longer focus on a book, turn on a CD, and has lost interest in clothes. I bring candy, flowers, or a plant—today it’s yellow tulips—as well as a bonus, which she unwraps. It’s a photograph.

She leans forward and traces the framed image shown in murky black and grayish white. “Is this modern art?” she asks.

“This is Luey’s little baby growing inside her,” I explain. “A picture from her ultrasound.” A year ago my mother knew the term.

“Why is the head so big? Does it have hydrocephalus?”

I will myself poise and a cool temper. She can remember that term but not what we talked about four minutes ago. “This is what a fetus looks like at six months.”

“Ugly?”

“Not to me,” I say. “Not to Luey.” She drops the photograph. “Would you like to rest?” I ask.

“No,” she snaps. “Do you think I’m an old lady who needs to nap?”

I do. Ten minutes feels like ten hours. “What did Maurice say in the letter Alice mentioned?”

“Who, pray tell, is Alice?”

It will be a long afternoon. “Excuse me for a moment,” I say, and leave the room. I return from the lounge with paper cups of tea. Fifteen minutes.

I pull out a copy of Ben’s letter. “I’d like your opinion, Mother, on a letter I found.” I’d like her to let me know if she believes what Ben has said, and then I will be glad if she will forget our conversation. Perception seems to ignite in her dark brown eyes. Please let that flame stay lit. “It’s from my husband,” I explain. “To another woman.”

“Ben’s lady friend? That bitch?”

Did all of The Oaks know? “I’m not sure she’s evil. Just another woman.”

Someone new, the last thing I could be.

“‘Darling.’ That’s what he calls her, ‘darling.’ But her name is Naomi.” I read the letter, choking twice . . . “He must have met her when he ran that marathon in Honolulu,” I add, and read down the most chilling words. “‘I can’t leave my first family.’” I brush away a tear to say, “He calls us his ‘first’ family. Does that mean the woman has a child? That there’s a second family?”

My mother is making eye contact with me, alert. “Go on.”

I read sentence after sentence, stopping at, “‘I dream that we could all live together.’ Isn’t that rich—‘we could all live together’? I wonder if I’d get to be number-one wife?”

“Keep going. I love this book.”

I skip to the bottom. Ben wasn’t exactly John Adams. “‘The net net . . .’ Can you believe he wrote ‘net net’ in a love letter?”

“Read!”

“‘I’ve thought of telling Georgia, of asking for her blessing or even to separate so you and I could be together, but that would break her heart and she’s my wife.’”

“He underlines this. See?” I show the letter to my mother. Her eyes have shuttered, but I continue aloud. There is comfort in reading, as if I am a child enjoying a fairy tale, not a horror story about ruination in a marriage. I wonder if Ben recopied and ever sent this letter. My mind goes blank when I try to imagine how Naomi might have felt if and when she got it—or might feel now. I have room for only my feelings, vast and malignant.

There is more, but I stop. I am lulled by mingled accents from the hall—Jamaican, Irish, Puerto Rican, Russian, and the patois of southern New Jersey. Ben’s letter has deepened the enigma.

Loyalty is a tight weave, a heathery tweed of which love is only one fiber, but in marriage loyalty can also be two people moving through life on parallel lines, never becoming one. Passion is a rocky EKG, but it’s a single line. I wish I knew Ben’s devotion to me was built as much on passion, a less dependable fabric than the feathers, angora, and satin of ball gowns and tuxedos. Passion is
Sense and Sensibility
and
A Man and a Woman
and also, I’d like to think, Ben Silver and Georgia Waltz, celebrating their twenty-fifth anniversary fucking and making love and everything in between one entire rainy weekend at Casa Del Mar. We stopped and started and sipped
Bellinis and listened to the Pacific knocking on the front door. Loyalty is a stately hymn. Passion is pheromones flying, shouting,
I love you, I love you,
round and round, forever.

I hear footsteps and open my eyes, half-expecting to see Ben. My brother is filling the doorway, wearing concern. “Stephan, I wasn’t expecting you,” I say.

“Nor I, you,” he offers over our mother’s snores. Despite her diminutive size, she rumbles like heavy machinery.

“I’m sorry I haven’t gotten here much,” I say, as I stand to hug. “I’ve fallen down on the job.”

“You have a full plate.” I enjoy the brief touch of our cheeks. His heavy beard is shaved to kid leather smoothness, like our father’s always was.

“Did you hear everything?”

“Enough.” After a minute or two, his voice goes soft. “Do the words make you feel better?” he asks.

“I’d feel better if Ben was alive and I never knew about this. I was happy not knowing.”

I’d like to turn back the clock to my own age of innocence. Stephan covers my hand with his. In my fifty years, I never remember a gesture this intimate and openhearted from the brother I wrote off as cold-blooded. This makes me want to cry, but he will be horrified by leaky, womanly emotion, so I shut my eyes tight against the tears.

“‘I sometimes think that God, in creating man, somewhat overestimated his ability,’” Stephan says, invoking his patron saint.

I smile up at him. “Ben was just a guy, flawed as any.”

“More flawed than most. We’re not all Bens.”

“Do you have any more choice material where that came from?” I have always liked this game Stephan plays.

He thinks a moment and comes up with, “‘In married life, three is company and two is none.’”

“You can’t possibly believe that.”

“Okay, I have it,” he says. “‘I am so clever that sometimes I don’t understand a single word of what I say.’”

“That’s the most humble remark you’ve ever made. Too bad it’s not original.”

“Old Oscar doesn’t mind. We’re on excellent terms.”

I’d like to think Stephan and I might be, too. I take a breath and dare to ask, “Are you my mysterious benefactor?”

Those gray eyes frack into me. “If I were, it would make your life a bit tidier, wouldn’t it?”

“I doubt my life will ever be tidy. I’m aiming for content.”

“Of course it has occurred to me to give you money,” Stephan says, his voice low and measured. “If and when you truly need it, I will. I’m not going to let you starve or make you beg. But you aren’t quite at the end of your rope, so no, that check didn’t come from me—or Daniel, if that’s what you’re wondering.”

Did my brother say “end of your rope” or “end of your hope”? As I sit in the dwindling light, I realize they are the same and I am not at the end of either.

“You don’t have to stick around, now that I’m here,” he offers. “You have the longer drive.”

I gather my things, stopping to show Stephan the newest family portrait. “Your great-niece or great-nephew,” I say.

“Looks just like Dad,” he says.

I kiss my sleeping mother good-bye, and Stephan escorts me to the lobby. “I don’t know where or how, but did you hear—Nicola found the necklace?” he says, as he pushes open the front door.

“I did.”
Thank God.
“I knew she would.”

“I have big plans for that girl,” Stephan says, then he kisses me on each cheek and sends me on my way.

I arrive home to an unkempt dog of no breed that the Westminster Kennel Club has ever recognized. He greets me like an intimate, jumping so we are nose to nose. The beast races to Luey and pants until she makes him beg for one of the fancy biscuits she buys in fifteen-pound sacks. I don’t want to imagine what part of a wooly sheep “lamb meal” comes from. Even less “chicken meal.” Not to be undone, a wagging Sadie shows up and begs for a biscuit, too, years of training undone.

“What happened to ‘only dogs under thirty pounds’?” I ask Luey.

“I made an exception for Lester,” she says as the dog chomps, scattering crumbs on the kitchen floor. “He’s Peter’s.”

Proceed with caution: parental peril ahead,
I warn myself. “I’m glad you and Peter are friends.”

“We were never friends,” she says, yet her composure tells me something connects them now other than a bridge between disappointment and distrust. “I agreed to take care of my buddy here til Peter gets back from his tour. I couldn’t stand to see Lester in a kennel.” At hearing his name, the dog attaches himself to Luey’s side. When she stops petting him, he starts sniffing Sadie, who graciously returns the favor, happy as any woman around here to have a suitor.

“How’s Nana?” she asks.

“She’s slipped some. Morris moved to Florida.”

“Why would he do that to her?”

“He didn’t have a choice. Family loyalty.”

“Ah, loyalty,” she says.

I see her weighing the good and bad of this notion. I applauded her yesterday when she told me of the derring-do she engineered to find Nicola’s necklace. As I heard the tale, I was sure she was as happy about this as Cola. I like who Louisa Silver-Waltz is becoming.

In the living room, she built a fire, using up the last of this winter’s supply of wood. Soon I’ll have to rustle up some new birch logs for the hearth. But now, I feed Ben’s letter to the flames.