Alternate Side

  Rachel had begged Charlie to be one of the parents at career day at her school when she was in third grade, one of the phases of Oedipal transference in which she thought her father was handsome and brilliant and her mother was nobody and had stupid hair. The two of them had come home at the end of the day, each wearing the expression of someone sorely disappointed.

  “Apparently I am a bad explainer,” Charlie said, filling a glass with ice cubes and vodka and yanking Rachel’s favorite pink-patterned tie, the one with wolves in sheep’s clothing, through the lariat of his collar. Rachel had already started upstairs to her bedroom. “A horrible explainer,” she yelled, before slamming the door. “Even I can’t really explain what Daddy does,” Nora said later, when she was tucking her in, but Rachel said, turning to the wall, “Then he shouldn’t have come to school to talk about it.”

  Increasingly what Charlie talked about was what he called “the short-pants boys,” by which he meant the young associates, some of whom prospered to what Charlie insisted was a laughable degree by means ranging from nepotism to ass-kissing to dirty-dealing. Charlie had once been one of those young men, and while he had done his share of ass-kissing, he had at first prospered because he shone with simple decency, which was still the case and owed more to fair hair and skin than anyone ever realized. Over the years his colleagues had waited for the shark to emerge from behind the nice guy, the wolf in sheep’s clothing to make an appearance, the open-faced mask to drop. Nora suspected that when they realized it was not a mask at all, they had begun to value Charlie less. She never mentioned those early years, when, as he liked to say, the sky was the limit.

  Nor did she intend to mention that the legendary Bob Harris had been so very anxious to meet with her. When she had finally agreed to sit down with him, she had insisted on meeting on an evening when she knew her husband had a client dinner across town. When Nora arrived at the office she slunk onto the executive floor as though she were there for an assignation, and indeed Bob Harris had attempted to corner her in the past at at least two office functions. “Can’t blame a guy for trying, now can you?” he’d said. Unlike many of the New York transplants Nora met, Bob Harris did not pretend to be to the manor born, but instead went the opposite way, milked his origins preposterously. He twanged like a banjo, called soda “pop,” and liked to say things like “when pigs fly.” His firm was called Parsons Ridge, after the town in West Virginia where he’d been born. “That sounds picturesque,” the PR-assistant wife of one of the short-pants boys had said at a cocktail party.

  “It’s a shit hole,” Harris had said.

  “You look fine,” he said now, Nora sitting opposite him in his office.

  “And you, Mr. Harris.”

  He sighed, reached for his bourbon. He always took it with a maraschino cherry for some reason, and Nora had noticed that the level in his glass stayed more or less the same through any event or evening. Nora had passed on a drink. She’d worn a black fluted skirt not conducive to giving the person sitting opposite a peek at her panties. Some of the men she had to do business with would drop their pens so their eyes were level with her knees and any gap between them. Bob wouldn’t see the point of that.

  “No matter what I do, you’re never gonna call me Bob,” he said. “Even if I get you to come work for me.”

  “Hard to figure how that would happen,” Nora said, “since I know next to nothing about your business.” She’d noticed that when people were around Bob Harris they tended to lapse into his syntax and vocabulary. She’d once heard a partner who had attended prep school and Yale unthinkingly use the verb “reckon.” As in Bob saying:

  “I don’t reckon it’s much of a secret that I’m putting a pile of money into a foundation. A pile of money.”

  “How much is a pile?” Nora asked.

  “You are a pisser,” Bob Harris said, shaking his head. “Anybody else sits there all quiet and mealy-mouthed, butter wouldn’t melt in it. Thinking what you’re thinking but not saying it. For now, let’s keep the exact number on the QT. Let’s just say it will make all these folks sit up and take notice. What do you think about education?”

  “Do you care about education?”

  “Hell, woman, everybody cares about education. Not that I did much with mine. Just—” He chuckled and gestured to the enormous plate-glass window as though it were a trophy case, assorted skyscrapers just beyond the sill. Bob Harris liked to make much of the fact that he had gone to a third-tier state school and gotten thrown out for making a chain of women’s undergarments that stretched around the entire administration building. Twice. “In every color under the sun, boys, not just your white ones, either. A lot of black and red. A lot.” He had a mysterious wife whom various profiles said he’d married while he was still in school, who was never seen and was said to live nearly all the time at their farm, which was in Virginia. There were no photographs of her in his office, nor of their son, who was said to be a geologist in New Mexico.

  Nora refused to fill the silence. “So what about it?” Bob continued. “Come run this foundation for me. People I know think you’re good at what you do. You got to have better things to do than shepherd a lot of housewives around looking at bracelets.”

  “It’s a museum. We offer historical and educational programs.”

  “There you go. You’re already in the education business. You got no learning curve, and a nice manner.” He leaned forward, and Nora pressed her knees together and smoothed her skirt, she thought surreptitously, until he grinned. “You know why you’re really here? One time I asked you about that museum, which I have to say I don’t get the point of one bit, and you said to me, All jobs sound silly unless you’re a pediatric oncologist, or a plumber. You remember saying that?”

  Nora shook her head, although it was certainly possible. Somehow she always found herself more outspoken with Bob Harris than she was with almost anyone else.

  “I’d need to know a lot more about how you plan to proceed to even think about this, Mr. Harris. The regulations governing foundations are pretty stringent. And the foundations that do good work do it because they’re focused, certain of their mission, with a clear sense of where and how to spend their money.”

  Bob Harris waved his hand in the air, picked up his bourbon glass, looked at it as though he were admiring the brown velvet color, which Nora had to admit was pretty, put it down again. She couldn’t help herself; she said, “Do you ever actually drink one of those?”

  Bob Harris raised the glass to her. “Smart. Smart girl. ’Scuse me, woman, smart woman. That’d be good, too, have the foundation run by a woman. Whatever needs to be done, we’ll do it. Whatever you need, we’ll get it for you. Just have a little think on it, all right? Just a little think.”

  On her way out Nora turned and said, “May I ask a small favor?”

  “God bless you, girl, I love the way you put words together.”

  Nora couldn’t help herself. She started to laugh. “Oh, can the hayseed act, Bob,” she said.

  To her surprise and admiration he started to laugh as well. “What’s the favor?” he said in an almost accentless voice, as though he were an actor who had heard the director cry, “Cut!” and had gone back to his everyday way of talking.

  “I already think one problem with your plan is the nepotism issue,” she said. “My husband works for you. So in the meantime, would you not mention to him that we’ve discussed this?”

  Bob Harris shrugged. “Darlin’, I mentioned to him just this morning that we had a little meeting scheduled. Swear on my mama, I was amazed that he didn’t seem to know anything about it.” And before her opened a vista of the evening, and probably the week, to come: silent treatment, recriminations, questions, recriminations, silent treatment.

  Which was precisely the way it went, Charlie at the dining room table with a drink and the greasy paper plate that meant he’d picked up
a slice of pizza instead of heating up something Charity had left in the refrigerator. The bottle of vodka was on the table, too. That was the signal that Charlie Nolan was headed for blind drunk, when the bottle was on the table. Drunk. As. Hell.

  Nora had stepped out of her heels in the foyer and walked barefoot into the kitchen, wondering how far down that road he’d traveled.

  “I thought you had a business dinner,” she said.

  “Canceled,” he said. “When were you going to mention your meeting with Bob Harris?”

  “It just happened,” Nora said, pouring some white wine and reaching for a container of leftover Chinese. “So I was going to tell you about it once I got home. And now I’m home.”

  “So you’re going to go to work for him,” said Charlie, declaratively, savagely.

  “No, I’m not,” Nora said. “He doesn’t have a clear plan, and I already have a good job.”

  “He won’t like that. He doesn’t like people who say no to him.” Nora sat down and looked at Charlie. She was thinking that Bob Harris struck her as exactly the kind of man who liked people who said no to him. Instead she said, “Too bad for him.”

  “You don’t even know him,” Charlie said. The word don’t was a shapeless, slippery thing in the very back of his throat, and Nora knew that Charlie had gone way down the vodka road before she’d arrived.

  “I’ve met him many times at your events.”

  “Did he say why he came to you in the first place?” Charlie said, and while Nora had asked herself the same question, she shot back, “That’s insulting.”

  “Come on, Nora. If you’re as big as Bob Harris and you’re starting a foundation, there are a hundred people you could pick to run it.”

  “I repeat—that’s insulting. I’m insulted. Maybe you want to stop insulting me now.” Homer put his head in Nora’s lap and whined. “Did you walk him?” she asked. “Of course not. Come on, good boy.”

  “At least one of us is a winner with that asshole,” Charlie said as he stumbled upstairs and Nora went down to the foyer. “Kiss. My. Ass,” she thought she heard as she snapped on Homer’s leash. His boss? His wife? The universe? Who could tell? On the stoop sat another tightly knotted plastic bag. “What next?” Nora asked loudly. “I mean, really—what next?”

  There was no way Nora would speak to Charity about any of this, about the parking situation or the bags on the stoop or Charlie’s black moods. It was important that Charity be kept as contented as possible, or as contented as Charity ever got, which was not so much when the twins were not around. The Monday after Thanksgiving she came up from the basement, where she always changed into her work clothes, sweat pants and a T-shirt, and said to Nora dolefully, “My babies back at college now.” Rachel and Oliver had arrived toting enormous duffels filled with dirty clothes, knowing Charity would be happy to see, and launder, and iron them, even the boxer shorts. Charity had done just that, repacked them, and sent them back to school refreshed, as she always did. She was habitually downcast after the hubbub was over.

  Charity had always been their nanny, arriving at their apartment only an hour after they had gotten home from the hospital, making clucking noises as the two handfuls of swaddle, one dark, the other fair, squirmed and whined. “Peace peace peace,” Charity had whispered, and Nora was all in.

  Aside from the fact that Charity passionately believed Nora needed to drink Guinness in order to breastfeed successfully, and was sure that the twins were starving and so tried to sneak them bottles of formula larded with rice cereal, she had been a very satisfactory nanny. She was always on time, she never refused to stay late, and she adored the twins without indulging them. She taught Ollie the rules of cricket, arranged Rachel’s unruly hair, had muffins on the counter after school when they were young and then fruit juices when they both started playing after-school sports. There was no hint of equivocation or dispassion in her devotion. You couldn’t mention the word Harvard around Charity because Rachel had been denied admission, and Nora suspected she had found and destroyed all photographs of the girl who had broken up with Oliver senior year of high school.

  Nora had only had to have a sit-down with Charity once, years before, when Charity had decided to let the kids know what a friend they had in Jesus. Charlie was a lapsed Catholic, Nora had grown up vaguely Presbyterian, but Charity belonged to the Church of the Living Risen Son of God, a mainly Jamaican congregation, which met in what had formerly been a movie theater. Nora knew this because Rachel had given her a full report after Charity had agreed to stay for a weekend when Nora and Charlie were obliged to go on one of those three-day golf and spa trips that a director Charlie worked with considered essential for team-building. The blood of the lamb seemed to have figured prominently in the service, as did the notion that everyone was a poor sinner.

  “I need to be cleansed in the waters, Mommy,” Rachel had said. “In the River Jordan.”

  When Nora confronted Charity about this, she seemed not the least contrite. “Children be needing the Lord in their lives,” Charity said.

  “I know you believe that,” Nora said. “But Charlie and I have different ideas about religion.”

  “Some things are just believing,” Charity had said, lifting her chin. “Some things just the truth.”

  “Guess that shut you right up,” Christine had said on the phone.

  Charity was the source of most intelligence about the block, which she got from the other housekeepers and nannies. As they walked the dogs and swept the sidewalks, they gossiped about movie stars, popular singers, and the people they worked for. Three months before the Levinsons put their house on the market—two months before Dori Levinson had given her husband’s clothes, tennis rackets, and chess set to a charity shop and had the locks changed while he was at work—Charity had said, “Mr. and Mrs. Levinson, no good.” Nora had been able to call Alma Fenstermacher and bring over a tin of cookies in a timely fashion because Charity said, “Mr. Fenstermacher, no more bladder.” It was Edward Fenstermacher’s gallbladder, of course, not his bladder, but Nora had still been glad of the intelligence. It was important not to cross Charity unnecessarily. Early on Nora had said jocularly, having heard an exchange on the playground between two nannies, “Do all Caribbean women yell at each other all the time?”

  “What?” Charity had shouted, and Nora just shut up.

  She had had to clear Ricky with Charity before he started working in the house. “Puerto Rico,” Charity had said, adding a sound like air going out of a tire under pressure. It had taken two years of his meticulous service for her to acknowledge that Ricky was not lazy and to stop checking Nora’s jewelry box for theft after he left, although how he could possibly steal anything when Charity hung over his shoulder like a shawl Nora could not imagine. Charity eventually acknowledged that he was hardworking and trustworthy, but said this was because he was actually from South America, which was not true, although he was not Puerto Rican, either. She had also let Nora know when Ricky and his wife had had first one child, then another. Nora had passed clothes and sports equipment that had once belonged to the twins along to Ricky’s boys, who were now eight and ten and whose photographs, posed in front of a spectacularly phony mountain backdrop, were taped to the dash of the van.

  There was a shadow government on the block, a shadow government that knew where all the bodies were buried, a system of mutual dependence, one group needing services, the other employment. Nora was never certain where the balance of power fell. Charity knew when Nora bought new underpants, when Rachel was menstruating. She changed the sheets, so she knew when Nora and Charlie had had sex, which was not so often now. She picked up their prescriptions. She knew their secrets.

  Nora would never forget the two of them sitting side by side on the couch in the den of their old apartment staring at the television screen the September morning of the terrorist attacks downtown, the sound the two of them ma
de together as the first of the World Trade Center towers distintegrated in slow motion. That day was the first time she had ever seen Charity sit down while at work. It was the first time Charity had stayed overnight when Nora and Charlie were there as well. At dawn Nora had found her in the kitchen, listening to the radio, making sandwiches for the firefighters at the fire station nearby, Charity wiping the tears from her face with the back of the hand that held the bread knife. Wordlessly Nora had joined her.

  The only other time Nora had seen Charity weep was at the twins’ high school graduation. She had worn a pink hat with silk flowers and a pink suit. Oliver had gone out and gotten Charity an orchid corsage. Nora would bet anything that that corsage was pressed somewhere, perhaps in the pages of Charity’s Bible.

  When Nora passed Ricky Monday morning she called, “Good morning, Enrique,” in as cheery a voice as possible, given the atmosphere around the parking lot.

  “You need me, Mrs. Nolan?” Ricky said.

  “Charity says the dryer isn’t working properly.”

  “That vent,” Ricky said, shaking his head. “I’ll take care of it. We don’t want to get on Charity’s bad side.”

  “No, we do not,” Nora said.

  Linda Lessman was waiting for a cab on the corner to go to work at the criminal courts building. Her fair hair was always damp in the mornings since, having been the captain of her college swimming team, with the square shoulders and narrow hips to prove it, she tried to do laps each day before work. Nora had been a little afraid of her when the Nolans first arrived on the block—of Linda’s blunt, declarative sentences and direct gaze—but over time she had come to like her.

  Legend had it that residents of the block had once caught up with one another in the supermarket and the drugstore, but the supermarket had been replaced by a twenty-story condo building, the drugstore by a bank branch, and everything was delivered now: the groceries, the dry cleaning, the takeout. When the twins were home they had breakfast delivered, coffee in go-cups and pancakes in foam containers. At 2 A.M. they would often order tikka masala and cheese fries, sushi and baklava.