A Week as Andrea Benstock

Thursday April 16, 1970

In 1970 spring teased Buffalo with a string of false starts. There would be a handful of warm days. Then the temperature would drop abruptly and snow would fall.

But on this April morning Andrea felt reasonably certain that spring had come to stay. The sun was warm on her face, the air fresh and light. She walked around her back yard as she had done recently on mornings that felt like spring. She examined the new leaves on the shrubs and trees, the emerging shoots of the spring bulbs. It seemed as though something new came into view every day. Now perhaps winter was really over.

If winter comes can spring be far behind?

Winter had come, an early winter and a harsh one, and deep in the winter, early in January, her father had died. The following afternoon she had stood watching as his boxed body was lowered into an opening in the frozen earth. There was snow on the ground that afternoon, a couple of inches of it, and there was fresh snow falling. Everything looked terribly white and clean.

And now everything was turning green.

She took her time noting the garden’s progress, bending now and then to pull a weed. The soil was cold to the touch but soon it would be warmer. It seemed almost wrong to be pulling weeds. They were alive, they were green, and the season was still new enough so that anything green was welcome.

The phone rang at one point but she did not rush inside to answer it. Eventually it stopped ringing.

A few minutes later she went inside. She drank a cup of coffee and smoked a cigarette. Then she picked up the telephone and began to dial a number. She had almost finished when she was suddenly overcome. There was a pressure behind her eyes, as if there were tears welled up there demanding to be shed. Her eyes remained dry, however. She felt quite dizzy and her hands and feet were very cold.

She managed to replace the receiver, managed to find a chair and sit in it. She made herself breathe deeply and slowly until she felt all right again, although the coldness in her hands and feet persisted. She thought that a straight shot of liquor would probably do her a great deal of good, but of course she never considered actually having a drink. It was morning and she did not drink in the morning. A woman down the block did drink in the morning, as Andrea had discovered not long ago. The discovery had unnerved her, even shocked her. The whole idea of a suburban housewife having a little nip as soon as her husband left the house, affected her so that for some time afterward she felt a little funny about drinking at all, at any hour of the day.

She smoked another cigarette — which was probably a particularly dumb idea when one had cold hands and feet, but the hell with it — then went to the phone and made her call. When her mother answered she said, “Hello, Mom. How are you?”

“Oh, I’m all right. And you?”

“Oh, I’m fine. Robin’s at school and Mark’s at the office and I just thought I’d call.”

“I’m glad. I was just going to call you, as a matter of fact.”

“Did you call before? About fifteen minutes ago.”

“No. Why?”

“I was outside and the phone rang and I didn’t feel like running for it. I thought it might be you.”

“No, it wasn’t. You were outside? It’s a beautiful day today, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it is.”

“Maybe the winter’s finally over. Sometimes it seems to me as though winter and summer both get longer every year and spring and fall absolutely disappear. Your father would say I’m starting to sound like those cranks who blame the snow on the atomic bomb and the astronauts. Actually I’m sure it’s Nixon’s fault.” There was a pause. Then, softly and tentatively, “Andrea, today is—”

“Yes, I know, Mother.”

“I knew you would remember, of course.” Another pause. “Thirty-nine years, it would have made.”

“I know.”

“It was the funniest thing last night. I was in bed and just on the verge of falling asleep and of course I was thinking that today was our anniversary and I had an impossible time deciding if it was going to be thirty-nine years or forty years. I was doing all sorts of complicated arithmetic, trying to figure how many years we had been married when you were born, one bit of nonsense after the other. I suppose it was the pill I took before I went to bed.”

“I’m sure of it. I was just going to say that.”

“But isn’t that a funny thing to be confused about? Well, it would have been thirty-nine years today.”

“Mother—”

“I’m all right.”

“I was thinking maybe I would come over for a little while.”

“Well, what I was thinking. I want to go to the cemetery today.”

“Do you think that’s a good idea?”

“It’s something I want to do. How would it be a good or a bad idea? I certainly don’t want you to come if you don’t want to, but I—”

“Don’t be ridiculous. Of course I’ll come.”

“Only if you want to.”

“Of course I want to. I want to wait until Lucinda gets here but she’s due any minute, and then I’ll come over, and we can go to the cemetery whenever you want.”

“Lucinda. Oh, your girl. I didn’t even think that it was Thursday, isn’t that funny? I was thinking of the date but not what day of the week.”

Thursday. So it was indeed Lucinda’s day, but it was not her day with Cass. That particular string of Thursdays had come to an end with her thirtieth birthday. A dividend of maturity — and when I became a woman I put away childish things.

If indeed that was what it had been. It had been hard at the time to know what they were to each other and it was not much easier now. But if she and Cass were still spending their Thursdays together, or if they had never done so in the first place, he might have been a help to her now. He knew her so well, and he knew Mark so well, and if they could have a certain conversation, she and Cass...

Or perhaps not. She kept doing that, creating roles for people in her personal mythology, secure in the knowledge that circumstances made it impossible for them to play the parts she assigned them. Winkie, her father, all the men who had ever touched fives with her.

Her mother was saying something.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t get that.”

“I just said you’ll come in an hour or so?”

“If not sooner.”

“Dress warm.”

“Yes, Mother dear.”

It was generally agreed, and had been said repeatedly at the funeral and during the week of formal mourning which followed it, that David Kleinman had had a good death. He had remained active right up to the end. His first heart attack had served him as a warning, encouraging him to slow the pace of his life and savor his remaining days. At the same time it helped condition his family so that his second heart attack, which killed him, did not come as a complete shock.

Certainly some of the comments on the quality of his death were inspired by the usual impulse to look and to speak on the bright side, but not a few of the men and women who said what a good death he had had did so with a touch of wistfulness in their speech. They were of an age to acknowledge the possibility of imminent death, some of them already suffering from the diseases which would ultimately kill them, and while it was never quite possible to envy the corpse at a funeral, life clearly being preferable to death, they would have welcomed assurance that their own deaths would be as easy.

On the day he died, Andrea’s father finished his last dental appointment shortly after noon. He went home for lunch, napped afterward for perhaps an hour, then drove to Andrea’s house where he had a cup of coffee. Then he took his granddaughter for a ride. They drove around for over an hour, stopped for ice cream, then returned to the Benstock house.

“I told Poppa David it’s my birthday next week and I’m gonna be five, and he says he won’t let me,” Robin announced. She was pretending anxiety but was clearly delighted with the notion of needing permission to be a year older.

“I merely said I have never had a five-year-old granddaughter and wasn’t sure about the whole thing.”

“He says I’ll have to be four for a whole nother year.”

“I said maybe.”

“Well, maybe you’re silly,” Robin said, and whooped with delight. “Silly, silly.”

He returned to his own house, ate dinner with his wife at the usual hour. He helped her load the dishwasher. While it ran they sat with newspapers in the front room. First he read the Times while she read the Buffalo News. Then they traded. She was reading Clive Barnes’s review of a new English play when he said, “Syl?”

She lowered the paper. His face looked drawn and his expression was one of puzzlement.

“I don’t feel well,” he said.

“What’s the matter? Stay right there, I’ll phone Irv Zucker.”

“Oh, it’s probably nothing,” he said, and then he sat back in his chair and died. Her eyes were on him as it happened and she knew instantly what had happened. He was there and then he was not, he was gone.

She had planned to leave the house when Lucinda arrived, but half an hour after the cleaning woman’s appearance she was still finding things to do in the house. At last she was in her car with the key in the ignition, and then she realized the one thing that she did have to do. She got out of the car and went back into the house and called her husband’s office.

She said, “I was just leaving the house. I’m going to Mother’s.”

“Yes, you said you probably would.”

“She wants to go to the cemetery.”

“Is that a good idea?”

She closed her eyes. She said, “I don’t see that it matters whether it’s a good idea or not.”

“I just—”

“It’s what she wants to do.”

“You’ll go with her?”

“Of course.”

“Well. How are you feeling?”

“I am fine,” she said levelly.

“Well.”

She made herself take a breath and release it slowly. “The reason I called,” she said, “is to find out if you’ll be home for dinner.”

“Of course I will.”

“That’s all I wanted to know.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Pardon me?”

“Are you doing some kind of a number? I always call you if I’m not going to be able to make it for dinner.”

“Well, I’m not going to be home for a while,” she said, “so it would be difficult for you to reach me, wouldn’t it? So I thought I would call and make sure, that’s all.”

“That’s all.”

“Certainly.”

She heard him breathing into the phone. The previous fall a telephone pervert had taken to calling her for a period of several weeks, breathing into the phone in a similar way. He’d stopped when she learned not to panic but simply to hang up as soon as she recognized who it was. Mark’s breathing reminded her of those calls, and then he said, “Well, I’ll be home at the usual time, Andrea. You can rest easy.”

I’m glad to hear that.”

“I’ll see you then. In the meantime give your mother my love.”

“I will.”

She replaced the receiver and put her hand to her forehead. Stupid, she thought. Stupid, stupid, stupid. She had known better than to make that call. And she had gone ahead and made it, she had been unable to leave the house without making it.

Stupid.

It was hard to say precisely when she learned that he was having an affair. She came to know gradually sometime between Thanksgiving and Christmas, so that when she did suddenly realize that he was seeing somebody she realized simultaneously that she had known as much for some time, had known it without facing it.

Her own reaction surprised her. She was far more upset than she could ever have imagined she might be. She was hurt, she was threatened, and more than anything else she was astonished. Perhaps the hardest thing for her to forgive him was his having turned out to be so different from her image of him. That was the true infidelity — he had been unfaithful all along by letting her perceive him incorrectly.

Had he had other affairs before this one? And how long had this one been going on?

And what happened now?

When she decided that she had to talk to someone, she chose Eileen Fradin. The conversation had a frustrating beginning because Eileen kept marshaling arguments to convince her that she was mistaken, that Mark was faithful to her, that his infidelity was a creation of her own imagination. Andrea found herself in the position of lining up evidence to prove her own conclusion, all of which only served to reinforce her convictions. Eileen seemed to have an answer, however farfetched, for every point Andrea made, and for one wild moment she actually found herself wondering if it might be Eileen with whom Mark was having his affair. But that was clearly absurd.

“Look, this is all beside the point,” she said finally. “I know what’s happening. He’s seeing somebody. I absolutely know this.”

“The thing is you don’t have to know it.”

“You mean close my eyes and it’ll go away? Maybe that works for ostriches but I don’t think it makes sense for people.”

“Well, you don’t have to be so certain, do you? Because what good does it do you?” She was puzzled, and Eileen went on, “Look, men are different. They’re like little boys.”

“Oh, come on. I’ve heard the song before.”

“Well, it’s true, isn’t it? Men can have sex and it won’t mean anything at all to them. For women it has to be emotional but not for them. Men do it for the good of their ego or because they just have this need to have different women. Variety. It all has a different meaning for them.”

“The old double standard.”

“Andrea, I’m not saying how things should be, just how they are. Can you imagine yourself going to bed with a man if you didn’t feel anything for him? Just because of a physical attraction? But for men this happens all the time, they think they’re not really men if they don’t do it.”

She found herself keeping her conversational guard up from then on. Because she had gone to bed with men without feeling anything for them, had made love merely on the basis of physical attraction, had made unemotional love even when little real-physical attraction existed either. But there was no way she could say this to Eileen Fradin, and she would not want to say anything that might even hint as much to her.

Once again she found herself feeling ambivalent toward Eileen, dismissing her as shallow and simple-minded while grudgingly admiring how well her mental processes were adapted to emotional survival. She entertained only those thoughts which were beneficial to her and swept all others resolutely aside.

Did Roger Fradin cheat on her? Did she think he did? Did she worry that he did? Evidently, whatever the actual circumstances, whatever Eileen’s perception of them, she managed to think of other things, just as she suggested Andrea do.

But of course Andrea could not do this.

And how well, after all, did all of this really work for Eileen? She was unquestionably a good wife and mother, a precise housekeeper, an adequate if unimaginative cook. She dressed well and kept her figure and was always cheerful. Nevertheless, there were unsettling times when Andrea sensed that her friend was running and could not catch her breath. Eileen still looked younger than her years, but when you looked at her from certain angles you could see that, in a year or two, she would abruptly begin to look older than her years. The skull was beginning to show beneath the skin.

And she was living on diet pills, joking openly enough about them, calling them her vitamins. But they were not vitamins. They were amphetamine, and Eileen took them daily as if on a permanent diet, her pill intake a constant whether or not she was watching what she ate. Her doctor prescribed the pills, and her druggist supplied them, and so it would never occur to Eileen to describe herself as a speed freak, if indeed she was familiar with the term in the first place.

It was not that long a time between Andrea’s discovery of her husband’s infidelity and her father’s death. It was only a matter of a few weeks. But they were very intense and concentrated weeks during which that one central fact dominated her thinking and, subtly or blatantly, colored her dreams.

There was no one with whom she could discuss it. After that first attempt she never raised the subject with Eileen, who for her part never referred to it again. Eileen was her closest friend, surely her most nearly intimate friend. Of the other women she knew reasonably well, the only one she might have discussed the matter with was Linda Gould, who had come back east and taken a flat in Amherst with her children. But Linda was Mark’s sister and that made the conversation impossible.

There were other people she could have talked to, except that for one reason or another she could not, Her mother. Her father. Cass Drozdowski. John Riordan. Winkie.

Mark.

She had conversations with these people within the privacy of her private mind. And now and then she would think of someone else — a casual friend from school or from her New York days, a friend of her parents’, an English teacher at Bennett High School of whom she had not consciously thought in fifteen years. People she did not really know, people she had never really known, but people whom she found herself wishing she could cast in the role of confidante.

Then the telephone rang early on a January evening and it suddenly ceased to matter who Mark was fucking, or how, or why, or for how long. Her father was dead. That was all that really mattered.

The death and the funeral and the official and unofficial periods of mourning changed everything so completely that she thought the change would be permanent. The moment she learned of her father’s death, Mark’s involvement with someone else ceased to matter to her, and in ceasing to matter it was as if it ceased to exist. It was Mark who answered the telephone that night, Mark who was the first to know the awful knowledge, and as he turned to her, giving her a part of the news with his eyes before he gave her all of it in a handful of phrases, as he did this, he was transformed entirely into a man playing one role and one role only, that of her husband.

And he had been very good. He was a strong man, such a strong man. She had recognized his strength the day she met him and had never since had cause to doubt it. That she kept finding evidence of his sensitivity and vulnerability never served to diminish his strength in her eyes.

Strength was constantly called for then. During the public part of each day Andrea would be very strong and Mark would weld his strength to hers, giving it backbone, reinforcing it. Together they helped Andrea’s mother endure the ordeal. Each friend or relative who approached to offer sympathy constituted a small emotional crisis, and Sylvia Kleinman sat with her daughter on one side and her son on the other, squeezing their hands in hers, sometimes breaking down, sometimes not, but drawing from them something that helped, something that made it easier.

She leaned on both of them, and together they kept her going. And then, when she was asleep with a sedative, Andrea’s aunt Estelle sleeping in Andrea’s old room to handle nocturnal emergencies, and when Mark and Andrea were in their own house with Robin asleep and no one else around, then it was Andrea’s turn to fall apart. She had been strong all day when her strength was required. Now she would buckle, and Mark would go on being a mensch, talking to her when she needed to hear words, listening to her when she had to babble on and on, pouring drinks into her because she needed something and wouldn’t take tranquilizers, and holding her when she needed to be held. She had a great need to be held.

They did not speak of his infidelity. She was reasonably certain of that. On a couple of nights she had quite a bit to drink, enough so that her memory was spotty, but she had no reason to worry that she had said or done anything to indicate that she knew. And of course there was no need to speak of it, no need now to think of it, because of course it was over and would not be resumed.

She did not like to permit herself to think of it in precisely those terms. That her father’s death might have brought her husband entirely back to her was as unsettling as it was a thoroughly persuasive hypothesis. She couldn’t think of it without seeing herself as having involuntarily sacrificed the one for the other, her father for her husband. She recognized the idea as nonsensical solipsism. She would not have done any such thing even if she could. Even so, her father’s death was a tragedy, and she did not like to think that any good could have issued from it.

Nor was it long before she had no need to fight off the thought. Before very long he had taken up where he had left off. He was seeing her again, whoever she was. And Andrea knew it, and he knew that she knew. So even her guilt was taken away from her.

At her mother’s house they sat in the front room with cups of strong black coffee. Her mother had been sitting in that room when Andrea drove up. As far as she knew, it was the first time her mother had purposely sat in that room since her father had died in it.

She didn’t say anything to that effect, but her mother raised the subject. “This is the first I’ve been in this room since that night,” she said. “With other people in the house, that is.”

“You’ve come in here alone?”

“Oh, yes. Frequently. I make myself do certain things, Andrea.” And, when Andrea refused to ask about these certain things, “Sitting in that chair, for example. Sleeping on your father’s side of the bed.”

“You’re torturing yourself.”

“No. I know the difference, and I’m not interested in torturing myself. When Mark volunteered to go through the drawers and closets and give the clothing to the Goodwill I didn’t give him an argument. That would have been, I would have had trouble doing it. But there are other things that a person has to do sooner or later, and rushing isn’t good but neither is putting it off. There’s a time when it’s better to get it over with, even if it hurts a little.” She considered this. “Even if it hurts more than a little,” she said.

“I just don’t think you should overdo.”

“No.”

“Or make yourself unhappy.”

“Not make. But I don’t see anything wrong with a person letting herself be unhappy. The sedatives Zucker gave me at the beginning served a purpose. They were necessary.”

“Of course they were.”

“And I still take a sleeping pill at night, a half a grain of Seconal, because there’s no point in lying awake nights. But the other things he gave me, the Librium and the antidepressants. You know, you can tranquilize yourself into a wide-awake coma with those things. Mildred Weingarten started on them when Harold had his operation. He had a prostate operation two years ago, it was completely successful, and he’s fine, and poor Mil has been stoned for the past two years. Of course she was at the funeral but you wouldn’t have noticed, but she always has this glassy look in her eyes and she’s so calm you want to take her pulse to make sure she’s still there. Do you remember that program, Jackie Kennedy showing off the White House? Mil has that same voice now. ‘And this is the Rose Room, and that was President Lincoln’s desk.’ That breathless little-girl voice.”

“You do voices so beautifully. Maybe that’s where Robin gets it from.”

“I could always get a smile out of your father.” Sylvia Kleinman hesitated, but only for a moment. “I don’t want to be a zombie,” she said.

“You couldn’t be a zombie if you tried.”

“I don’t want to swallow any scientific miracle designed to keep me from feeling what I have every reason in the world to feel. It’s not going to kill me to cry once in a while. It’s not going to kill me to feel depressed. Sometimes it’s a very good thing to feel depressed. When you lose someone you want to realize how much you’ve lost or else you don’t appreciate how much you had. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, depression. It can be a relief. Or a release, I don’t know which I mean. Maybe both. Like crying.”

She remembered the night she’d sat up with a bottle mourning Winkie. And other scattered nights when alcohol and solitude helped her sit among shapeless sorrows reaching out at wispy insights.

“Thirty-nine years. Do you know something, Andrea? We loved each other.”

“I know.”

“That’s not terribly common. As a matter of fact it’s unusual. I was with your father, why, since I was a girl, really. My whole adult life. Wouldn’t it be terrible not to be sad? Wouldn’t that be a terrible thing?”

“Oh, yes.”

“It would be awful. I would not want to be like that,” said Sylvia Kleinman.

They were in the house on Admiral Road for almost two hours before they left for the cemetery. They had lunch, they drank coffee, they talked, and the older woman worked on a sweater for her granddaughter. Andrea had tried knitting at various times before deciding she lacked the patience for it. Watching her mother, she thought that it didn’t even seem very interesting. Once you were accomplished enough to do it properly, your fingers worked automatically without any participation by your mind.

The telephone rang periodically. Each time her mother answered it, and each time it was one of her friends just calling to see how she was doing. The first few times the phone rang Andrea thought it might be Mark. Their conversation had disturbed her and she supposed it had disturbed him as well, and she thought he might try to reach her at her mother’s to make some effort at smoothing things out. But the phone kept ringing and it kept not being him.

And why, really, should he call? Nothing he could tell her over the telephone would make things any better, and any number of things could make the situation worse.

She reached for a cigarette and discovered she had one still burning in the ashtray. Every few months she tried to stop smoking, and each time she found some source of tension which excused her putting off the job of quitting. Most of the times she stopped she did so without missing a cigarette. She would put out the last cigarette of the night and resolve not to smoke the next day, and when morning came she usually had a cigarette going before the resolution even came to mind.

Now she sat smoking and listened to her mother having her standard conversation. Her voice had an artificial brittle tone to it, or so it seemed to Andrea.

“That was your mother-in-law, Andrea. I thought of telling her you were here but I didn’t bother.”

“I’m glad you didn’t.”

“You’d have had to talk, and it was enough that I had to talk to her. I shouldn’t say that. It was nice of her to call. It’s nice of everybody to call. The phone calls have been tapering off a little the past few weeks, but today the volume’s up again. Because of it being the anniversary, but do you know that not one single person has mentioned the fact? As if they don’t want to call it to my attention in case it slipped my mind. Although I’m sure I’d behave exactly the same way. As a matter of fact I know I already have behaved the same way, making a point of calling on a birthday or a yahrzeit but not mentioning it unless the other person mentioned it first. Which is sensible, actually. I’d rather not have that particular conversation with the entire world, and by not mentioning it they leave it up to me.” She stopped talking suddenly and frowned. “Do you know something? I’m becoming a chatterbox.”

“Oh, Mother, you are not.”

“But I am, I know I am, I can tell the difference. I’m thinking out loud, using you being here as an excuse for talking to myself.” She stood up. “Are you done with that coffee? Because I’d like to go to the cemetery now.”

“You’re absolutely certain? Maybe the first visit since the funeral, maybe it shouldn’t be on a special day, that’s all.”

“Second visit.”

“What was that?”

“Second visit. I went by myself two or three weeks ago.”

“You never said anything.”

“Why should I say anything? I was sitting here one afternoon and I got the impulse to go and I went. Andrea, there is something you’ve got to understand. I am able to cope with things.”

“Oh, Mother, I know that.”

“I’m not sure that you do. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to. I surprise myself every day. I have more strength than I ever knew I had. Except that I’m not sure it’s right to call it strength. Whatever it is, it’s the thing that enables a person to keep on. The fact that I’m very sad, that I have a deep sense of loss, that doesn’t seem to interfere with my ability to handle things. Now can we just go? Or I’ll go myself if you’d rather, but I want to go now.”

“Oh, Mother!”

“I’m sorry, Andrea, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean the way that sounded. You know I didn’t.” The phone began to ring. “Oh, don’t bother to answer it. Just let it ring or we’ll never get out of here.”

They could still hear the phone as they got into Andrea’s car. But it wouldn’t be Mark, she told herself. There was no reason to think it was Mark.

Mother and daughter kept up an effortless conversation on the drive to the cemetery. When the main gates came into view they fell silent. As Andrea turned the car into the cemetery she said, “You’ll have to tell me where to go. I’d be completely lost.”

“They gave me a map when I was here before. A little man offered to show me the route but I told him I would find it myself. I remember he had something wrong with one of his eyes. I have the map somewhere in my bag but I think I can remember. Keep bearing left until I tell you different.”

They drove slowly, and in silence. The spring weather had brought other visitors to the cemetery. They were mostly women, and most of them had come alone. Signs of spring, Andrea thought. The trees begin to leaf out, the spring bulbs push up out of the soil, the birds come north again. And the widows emerge from their dark houses and swim upstream to graveyards.

“The next fork to the right. And there it is, on the left just beyond those trees.”

The grave was situated in one of several Jewish sections of Forest Lawn Cemetery. The double plot of which he now occupied the southern portion had been purchased by David Kleinman in 1961. He had never mentioned this fact to his wife or daughter; they learned about the plot when they opened the strongbox in which he kept his insurance policies and a copy of his will. (The will was unremarkable — after token bequests to his office staff, everything was left outright to his widow.) Sylvia Kleinman was not surprised that a burial site had been purchased. Her husband had been meticulous about putting his affairs in order since that first heart attack. What did surprise her was that he had made this purchase so long ago. But it was not an enormous surprise, and certainly not out of character. It was very much the sort of thing David Kleinman might do on his own initiative, and, having done it, the sort of thing he would never dream of discussing. The grave was as yet unmarked. In some months a stone would be put in place. More orthodox Jews waited a specified number of months before raising the stone, and did so at an unveiling ceremony accompanied by a brief memorial service. But there would be no ceremonial unveiling for David Kleinman. When the stone was ready it would be installed without a fuss.

Andrea knew what the stone would look like. She had been consulted when the stonecutter had been commissioned to prepare it. It was to be a very plain rectangular block of granite. The name Kleinman would be engraved across the top; below it her father’s name would be on one side, along with the year of his birth and the year of his death. The other half of the stone’s face would be blank. For the time being.

Andrea parked the car a few dozen yards from the grave site. She walked around to open the door for her mother and took her mother’s arm when she emerged. She could read very little expression in her mother’s face. The features were masked, withdrawn, remote. They walked together across the asphalt roadway and over the grass.

She found herself walking very carefully, setting her feet down gently, as if she were walking not on the dead but on the living. At the last interment she’d attended before her father’s, it had struck her that there ought to be walkways between the graves. When hours later she’d mentioned the thought to Mark he’d called her inconsistent. “You were just saying what a waste of space cemeteries are. How everybody should be cremated and the ashes scattered. Now you want aisles between the graves.” And of course she had been inconsistent, and of course burial was stupid, and of course embalming was stupid, and the disgusting cosmetology of undertakers was stupid. But if you were going to bury someone, and then walk so matter-of-factly over their bones—

So now she walked lightly, as if the dead might groan beneath her weight.

She did not know how long they stood together, heads bowed, at the side of the grave. It seemed to her that she ought to order her thoughts somehow. There were prayers to be said at gravesides, but she did not know any and would not have said one if she had.

Was there anything that she could say to her father? If there were important things they should have told each other, it was past the time for that now. And so she just let her thoughts find their own paths. It was a beautiful spring day, certainly. Many of the graves were planted with flowers and flowering shrubs. They would do the same, but not until the stone was up.

She closed her eyes and heard birdsong not far off. When she was in high school a boy in one of her classes had been an enthusiastic bird watcher. He used to go to the cemetery early in the morning before dawn to look at birds through binoculars. He had told her this once, and she had shown polite interest while thinking privately that anybody who would get up in the middle of the night to chase sparrows had to be out of his tree himself. Then one day, painfully shy but resolute, he had invited her to accompany him on his next birding expedition. She couldn’t now remember what excuse she had offered. She’d stammered out something. What she did remember was the look on his face. She had evidently figured prominently in his fantasy life, while he had scarcely existed for her, and she had consequently managed to be unintentionally cruel.

Funny. She hadn’t thought of him in years. And, considered in retrospect, the prospect of walking through the still cemetery at dawn was attractive, even romantic. At the time she’d thought it creepy and ridiculous.

“Andrea, wait for me in the car, please. I want to be alone for a few minutes.”

She hesitated for just a moment, then turned and walked back to the car. A cloud had slipped across the sun and she felt a chill. She got into the car, sat behind the wheel with her arms folded over her breasts. Through the windshield she watched her mother, a still figure on a painted landscape.

Her mother stood beside the man at whose side she had spent two-thirds of her entire life. And she stood where she would someday lie. Andrea felt something very chilling in the idea of standing upon a spot and knowing you would one day be buried there. And when the tombstone was in place, with one side left blank for her mother’s name — oh, it was chilling, of course it was, and yet in a strange way there was something almost comforting about it.

In a month she and Mark would celebrate their seventh wedding anniversary. At any rate they would mark the occasion. A celebration might not be entirely in order.

In thirty-two years she and Mark would be married as long as her parents would have been married today. If they were alive.

If they were still married.

She shuddered, more at the second thought than the first, and fumbled in her purse for her cigarettes. Was it proper to smoke in the cemetery? But she was in her car, for God’s sake. It shouldn’t matter, should it?

She lit a cigarette, glanced at her mother, who did not seem to have changed position at all. The woman lived each day with grief for company, but for all that Andrea felt sorry for her, today she envied her. She had lost something infinitely precious, to be sure, but for thirty-nine years she had had something precious.

While Andrea, for the first time in seven years, was forced to consider the possibility that her marriage might fail.

And that of course was why she found Mark’s infidelity so impossible to cope with. She could not reasonably be upset at the fact that he might find someone else attractive. If she could only have believed Eileen’s argument — that men committed adultery in a casual and meaningless manner — then she could probably have accepted it readily enough, could have overlooked it as Eileen had advised her to do.

But Mark was not apt to be casual about such things, The sexual roles, as Eileen conceived them, were turned upside down in Andrea’s marriage. It was Mark who had had rather less premarital experience, Mark who was less able to divorce the physical and emotional components of sex.

She had been with two other men since her wedding day, and even now, when she found the whole idea of adultery hateful, she could not really find it in herself to waste time regretting those two affairs. That afternoon with John Riordan hardly seemed like adultery, and certainly could not be said to constitute an affair. It was a way of closing out the past, of recognizing the dimensions of the role she had chosen for herself, of saying good-bye permanently to the person she had been before marriage. She had not been touched, and this was consistent with the nature of the sex act she had chosen. She had remained clothed. Riordan had not touched her flesh. Her mouth had performed a mechanical service, making the sex act a metaphorical statement.

With Cass Drozdowski, the string of Thursdays had been any number of things, none of them threatening her marriage in any substantial way. There had been a real element of risk. If Mark had found out about their affair — and it had not been impossible that he should have found out — then her marriage might have been imperiled. That possibility aside, it had never been for a moment conceivable that either she or Cass would begin building sand castles of romantic love. Oh, Cass was a way for her to “prove to herself that she had a life outside of her role as wife and mother. It gave her a vehicle for harmless revenge on Mark for his having cast her in this role. But it had never meant anything to either of them, and they were both relieved when she ended it.

On her thirtieth birthday she had decided to terminate the affair, and indeed she had seen him only once after that. It was two weeks and a day after her birthday and they met as arranged at the motel where they always met. But they did not embrace and they did not go to bed. She explained to him what she had decided, finding as she did so that it was much easier to have this conversation than she had thought it would be. But then she had always found it easy to talk to Cass.

When she had finished speaking he said, “Well, I expected this. I thought another month or two, but probably not much more than that, and God knows we’ve already had the best of it. I’d say something about staying friends but of course we will and it goes without saying.”

“Friends. It’s all we ever were.”

“That’s exactly true, Andrea. Andrea. Did they ever call you Andy?”

“They never did and they better never start.”

“Far be it from me to be the first. Where were we? Friends and how that’s all we ever were. It’s true, and I’ll tell you something. That put us ahead of most people. You wouldn’t believe the number of people go to bed together without even liking each other.”

“Oh, I would believe it.”

“Yes, you might at that.”

“Is that supposed to mean something?”

“Just the dumb Polack making conversation. No, it’s not supposed to mean anything in particular. Why did you ever marry the guy in the first place, Andrea?”

“Now that’s a hell of a question.”

He nodded. “It’s one I’ve been wondering about ever since I met you. Well, not quite, because I met you before you were married.”

“New Year’s Eve.”

“New Year’s Eve, and I can’t say I paid much attention to you that night. Nothing personal. The way I was drinking I didn’t pay much attention to anything or anybody. But ever since I got to know you, yes, I’ve been wondering about it.”

“And what is wrong with the usual answers? Such as Mark and I happen to love each other.”

“I’m sure you do. But I don’t think that’s why you married him. It could be why he married you but not the other way around.”

“I suppose you have a theory.”

“Oh, maybe the bare bones of a theory. Not that you want to hear it.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

He considered, then shrugged. “All right. I think you married him the same way you moved back to Buffalo and into your parents’ house. Both moves were ways of coming home, of playing it safe. It was a kind of retirement, wasn’t it?”

“That’s a really crummy way of putting it.”

“If it makes you angry I’m sorry.”

“I’m not angry.”

He looked at her, his eyes intent. “I have the feeling something happened in New York before you left, something that really scared the living shit out of you. And everything afterward was a reaction to it. What happened there, Andrea?”

“Nothing in particular.”

“That’s hard to believe.”

She thought for a moment. “Nothing you don’t more or less know about,” she said. “I was doing too much drinking and too much screwing around. The two seemed to go together.”

“They still do, I’ve noticed. For most of the people in the world.”

“Maybe. Where was I?”

“Drinking and screwing around.”

“Yes.” She closed her eyes for a moment, taking time to examine the memories that filtered in behind her eyelids. “I’d been working uptown. A music publisher, it was secretarial work but there was supposedly an opportunity to learn the business. But I didn’t want to learn the business and I didn’t care about the work and I lost the job.”

“They fired you?”

“Not exactly. I was coming in late and calling in sick a lot and the boss talked to me, and the two of us more or less agreed I would leave. It was one of those things where I could have talked my way back in but I didn’t want to.”

“Uh-huh. Then what?”

“Then I went through a period of time, I don’t know how long, where I would wait tables here and there in the Village. There were plenty of jobs available and you could go from one to another and work when you needed the money. With the tips it paid better than office work. And it made it very easy to drift. You could adjust your hours at will. And I wasn’t getting anywhere and wasn’t even trying to get anywhere, and eventually it occurred to me that I didn’t want to get anywhere. I didn’t want to wait tables for the rest of my life but I didn’t want a more challenging job, either. And the life I was leading, sleeping with a lot of men and barely knowing their names, hanging out at the bars every night, it was no way to spend a life.”

“You must have enjoyed it.”

“Of course I did, for a while. But you can only spend so much time that way or you go off the edge. You said something must have scared the shit out of me.”

“I had the feeling.”

“There were lots of things that scared me. There was a woman who used to turn up at the Riviera. I don’t know how old she was. Probably the age I am now, but maybe older. She seemed very old to me at the time. She was an alcoholic but she didn’t get sloppy drunk and she was presentable, and just about everybody who hung out there had gone home with her at one time or another. I reached a point where I hated to be in the same bar with her because it was so easy to see myself turning into her.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Vicki, her name was. I never knew her last name. Hundreds of people down there that I knew by their first names only. Those were funny days. There was one morning — Cass, I don’t know if I should tell you this.”

“Don’t if you don’t want to.”

“Oh, there’s really no reason not to. It was the first thing I thought of when you said something must have scared me. One morning I woke up in my own bed in my own apartment.”

“And there was a total stranger lying next to you.”

“No. That happened once but it wasn’t that bad, and there were times when I would wake up in some man’s apartment without remembering going there or what we did, but usually I would at least remember the guy, No, this time I woke up alone.”

“And that scared you?”

“Forget it.”

“I’m sorry, Andrea.”

“I woke up alone. And I tried to remember the previous night, and it had been a usual kind of night, this bar and that bar and then my memory began getting patchy, and the last thing I could remember was being by myself and on my way from one bar to another, I had this flash of throwing up on the street. I used to throw up occasionally. I never do that any more. But in those days I never had a hangover, I never knew what a hangover was, and nowadays, God...”

“Don’t remind me.”

“But that morning. No hangover, but this rush of guilt and fear because of the holes in my memory. And then I discovered that I had come home with somebody, I’d brought someone home with me.”

“I thought you said you were alone.”

“Yes, I was. But someone had been with me and had left. I didn’t remember any of it but I’d brought someone home and I had had sex with him and I didn’t know who it was.”

“How could you be sure?”

She stared at him. “You’re a lawyer, aren’t you? Let’s just say there was evidence. Oh, hell. I had dried come in my pubic hair, does that clear it up for you? If you laugh I swear I’ll throw an ashtray at you.”

“I’m not laughing.”

“It was the thought of some man walking around and he’d fucked me and I might have enjoyed it, who could say, and I didn’t even know who it was. I could meet him on the street and not recognize him and he’d have fucked me and he could give me a big hello and he might be a total stranger to me. Or maybe it was someone I knew, an old friend, and he’d say, hey, last night was terrific, and I’d have to pretend I knew what he was talking about. Or — oh, hell, it was terrible. I’m sure there was nothing I could have done that would have been as bad as not remembering what I did do, and I knew that at the time, but it seemed to sum up everything that was wrong with the life I was living.”

“So you came home.”

“Not that day and not that week, but I think that I was what decided me. If any single thing decided me.” She looked at him thoughtfully. “I wasn’t going to tell you because I was ashamed, you know, and it wasn’t anything to be all that ashamed about, was it?”

“Not really.”

“The shame was because I didn’t remember.”

“And that’s why you’re in Buffalo, and that’s why you’re married to Mark. One thing, though.”

“What?”

“Something I’ve been thinking. It wouldn’t be hard for you to start hating him for the same reasons you married him. Buffalo is safe but it’s also dull, and you might decide that Mark’s both of those things and that it’s dull being his wife. Now hold on. I’m not saying he’s a dull man. He’s not. But you can take him for I granted, or at least you think you can, and you might wind up resenting him for all of that. I don’t know if I’m putting this correctly.”

“And I don’t know that I care for what you’re saying.”

“Well, maybe we’ll just let it go at that.”

“Yes, maybe we will. Making such a big thing about how we’ll always be friends, but this conversation could end a beautiful friendship right off the bat.”

“Oh, I doubt it, but we’ll let it go.”

But she couldn’t let it go. “I wonder how much you project,” she said. “If you think about who you married.”

“Oh, there’s a little truth in that.”

“And maybe you only wanted to screw me so that you could get even with her.”

“No, that’s not how it works with me. I don’t like to look for complicated motives, you know.”

“Not when it comes to you, you mean.”

“You got it, kid. Why look for complicated answers for the simple Polack? Every boy needs a hobby and adultery’s more interesting than stamp collecting. I’m a runner-arounder, that’s all. I’d screw a snake if somebody would hold its head.”

“Well, I like that,” she said.

When her mother returned to the car neither of them said anything. Andrea started the engine and turned the car around, and she was able to find her way back out of the cemetery the way she had come.

Halfway home Andrea braked for a traffic light. Her mother said, “I wonder how often I’ll do that. Go to the cemetery.”

“How do you mean that?”

“Well, I went to my parents’ graves. They’re buried in Pine Hill, of course. I always went a couple of times a year, and I’m only beginning to realize it now, Andrea, but I went because I thought I had to. That it was something I was supposed to do, the duties of a daughter. Not that I thought anyone was looking down from heaven and watching me, because that’s nonsense, but as though I acted as if somebody was watching. Oh, it was a way of remaining close to them, or trying to feel close to them, but it was also a duty, it was something to do a certain number of times a year. I’m out of cigarettes. Do you have one?”

“In my bag.”

“Thank you. With your father, it’s different. Just now while I was standing there alone I was thinking that this was as close as I could get to him. But is that true? I don’t think that it is true. I think that I am always close to him, wherever I am, and at the same time I’m never close to him. He’s a part of me, and at the same time he’s gone, and both of those facts will always be true. And they are just as true whether I’m standing in a cemetery or saying kaddish in temple or sitting home watching television. Does it make sense to you, what I just said?”

“Yes, of course.”

“I wasn’t sure. I know what I meant but I wasn’t sure I made it clear. I suppose I’ll go to the cemetery as often as I feel like it but I don’t know how often that will be. One thing, I don’t think I’ll ever go because I think I’m supposed to go. All the things we do because we think we’re supposed to do them, and who on earth cares what we do? Nobody does.”

When she pulled the car into the driveway on Admiral Road her mother told her not to bother coming in. “You’ll want to get home. Robin must be home from nursery school now, isn’t she? I think I’ll just lie down for a rest before I fix myself some dinner.”

“Why don’t you come out and have dinner with us?”

“Oh, that’s nice of you, but not tonight. Tonight I think I’d rather be by myself.” She reached for the door handle, “Thanks for going out with me, darling. I appreciate it.”

“Mark’s having an affair.”

“What did you say?”

She looked straight ahead, focusing her eyes upon her hands as they rested on the steering wheel. She found that she was staring at her wedding ring and thought that it might dissolve symbolically before her eyes.

“I didn’t think I was going to say that.”

“Well, I didn’t hear anything,” Sylvia Kleinman said.

“He’s seeing someone.”

“You can talk to me, Andrea, but only if you’re sure you want to. Otherwise I never heard a word you said just now. If you’d rather.”

She turned, looked at her mother. “No, I have to talk about it,” she said. “Oh, God, it’s been going on for months. I have to talk about it.”

“Well, come inside,” her mother said, after a moment. “Come on in the house. I’ll put up a pot of coffee.”

She had thought it would be very hard to talk about it with her mother, yet once she started it turned out to be very easy. The words flowed. Then there were no more words to say and she sat waiting for her mother to say something.

“He knows that you know.”

“Yes.”

“But you haven’t had a confrontation. It hasn’t come out into the open.”

“No, not yet. It almost has. We talk about it without talking about it. I called him this morning to ask him if he would be coming home to dinner. It was childish, it was a way of telling him without telling him. I don’t really know why I did it.”

“Because you were hurt.”

“I suppose that must be why.”

“Of course.”

“It’ll be better when it all comes out in the open, when we can talk about it instead of talking around it.”

But her mother was shaking her head. “I don’t agree.”

“You don’t?”

“It would be better if he didn’t even know you knew, but I suppose it’s too late for that. But you can stop mentioning it, stop referring to it. You can act as though you’re forgetting about it, as though you’ve decided that it has all blown over. And that will make it easier for all concerned, and before you know it it will blow over, and that will be the end of it.”

“Just like that.”

“That’s the way it usually works, Andrea.”

“Unless it’s someone he’s serious about. And I think it probably is.”

“And you’re afraid.”

“Of course I’m afraid. Who wouldn’t be?”

“You’re afraid he’ll leave you and Robin.”

“Yes, I’m afraid of that. Or I may leave him — that’s a possibility too, you know.”

“Why would you do that?”

“Why would I do that?” Her voice cracked, and she reined herself in, made herself calm down. Quietly she said, “Because I just might find out that I don’t love him any more, Mother. For a starter.”

Her mother got to her feet, crossed the room and stood for a moment at the window. It was very much a theatrical gesture, and Andrea wondered if it had been done with a theatrical purpose in mind. Whether it had or not, Sylvia Kleinman had certainly taken command of the scene. She stood at the window, her back to Andrea, and let the silence build.

Then she said, “A couple of years ago you were talking about one of your friends, I don’t remember which girl it was. You said she was acting as if she was the first woman ever to have a baby.”

“Oh, Barbara Singer.”

“That’s right.”

“The expression wasn’t original on my part, I’m afraid.”

“That doesn’t matter. It was a nice turn of phrase because a person instantly knew just what you meant. You’re acting as if you were the first woman whose husband ever saw another woman.”

“In other words, it happens all the time.”

“That’s right, Andrea.”

“In other words, men are just little boys, and they can have sex without being involved, and it doesn’t necessarily mean anything, and if we all stick our heads in the sand like a flock of ostriches everything will be all right. In other words.”

“Not that, exactly.”

“Oh? Because that’s what it sounds like. Exactly.”

“No.” Crossing the room toward her, sitting on the couch beside her. “With some men that’s true. They have other women to prove their manhood. Or because it’s a pleasure that they aren’t willing to deny themselves, and it means no more to them than eating a meal or swallowing a drink. Maybe more men are like that than not, I couldn’t say.”

“I don’t think Mark’s like that.”

“No, neither do I. Although any man might be like that from time to time, but something you told me makes me think it isn’t that way in this case.”

“That he picked me up again after... after daddy’s death.”

“That’s right. If it was just physical, and the two of you became very close right after your father’s death. Not that you haven’t always been close but I think you saw how much you needed him. Now that would have been a very good excuse for him to break it off with this woman and leave it broken off. You don’t have any idea who she is?”

“No idea at all. I try not to think about her. Of course I want to know who she is, but at the same time I don’t want to know.”

“Yes, I can understand that. Well, it was a time when he could have left it broken off if it was just a sex thing, just a seven-year itch — you have been married seven years next month, isn’t it?”

“Seven years next month, yes.”

“But the seven-year itch isn’t necessarily just sex. Or it can be just sex, but the man involved might have to convince himself it was more than pure sex or else he would feel it was cheapened. What’s the matter, what did I say?”

“That was perfect, what you said. That’s Mark, all right. That’s exactly what he would do.”

“You’d know better than I would, Andrea, but I think he might do that.”

“Oh, he would.” There was a delight in this insight into his character, a pleasure in recognition. “He’s such a romantic. I think he could do almost anything if he managed to convince himself that he was doing it for love.” She closed her eyes for a moment. Without opening them she said, “He could leave me, if he thought he loved someone else.”

“He won’t leave you.”

“He might.”

“Not if you make it easy for him to stay. Right now you’re going through two things at once. You’re afraid, concerned about the future of your marriage, and at the same time your pride is hurt. Your pride wants to confront him, to force the issue, but underneath you want your marriage to last and so that’s the last thing you should do.”

They went on talking, and they drank coffee and smoked cigarettes, and Andrea kept raising objections which her mother kept handling, calmly, patiently. But there was something that kept her mother’s words from soothing her and she did not know what it was. Then she was struck by the visual image of her mother at the graveside, and then she knew.

She said, “But don’t you see? No, you wouldn’t see, because you had something perfect yourself. But whether the marriage lasts or it doesn’t, it almost doesn’t matter. Because it will never be the same between us again.”

“That’s not true.”

“We’ve been married seven years. How will I feel about Mark in thirty-two years? Not the way you feel about daddy.”

“You may. I hope you will.”

“Because I’ll forgive and forget? I don’t think a person does that.”

“Really?”

“No, I really don’t. Forgive? Oh, of course I would be able to forgive him, but it would always be there, wouldn’t it? I don’t think I would ever get over it.”

“But you would. You will.”

“I don’t think so. I don’t think anyone would completely get over something like that, really.”

“People do, Andrea.”

“I don’t think—”

“I did, Andrea.”

She looked at her mother. Their eyes met. She felt as if she’d been struck in the chest, directly over her heart, and involuntarily she put her hand to the spot and fancied she could feel her heart pounding beneath it.

She was back in her own house in plenty of time to take Lucinda to the bus stop. Then she set about preparing dinner, with Robin keeping her company. Robin kept up a nonstop account of all the fascinating things Lucinda had told her. On this particular day Lucinda had been preoccupied by the various ways in which any number of relatives and acquaintances had died. This one had cancer, this one had the pleurisy, that one had fallen in the path of a New York subway train. She didn’t know whether or not to interrupt Robin’s grim recital, but decided it would probably be more traumatic if Robin were prevented from repeating what she had heard.

And at least Lucinda talked to the child. She commonly said more in an hour to Robin than Andrea heard from her in a year.

She kept busy in the kitchen, kept up her half of the conversation with Robin. Mark came home at the normal time, and the two of them met him at the door. Robin wrapped her arms around his legs and hugged him. He picked her up and held her in the air. “Spring is here,” he announced, “’cause I see a Robin.” He put the child down and took the drink that Andrea was holding, and she got up on her toes and kissed him.

He said, “Quite a welcome.”

“Well, I was a bitch on the phone. In fact I’ve been a pain lately, haven’t I?”

“Oh, not all that much of a pain.”

“The closest I can come to an excuse for this morning is I just talked to my mother before I called you, and on top of it being the anniversary she wanted to go to the cemetery. I don’t remember if I mentioned that or not.”

“Yes, you did.”

“Well, it rattled me a little.”

“I can understand that.” He put his arm around her waist and they walked to the kitchen where she had fixed herself a drink. She picked it up and they raised their glasses to each other and drank. In the living room he asked her how it had gone at the cemetery.

“It wasn’t really bad. I didn’t know it before, but this wasn’t her first visit. She went all by herself a few weeks ago and never told me.”

“She’s quite a gal, your mother.”

“Oh, more than you know.”

“I’m sure.”

“No, much more than you know, more than I ever knew. She told me the most extraordinary thing this afternoon.”

“Oh?”

“It’ll keep.” And, with a nod in Robin’s direction, “Little pitchers and all. Anyway, it’s a long story and I want to make sure I tell it right. Incidentally, if I seem a little odd, it’s probably because I’m still reacting to what she told me.”

“Now you’ve got me hooked.”

“Well, stay hooked. Right now I’ll get dinner on the table. No, stay where you are, you can read the paper if you want. It’ll be another few minutes.”

During dinner, and in the time between dinner and Robin’s bedtime, she kept going over what her mother had told her and trying to decide how she would recount it to Mark.

She was waiting in the living room when Mark finished tucking Robin in for the night. “That kid’s certainly morbid lately,” he said.

“Morbid? Oh, Lucinda.”

“And Lucinda’s friends and relations, all of whom seem to have come to a bad end. Maybe you could say something to Lucinda.”

“We don’t have a terribly verbal relationship. Robin’s the only one she talks to. And I was thinking, I’m not sure it’s Lucinda. What I mean is that Robin’s probably very eager for information on the subject of death and dying. Because of my father. She seems to be handling things well but kids are brilliant at reacting the way they think you want them to. And you know how close she was to Poppa David.”

“It’s a damn shame she has to learn about death at this age,” he said.

“Yes, but when’s a good time?”

“Well, that’s a point.” He was in his chair, an oversized Naugahyde recliner of the type Robin spoke of categorically as Daddy Chairs, and he leaned back in it and elevated his feet. “The goyim have it a lot easier. They can tell their kids that So-and-so went to heaven and leave it at that. They can even believe it themselves if they feel like it. I wonder if the whole concept of Heaven and Hell originated because some kid was making a pest of himself and some parent wanted to find an answer that would shut him up.”

“What a thought.”

“I wonder if many of them really believe it. Here I have two Catholic partners and I haven’t got the slightest idea what they really believe in. Kids in college talk about their beliefs but when you grow up you learn not to discuss them. What do Cass and Tony believe in? Now Tony doesn’t go to church and Cass does, but I’d be surprised if Cass even believes in God, while I would guess Tony does, at least on some level. But do they believe in heaven? Probably not, but they’ll tell their kids they do, whereas we can’t take that easy out with Robin.” He yawned. “Well, it’s supposed to be hard to be a Jew, isn’t it? Part of the game. You had something you wanted to tell me, or don’t you feel like talking about it?”

“No, I want to tell you. I thought it was so extraordinary, but maybe that’s just me.” She paused to light a cigarette. “I told you we went to the cemetery and that wasn’t as bad as it might have been. Not that it was a pleasure, but it could have been worse, and she’s really very good at keeping control of herself, and I think in a healthy way.

“But that’s not the point. I drove her back to her house — I almost said their house, I’m still doing that now and then. And I went inside for a minute, and we got to talking about Linda.”

“My sister Linda?”

“Yes. I don’t know how we got on the subject. Oh, I do, too. Your mother had called earlier and she mentioned that and got onto the subject of Linda from there. She wanted to know if there was any possibility of Linda and Jeff getting back together again.”

“About as much a possibility as there is that the sun will come up in the west tomorrow.”

“That’s more or less what I told her, but in a less colorful way. She thought this was terrible, and she had almost as much trouble using the word divorce as she has saying cancer, and she asked why didn’t Linda go out there so Jeff could see the children—”

“Oh, Christ. If that son of a bitch had the slightest interest in his kids.”

“That’s what I told her, and without saying so I tried to get across the idea that he is a son of a bitch. I explained what you’d gone through to get him to send child support on a regular basis, and I told her some of the stunts he’s pulled, and she still inclined toward the position that Linda ought to make an effort to keep the marriage together.”

It surprised her how easy it was to invent this part of the conversation. She felt that she could, if pressed, reconstruct the entire conversation about Linda, when indeed she and her mother had talked about Linda not at all. But she needed a suitable way of leading into what her mother had in fact told her, and this was better than anything else she could think of.

“So I told her she was just making a blanket defense of the institution of marriage because she had had an exceptionally fine marriage.”

“A point I would have made if you didn’t,” he said, nodding approval. “A very good point.”

“That’s what I thought, but wait. I told her how Jeff had been running around, and being very open about it, or at least that’s Linda’s story—”

“I don’t think there’s any question about it.”

“—and I asked her how she would have felt if Daddy had ever had an affair with another woman.”

“And?”

“Well, can’t you take it from there?”

“I think I know what you’re getting at but I’m not going to say it.”

“That’s it, all right, and now I’m having trouble saying it. But I’ll say it. By God, if that woman could say it I think I can. My father had an affair with another woman. No, there’s more. My father fell in love with another woman. And he wanted to get a divorce. He wanted to divorce my mother and marry another woman.”

He leaned forward, his expression thoughtful. “That’s hard to believe,” he said.

“Hard to believe? It’s impossible to believe, at least for me. But it’s the truth.”

“When did this happen, did she say?”

“Almost twenty years ago. Which means it happened after twenty years of marriage. I guess he was about forty-five at the time. I would have been, oh, I suppose I was a freshman in high school.”

“Thinking back, did you have any idea at the time?”

“Are you kidding? Of course not. God, all my life there’s been one thing I’ve always been absolutely certain of, and that’s that my parents’ marriage was made in heaven. That they had a perfect relationship and were completely devoted to each other.”

“I don’t suppose there’s such a thing as an absolutely perfect marriage.”

“No, of course not... but my parents — well, I’m certain that I’ve always viewed their relationship through rose-colored glasses. And my father has always been a hero to me. But the idea that he wanted to leave my mother, that they actually sat down together and talked in terms of divorce — I’ll tell you something, I think it rattled me more twenty years after the fact than it did her at the time it was happening. Not literally, but it shook the hell out of me. I questioned her as if she was on the witness stand and I was cross-examining her. You know, it’s shaking me up now to talk about it.”

“I can see that. Do you want a drink?”

“I think I do.”

He fixed drinks for both of them, brought her hers, sat down with his in his chair.

He said, “Your father was in his forties.”

“Yes. Around forty-five, I guess. I could figure it out more exactly if it mattered.”

“I was only thinking that it’s supposed to be pretty common at that age. A man gets to be forty-five or fifty and he starts to worry about, oh, the decline of his masculinity, say. Or general worries about growing old. And then some chick turns up, and she thinks he’s fascinating because he’s a mature and intelligent and successful man, and he goes crazy over her because she’s twenty years younger than his wife and it’s an amazing ego thing for him to realize that she’s interested in him. From what I’ve heard, it happens all the time.”

“I think this was different.”

“Oh?”

“I think so.” She leaned forward. “She wouldn’t tell me who the woman was, but—”

“Oh, she knew who it was? I didn’t know that.”

“She knew. This wasn’t what you just described, a middle-aged man and a young girl running around to motels. Did they have motels eighteen or twenty years ago?”

“Of course. Motels came in after the end of the war.”

“Well, it wasn’t that. It was pretty serious, or at least everybody involved thought it was serious at the time. He came right out and said he wanted a divorce, and it was all out in the open that he was seeing this woman. I’m pretty sure she was married, too. I don’t think my mother said so but there was something she said about children being involved, and I didn’t have any brothers and sisters, and she definitely said children, not a child. I think this woman was married with children, and I think she was probably about the same age as my mother.” She paused for a sip of her drink. “And I lived right in that house while all of this was going on and I never had the slightest idea.”

“Do you remember if they had fights? You could have heard loud arguments without knowing what they were about.”

“I don’t think I ever heard either of them raise their voice to the other. I suppose they were very good at keeping up a good front for me while all this was going on. Another thing, I was probably not very perceptive in that area because it never would have occurred to me to notice anything. I just so completely took it for granted that they were happy with each other.”

“How did it work out?”

“What? I was thinking of something, I didn’t hear you.”

“I just wondered how it worked out. Obviously they stayed together, but did she go into any detail?”

She nodded. “A certain amount of detail. She said her first reaction was to give him a divorce. She said it was a terrible shock to her pride, and here she was comparing herself to Linda. She said her pride was probably hurt less than Linda’s because Jeff’s affairs were conducted publicly. The whole state of Arizona knew he was fucking around. She didn’t phrase it that way.”

“No kidding.”

“Whereas my father was discreet. There was him and this woman, and then my mother knew, and presumably this woman’s husband also knew, although maybe he didn’t. Since she never mentioned that the woman had a husband I can’t know for sure that he knew what was going on. But the point is that nobody else knew.”

“What’s the matter?”

“I just wonder. There must have been other people who knew. I bet that woman had at least one friend that she told, and I wonder if my father may have had someone he confided in. And in the course of a couple of years I wonder how many other people heard a little gossip on the subject. You know how quickly gossip moves in this town.”

“Faster than a speeding bullet.”

“So I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of the people in their little circle knew. But the point is that my mother didn’t know they knew. She didn’t have to face anything. So in that sense it didn’t matter so much whether they knew or not.”

“You were starting to say how everything resolved itself.”

“Yes. I wish I could remember exactly what she said and how she said it. There were a million questions I wanted to ask, you know, but I felt I had to restrain myself. Evidently what happened was that they decided to postpone any definite action for the time being. They wouldn’t take steps toward a divorce right away, and he wouldn’t move out of the house.”

“He never moved out of the house?”

“No. I don’t know if he slept in the same bed with her during all this. That was one of the questions I couldn’t bring myself to ask her.”

“I don’t blame you.”

“But they spent their nights under the same roof, whatever bed he slept in, and appearances were kept up. And I was kept neatly in the dark, which was one of her main arguments. Until everything was absolutely certain one way or the other she didn’t want me exposed to any trauma, and this made sense to him, too, so the appearances were kept up.”

“But he went on seeing the woman?”

“Evidently. You see, they didn’t talk about it. There was a sort of agreement to that effect, although I doubt they bothered spelling it out. He went on seeing the woman for a while and then it burned itself out. That’s her phrase, incidentally. It burned itself out. Meaning, I suppose, the passion he and the woman had for each other.”

“Do you suppose they were in love?”

“I don’t know. I’ve been wondering about that. On the one hand I want to believe that my father couldn’t have been in love with anyone but my mother, and on the other hand I don’t want to think he’d be capable of wanting to end their marriage over a serious case of the hots.”

“Knowing your father, I’d say it might be a case of the hots, and where did you get that expression, by the way?”

“It’s fairly awful, isn’t it? I think I read it somewhere. I’m sure I never said it before.”

“Well, if you never say it again that’s all right, too. No, the point is that I would guess it might be a basically sexual thing with him, but that he would have to think it was love at the time. And that way it would blow over, or burn itself out I guess you said, because he or even both of them would reach a point where they saw that it was just passion, or the passion would begin to die down a little and they would realize that real love didn’t really enter into it. Do you understand what I mean?”

“Yes,” she said.

“That sounds more like your dad. From what I know of him, and I think I got to know him fairly well. God knows I thought a lot of him. And I don’t think any less of him on the basis of what you’ve told me tonight, Andrea.”

“Neither do I.”

“Are you sure? You shouldn’t, and I hope it’s true.”

“It is.”

He seemed relieved to hear that, and she guessed that on at least one level his relief had nothing whatever to do with her father.

“I think I’ll just freshen this,” she said. “How about you?”

“Well, make it light. Say, I’ll get them, Andrea.”

“Oh, you look much too comfortable,” she said.

She took her time fixing the drinks. She felt shaky and on edge, her mind trembling with an electric tension that reminded her of Eileen Fradin on diet pills. But in her own case the effect was not the result of pills. It was clearly the product of the conversation they were having. It was an enervating conversation, and in a way that was not entirely unpleasant. And she sensed that it was a very important conversation. She might have been an actress playing a scene at the close of the first act, and the whole structure of the third act would depend on how convincingly she played her part now. But she had a burden most actresses were spared. She had to make up her own lines as she went along.

Seated in the living room once again, with her drink in one hand and a fresh cigarette in the other, she said, “Where were we? I was saying that it just ended. Father’s big romance. I don’t know how long it took, a couple of weeks or a couple of months. I would guess no more than a month. It was never what you could call an arrangement, where the marriage is a marriage in name only and the affair is public knowledge, the way it is in English novels. I don’t know how long the affair went on before my mother knew about it, but I would guess it came out into the open fairly soon. And then I would guess it was over within a month.”

“Not much time in the course of a lifetime.”

She leaned forward, eyes bright. “That’s exactly it! They were together for almost thirty-nine years, and there were two or three bad months, and what does that mean over the whole course of their lives? I asked her how it had changed things afterward and she insisted it hadn’t changed them at all. That her feelings for my father never changed and that his feelings for her never changed, either. That it was something that just happened, and afterward maybe it made each of them appreciate the other a little bit more, but that was all. Now here was something that must have torn her completely apart, Mark, but remember she was telling me about it almost twenty years later, and even though she remembered it vividly she was able to talk about it as something that was ultimately no worse than a bad cold. What’s so funny?”

“‘No worse than a bad cold.’ That’s what they say about something else.”

“What? Oh, I’ve read the expression. It’s syphilis, isn’t it?”

“God, no. Gonorrhea.”

“Well, the same thing.”

“The hell it’s the same thing. Syphilis is a whole lot worse than a bad cold. So is gonorrhea, as I understand it. Another thing they say about gonorrhea is that you’re not a man until you’ve had it.”

“I hope you’re not a man according to that definition.”

“Nope, still a little boy.”

“Well, that’s good.” She fell silent for a moment. Then she said, “She told me they never talked about it after it was over. Except that one night he took her hand and said, ‘I want you to know that everything’s all right now, and there won’t ever be anything else to worry about.’ Or words to that effect.”

“And that was that.”

“Uh-huh.”

“And they were set for the rest of their lives. You have to give them both a hell of a lot of credit. It’s obvious that she deserves credit, but so does he. Or don’t you agree?”

“That’s exactly how I feel, but I thought it might be the way I felt about my father. You used an expression before. Faster than a bullet?”

“Faster than a speeding bullet.”

“Yes. What’s that from?”

“Faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a mighty locomotive, able to leap tall women in a single bound—”

“Tall buildings.”

“I like it better my way.”

“You would. It’s Superman, isn’t it?”

“Uh-huh. The old radio program.”

“I thought so. Well, I always thought my father was Superman. Not literally, obviously, but the same way that Robin thinks you’re something special.”

“When actually we both know I’m nothing much.”

“Oh, you’re something special, and don’t think I don’t know it. But you’ll never get the devotion from me you’ll get from Robin, because that’s a very special thing between fathers and daughters. The point is, you never outgrow it. Or at least I never did. I still think my father was Superman. I’ll tell you what I’d like to know.”

“What?”

“Did he still have sex with my mother while he was in love with the woman? I don’t know why I care. Just the kind of curiosity you have when your mind’s in the gutter. Naturally I didn’t ask her.”

“Of course not. Does it matter whether he did or not?”

“Not to me it doesn’t.”

“That doesn’t interest me as much as wondering what the woman was like. That’s what I’d find fascinating.”

“It’s probably someone we know.”

“Really?”

“Really. She was at the funeral. My mother happened to say that, and I wanted to try to find out more, but I decided not to. She came to his funeral. I wonder how she felt. I wonder — oh, there are a million things I wonder. What it felt like for mom to see her at the funeral. But then again she’s probably seen her hundreds of times since it all happened. Thousands of times, even. Maybe they’ve been invited to the same parties for all those years. Maybe they run into each other constantly at the club. And by now it doesn’t matter any more.”

“That rounds it all out,” he said. “Don’t you think it does? I kind of like the idea that she came to his funeral.”

“Yes, I know what you mean.”

“You made these drinks on the heavy side, didn’t you?”

“I may have. Why?”

“Because I’m feeling mine.”

“Well, so am I, but in an enjoyable way.”

“Oh, I never said I wasn’t enjoying it.”

“You know what would be nice? Except that you don’t like to drink too much when you’ve got work the next morning, but it would be nice if I made us one more round of drinks, and we could take them in the other room and sit on the couch and watch the news.”

“Oh, is it time already?”

“Just about. We could sit on the couch, and we could maybe get a little drunk, and we could possibly even do a little country-style necking.”

“You think we could do that, huh?”

“Except that you have an office to go to tomorrow, and we might wind up having still another round of drinks, and the necking might tend to get out of hand.”

“It just might. Old down-home country-style necking has a way of doing just that. But do you know what I think?”

“What?”

“I think you should make the drinks.”

She took his glass from him and hurried into the kitchen. She swerved just the least bit en route — she really was feeling the drinks.

In her mind she heard a voice. Her father’s voice... Mark’s voice. “Everything’s going to be all right now. There won’t ever be anything else to worry about.”

Oh, it might not be all that easy for Mark and her. But you took things as they came and you found the right way to handle them, and sooner or later things worked out as they were supposed to.

She smiled, a very private and very self-satisfied smile, and then she finished making the drinks. Bringing them back to him, unsteady on her feet, she nonetheless felt calm, in control. It felt good, being in control again.