The Three Weissmanns of Westport

2

It was around this time that Miranda made her infamous appearance on Oprah. It was all a blur at the time — being led from a room full of snacks she was far too nervous to eat, stepping over cables, stepping onto a stage, sitting on a sofa, the sound of applause, the radiance and confidence of the woman across from her, some questions, some answers... How could she have let this happen? Didn't she check up on the stories the writers told her? Couldn't she see? Didn't she care?...

She felt like a corrupt politician stonewalling the press, like a criminal, like one of her disgraced writers. But Miranda knew that what she was saying to this woman, who hardly seemed real she was so very Oprah-like, was not only true, it was profound. Why did no one understand when she tried to explain? When she told them that her writers' stories were real-life stories even when they were lies?

"Because in real life people make things up," she said to Oprah.

But Oprah shook her iconic head, and Miranda was overwhelmed with shame.

She stayed in her loft for weeks after that, not answering the phone, not picking up calls from the clients whom she had tried to defend, ignoring the chorus of pleading voices on her answering machine: her mother, her sister, even the lawyer who was trying to defend her, for several publishers were now coming after her for fraud.

She lay in bed, tangled in her sheets, asking herself and her four walls in a loud keening voice: Why?

And then imagining, in the ironic voice with its Yiddish lilt that she had always playfully bestowed on God, a voice that answered by raising its shoulders and helplessly holding out its hands: Why not?

This is Miranda Weissmann, the answering machine said. This is your lawyer, the answering machine answered, and there is a lien on all your property until the lawsuit is settled, so couldn't you please call me back?

In real life, people don't call back, Miranda explained to the pillow. In real life, people have tantrums.

Annie and Betty both tried to visit her, but even they were left standing in the hallway banging on the door, Annie calling in, "Oh, don't be such an ass."

It wasn't until Annie left a message on the answering machine describing their mother's unhappy state in gruesome detail that Miranda felt she actually had to answer the phone.

"She's really suffering," Annie said when Miranda finally picked up. "She needs you."

Miranda showered and dressed and headed uptown. Though she was acknowledged even by herself to be extraordinarily self-absorbed, no one had ever accused Miranda Weissmann of being selfish.

The apartment was on the tenth floor, just high enough for a spacious view of the park, just low enough for a human one. Central Park was their front yard, Joseph liked to say. Their grounds. He and Betty had tried living in the suburbs when the children were little, in Westport, Connecticut. Dull and lonely there, they agreed, and after only one year, when so many other young couples were leaving the city, they found the big apartment on Central Park West and bought it for a song. That was the word Joseph had used, a "song," and Betty still recalled that day when they signed the papers and went to look at their new home. That sickly ambiance of someone else's old age had surrounded them — the filthy fingerprints around the light switches, the greasy Venetian blinds, the grime of the windows, and an amber spiral of ancient flypaper studded with ancient flies. But all Betty could think of was that they bought it for a song, and she had looked so happy and so beautiful in the weak silver city light that Joseph had not had the heart to explain the expression, to tell her they had paid the song, not received it.

Now they both stalked the premises like irritable old housecats, watching each other, waiting.

"You are leaving me," Betty said late one morning. "Hadn't you better leave, then?"

"Hadn't?"

"I think a certain formality of address is required under the circumstances, don't you? Unless you want to call the calling off off, of course."

There were times when Joe did want to call the calling off off. But that day was not one of them. Betty was being insufferable. She was vamping mercilessly, wearing her bathrobe, speaking in an arch yet melodramatic voice, and, perhaps most alarming of all, drinking shots of single malt in midmorning.

"That's a sipping whiskey. Not a gulping whiskey."

"I'm distraught."

"You're being ridiculous, Betty. You look like something out of The Lost Weekend. This is not healthy, moping around the apartment, drinking."

"My husband of fifty years is leaving me," she said.

Forty-eight, he thought.

As if she'd heard him, she said, "Bastard."

She threw her glass at him.

"All right, Elizabeth Taylor," he said, getting a towel from the bathroom.

"Wrong movie," she screamed.

"It's not a movie, Betty," Joseph said. "That's the point."

"Bastard," she said again. She sat down on the couch.

The buzzer rang, and Betty stayed where she was, staring straight ahead at the fireplace. She had discovered the mantel with its towering mirror and decorative gesso detail at a salvage yard decades ago. How could Joseph expect her to leave her Greek Revival mantel? Her hearth, as it were? She saw her reflection, sullen, in the mirror. The matching busts of impassive Greek Revival women adorned with gold leaf gazed back at her from either side of the mantel. She heard Joseph's footsteps. What a heavy tread he had. How she would miss it when he was gone, when she was alone with the mantel's two white wooden busts. Through the intercom, she heard the doorman announcing Miranda. As a child, Miranda had talked to the fireplace ladies, sometimes staging elaborate tea parties with the disembodied heads as her guests.

"Do you want her to see you like this?" Joe said when he returned to the living room.

For a moment Betty thought he was addressing one of the busts. Then she understood.

"Do you want her to see you at all?" she said. She heard and hated the sound of her voice. Oh, Joseph, she wanted to say. Let's stop all this nonsense now.

They could hear Miranda's key in the lock. Joe thought, I have to get that key back. Annie's, too. He glanced at his wife. She was wearing her old white bathrobe, and curled in on herself on the couch, she looked like someone's crumpled, abandoned Kleenex. Joe winced at his own word, the word "abandoned." No one was abandoning anyone. He would be generous. He was generous. She was being irrational. It wasn't like her. She didn't even look like herself, her face puffy from crying. If she would just be reasonable, everything would be fine: she would be so much happier once she moved into her own place.

"This situation is becoming sordid," he said.

"Squalid even."

Miranda came into the living room, walked to the couch, and gave her mother a kiss.

"Whew," she said, sniffing. "Someone got started early."

"I'm suffering."

Miranda sat down and put her arms around her mother.

"My poor darling," Betty said. "So are you, aren't you? There, there, Miranda darling. There, there."

Joe looked at the two of them patting each other's back and murmuring, "There, there." He felt awkward, an ogre standing with an enormous white bath towel. But what had he really done? Was it so wrong to fall in love?

"This is a very unhealthy situation," he said.

The two women ignored him.

He threw the towel down at the spill and stared at it. "Your mother never drinks," he said. "You have to talk to her, Miranda. I'm worried about her."

There was withering silence. The warm perfume of Scotch whiskey hung in the room.

"I'm not an ogre," he said.

The next day, Joseph packed his bags and left for Hong Kong on a business trip.

"You must be relieved," Annie said to her mother on the phone.

But Betty was not relieved. She was even more miserable than before.

And, too, there was the problem of money. An immediate, acute problem. Unaccustomed, unaccountable. Undeniable. On the advice of Joseph's lawyers, Joseph's lawyers now informed her, Joseph was cutting off all credit cards. The joint bank account, which Betty used for household expenses, would not be replenished until a settlement had been reached.

"I thought Mr. Weissmann didn't want to use lawyers," Betty said to the lawyers. "We have a mediator." The lawyers replied only that they supposed, judging by the evidence of their employment, that Mr. Weissmann had changed his mind.

"I'm awfully sorry," Joseph said when he called. "It was on the advice of my lawyers that I got lawyers."

"Do they advise me to get lawyers, too?"

"We can work this out equitably. It just takes a little time. I'm prepared to be generous."

"Joseph, you're squeezing me out of my own home."

"Well, maybe that would be best. While we settle things."

Just hearing his voice made Betty feel a little better. It was a voice she had heard every day. After the conversation, she felt more herself.

"That's crazy," Annie said when her mother explained this to her. "He's behaving horribly. And you can't move out. That's Divorce 101."

"The co-op is in his name. Legally, it's his. So he just has to straighten things out — legally. Then we'll work it out between us. Until then, he's not really free to let me have the apartment. Legally."

"Mother, you know that makes no sense, don't you? I mean, you do know that?"

"And of course I don't have the money to keep it up just now. Do you know what it costs to maintain a place like this? I'm sure it's a fortune. But I don't really know. Joseph always took care of that part of it. He's always taken such good care of me..." she said with a wistful sigh that was soft with gratitude and comfortable memories.

Annie thought of the little bag with money in it her great-grandmother had always kept hanging around her neck, for emergencies. "Don't you have anything in your own name?" she asked.

"A little knipple like my grandmother? Why should I?"

"Well, in case something like this happened."

"Something like this was supposed to happen thirty years ago, when you girls went off to college, when women were unprepared for something like this."

"But you're unprepared now."

"But it wasn't supposed to happen now," Betty patiently explained yet again.

It was soon after Joseph left that Betty heard from her cousin Lou. Cousin Lou was an elegantly dressed man with a pink face for whom the description open-handed might have been invented. He had, to begin with, disproportionately large hands that burst from his sleeves and were constantly slapping the backs and patting the cheeks and enfolding the helpless smaller hands of the many people he liked to have around him. Lou had come to the United States as an evacuee in 1939, an eight-year-old boy from Austria bringing nothing with him but his eiderdown and a copy of Karl May's first Winnetou novel. Betty's uncle and aunt had taken him in for the duration of the war, but he stayed on after the war ended, for he had lost everyone in the camps. The loss of his family was something he never mentioned. In fact, the only topic from that time that he did talk about was someone named Mrs. James Houghteling.

Mrs. H., as he called her, had been the wife of the Commissioner of Immigration when the eight-year-old refugee had arrived at Ellis Island.

"Now, that same year there was a bill before Congress," he said, the first time he discussed Mrs. H. with the little Weissmann girls. "Do you know what Congress is?"

They nodded yes, though they had only the vaguest idea of men seated in a horseshoe arrangement from a poster in school.

"Then what, Cousin Lou?" Annie said, adding, "Don't worry," for in spite of the parties he always gave, Cousin Lou always did look a little worried.

"That same year," Cousin Lou continued, "someone thought it would be a good idea to allow twenty thousand refugee children to come here, to the United States. Children just like me. Did you know I came here on a boat when I was little?"

Annie nodded again. Annie knew about World War II. She knew about the Holocaust. She had seen a terrifying documentary on Channel 13.

Miranda began to rock on her heels.

"Twenty thousand! That's a lot of little boys and girls, isn't it? So they asked the Congress, which is in charge of things like that. But the Congress, it said, No, we don't want those twenty thousand children. What would we do with twenty thousand children? We have our own children!"

At this point in the story, Annie took Miranda's hand. What if Miranda had heard of the Holocaust, too? Was that why she was rocking back and forth?

"Their own children," Annie repeated, trying to move things along.

"Now, I never actually met Mrs. H., but I feel as if we're old friends. And one night Mrs. H. was at a party, and at this party she said that the trouble with the Wagner-Rogers bill — that's what it was called — the trouble with bringing in these twenty thousand children was that they would all too soon grow up into twenty thousand ugly adults!"

Miranda began to sob, not because she knew of the Holocaust as Annie feared, but at the thought of so many ugly people. She had nightmares for a week afterward, but no one blamed Cousin Lou. It was impossible to blame Cousin Lou for anything. And in time the story of Mrs. H. became a welcome ritual for the girls whenever they visited Cousin Lou or he visited them.

Lou would pause on those later occasions. He would narrow his eyes and purse his lips, as if he were thinking, thinking, thinking. "Mrs. Houghteling," he would then say, pronouncing both the H and the gh with a hard, exaggerated Yiddish ch, as if he were clearing a hairball from his throat. It was only years later that Annie and Miranda discovered the proper pronunciation was Hefftling. "Mrs. Chech tling," the girls would chant back at him, feeling the word, an ugly word for an ugly soul, vibrating deliciously in their throats. Then Lou would shrug and say, "Well, I must have been a beautiful baby." And Miranda and Annie would always respond, like good congregants, "'Cause, baby, look at you now."

They had heard the story so many times that "chechtling" had become a Weissmann family verb for snobbish behavior. "Stop chechtling, you big prig," Miranda would say if Annie turned up her nose at some outlandish adolescent style Miranda was affecting. "You're just a selfish bourgeois chechtler," Annie would say when Miranda made fun of her brief eighth-grade Maoist phase.

Cousin Lou, who insisted that everyone call him Cousin Lou, was not a subtle man, but he was a sincere one. He had made a great deal of money as a real estate developer, but his true business seemed to be providing food and drink for as large a number of guests as he could manage. Passionately devoted to his adoptive American family, his definition of that family had grown so prodigiously over the years that he could no longer fit all of his family into his house at one time, or even two. "You're like family!" he would say, embracing freeloaders, friends, hangers-on, acquaintances, in-laws, and stray children from the neighborhood. Like many immigrants, he was a patriot, and the frenetic magnanimity of his social activity was, as he saw it, his patriotic duty.

His first solution to convivial overpopulation had been to build ever bigger houses for himself. He now lived in a sprawling modern house of glass on a steep hill overlooking Long Island Sound. But even this would not accommodate his guest list. The teeming friends who were "like family" multiplied like fruit flies in a jar, and Lou had finally begun to rotate them in shifts, one swarm at a time.

One of Betty's times, an exalted one, was Labor Day. When Lou called this year to invite her and Joe and the girls to his usual Labor Day party in Westport, Betty said, "Oh, what a shame. Joseph would have loved to come, but he's divorcing me. Well, maybe next year," and hung up.

It was this kind of behavior, fey and satirical and so unlike their normally open, cheerful mother, that filled Annie and Miranda with despair and, when they were honest with themselves, outrage not just at Josie but at Betty as well.

"She's insane," Annie said when Lou called to ask what was going on. "He's driven her mad. You can't tell her anything. She won't listen. All she does is watch black-and-white movies all night and quote them all day. She's paralyzed, she's broke, she sits by the phone and waits for him to call. I know she does. She answers on the first ring. Did you notice? And she might have been drunk, too. My mother! Drunk! Was she? God, I hope not. Was she?"

"Well now, let me think — "

" — and I had to force her to get a lawyer — she wasn't even going to get a lawyer! She can't pay the bills. The bastard has somehow cut her off, and he says nothing can go forward until the apartment is empty and..."

But by now Cousin Lou had gotten the picture, and to him it was a picture of a refugee, and he never could resist a refugee. Within minutes he had called Betty and invited her to come and stay in Westport, as long as she liked, in a cottage he owned at Compo Beach.

Betty knew the property was extremely valuable. It stood in a little cluster of little streets among what had once been other little beach cottages. Small, cheek-by-jowl, with tiny front yards, no garages, the cottages had not been fashionable during the heyday of the suburban house and showy green lawn, when she and Joseph and the children had briefly lived in the town. Schoolteachers rented them in those days. A few divorced mothers or widows fallen on hard times. Like me, Betty thought. Somewhere in the late 1980s all this changed and the cottages were snapped up and vigorously renovated. They were now a huddle of self-consciously and charmingly designed "vacation homes" — McCottages, Annie called them. Lou's bungalow was the sole survivor from the old days. He had been renting the place out to the same woman and her son for years — "They're like family!" But now the son had grown up and moved away, and the old lady had finally died.

"Don't you want to beautify it?" Betty asked, using Cousin Lou's code for demolition.

"Time enough for beautification," he assured Betty. "Just your presence will be beautification."

Betty tried to remember Lou's cottage. A little boy had been swinging from a rope swing, she was sure. From an apple tree in bloom. Or was that in a movie she'd seen? Well, never mind. It was a charming place, it had to be; it was a cottage, after all. Cottage. Such a charming word. She imagined rose-patterned wallpaper. She would take long, lonely walks by the sea. It was only Long Island Sound, not the sea, really, but there were sure to be gray, windy days nevertheless. She stared out the window at the nighttime view she'd known for so long. The park was black and deep, the yellow pool of a streetlight puffing out of the darkness here and there, a taxi's red taillights just visible, then gone. Could Joseph really mean for her to abandon her life, just as he had abandoned her? Well, then. What did she have to lose? It was all gone already.

"You're very generous," she said. She shook off an uncomfortable echo of Joseph's voice — I'll be very generous... very generous... "Thank you, Cousin Lou. What would I do without you?"

"Ha!" cried Cousin Lou. "I think we should ask Mrs. James Houghteling that one!" And he chuckled, invoking that long-gone lady's name three more times before hanging up.

And so it was, against the advice of the divorce lawyer Annie insisted her mother hire, and in direct refugee defiance of the spirit of the wife of the former Commissioner of Immigration, that Betty Weissmann decided to emigrate to what Cousin Lou newly dubbed Houghteling Cottage.