“Well done,” said Avis.
“Peasant hips,” said Dinah. She offered Avis a spicy chicken wing, and Avis accepted. The waiting room was a mess of crumpled wax paper, napkins, and crumbs by the time the baby arrived.
Why do babies all seem to be born at three in the morning? I was deep asleep when they called me. Neither grandmother had quit the field. Nicky grinned ecstatically, they said, when he came to announce the most beautiful baby ever born, and that she had Dinah’s hair.
“How is Grace?” Avis asked.
“Insanely great. One of the nurses said she had never seen anyone smile like that.”
“Can we see her?” both asked. Dinah meant the baby. Avis meant Grace.
Soon Grace, cleaned up and still smiling, was rolled out of the delivery room on the way to a room of her own. Her pale hair was dark with sweat, and there were deep bluish crescents under her eyes. Avis touched her daughter’s cheek, and said, “I’m proud of you, darling.” It had never been easy for Avis to say things like that, and she’d chosen a good moment.
The baby was taken to the nursery so the new mother could get some sleep. Avis and Dinah admired their grandchild through the nursery window, and Nicky went home to send an e-mail to everyone in the world to say that the baby was twenty-seven inches long and they were calling her Rainbow Raisin.
Avis has hired a baby nurse for them,” Dinah informed me, as if she had just learned that the baby was to be raised by Nurse Ratched. She was calling to tell me the baby would be called Belinda, not Brooke for her own mother, as Dinah had hoped.
“Grace loved Belinda. So did Nicky, and they’re still in mourning for her.”
“Nicky loves Brooke too, and Brooke’s still alive to appreciate it.”
I happened to know that they had never seriously considered it; Nicky said if they named the baby Brooke everyone would think they were hoping for a bequest from Mrs. Astor. “Is the nurse going to live in?” I asked, thinking a change of subject would be wise.
“That was the plan, but Nicky hit the roof.”
I had thought that new parents normally wept with gratitude at having experienced help in the first weeks of a baby’s life.
“If they wanted another human being in a cramped apartment 24/7 they’d want me,” Dinah informed me. “Nicky wants to raise his baby with his wife. He’s home, he’s a night owl, he couldn’t have a stranger in the house.”
She had called me from the kids’ apartment, where she had just finished cleaning the bathrooms, getting everything ready for the homecoming. I agreed that I would meet her there, after I closed the shop, and bring flowers.
Dinah was on the floor in the kitchen editing the lower shelves of the refrigerator when I arrived.
“Remember that first flat you had where I used to come and stay?” Dinah greeted me.
“Do I!”
“Up seven flights of stairs?”
“Four. My legs were like iron in those days.”
“Oh God, what do you suppose this was?”
The container she had just found behind three nearly empty jars of pickles had hillocks of gray-green mold, like a blanket of lichen, covering the contents. “They can’t have cleaned out this reefer since the Coolidge administration. Who raised these people?”
The buzzer rang. I checked the video cam and soon we had a UPS man at the door with an enormous box from Bloomingdale’s addressed to Mr. and Mrs. Wainwright.
“Well, I’m Mrs. Wainwright,” said Dinah, and she set about cutting the packing tape with a steak knife when no scissors could be found. Inside the packing carton was another box with a gift card and tied with satin ribbon. Dinah opened the card and read, “ ‘Granny Dinah told me you needed one of these. Love to all three of you from Nona.’ Granny Dinah? Gag me with a spoon.” The inner box held a professional-size food processor. Dinah said, “Oh, for Christ sake. I told her they needed a little tiny one, like a blender, for making baby food.” There were now Styrofoam packing peanuts all over the floor, and I was looking at the extremely minimal counter space in what passed for a kitchen. “Even I don’t have one this big,” said Dinah.
“Then you take this one and give them yours.”
“Lady Gotrocks will come to visit and notice.”
“Don’t be mean. We’ll explain. She’ll be pleased.”
“To be giving alms to poor Mother Courage here?”
“She isn’t like that. At all. She admires you. She’ll laugh at herself, and be embarrassed, and then pleased that you can use it.”
“No.” Dinah started repacking the box. “We’ll return it and get a credit, and I’ll help Grace choose what she really needs.”
For a little stretch I was quite cross with Dinah, who seemed to me pointlessly disdainful and competitive toward Avis, so I left her to work in silence while I arranged the flowers. Fortunately I don’t think she noticed I was annoyed. I think to her I had never stopped being the public school urchin from Ellsworth, Maine, to whom she was teaching the ways of the world.
When the refrigerator was finally clean to Dinah’s standards and we’d done two loads of wash, trekking down to the basement laundry room and back, we took ourselves out for Ethiopian food, Dinah’s latest passion.
She ordered. We ate from the same dishes, picking up gobbets of spicy meat and vegetable with swatches of a spongy bread that was more like a warm wet towel than a loaf, but utterly succulent.
“What do you want the baby to call you?” I finally asked her, when we’d said all there was to say about the food.
“RJ’s boys just call me Dinah.”
“I think Granny Dinah is rather charming.”
“What do Althea’s grands call her?”
I said, “Your Majesty,” and Dinah laughed. Oh, it was a pleasure, that deep-throated laugh.
“Do we need more beer?”
“Always.”
Dinah signaled the waiter. When he had brought the bottles and poured, Dinah said, “What if I told you I’m thinking of marrying Mike?”
“Oh my god! I’d say, ‘Oh my god!’ Dinah! Are you?”
“I am.”
I started to laugh. “Oh my god. I am absolutely thrilled!”
She smiled broadly. “Are you?”
“Thrilled! He’s a great guy, Dinah. I thought this day would never come, what’s gotten into you?”
She shrugged, happy. “I don’t know. He’s got a good track record as a husband. We have a wonderful time together.” Her deep blue eyes seemed lit with hope.
I raised my glass to her, and we clinked and drank.
“Has he asked you?”
“Not exactly. Everything but, though. We’ve had the money conversation. The where-would-we-live conversation. The what-would-retirement-look-like conversation.”
“The Florida/not Florida conversation?”
“Even that.” She looked deeply content and also excited, pleased. Young. Like a person with a second chance. I felt suddenly sad that this would never happen for me.
“I am so happy for you, I could weep,” I said.
Avis also thought that the children should come home to a clean apartment. She sent Ursula downtown to see to it. Ursula was waiting when the little family arrived home from the hospital, bowing shyly when Grace and Nicky exclaimed at how fresh and sparkling everything was. She had made Grace’s favorite foods for dinner, and she tried to get Grace to go to bed and have supper on a tray, but Grace wouldn’t. Ursula served them at the table, fussing every bit as much as she had for the Great Inca, although their flatware was stainless and they’d never unpacked the cloth napkins. The baby slept in her carrier on the other end of the table throughout the meal, like some marvelous dish they were saving for later.
Late that night, pottering in the kitchen, Grace exclaimed, “Ursula’s thrown out all the sponges!”
“Ursula? That sounds more like the fine Italian hand of my mother,” Nicky said. Dinah used dish towels tucked into the pockets of her aprons for everything in
the kitchen and washed them in hottest water every night, not trusting that sponges were ever clean enough. But Grace, sleep-deprived from nursing every three hours, and so besotted with the baby that not much else penetrated the fog, forgot he had said it and forgot that she’d agreed. She fervently thanked Avis for sending Ursula to clean so beautifully. Nicky, being Nicky, didn’t thank anyone.
Chapter 15
I think it was in September that a client invited me to a luncheon to benefit refugee women. She had taken a table. I’m fond of the client and was further pleased because Gil was on the board of the organization. The luncheon was at a new hotel at the top of an office tower near Central Park with spectacular views of treetops still in the full green splendor of late summer. At the table, my neighbor on my left was my classmate Nanny Townsend. We got caught up with each other, but the seat at my right was empty until well into the main course, so I sat silently when we changed conversational partners after the appetizer. I didn’t mind, as it gave me a chance to watch Gil at his table near the dais. I liked seeing him smile as he talked; I liked admiring his large handsome silver head. Once he looked over at me and our eyes met. My old sweetheart. He’d been my love for well over half my life.
Then the seat on my right was suddenly filled by a woman who arrived talking and never stopped; her mouth was still in motion when I left the ballroom an hour later. Her name was Casey. She was wearing a Prada suit and a little too much jewelry for daytime. She apologized for her lateness, told us in detail what important thing had detained her, in minutes had filled me in on whom she was married to first, whom she is married to now, how long she had lived in Los Angeles and how long in Bermuda, why she stopped going to Fishers Island in the summers, whom she had lately met in Provence, and how well and how long she had known our hostess. She didn’t even stop when the speeches began, except that when the philanthropist Victor Greenwood was thanked from the podium, she looked around saying, “Oh, is Victor here?” She had a delightful smile, but a mind like a bat, swooping down on things that looked nourishing to her, then swooping off again. Nanny murmured to me, “Casey’s friends say they should take out a full-page ad in the Times saying ‘Casey Leisure knows these people, list in formation,’ and then list everyone in the world.
I was listening to an honoree from South Sudan when I heard Casey say, “Of course, I knew Mary Allison well, and Mike is simply devastated without her. Out of his mind, really. Did you hear, he’s gotten mixed up with Dinah Wainwright? His friends don’t know what to do.”
I joined the conversation. “Do you know Dinah Wainwright?”
“Oh, I’ve known her for donkey’s years from the Vineyard.”
The woman on her other side said, “I remember her column ‘Dinah Might.’ ”
“Well,” said Casey, “but did you know she didn’t really write it?”
Surprise was expressed.
“She can’t write her way out of a paper bag.”
I said, “I’m quite a fan of her work for Art and Design.”
“I know the woman she pays to write it for her,” said Casey. “Really, I do. Well, my friend knows her. And once I shared a cab with Dinah, coming home from some dreary dinner in Chelsea, and I said, ‘I’m a great friend of so-and-so, her ghostwriter, and she just looked at me and said, ‘Who?’ It was too funny.”
“It must be expensive for her,” I said.
“Oh, don’t worry, she’s got plenty of dough. The point, though, is sweet Mike Allison. Do you know him?”
I said, “A little.”
“He seems nuts about her, so no one says a thing to him. He and Mary were so devoted, there are things he doesn’t know about women. I suppose it can’t hurt him to have some fun as long as he doesn’t marry her.”
“I always loved that column, ‘Dinah Might,’ ” said the woman on the other side. “It was really clever.”
“Yes. Well,” said Casey.
I stayed in my seat until the coffee was poured. Then I blew a kiss to my hostess and slipped away. I sent her a note that afternoon, saying how sorry I was to leave, but such was the life of the working girl.
Thanksgiving that year was perhaps the happiest I can remember. Althea was planning to spend the winter in the south of France, so I would soon have my love nearly to myself again for three lovely months. Dinah invited Avis to Thanksgiving dinner, and Avis gratefully accepted. Mike and Dinah’s intention to marry was now known to the family and a source of rejoicing on our side; on Mike’s, too, this seemed to be happy news.
Mike’s son Barry was short but had his father’s muscular build. He worked as the tech expert at a charter school in New Jersey. Barry’s wife, Tia, pixieish and very pregnant, carried her expectation as if it were a bowling ball surprisingly attached to her slender body.
Do you think Tolstoy is wrong about happy families? I think he’s wrong in at least one respect; some happy families sing. For grace, Mike and Barry sang a canon based on those verses of Matthew: Seek first the kingdom of heaven, and all of it shall come to you. Ask and you will receive; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened.
Avis knew the hymn and joined in. Mike said to her, “You have a lovely voice. A very pure sound,” and Avis blushed, not a thing she did often.
“Did you sing at school, Avis?” Dinah asked. I remembered quite clearly that Avis did not, and gave Dinah a look.
“No, I botched all my tryouts,” Avis said. “Awful stage fright.” To Mike, she said, “Dinah’s the one with the voice. You should have heard her singing ‘Hard-hearted Hannah, the vamp of Savannah, G-A.’ ”
Dinah was surprised. “How on earth did you remember that?”
“You sang so well, and were so funny!”
Grace said, “Dinah, I think you should sing it right now.”
“I don’t remember the words.”
“Was this a variety show or something?” Mike asked.
“No, on Saturday nights we had our one meal of the week without the faculty. Claques would bang on glasses and start chanting ‘We want Nan-cy Dew-ey,’ someone they liked who could really sing, and whoever it was would stand up and let ’er rip.”
“Was this like a convent school?” asked Tia.
Mike asked, “A cappella?”
“No. Yes, a cappella. Dinah was a phenomenon.”
“And she still is,” said Mike, raising his glass. We all agreed and drank to the chef.
Nicky said, “You know, Sebastian sings opera.”
Avis said “Really?”
Barry and Tia began ringing their spoons against the glasses and chanting “We want Sebas-tian, We want Sebas-tian!” I had no idea what was coming. Sebastian did, though. He woke up and rushed to Grace when he heard his name. She picked him up and held him. Nicky brought a jar of peanut butter from the kitchen and fed him a knob of it. As the dog struggled to eat, his little tongue and jaws working madly, Mike sang “La donna è mobile.” It looked exactly as if Sebastian were lip-synching. Avis was literally weeping with laughter.
After dessert and coffee, we called for Mike, who gave us “Nessun dorma,” and then at last Dinah did get up and sing “Hard-hearted Hannah,” accompanied by a wicked shimmy. When we cheered and clapped, she said, “I couldn’t let myself be outdone by a dog.”
When the kitchen was clean, and the young had gone home, Mike and Dinah stood with their arms around each other as Avis and I said good night. In the elevator, Avis said, “I really don’t think I ever had a better time in my life.”
Ask and it shall be given. Seek and you shall find. Knock and the door shall be opened unto you. What would the world be like if we believed that and it was true?
After Christmas, Gil and I spent ten blissful days on St. Martin, on the French side, a place he’d never been with Althea. We played a lot of tennis. We swam in the surf and walked on the beach, and sat in the shade and read stacks of books. The staff addressed me as Madame Flood, and on our last night, Gil gave me a ring, a large perfect pearl set in w
hite gold, with matching earrings. What people call a dinner ring. He’d given me many presents over the years, but never the ring I wanted. I cried for all sorts of reasons, and touchingly, so did he. We were outdoors, on a terrace lit with torches, in velvet warm night air; I’d had a little too much sun that afternoon and had that delicious feeling of being hot and chilled at the same time that one associates with summer nights when young.
It wasn’t long after we got back that the axe fell.
I had discovered a little lump somewhere it didn’t belong—it’s not important—that my internist said was either a cyst or it wasn’t. He sent me to a specialist. The office was on the ground floor of one of those massive apartment palaces on Fifth, quite near the Met. I was nervous about the lump, so I couldn’t keep my mind on what I was trying to read. I studied the carpet, the rather tired blue-striped wallpaper that was starting to come unstuck in an upper corner, the framed wall posters of art shows one had missed by several decades. The only other person waiting was a well-groomed but heavyset brunette in her early fifties with thickish features, just the tiniest bit bovine, and a heavy jaw that her too-short haircut did nothing to counterbalance. She had a honking great emerald-cut diamond on her left hand, though, so one supposed she had more to offer than her looks. She was immersed in a copy of Town & Country.
The receptionist buzzed in a very attractive blonde in a vintage Joan Vass overcoat, which got my attention. When she had disentangled herself from her iPod, hung her dripping coat and umbrella, and stowed her scarf and hat, she looked around and cried “Betsy!”
Betsy and the blonde, whose name was Carol or Cheryl, knew each other well. I occupied myself by working out how in this great city made up of so many interlocking villages they had become connected. Childhood friends? Their children were friends? Professional colleagues? Wives of colleagues? Ah! The Town Club.
The one with the jaw had a rather wicked wit, just showing you can’t ever judge a book. The pretty one was computer dating. When last seen, she had been off to Mohonk with a man who had seemed perfect for her. How had it gone? Not well. They had shared a love of Brahms all right, but alone with Carol he was far less interested in sex than he was in trying on her underwear. Even I had to smile, although of course I was pretending not to listen.