The Three Weissmanns of Westport

11

The mornings came later, and the air grew colder. The beauty of Westport shrank and drew back from the eye. What had been lush and green was stalky and irrelevant. Where the roads had been lined with trees swaying in the breeze there were now just bare, rigid trunks. Behind them, stripped of their leafy veils, colossal facades of houses meant to look like mansions were revealed to resemble nothing so much as the better chains of New England motor inns. Annie surreptitiously phoned the professor subletting her apartment to see if he might want to leave early, which he did not. Betty stood for hours staring out her bedroom window, her widow's walk, and mused bitterly that she was neither walking nor a widow, yet there she was, in Westport, in purgatory. And Miranda? She was quiet, quieter than the other two had ever seen her.

Miranda knew she was making a sullen spectacle of herself, but she didn't seem to be able to stop. It was very much like having a tantrum — she felt that herself. There was that same fatigued momentum. But she could not talk to either her mother or her sister about Kit and Henry, and Kit and Henry were all she could think about. Sometimes she felt herself storing up affection for them, hiding it, protecting it, like a squirrel burying nuts. It was a kind of treasure, this burrowed cache of emotional heat and urgency. Other times, she felt herself losing them, as if they were long dead and she could no longer remember their features.

What the hell had happened? She felt again the shiver beneath her hand as Kit drew back, on the day he left, like a horse who'd been spooked.

Annie's emotional schedule took on an almost heartening regularity: days of work, nights of worry, mornings of icy aquatic contemplation leading nowhere. On one of these faded, dun-colored mornings, Annie was slapping through the icy water of Long Island Sound, engaged in her morning swim. The clarity of the cold, the obscurity of the dark water, the sincerity of true solitude: these were things she cherished. As she lost herself in the rhythm of her exertion, as she exhaled into the freezing water, then turned her face to the sky and gulped in the dawn air, she worried about money and her mother's manic widowhood and Miranda's sullen silence; then, what she always somehow came around to thinking about was Frederick. She recalled his appreciative laugh at some remark she had made, the remark itself lost, the laugh clear and ringing in her memory. His eyes, dark and mischievous, looked into her eyes, and they were full of feeling. Or were they? Had she misread his eyes, his feelings? Had she gotten it so wrong? No. No, in spite of the fact that he had not called, in spite of his cool treatment of her on Rosh Hashanah, in spite of this, in spite of that, Annie was somehow sure she had been right about him. Of course, it made no difference. Right or wrong, the facts remained the same: he hadn't called, he had treated her with mere civility the last time they met, he was as far from her as if he had never had any feelings at all.

Miranda had stopped teasing her about Frederick, which was both a relief and a morbid confirmation of her own conviction that the affair was indeed over. But Miranda was so uncommunicative about everything lately. Her new reticence was just as showy as everything Miranda did, Annie thought irritably.

Inside the cottage, Miranda sat in the kitchen, her arms resting on the table. She held a large orange in her hands. She stared at it.

"Honey," Betty said, shuffling in and standing behind her. She watched her daughter listlessly roll the orange back and forth from one hand to the other. "Honey, maybe you need a hobby."

Miranda laughed. "A nobby?" It was part of a joke Josie used to like, about retirement.

An old man who's just retired to Florida asks another old guy, "How do you stand it? After two days already I'm bored."

"Simple," says the guy in a heavy Yiddish accent. "I have a nobby."

"A nobby?" says the first old man. "What's a nobby?"

"A nobby, a nobby — like collecting stemps."

"You collect stamps?" the first one asks.

"Stemps? No. I keep bees. In mine condo."

He takes the newcomer up the elevator, into his condo, takes a shoe box from the closet, and lifts the lid. "There!"

"But they're all dead! This is just a box full of dead bees! What kind of a beekeeper are you?"

"Hey," says the guy. "It's just a nobby."

"Want me to keep bees, Mother?"

"If it would make you happy," Betty said. She paused. "Would it?"

"I'm okay," Miranda said, and turned back to the orange, making it clear the interview was over. The citrus scent drifted up. She waited for the thud of the newspaper on the muddy drive, then went out to lift the gritty blue plastic bag and carry it inside. By the time Annie returned in her lumpy wet suit and showered and dressed for work, Miranda had riffled through all the sections.

"I wish you wouldn't always crumple it up like that," Annie said, picking up sheets of the Times and smoothing them out.

"Just get another paper at the station if you don't like it."

"Typical."

"Of what?"

"Now, girls," Betty said abstractedly. But her heart wasn't in it, and Annie and Miranda, sensing it wasn't, scowled at each other like spoiled children until it was time for Miranda to drive Annie to the station. They left their mother staring blankly out the window, holding a coffee mug against her cheek, where her sinuses hurt.

"I'm sorry," Annie forced herself to say when they got in the car. "It's just a newspaper. I'm too old to act like this." She did not add that Miranda was also too old. "I've lived alone too long."

"You?" Miranda said. "What about me? Talk about living alone too long..."

Annie felt sororal rage rising. Was she not even able to apologize, to apologize so delicately, without it becoming a competition? "Green," she said in retaliation, when the traffic light turned and Miranda did not instantly gun the engine.

Miranda dropped her sister at the station, roared off in the noisy old Mercedes to the parking lot at Compo Beach, then walked along the road in the gloom until she reached Burying Hill beach. She did this every day. It would have been easier to drop Annie at the Greenfield Hill station, which was so much closer to Burying Hill, but she did not want Annie or anyone else to know where she was headed. She stared eastward, in the direction of Kit Maybank's aunt's house. It made her feel closer to Henry and Kit somehow, as if they were just around that rocky bit of coast ahead. She had called Kit several times. Once, she even spoke to Henry. Then Kit stopped answering her calls. Miranda had e-mailed him and gotten a quick, apologetic note in response — so busy, just impossible, soon... Of course, she had not heard from him again. It was as if Kit, and so Henry, had dropped off the face of the earth, her earth at least. She wondered who was looking after Henry. Kit had said one of his college roommates had a nanny who had a cousin. This didn't sound reassuring to Miranda. Poor Henry. She had offered to come to L.A. to look after him, but Kit had not really taken her suggestion seriously. And so they were gone, beyond her reach, out of earshot and out of sight, and she was here gazing eastward in the early November drizzle.

"Hi," someone said, coming up beside her.

Miranda jumped, hoping for a fraction of an instant that it was Kit, then stared at Roberts as if she didn't recognize him.

"Sorry. I didn't mean to startle you. But it's really starting to rain. Can I give you a ride home?" he asked, looking back at the beach's parking lot and seeing Miranda's car was not there. "Or did you paddle here in your trusty kayak?"

Miranda did not smile. She could not summon the social will on this her private, solitary walk. She just managed to mutter a thank you and decline the offer.

"I like to walk," she said.

"Okay," said Roberts.

After that morning, she would occasionally run into Roberts, who also seemed to like to walk. He never presumed to join her, for which she was grateful. He would pass her, going in the other direction, or come upon her as she stood silently admiring some somber moment of landscape. And he would incline his head in greeting. No more. Yet even that she found intrusive and jarring. Although she knew she was being unreasonable, she often varied the time of her walks in order to avoid him.

It did not help that he found his way to the cottage now and then for dinner. He's certainly made himself at home, she thought as she came in one evening and found him mulling wine in the kitchen.

"Doesn't the house smell delicious?" Betty said.

Annie threw Miranda an anxious glance. She hoped her sister would not insult Roberts. He stood at the stove looking so proud of his concoction. She moved toward him protectively, and stood beside him, as if her presence could shield him from the cold indifference of her sister.

Miranda sniffed the sweetened air and could not help but smile.

Relieved, Annie took a mug from Roberts. She wondered why Miranda thought he was so old. He was probably in his mid-, possibly late sixties, she realized. His face was creased, but not from age. It was a hearty, weather-beaten face. Miranda's aversion to him was a mystery to Annie. And an irritant. He was so much more suitable than Kit Maybank. It enraged Annie that Miranda was mourning so ostentatiously for someone who had treated her so badly.

"Roberts is such a lovely man. And, by the way, I am very disappointed in Kit Maybank," Betty said to Annie that night when Roberts had gone and Miranda was out taking a final solitary walk. "Has she heard from him at all?"

Annie shrugged. Miranda had certainly not confided in her. "Maybe he'll come back for Thanksgiving to spend it with his aunt. But, Mother, I don't think we should make too much of this friendship. I mean, Miranda has her enthusiasms, that's what makes her Miranda, but she's about to turn fifty, for God's sake. She can't just keep pining for, well, you know, a kid half her age."

"You're so literal-minded, Annie. She isn't pining for Kit. I mean, really! She's not a teenager."

"That's what I just said. That's my point."

"You and your points," Betty said indulgently. "Anyway, it's the child she wants. I would have thought that was obvious, poor thing."

Not for the first time, Annie wondered at her mother's acuity. And at her own lack of it.

Ever since they had come to Westport, a little over three months ago, Miranda and Annie had been avoiding Josie's calls. At first, when they were still willing to speak to him, they had tried to point out the error of his ways. He had answered that this was how things had to be, in a tone of such firm resignation that he might just as easily have been saying it was God's will.

"The roof leaks," Miranda screamed into her cell phone. "There are mouse droppings on the sunporch."

"You've beggared our mother, your wife," Annie yelled into her office phone. "Have you no shame?"

"Josie, you have to help her," they both pleaded. "If you really understood what was going on, you wouldn't do this. Please let Mommy come home."

After a while they realized that Josie did not want to understand what was going on, and they stopped calling him. They stopped answering his calls, as well. It had been months since either of them had heard his voice on anything but an answering machine.

Then Betty informed them that there was a standing lamp in the apartment that she absolutely had to have. Annie pointed out that there was no room in the cramped and cluttered cottage for another lamp. Miranda said Josie had probably sold the lamp anyway. But a few days later, Miranda and Annie found themselves driving their mother's old car into the city to pick up the lamp. It was Annie who had finally agreed to call Josie at his office to arrange the time.

"Josie? It's Annie."

"I know it's you, honey. How many people call me that?"

Annie thought she heard a catch in his voice. Do not weaken, she told herself.

"I've been calling you," Josie said, his voice hurt.

"I know." She glanced at the three pink memos with his name on them sitting on her desk.

"Well, never mind. Now you've called me back. How are you girls? How's your mother?"

"Look, I just need to get into the apartment. Mom wants the standing lamp from the bedroom." Annie hesitated, then said, "From her bedroom."

There was silence.

"Josie?"

"Okay. Right. I'll have Ozzie bring it down for you. Any day you say."

Ozzie was the handyman. Annie wondered if Ozzie missed her mother.

"That's okay," she said. "I have a key. I just wanted to let you know."

"Mmm," Josie said. "Well, actually, I had the locks changed."

Annie said, "What?" but she had heard him.

"It just seemed prudent," he said.

"Jesus, Josie."

"I know."

"Prudent? Jesus."

Then neither of them said anything. And neither one hung up.

"I'm sorry, honey," Josie finally murmured. "I'm so sorry."

Annie was in her office. It was a small room in the back of the building on the ground floor. There was a window that faced a wall covered with ivy. The window needed to be washed. Her back was aching. She hadn't gone swimming in a week. It was getting too cold, even with a wet suit. Maybe tomorrow she would go to the Y. She thought these things, noticed the shaft of thin city light that slanted in through the window and landed on her desk, but what she really thought was Oh, Josie. Josie, how could you?

"When are you coming?" he asked.

"Saturday."

"Right. Okay."

"Okay."

"Okay."

Annie thought, This is the man who brought me up, the man who was a father to me.

"Look, have dinner with me, okay?" Josie said. "You and Miranda?"

Annie was about to say no when he added in a truly pathetic voice, "Please?"

Now she and Miranda were driving into the city to pick up a useless lamp and have dinner with a useless father-manque.

"I hate him," Miranda said. "Why are we doing this?"

"Beats me. I weakened, I guess. His voice... it was heartbreaking."

"Hmmph." Miranda crossed her arms and held them against her chest, pouting. "I think men are big babies."

"Infantile grandiosity. I've always liked the sound of that. Rolls off the tongue."

"But real children aren't grandiose. They're actually grand. Look at Henry, for example."

Annie pictured Henry on the floor of the living room, four adults gazing adoringly at him as he pushed a car in circles. She remembered, too, a moment later in that same day. Henry had fallen asleep with Betty on the couch. Kit and Miranda, returning from a walk, had just come up the battered cement steps, leaving the door from the outside to the sunporch open. Annie was at the window facing the sunporch, picking dead roses from a bunch Kit had brought them a week earlier, and she was just aware of them, in the corner of her vision. They stood, one on each side of the door. Kit put out his hand and touched Miranda on the shoulder, a gentle, single, petting motion, like the soft swat of a cat. And they had both laughed softly and privately.

Annie wished she had not witnessed this scene. It meant that much more worry. She had always worried about Miranda. Even when Miranda was riding high, Annie had kept an eye on her younger sister. It was a remnant of childhood — a wariness of her sister, who demanded so much and seemed to devour the bulk of their parents' attention. It was also a source of power for Annie, a self-protective self-importance that translated into an almost prim protectiveness of Miranda. She had understood this even as a little girl. If Annie did not look after Miranda, what other role was there for her? Only resentment, and resentment was such an uncomfortable sentiment. Annie loved Miranda, found her impossible not to love, and very early on she had discovered a way to love her with dignity: worry.

Such good friends, Annie told herself when she saw Kit and Miranda that day from the sunporch. Friends, she thought again, trying to convince herself. And then, unable to hold out against her own eyes, the admission: lovers. She'd felt suddenly envious of Miranda and sorry for her all at once.

But as soon as Kit and Miranda came into the living room, it was as if the handsome young man at her side vanished. Miranda stood before the sofa, her face, that lively, determined face, shifting, suddenly and beautifully. A transformation, Annie thought at the time. Peace, she thought. Miranda at peace. And she had followed her sister's gaze, an almost palpable emanation of simple, complete happiness, to its destination, a small child, blinking, sucking his thumb, his pretty mouth curling in a smile around his little fist.

"How is little Henry, anyway?" Annie asked now as they drove against the shimmer of the setting sun.

Miranda said nothing.

Perhaps she had not heard. Annie glanced at her silent sister, profiled against the window, her sunglasses hiding her eyes.

Impassive, wordless, Miranda turned to face the window and the passing prickly November woods beyond.

Annie did not repeat the question.

Josie was meeting them at a tiny bistro they had all liked "when the family was intact," as Miranda put it. "He could have chosen a more neutral place."

"I don't think he wants to be neutral."

"Fat chance," Miranda said.

"That he can be or that he wants to be?"

"I don't know, Annie. Why do you always have to make so much sense? You know what I mean."

And Annie, after a moment of reflexive annoyance, had to admit that, yes, she did know exactly what her sister meant.

Josie had not yet arrived, but their table was ready, their usual table; he must have requested it, for the restaurant was busy. They sat and waited, neither of them sure what her feelings were. Then he walked in, and they were overcome by waves of love, embarrassment, and penetrating anger.

He looked older and younger at the same time. What is that about? Annie wondered. She had not seen him in months, and here he was, her Josie, smaller somehow, grayer, thinner, but his step was so jaunty, the way he moved his arms, so light and carefree. How dare he be carefree when her mother could barely walk beneath her load of care?

"I miss you girls," he said.

"Whose fault is that?" Miranda said.

Joseph stared at his two daughters, his little girls. Miranda sat with crossed arms, her lower lip jutting out, the way she had when she was truly a little girl. She glared at him, which was on the whole less unsettling than Annie, who did not even look at him. Oh, what had he done? His whole life was gone, just like that. Betty was gone, Betty and her picnics. It had been their joke, that she turned everything into a picnic. She turned everything into an outing, even a trip to the motor vehicles bureau to turn in the license plates of their old car. Oh, we'll go together, she had said. Let's go to the one downtown! We'll take a walk along the water, see the ships like the tourists. It's not a picnic, he had said, as he so often did. They could have had such a nice old age, an old age full of unlikely picnics. But picnics were old-fashioned entertainments, and he wasn't ready for his old age. Felicity had reached down a firm young hand and fished him out of that murky bog.

"I don't think it's legal to lock Mom out of the apartment," Annie said. "And if it is legal, it's not ethical, Josie. It really isn't."

"But your mother agreed to it," Joseph said. "I discussed it with her."

"I beg your pardon?" Annie was really shocked. Betty had never mentioned it.

"What possessed her to do that?" Miranda said. "And why do you want the locks changed anyway? It's not like we're going in there to ransack the place. The place that is her home, by the way."

"Oh," Joseph said vaguely. "It's just protocol. Anyway, I'm living there, and I need my privacy. I'm entitled to my privacy, aren't I?" He looked at them, hurt.

"Well, you're entitled, anyway," Miranda muttered.

"I just want to have a nice dinner," he said. "That's all. A nice dinner."

They had always come to this restaurant for their birthdays, ever since Annie was ten years old and Miranda eight. It was a grown-up restaurant, and they were each allowed a sip of wine.

"A bottle?" Josie said. "White, right?"

Yes, white wine, Josie, Annie thought. They would come with their mother and settle into their seats, order their pretend cocktails with jolly red cherries floating on top. Then the doors of the restaurant would fly open and there would be Josie, his overcoat and briefcase, artifacts from that exalted, distant place, the office. And he would bring Annie a bouquet of anemones for her birthday, white roses for Miranda. The waiter would fetch a pitcher of water, and the flowers would adorn the table, bright and important.

What would Josie do this year? Send flowers? Forget that he had ever gotten the anemones and roses? Either way, it would be heartbreaking.

Next to Annie, Miranda sighed, wiped away a tear. "Fuck," she said softly.

The food came and the girls picked at their moules frites.

"That's your favorite," he reminded them. He felt sick and barely touched his steak. He ordered another bottle of wine and wondered what he could do to make them understand. It was something that had just happened. One day he had been laughing at one of Betty's comments, walking to Columbus Avenue to get Tasti D-Lite with her, the next he was so in love with Felicity he could hardly speak. He had fallen in love in a way he could barely credit, a heart-pounding, urgent, hopeless way. If they really loved him, these daughters of his, they would rejoice for him, rejoice with him. I am reborn, he wanted to cry out. He wanted to drink champagne and celebrate. He wanted Miranda and Annie to join him in a toast. A toast to life. His life.

But he looked at the girls, and he saw he would have to drink that toast alone. They loved their mother and he had hurt her. But he loved their mother, too. That's what they didn't get. He noted that it was much easier for him to say, even to think, that he loved her when he referred to her as "their mother," rather than Betty, but he did love her, their mother. He would always love their mother. But things change.

He sighed, and both girls glared at him. Well, he didn't really expect them to forgive him. Not in this lifetime. They were hurt, they were angry. Fine. He got it.

"I understand that you're angry," he said. "I'm not a fool. And I'm not perfect. I understand that, too. But I love you both, and I'll always be here for you."

His voice was shaking with emotion. There were tears in his eyes.

Annie shook her head in disbelief. Was he kidding? "You threw our mother onto the street," she said loudly. "With no money. None. Do you understand that, too?"

Joseph looked nervously at the surrounding diners.

"Look," he said, lowering his voice. "There are steps. Steps you take. You know... in a" — he lowered his voice even more — "divorce."

"You can't even say the word? Divorce. Divorce, divorce. Ugly cruel mean-spirited divorce. There. Okay? Clear?"

Annie's face was hard and furious. Joseph glared at her. She had always been so sensible, a calm, rational person — like him. But being reasonable obviously had a cold side to it, too.

Miranda, on the other hand — there had never been anything reasonable or cold about her. She was a flurry of impetuous emotion. She understood love. So he tried his other daughter, he tried Miranda: "It's just unavoidable, honey. I can't help it. It doesn't mean I don't love you both." He attempted a conspiratorial smile. "It will all work out in the end." That was Miranda's saying, her mantra.

"You think so?" Miranda said.

She pushed her chair back violently as she stood up.

The wrath of women, he thought. There was a downside to heat, it seemed, as well as cold. They could all go to hell. He watched Miranda's napkin, which she had thrown from her lap, falling like a white gliding gull. He heard the clatter of Annie's chair echoing Miranda's. He heard his daughters' footsteps. A waiter's hand reached down and whisked the napkin off the floor. When he looked up, Miranda and Annie were gone and he was alone.

One morning shortly after the disastrous dinner with Joseph, Betty waited until both Miranda and Annie arrived at the breakfast table before surprising them with the news that she had received an offer from Joseph's lawyer the evening before.

"You mean our dinner with Josie did some good?" Miranda asked. "I knew it would!"

"Thank God," Annie said. "It's about time he stepped up to the plate."

"Yes," Betty said. "Of course, I can't possibly accept it." She shook her head sadly. "Generous as Joseph is being... Well, it's just that he's offered a settlement of three hundred thousand dollars."

"Oh brother," Annie said.

"Over ten years."

"That's a joke, right?" Miranda said. Then she added thoughtfully, "Except you still have the apartment. That must be what he's thinking. You could sell it and invest, what, three million dollars? Even in this market. And live really comfortably. Not the way you've been living, but..."

"Oh no, dear, the three hundred thousand dollars paid over ten years would be his payment for my share of the apartment. Now that is a decent return on my five-thousand-dollar investment, I guess, although it has been almost fifty years. However, there's an argument to be made for it, I'm sure. But I just don't feel comfortable having Joseph live there with that woman."

Annie and Miranda stood dumbfounded.

"That woman?" Miranda said after a long, uncomfortable silence. "What woman?"

"Vivacity?" Betty said, looking thoughtful. "Something like that. Joseph's middle-aged young woman. Capacity! That's it."

Miranda and Annie never did learn how their mother found out about Felicity. She never mentioned the incident. She had said her piece, made her decision, and the subject of how she learned of the intruder need never be raised. It had been a shock to her when she had called Joseph at the apartment the night before and the woman who worked in his office answered. Betty had recognized the voice — it was quite distinctive, a high, strong voice still carrying a trace of Boston. She saw the woman's face in her imagination, a pale, heart-shaped face with sharp but not unpleasant features and big, unnerving, round blue eyes. She heard the woman's confusion when she recognized Betty's voice. And she knew. She had known all along, she realized. She had known all along.

"Is Joseph in?" she asked.

"Joe!" she heard the woman call.

Joe. It was as if Joseph had cut off not only half his name but half his life. Her half.

"Betty!" he said. "What a surprise."

"I won't do it, Josie," she said, using the children's name for him.

"Won't do what?" he asked.

But she knew he understood.

"Life is not a picnic," she said. "You were right about that." And she hung up.