Commonwealth

  9

  Fix was still alive the Christmas after Teresa Cousins died. Impossible but true. It would be his last Christmas, but then the last two Christmases had been his last Christmas, as this past Thanksgiving was his last Thanksgiving. Franny didn’t want to leave Kumar and the boys again for the holidays, nor did she want to bring them with her to Santa Monica. It was too depressing. Franny and Caroline also considered the question of their mother who had been increasingly neglected in every year it was taking their father to die.

  “Dad’s not the only one to worry about,” Caroline said, thinking of their mother’s husband. Their mother confided in Caroline now, maybe more than she did in Franny. This was the pleasure of a long life: the way some things worked themselves out. Caroline and her mother had become very close.

  “I’m flipping a coin,” Caroline said over the phone. “You’re just going to have to trust me.”

  “I trust you,” Franny said. There was no one she trusted more than Caroline.

  “Heads you go to Dad’s for Christmas, tails I go to Dad’s.” This was what they’d come to, an instant of anticipatory silence and then the clatter of a quarter coming to rest on Caroline’s kitchen table in San Jose.

  The plane had circled in a holding pattern for forty-five minutes before delivering Franny, Kumar, and the boys to Dulles in harrowing weather—snow and pitch-black dark. Ravi, fourteen, and Amit, twelve, sat in the back of the rental car, earbuds stuffed deep into their ears, their heads bobbing gently in discordant time. The boys had been untroubled by the icy skid of the landing gear against the runway, just as they were untroubled by the interstate to Arlington, which was a soup of accidents and ice, cars crawling back to the suburbs like beaten dogs, holiday travelers anxious to arrive on time, holiday travelers desperate to flee. Franny called her mother to tell her not to hold dinner. There was no saying how late they’d be.

  “Be as late as you need to be,” her mother said. “If things get bad we’ll eat the onion dip.” She always made onion dip for Ravi, who liked things salted, and a caramel cake for Amit, who liked things sweet.

  “As if my mother has ever eaten onion dip,” Franny said to Kumar after hanging up her phone. She was inching the car forward while Kumar attended to the last of his work e-mails. Kumar worked in the mergers and acquisitions department in the behemoth Martin and Fox. He was making plans to defend his client from a hostile takeover even as his wife drove through the blinding snow. It was only fair. Had they been going to see his mother in Bombay she would not have been driving.

  “I’ve never seen your mother eat anything,” Kumar said, his thumbs burning up the screen on his phone. “Which is my best proof that she is a goddess.”

  Beverly and Jack Dine were both in their sixties when they married: hers early, his late. Kumar had only known Franny’s mother as Jack Dine’s wife, the empress of the Arlington car dealerships, and so he regarded her as happy and powerful, a source of bejeweled splendor. Kumar believed his mother-in-law to be the person she was in this present moment, free from history, and in return for that gift Beverly loved him like a son.

  Jack Dine’s house had once been owned by a four-term senator from Pennsylvania. It had a wall and a gate, but they kept the gate open and for Christmas draped the wall in swags of pine punctuated by oversized wreaths. The great circular driveway was parked up with cars. Every light in every window was on, the lights pinned to the high branches of the trees were on, and the snow threw back the light and illuminated the world. From the car they could see all the people through the long front windows packed together like dolls in an enormous dollhouse.

  “Is she having a party for us?” Amit asked from the backseat. At their grandmother’s house anything was possible. There were only a few parking spots left down at the end of the driveway, and so they wrestled their bags from the back and made their way through the snow.

  “Merry Christmas!” Beverly said when she threw the door open. She hugged Amit first, then Ravi, then hugged them both together, each in one arm. Beverly’s seventy-eight could rival anyone else’s sixty-five. She had stayed slim and blond while having the sense to never push things too far. A life spent as a great beauty was still clearly in evidence. Behind her the house was full and overflowing, lights and pine and glasses of champagne. The Christmas tree in the living room brushed the ceiling with its highest branches and seemed to have been encrusted with diamonds and pink sapphires. Somewhere on the other side of the house someone was playing the piano. Women were laughing.

  “You didn’t tell us you were having a party,” Franny said.

  “We always have a Christmas Eve party,” Beverly said. She was wearing a smart red dress, three ropes of pearls. “Now would you please come in the house and not stand on the porch like a bunch of Jehovah’s Witnesses?”

  Kumar and Franny pulled in their luggage and brushed the snow off their shoulders and hair. At least Kumar was wearing a suit. They had picked him up from the office on the way to the airport. But Franny and the boys looked like nothing but the disheveled travelers they were. The boys had seen guests walking around with plates heaped with food and so they dropped their bags and headed for the dining room to find the buffet. The boys were always starving.

  “It isn’t Christmas Eve,” Franny said.

  “Matthew’s family is going skiing in Vail for Christmas so I moved the party up. It was easier for everyone this way. Really, I think I’ll always have it on the twenty-second.”

  “But you didn’t tell us.”

  Kumar leaned in and kissed Beverly on the cheek. “You look beautiful,” he said, changing the subject.

  “Franny!” A heavyset man past middle age wearing a red houndstooth button-up vest came and swept her up in too zealous a hug, shaking her back and forth while making growling sounds. “How’s my favorite sister?”

  “That’s only because Caroline isn’t here,” Beverly said. “You should see the way he makes over Caroline.”

  “Caroline gives me free legal advice,” Pete said.

  “If you get sued over the holidays I’d be happy to help,” Kumar said.

  Pete turned and looked at Kumar, trying to place him. His face lit up with pleasure when finally he was able to put it all together. “That’s right,” he said to Franny. “I forgot he was a lawyer too.”

  “Merry Christmas, Pete,” Franny said. Surely she would burst into tears at some point in the evening. It was only a question of how long she could hold off.

  “Pete and his family are going to New York to see Katie and the new baby,” Beverly said. “Did I tell you Katie had her baby?”

  “Christmas in New York.” Pete smiled and his teeth made Franny think of ivory, like elephant’s tusks carved down to the size of human teeth. He was drinking eggnog from a small crystal cup. “Can you imagine that? Sure you can. You’re a city girl. Are you still in Chicago?”

  “Let them go upstairs and settle in,” Beverly said to Pete. “They’ll be back in a minute. They just got off the plane.”

  But then Jack Dine was there, wearing a needlepoint vest, a leaping stag rendered convincingly in small stitches. Jack had always been such a big man, tall and broad, though now he seemed no larger than his wife. “Who’s the pretty girl?” he asked, pointing to Franny.

  Beverly put her arm around her husband. “Jack, this is Franny, my Franny. You remember.”

  “She looks like you,” Jack said.

  “And Kumar. Do you remember him?”

  “He can get the bags,” Jack said, waving him away. “Go on now. Take them upstairs.”

  Kumar smiled, though it would be hard to say how. He was a generous man, and the boys weren’t there to bear witness.

  “Jack,” Franny said, putting her hand on her stepfather’s trembling forearm. “Kumar’s my husband.”

  But Kumar was not about to miss his exit. He would take what was available. “Sir,” he said and nodded his head. Somehow, in an impossible feat of balance and strength, he manage
d to scoop all of it up. He looped the boys’ duffels across his chest.

  “Go through the kitchen,” Jack said when Kumar had taken a single step in the direction of the sweeping staircase. The luggage was just about to overtake him, and still he turned and took the bags to the kitchen. There was a narrow back staircase that the servants had used when there were servants.

  “They think they can go right through the middle of your party,” Jack said to Franny, his eyes tracking Kumar’s back. “You’ve got to watch all the time.”

  “That was my husband,” Franny said. Was she choking? She had the strangest feeling in her throat.

  Jack patted her hand. “Tell me what I can get the pretty lady to drink.”

  “I’m fine, Jack.” Franny had thought that she had won the toss. When she heard the quarter come down on Caroline’s table, when Caroline told her to go and spend Christmas in Virginia, she thought she had gotten the better deal. Now Franny found that she was longing for her dying father, her father who was nearly dead.

  “I’ll get you some eggnog,” Jack Dine said and then turned and walked back into the crowd.

  “Worse.” Pete followed his father with his eyes. “In case you didn’t catch that. He’s a lot worse. Has he started any fires yet?”

  “Why would you say that?” Beverly asked, her voice gone flat. She loved Jack Dine, or she had loved him when he was still someone she knew. His sons, on the other hand, often required more consideration than she cared to give.

  “Because sooner or later he will,” Pete said. He was scanning the crowd, looking for someone better to talk to. “Matthew!” He raised a hand and waved to his brother. “Look! Franny’s home.”

  Matthew Dine’s vest was black, but he wore a gold watch chain with a small red Christmas ornament hanging from it, a single glass ball that made him look more festive than all the rest of them. Franny had forgotten that Jack Dine’s Christmas parties required vests for men. Glancing across the room the theme emerged: women in red, men in vests. Matthew took both of Franny’s hands in his hands, kissed her on the cheek. “You haven’t made it three steps past the door,” he said in a solemn voice.

  Franny liked Matthew the best. Everyone did. “Where’s Rick?” she said, thinking she might as well get all three of the brothers out of the way before she tried to fight a path to the staircase.

  “Rick has his nose out of joint about something,” Beverly said. “He said he wasn’t coming.”

  “He’ll come,” Matthew said. “Laura Lee and the girls are already here.”

  As I was going to St. Ives, I met a man with seven wives. Each wife had seven sacks, each sack had seven cats. Franny couldn’t keep them straight. She knew the Dine boys, that’s what they were called late into their fifties, but their wives and second wives confused her, their children, in some cases two sets, some grown and married, others still small. Kits, cats, sacks, and wives. There were members of the Dine family who considered her in some vague sense to be a sister, a cousin, a daughter, an aunt. Katie Dine in New York had a baby. She couldn’t follow all the lines out in every direction: all the people to whom she was by marriage mysteriously related. Jack Dine’s first wife, Peggy, had died more than twenty years ago but Peggy Dine’s sisters, along with their husbands and children and children’s spouses and their children, were still invited to the party every year—cherished guests! Every year they came and stood in the house that had once been their sister’s and catalogued the changes while eating the canapés that Beverly had made herself—the new sofa and a different color of living room paint and the painting of birds above the fireplace—it was a desecration of Peggy’s memory. The rearrangement of objects was more than they could bear.

  The guests were catching on to the fact that Beverly’s daughter had arrived, and the ones who knew her were anxious to see her, and the ones who didn’t know her had heard so much about her. Matthew leaned towards her, whispered in her ear, “Run.”

  Franny gave her mother a kiss. “I’ll be right back,” she said.

  She went through the kitchen, where two black men in black pants with white shirts and vests and ties piled ham biscuits onto silver trays, while a third man arranged boiled shrimp around a cut-glass bowl of cocktail sauce on a massive silver platter. They didn’t lift their heads from their work when she came through the room. If they saw her at all they said nothing about it. She went up the back stairs to the room where she and Kumar always slept. All of the Dine boys lived in town, all in beautiful houses of their own, so even at Christmas there was never a worry about space. In his retirement Jack Dine’s empire had been divided three ways, giving Matthew the Toyotas, Pete the Subarus, and Rick the Volkswagens. Rick, who was lazy, was also bitter, and often said it wasn’t fair that Matthew got Toyota. No one could compete with Toyota. He particularly envied his brother the Prius.

  Franny opened the door quietly and found her husband lying on top of the bedspread in the dark. His jacket and tie were hanging in the closet, his shoes tucked beneath the bed. Kumar had always been neat, even when they were in law school. She dropped her coat and scarf on the floor, pushed out of her snow boots.

  “I would feel very sorry for myself,” he said quietly, his hands folded over his stomach, his eyes closed, “except that I’m feeling sorry for you.”

  “Thank you,” she said and crawled the length of the vast mattress to lie beside him.

  He put his arm around her, kissed her hair. “A different couple would make love now.”

  Franny laughed, pushing her face into his shoulder. “A couple whose children wouldn’t be walking in the room any minute.”

  “A couple whose host wouldn’t shoot the son-in-law for miscegenation.”

  “I’m sorry about that,” Franny said.

  “Your poor mother. I have to feel sorry for your mother, too.”

  Franny sighed. “I know.”

  “You have to go to the party,” he said. “I’m not brave enough to go back down there with you, but you have to go.”

  “I know,” she said.

  “Ask the boys to bring me up a plate, will you?”

  Franny closed her eyes and nodded against his chest.

  If Kumar had his way they would leave for Fiji every year just before Thanksgiving and not return until the New Year rang in and the decorations came down. They would swim with the fishes and lie on the beach eating papaya. On the years they were tired of Fiji they would go to Bali or Sydney or any sunny, sandy place whose name contained an equal number of consonants and vowels.

  “What about school?” Franny would ask.

  “Aren’t we capable of home-schooling for six weeks out of the year? It wouldn’t even be a full six weeks. We would subtract the weekends and vacation days.”

  “What about work?”

  Kumar would look at her sharply then, his dark eyebrows pushing down. “Just participate in the fantasy,” he said.

  Kumar’s first wife, Sapna, had died on Pearl Harbor Day in the full tilt of the holiday season, four days after Amit was born. It was easy enough to remember how long ago that was as Amit was twelve. Sapna had been ten years younger than Kumar.

  “Ten years kinder,” he would say to her on her birthday. “Ten years more forgiving.” It was true, Sapna’s joy in life could make her seem uncomplicated, when in fact she was probably as complicated as anyone else. “No stupidity in happiness,” she liked to say. She loved her husband, she loved her sons. She loved that she had managed to escape northern Michigan for Chicago. Their lives, however busy and freezing cold, were good lives. She had come through childbirth for a second time without a hitch. They were all home together. Ravi, who was two and a half, was taking a nap. Sapna was sitting on the couch, the baby in her arms. She looked right at Kumar and said, “It’s the strangest thing.” Then she closed her eyes.

  The autopsy showed a genetic abnormality of the heart—long QT. Considering the severity of her condition, the real surprise was that she hadn’t died after Ravi was born
. But sometimes people didn’t. Sometimes they lived their entire lives never knowing the fate they missed. When tested, they found out Sapna’s mother had the gene as well. Her sister had it.

  “For the vast majority of the people on this planet,” Fix had said, “the thing that’s going to kill them is already on the inside.”

  It was less than a year after the death of his wife that Franny came to Kumar’s table at the Palmer House and asked him what he wanted to drink.

  “Jesus,” he said, staring up at her in disbelief. “Tell me that you’re not still working here.”

  Kumar, she thought. How had she forgotten Kumar? “Every now and then, only on the weekends,” Franny said, leaning over to kiss his cheek. “I have a real job in the law library back at the University of Chicago but the pay is appalling. Plus I like it here.”

  Kumar was waiting to pick up a client and take him to dinner. “I’m offering you a job,” he said. “You can start Monday. A single job that will pay you more than your two jobs combined.”

  Franny laughed. Kumar hadn’t changed. “Doing what?”

  “Due diligence.” He was making it up. “I need you to compile financial records for a merger.”

  “I never finished law school.”

  “I know how far you got in law school. We need someone we can count on. This is your interview. There, I’ve hired you.”