The Three Weissmanns of Westport

19

Betty came home after six days, but she was very weak. After a few days in the cottage, she was even weaker, and Annie and Miranda took her to the doctor's office, each holding an arm.

"What a fuss," Betty said. "I just need rest."

But the doctor said she had caught a staph infection when she was in the hospital, and he put her on heavy doses of various antibiotics.

She insisted on getting out of bed each morning, however, and her daughters would settle her, in her sunglasses, on the living room couch when it was chilly and on the sunporch chaise, in her sunglasses, when it was warm. The sunglasses helped with the headaches.

"You look very glamorous," said Cousin Lou on one visit.

"It's my own private sanitorium." Her legs were covered with a blanket, a cup of broth in her hands.

Lou caught sight of the broom in the corner, grabbed it, and began to sweep absentmindedly.

"How is Mr. Shpuntov?" Betty asked.

"He hit his caregiver yesterday."

"Uh-oh."

"She hit him back. So that was fine. I wonder when the word went from caretaker to caregiver." He stood at the foot of Betty's chaise. She looked chalky and thin — her wrists protruded from her sweater, tight veined sinews. "How are you?" he said, suddenly serious.

Betty said, "I never hit my caregivers. Or my caretakers."

Annie came out with her mother's pills.

"Do I, Annie?"

"Hardly ever."

"Sit down, Lou," Betty said. "It's very pleasant, just sitting. I had no idea I would like being a patient so much. I highly recommend it. I think I have found the career at which I excel. Of course, I am still a widow. I won't give that up."

"Multitasking," Annie said. She was worried. Betty really did seem to like reclining on her chaise, staring out at the trees and the sky. She was dreamy and faraway, preoccupied.

"There's a goldfinch here," Betty was telling Cousin Lou as if it explained everything. "A goldfinch I see when I'm very quiet and patient."

Roberts came that evening and brought bunches of daffodils for Betty.

"This one is for you," he said, handing a stem to Annie.

He came almost every day now. Poor man, Annie thought. Miranda was hardly ever there, yet he sat so patiently, entertaining Betty with stories of some of his greediest clients and their twisted estates, often staying for dinner.

"Do you miss it? Do you mind being retired?" Betty asked. "Because we can get another chaise and you can come to my sanitorium. It keeps me busy."

"Oh, I keep my hand in. I have a few clients still."

"Like Charlotte Maybank? She seems very excited about her posthumous financial dealing."

Betty expected Roberts to smile as he did when regaling her with the eccentricities of clients and the absurdities of cases over the years. Instead, he set his jaw and said nothing. Betty said, "Sorry. None of my business."

Annie often came home from work to find them sitting in silence, the lengthening day casting a pale light on their faces. How tiny and frail her mother looked in her wispy black outfits beside Roberts, who was tan, almost ruddy, a tall, lean man in a tall, lean suit.

His face would crease into a smile when he saw her. He would rise from the invalid's side and lean over to kiss Annie's cheek. She would compliment his bow tie. And they would have cocktails.

"Miranda didn't pick you up at the station?" he asked on the first of these evenings, when Annie arrived alone.

Poor Roberts, she thought. "No Miranda. Just us chickens tonight, I'm afraid."

"Ah." He took a martini from her. "Did you walk from the station? You know, I could always come and get you, Annie, if Miranda's busy."

Annie smiled. Gallant Roberts. Very old-school. Like me, she thought. "I dropped Miranda off after she picked me up. At Leanne's. But how thoughtful of you."

He nodded. "Miranda's been a blessing to Leanne. Charlotte is a handful. But..." He paused here, then said, "Well, Charlotte's been going through so much."

Miranda was not coming home until much later, so Annie didn't ask him to stay for dinner. He joined them anyway.

Lonely, she thought. Not like me. What was the opposite of "lonely"? The word to describe someone who could not stand to be around people? "Togetherly"? "Loneless," she decided. Yet she found that he was one of the few people she did not feel like running away from. No hiding in the attic from Roberts. In fact, he rather reminded her of an attic, the air soft, the light filtered, the contents dusted with recognition or obscurity or gentle surprise.

Felicity decided to treat the girls, by which she meant Gwen, Amber, and Crystal, to lunch at Cafe des Artistes. Amber was such a... she smiled... she had been about to use the word "treasure," as if Amber were an exceptional maid of long service. There was something a little servile about the girl, in an ambitious way that Felicity recognized. Crystal was a silly nonentity, but Amber... even with her aging teenager slang... there was something about her. She was so attentive, and yet one felt the steel behind her acquiescence. She reminded Felicity of... Felicity. Which intrigued her. And then, all those free massages. Felicity was the envy of her friends.

She had never been to Cafe des Artistes, but it was an Upper West Side institution, and as she planned on becoming a proper Upper West Side institution herself, she thought she and Cafe des Artistes should meet. She had made a reservation for 1:00, and she left the office with plenty of time to get there, even with traffic. Taking cabs was a new luxury, taking cabs even when the subway ran directly to her destination. Her life had changed in many small ways like that, she thought with satisfaction. She had worked hard for these little luxuries, worked hard at the office, worked hard at making Joe happy. She did not begrudge either the office or Joe her sweat equity, she loved both her work and Joe, but sweat equity it was, and now she was getting her returns.

She walked into the richly dim restaurant, and a courtly man led her to her table. The silver glistened, the napkins and tablecloths were stiff and formal and white, like dress shirts, she thought. She looked up at the murals. They were famous, she knew. Redheaded women, nude, swinging from vines. Those redheads never had to work in an office, she thought. They didn't have to save and save to buy a boxy one-bedroom apartment in an unfashionable building in a huge unfashionable complex that might just as well have been in New Jersey as on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Felicity pursed her lips, then smiled. The fleshy naked women in the old-fashioned paintings would be scrawny ancient crones by now. Not to mention dead.

Rich soil for a rich house, Miranda thought, digging in the rose garden behind the Beachside Avenue house. House? It really was a mansion, there just was no other name that fit. It had been built as a show of wealth, not as a shelter. The rose garden had been neglected for years, but the tendrils and vines still crawled vigorously over the trellises. Miranda pulled at the weeds. Henry was taking his nap inside, Leanne was working on the paper she would soon have to present at some epidemiology conference. Miranda, who had no paper to write, no nap to take, was weeding. She did not know how to garden. But she could weed. Anyone could weed. Even a failure, even a bankrupt, even a woman who was silently, odiously betraying her best friend.

Miranda had fallen in love so many times, each of them a dizzying ascent of need and a sickening drop of disappointment. But this was Leanne, Henry's mother, her new friend, this person to whom she confided everything. Except one thing. The most important thing.

How odd, how private, how intimate to keep quiet about your feelings. Miranda cherished her secret. It sickened her, literally, leaving her breathless and queasy, but she somehow didn't mind. She reveled in her misery. Ironic, this Romantic extravaganza all bottled up inside.

It began to rain, hard. Perhaps she would catch pneumonia and die. That would be very Romantic.

Miranda had read plenty of books about women falling in love with women. They were a niche part of her business, a popular subgenre, a little out-of-date now but very big in the nineties. She had sold two of them herself, one to Knopf, a huge advance, quite a coup, she had to admit. The women discovered their real selves, etc. Could no longer live a lie, etc. She had felt some sympathy, yet the whole business had always seemed so unnecessary, extravagant even. An act of excessive imagination, if not sheer will. She had been far too busy falling in love with unsatisfying men to think very much about it, much more than: What would be the point?

You're the point, Miranda thought. Now I know.

She watched Leanne, dry and warm and shuffling papers inside. The rain fell dramatically, and the Long Island Sound waves, waves that had caused so much mischief months ago at this very spot, splashed behind her. She didn't really know how she had gotten from there to here, and she didn't really care. As long as she could stay.

From her vantage point of rain and rose stalks, Miranda saw Roberts enter the room and speak to Leanne. She saw Leanne run her hands through her hair, a gesture of despair. Roberts was showing her a sheaf of legal-looking papers. Leanne threw her head back, staring at the ceiling. She stood and made helpless, questioning gestures, her arms wide and flailing. Her hands became fists, and her mouth opened and closed. Miranda walked through the rain to the window. She gestured weakly at Leanne: Should she come in? Leanne, shouting and waving the papers at Roberts, did not even see her, and Miranda slogged her way to the car and drove to the station to wait for Annie.

Felicity marched through the same downpour. The trees in Central Park, budding but black in the rain, rattled their branches ominously. The doorman held his umbrella for Felicity, and she walked beneath it with as much dignity as she could muster under the circumstances. She was soaked, her mink coat matted and limp, a sad family of vermin drowned and slung across her body. Her hair was drenched, her umbrella blown inside out and abandoned long ago. She had been walking and walking and walking. Her shoes were ruined, of course. In the elevator she could smell the wet fur, musky and animalistic, reeking like a dripping dog.

"Joe!" Her shoes squelched on the marble she'd had installed in the entrance hall. "Joe!"

He came out of the kitchen looking warm and unruffled, a glass of Scotch in his hand. In general, she approved of his meticulous clothing, his careful grooming, his unchanging habits. Now his smooth comfort infuriated her.

"Can't you see I'm soaking wet?"

He took her coat and held it away from him. "Towel?" he said, walking toward the bathroom. He wondered if he would always be supplying towels for hysterical women. At least Felicity had not thrown a glass of good whiskey at him the way Betty had. He had just phoned Miranda. He called every day. She hung up on him every day. The girls did not bother to hide their contempt for him. But he had to find out how Betty was. Meningitis. Betty rarely got even a cold. How had she gotten this terrible infection? Somehow he knew it was his fault. Miranda and Annie obviously felt the same way. At least she was out of the hospital now. They never let him speak to her. He was sure Betty would want to talk to him if they let her. After all these years together. But they were no longer together, Annie had reminded him. She has cut the cord, Annie had said. She's recuperating physically and emotionally. Do you want to make her feel worse? Are you that selfish and self-centered? I don't care how guilty you feel, she had said, you are not going to upset my mother.

"It's Frederick," Felicity was saying, squelching behind him.

He pulled an enormous white bath towel from a shelf. "Here, darling."

"I'm speaking to you! Didn't you hear me? Frederick!"

The wet coat hung heavily at the end of his outstretched arm, dripping. He dropped it in the bathtub, half expecting damp revengeful minks to rise up from its folds. He hated that coat. Why was she wearing it in April anyway? If Miranda had ever seen it, she would have been furious. Of course, she was furious anyway. He threw the towel around Felicity's shoulders. "What about Frederick, darling?"

"He's marrying her. That... girl."

Joe put a smaller towel on Felicity's head. She looked like an angry nun. "Which girl? The one who was here? Which one? I couldn't really tell them apart. Are you sure? Neither one of them seems at all like Frederick's type. And they're just children."

"Hah!" said Felicity. "There you have it. Children."

"Well, it's better that he's marrying a girl than a boy, isn't it?"

"No, don't you see, they're going to have one. She's pregnant, or so she claims. I don't believe a word of it. She's not showing at all. Of course, how could you tell, she's always going to some gym. I told him to demand a paternity test. Gwen is beside herself. Think how she feels! After all she's done for that girl. And me! I let her live here!"

Joseph held the glass of Scotch to his lips. He could see Betty on the couch in her crumpled bathrobe, a fury. The glass had hurtled through the air. The perfume of the Scotch had hung around him like a cloud. The apartment had been a battleground. Now it was just an apartment. Felicity shuffled ahead of him, draped in terry cloth. He would have to tell her soon, he knew.

"And Frederick!" she said, her words drifting back to him, muffled by the towel around her head. "How he could do that to his own daughter. Is he from Alaska? That's where they'll move, no doubt. That's what they'll tell us next. And don't even ask about Evan — he's beside himself. He's furious. It's so humiliating for the family. I mean, Frederick is a public figure. Everyone will know. I'm so upset, I walked home. But when it rains it pours, and it poured, and I'm soaked. Thank you," she added, turning into the kitchen, rubbing her hair with the towel. "That little gold digger."

"Where is she, anyway?" Joseph said, glad to be able to postpone his own news. "She didn't come home with you?"

"Oh, she'll never set her scheming little foot in this apartment again."

He put the kettle on and poured some whiskey and sugar in a mug. "Sit down," he said gently. He took a lemon out of the refrigerator, cut it, squeezed it in the mug. When the water boiled, he poured it into the mug and handed the concoction to Felicity.

She breathed in the fumes. "Just what the doctor ordered. We'll have to change all the locks."

"Yes," Joseph said. "We will definitely need to do that. Or someone will."

At his tone, Felicity stopped sipping from the mug. "What?"

"I just got the final word from the lawyers."

Felicity stood up, very straight within her nun's habit of towels. "Yes?"

"The apartment is Betty's."

Felicity took a moment, then said, "Fine."

She sat back down, drank a little more of her toddy.

This was the part of her Joseph loved, he realized. The hard part. The unyielding part. Felicity was strong. She was not always entirely human, he had discovered. But she was always strong.

"I've always wanted to live downtown anyway," she said. "The West Side is so over."

In the Museum of Natural History, beneath the dinosaur, where she and Crystal had taken refuge from the rain, Amber held her cell phone in one hand. With the other she pinched her sister's arm as punctuation to every other word. "It's all her fault, Frederick. Everything was going so well," she said into the phone, administering three pinches.

"Ow... It just slipped out, Amber... Ow..."

The day before the rainstorm, Betty had gone to the doctor with a bad cough. She hadn't wanted to, but when Annie got home from work and heard her, she had called the doctor and made the appointment without even asking Betty, treating her like a child, and Betty did not have the energy to argue.

"I don't like the way you sound," the doctor had said.

I don't like the way you sound, thought Betty. He was a young man and condescending. But at least he didn't call her dear and talk very slowly and loudly the way some of them did.

"But she just has a cold," Miranda said when the doctor insisted on putting Betty back in the hospital. No need to make a big deal out of it. And everyone knew that people got sicker in hospitals. Especially older people.

"Don't get sundowner's syndrome," she said that night when she and Annie left Betty to the ministrations of the harried nursing staff. "Wash your hands a lot."

"I already have a staph infection, darling."

"See?"

Betty had sent them off with a thrown kiss, a coughing fit, and a wave.

"American Idol," she'd gasped urgently, pointing at the TV.

They looked back at her when they reached the door. She was small and pale and wracked with coughs. Tubes ran into and out of her. She fished her wallet out of the bedside drawer. She dialed the phone, glancing up at the 800 number flashing on the television screen to get it right.

"Oh God, not again," Annie said.

A young man on the TV commercial mopped up a puddle of cola with a miraculously absorbent cloth. "Wowsham!" he said.

The next day, the day of the rainstorm, Betty was still in the hospital. Miranda had spent most of the day there, then taken a break to pull up weeds and breathe the uncontaminated air blowing off the Sound.

Now, as Roberts and Leanne enacted their unhappy pantomime behind the window, Miranda picked Annie up at the station and drove straight to the hospital. She said nothing about what she had seen in the rain. They spoke only of Betty.

"She was fine this morning," Miranda said. She heard how lame this sounded. "She ate some toast and applesauce."

When they arrived in Betty's hospital room, they hung up their wet coats, and their mother waved them closer, one on each side of the bed. "Sit here, and you here," she said. Then she held them close.

"I love you," she said softly, tears welling up. "I love you both so much."

Annie and Miranda caught each other's eye across their mother's back.

"We love you, too," they both murmured. But, what the hell is going on? said their tone.

"It's over," Betty said at last, after a considerable embrace and hushed sniffling. "It's over."

"What?" Annie asked, standing suddenly. "What's wrong? What did the doctor say?"

"The divorce. The divorce is over," Betty reassured her.

"You're not getting divorced?" Miranda asked, a stupid smile spreading across her face.

"Oh, darling, of course we're getting divorced. That's the point. Josie has to give me a divorce now. The forensic accountant figured everything out."

"What forensic accountant?" Annie asked. "What are you talking about?"

"His name is Mr. Mole. Isn't that perfect? I knew he'd help the minute Roberts told me his name."

"Roberts?"

"Roberts and Mr. Mole arranged everything. Josie has to give me our apartment. He has to give me some of our assets, he has to behave like a mensch. It's all settled. I knew he was a mensch. He always said so, after all. "

Annie sank back onto the bed. "Jesus," she said, letting out a sigh of relief. Then: "Some mensch. What Yiddish dictionary do you use?"

"We won!" Miranda said. "Finally. We really won?"

"I'm supposed to go into town tomorrow to sign the papers. But..."

"They'll let you come home tonight, and we can drive you in," Annie said.

Betty laughed. "You practically pronounced me dead, and now you want me to hop out of bed and go to meetings? Anyway, they will not let me out tonight..."

"But..."

Betty coughed, then pointed to her chest. "...Pneumonia or some such thing..."

Annie rushed out of the room in search of the doctor, who was nowhere to be found, of course. Pneumonia or some such thing? She had saved that minor piece of information for a parenthesis? Her mother was infuriating. Annie wanted to shake her and her pneumonia. She wanted to shake someone, anyway. The doctor would do. She listened to the page: Dr. Franken, Dr. Franken, please call in... Dr. Franken, Dr. Franken... " Her mother called him Dr. Frankenstein. He was not much older than Annie's son Charlie. Dr. Franken, Dr. Franken. Hospital pages always sounded so ominous. The blood was pounding in Annie's ears.

"You have power of attorney," her mother was saying when she went back into the room to wait for the doctor. "I want both of you to go in and sign the papers for me."

"Oh, Mom, that can wait. Let's worry about your health now..."

"You can worry about two things at once, Annie," Betty said, smiling. "I've seen it firsthand. I want you to go in." She paused. She reached out and held Annie's hand in her own left hand, Miranda's in her right. "I want you to go," she said.

Dr. Franken, Dr. Franken, said the page.

"I want that rotten, selfish, dirty bastard to face you," Betty said. Her eyes were fierce. "Both of you."

Miranda and Annie stared at their mother.

"He owes you that," Betty said. "Rest his soul," she added gently.

The doctor appeared eventually, a youngster in a white coat. Betty's staph infection had gotten worse, he said. Pneumonia... intravenous antibiotics... couldn't possibly go home... at her age... lucky to have survived the meningitis... at her age... at her age... at her age...

Annie had mechanically taken notes. When she tried to decipher them when she got home, she said, "Just words. A bunch of meaningless words. All I really heard was at her age. She's not even that old. That little punk doctor."

She lay down on Betty's chaise.

"Don't worry, Annie," Miranda said in a worried voice. "She'll be okay."

It was the first time Annie could remember Miranda comforting her. It terrified her. Things must be very bad indeed.

Miranda called Leanne, who promised to call the hospital and see, doctor to doctor, what was really going on.

"She'll go in and see her in the afternoon, too, when Henry's napping. Hilda can keep an eye on him."

Miranda seemed so proud, Annie thought, as if Leanne's generous behavior reflected on her somehow. "That's great," she said, and Miranda beamed.

Then Annie called Cousin Lou's house to see if Rosalyn could go to the hospital in the morning.

"Oh, she can't possibly, she'll drive your poor mother crazy. No, God, no. I'll go, though. I'm more soothing, aren't I? I cheer people up. I'll go. Rosalyn is much too nervous right now. This business has been a terrible strain on her."

"What business? Mom in the hospital?" Leave it to Rosalyn to turn this into her own malady.

"No, no. Those two girls from Palm Springs. It's gotten all topsy-turvy."

Annie almost moaned. She did not care about Amber and her antics right now. She did not even care about Frederick. What was done was done. She cared only about her mother.

"One of them seems to have run off with that Barrow fellow," Cousin Lou was saying. "Gweneth is mad as a wet hen..."

Where did her cousin ever come up with that colloquial American expression? Annie wondered irrelevantly.

"Rosalyn has been on the phone with hysterical women all day. She's devastated. And with a baby coming..."

Annie said, "Cousin Lou, I'm sorry Rosalyn is in such a state, but can you go to the hospital tomorrow morning or not? I kind of have to know."

"What am I? Family? Or family? First thing in the morning."