I wasn’t in fact spending that much time alone. Instead, I was with new people, people who’d never met Gil. I went out to Southampton with a woman I swam laps with at the Colony Club. I went to films with single friends I’d known slightly for decades, and to the opera with one of Avis’s young walkers. Little by little the days passed. Toward the end of the summer I paid some attention, not much, to talk of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and their problems. Richard Wainwright would call and say he thought I should sell this or move that. He sounded upset, but that barely registered. I told him to make any changes for me he thought right. Then Lehman Brothers crashed and burned, and even I woke up to the news that we were witnessing an end to prosperity as we had known it.
So I had something new to worry about.
I suppose I had better admit here that I was dealing with something almost more disorienting than Gil’s death. Which, after all, we had both always known was coming. It was this: as you will have gathered, there was a place in Connecticut that had been ours, his and mine. It had come to him from his parents; Althea had never been interested. There was a small house of great charm, the place where we lived together as a couple. There were gardens, especially a rose garden planted and tended by me for many years. Huge deciduous trees like peaceful giants surrounded us with colors in the fall. He had always told me it would come to me, along with enough money to keep it up.
I can’t explain it . . . it’s not that I can’t get along without a country house. It’s the surprise. Well, the shock. My gardens. How many times had he seen me come in glowing after an afternoon of staking delphiniums, deadheading peonies, digging in the rose beds, knowing I thought they would always be mine?
I’ll never know what changed. Or if this was always his plan. Nor will I ever be the same.
I found out at the funeral through an innocent conversation with the Floods’ estate lawyer, whom I had met earlier that morning. The service was at the church of St. Vincent Ferrer, Althea’s church, in the east sixties, right down Lexington Avenue from Hunter College. It’s a neighborhood I know well, not far from my first flat where I lived when I worked for Philomena. The day was bright and dry, if still very raw, but I had dressed for a walk after the service. The reception was to be held at Gil and Althea’s apartment, and of course I couldn’t go there; instead I stood in the narthex waiting for Althea and the children to enter the small herd of limousines that idled outside and be whisked off, watching the friends and extended family pouring past me as if I were a rock in a streambed and they were the water. As they descended the church steps in the pale sunlight, they were already beginning to chatter to each other about the beauty of the service and whether to walk or look for a taxi, when the lawyer joined me.
He was just doing his version of mourning Gil, by musing aloud about what a wise and thoughtful job Gil had done of planning for his loved ones, unlike some of his clients who seemed truly to believe they were taking it with them. How carefully Gil had weighed this against that so that all three children could share equally in unequal things. He felt free to talk to me of such matters, as he knew I’d been close enough to Gil to be a legatee. He mentioned that Gil had left me a token sum of money and his grandfather’s gold pocket watch, which he’d been given on his own twenty-first birthday. Gil carried it when he wore black tie, which he rarely did with me. He had left my house to his daughters.
The lawyer had no idea that he had just reached down my throat and stopped my heart.
So. I had a lot to process.
But in the fall of 2008, so did everybody else. Richard had read the tea leaves cleverly, and both Dinah and I were well insulated from the rolling disaster going on down on Wall Street. And, as we all learned to say eight times a day, on Main Street.
But my clients were not immune by any means. One of my ladies had lived for decades in a palatial Park Avenue duplex. Her husband had invested everything with the Ponzi schemer Bernie Madoff. Overnight, they moved to a garage apartment in the suburbs, and at seventy-four she is selling cookware at a Bloomingdale’s in a mall somewhere. Her husband has congestive heart failure and sits all day in a wheelchair looking out the window. Or so I’m told.
I sell a luxury product, and even those who could still afford to travel and dine out stopped spending conspicuously that winter. If you didn’t actually need a new opera coat or fresh cruise wear, it seemed more appropriate to do without or to appear in “vintage.” Plenty of my clients had pieces that had become vintage while hanging in their own closets; that’s how it works if you buy good things that suit you and take proper care of them. They’d stop in wearing some suit I’d sold them in 1991 and thank me. By February 2009, I’d had to let Stephanie go and was running the shop myself. Mrs. Oba volunteered to take a pay cut and come in only three days a week. I was grateful, though I miss her on the days she’s not there. Her daughter is now practicing medicine in Boston and her son lives near her in Brooklyn and has small children, so she has plenty to keep her busy.
I did not.
The hours were long in the shop, with virtually no custom. Life was gray. So I was particularly happy to see Avis outside pressing the bell for me to unlock the door on a blowy day in March. She came in, bringing the fresh smell of wind with her, her cheeks bright, her expensive loafers sodden.
“You look marvelous,” I told her truthfully as she took off her wet things.
“I’ve been taking yoga with Grace. Bikram. I must say I feel sensational.”
“That’s the one in the hot room?”
“Yes, it’s wonderful. I can stand on one leg for hours, and as Grace says, I am strong like ox.”
“I’m quite jealous,” I said, though I have never had trouble keeping my figure and I hate classes, as well as heat.
“I need a new evening skirt or two and maybe a jacket, if you have something with pockets.”
“For here, or are you heading south?”
“Both. I’m taking Lindy and her parents to Sea Island for Easter.”
“Lucky them,” I said.
“You couldn’t shake loose for lunch, could you?” Avis asked. “Could your girl cover for you for an hour or so?”
“I’ll tell you what. Let me show you a couple of things and then I’ll just close up. If customers show up without appointments, tant pis.”
“That’s the spirit,” said Avis.
At the bistro around the corner we ordered cheese soufflés and split a bottle of Sancerre. A little vacation in a glass, it seems, to have wine at lunch. I enjoyed myself, but I could see now that something was troubling Avis. She got around to it over coffee.
“Have you seen much of Nicky lately?”
I said not as much as I used to.
“How does he seem to you when you see him?”
I considered. To be truthful, he seemed drawn and touchy.
“I expect they’re both exhausted. How’s Grace?”
Avis paused, unhappy. Finally she said, “Could I tell you something in confidence? Really total confidence?”
I said of course.
The long courtship. The months Nicky spent on the West Coast. His seeming contentment there, so far from his wife, though the separations made Grace so unhappy. As soon as she started to talk I had the sense of suddenly hearing a disturbing noise that’s been sounding in the distance for quite a while.
Avis had seated herself with her back to the room, and I was on the banquette across from her. She was wearing a black skirt and a gray Donna Karan jacket over a soft white open-collared shirt, and she had a long sheer linen scarf in charcoal that she wound around her throat, then removed again minutes later. Ladies of our age spend half their time reacting to their demented inner thermostats.
The restaurant had been crowded when we sat down, but by now the only occupied table near us was behind Avis, a foursome in the middle of the room who were absorbed in one another and having a jolly time. One of them was a lady known to us. I kept an eye on them as Avis leaned toward me, speaking so
ftly.
“ . . . says that . . . Well, that Nicky’s drive isn’t very strong. Even when they first fell in love, he was . . . tentative, I guess is the way she put it. Very happy to kiss and cuddle and leave it at that.”
Oh. That kind of drive. This was really nothing I wanted to know about my beloved godson, and Avis was pretty rigid with discomfort as well.
I murmured something and kept a close watch on the table behind us. They were ordering dessert.
Someone came and poured us more coffee. Avis stopped talking. Like most people brought up with servants, she didn’t interrupt conversation while being served except to say thank you, unless the topic was sex or money.
“So . . .” She took her scarf off again. “Since the baby, there’s been . . . it’s all stopped.”
We looked at each other.
“Nothing? No . . . Nothing at all?”
“They haven’t been . . . intimate”—Avis squirmed at the word, knowing she sounded like a down-market women’s magazine—“since her fifth month.”
Oh dear. I tried briefly to imagine having had this conversation with my own mother, or grandmother, or anybody, and failed. Poor Grace! But at the same time, I saw how truly close Grace and Avis must have grown, at last, that Grace had confided this. And how much it meant to Avis.
Dismayed and angry as I was about Gil, he had never been less than ardent as a lover and a gentleman in bed. I’ve led a sheltered life in that way, and I barely knew what to say.
“Have they talked about it?”
“She’s tried. Nicky says . . .” I put my hand over hers, and she stopped speaking. Our acquaintance at the next table had risen, no doubt on her way to the ladies’, and spotted us. As she penetrated our air space, we turned together and lit up our faces, all smiles.
“I thought that was the back of your head!” the woman trumpeted to Avis.
“Delia, what a treat! How are you?”
“Everything’s fine. Actually that’s a complete lie, but we won’t go into it.”
“You remember Lovie?”
Delia greeted me. Then said to Avis, “How is that precious grandbaby?”
“Perfect.”
“Well, give her a hug for me,” said Delia. “It is lovely to see you both.” She blew us kisses and set off. At the table she had left, her three companions were leaning close together; then suddenly there was a loud burst of laughter.
“She’s a beast,” Avis said. “Tell me when it’s safe to go on.” When she could, she said, “Nicky says he doesn’t see the problem. He said he had so much of that sort of thing when he was younger he just doesn’t feel the need.”
“But that’s like saying you had so much food when you were young you’ve given up eating.”
Avis nodded. I wondered how much of that there had been in her own marriage in the later years. Delia reappeared, and we fell silent again.
“What can Grace do?” I asked finally.
“There are really only two choices, aren’t there? Give it time and hope it gets better, or leave him.”
I was shocked. Avis, who had put up with so much with Harrison. And all our hopes for Nicky and Grace! All our shared pleasures in the match. The baby.
Custody fights. And my god, Dinah!
Easter. Gil had been a believer, but I have always been more of an atmospheric Christian. I love the flowers and the incense and the music, especially singing the hymns that seem conferred through DNA, but which I really acquired at boarding school. In those years we all went to church every Sunday morning and also sang hymns after supper while the math teacher hammered away at the upright piano in the Main Hall parlor. A clever piece of indoctrination, the hymns. Those melodies are emotional triggers that flood your system with the information that This is part of you and You are part of all that it has been for centuries, and Whenever you return, you will be welcomed and taken in. To find you know verse after verse, the alto lines, the descant, without having made any effort to learn or remember them, is a powerful experience.
Gil and I were normally in Connecticut for Easter; Althea preferred to observe Christian festival days in a Catholic country, specifically France. Easter is my least favorite part of Christianity—too triumphal for me—so Gil went by himself to the boxy stone Episcopal church in the next town over, and I worked in the garden for my Easter observance if the ground was soft enough, and if not, sat inside on the sun porch looking at garden catalogues, planning my annual beds.
This year, drawn by I’m not sure what, I went to the Palm Sunday service at the church that Gil attended in the city. It was odd to be greeting the season of resurrection with no crocus or snowbells or jonquils of my own to welcome back from the dark of the earth. I had filled my apartment windowsills with paperwhites in pots, and the violets twinkling amid dark green ground cover in Central Park and the daffodils and tulips along the median on Park Avenue would have to be my garden now. Walking north that Sunday morning with a weak spring sun warming my back, I remembered a beige linen spring coat I’d had in boarding school, with elbow-length bell sleeves, worn with a navy pillbox hat and long matching kid gloves. Very Jackie Kennedy. I could see myself walking with Meg to the Congregational church in the village, the feel of the garter belt tugging at my hips, the pinch of my stacked-heel pumps from Willy’s Style Center in Ellsworth that never fit right. I could see the two of us, with all our lives stretching before us, and just about everything we then imagined those lives were going to be destined to be wrong.
Simultaneously I felt very much myself as I am now, a woman of a certain age who could barely resist stopping to pull the city’s weeds out of the city’s flower beds.
Could it be that I’d never been to Palm Sunday service in an Episcopal church? If I had as a child, I don’t remember. I remember Sunday school dresses and Mary Janes with white socks, and being given two palm leaves to take home. You made a slit in one and pulled the second one through it to form a cross, and you tucked that into your mirror frame in your bedroom, where it stayed until it was time to burn it to make the ashes for the next year’s Ash Wednesday.
This year, in this church, when it came time for the reading of the gospel, one of the deacons spoke the words of Pontius Pilate. The rest of us played the part of the crowd. “Meanwhile the chief priests and elders had persuaded the crowd to ask for the release of Barabbas and to have Jesus put to death,” boomed Father Leonard in his purple Lenten robes with his rich baritone.
The deacon cried, “Which of the two would you like me to release to you?” and we all shouted “Barabbas!” Shouted. With what felt like enthusiasm.
“Then what am I to do with Jesus called Messiah?”
“Crucify him!” we shouted.
“Why, what harm has he done?” the deacon asked us.
But we all just shouted louder, “Crucify him!”
It was horrifying. I walked home in the sunshine feeling like a sac of poison. Feeling as if I didn’t know who I was.
One afternoon in late April I was walking across the park after lunch on the West Side with an old classmate. It was a brilliant day, perfect weather for walking. The park smelled of warm earth and was full of foreign tourists carrying maps and guides to the city, a good effect, I suppose of a weak dollar, though I wasn’t writing the Fed any thank-you notes; it was costing me more and more to buy from my European designers, let alone to go on scouting trips and pay for a decent hotel room with euros, and as I’ve mentioned, my clients were buying less and less. Eventually, I supposed I’d pass some tipping point, when the clients stopped coming to me at all because I had nothing in the shop to show them.
I could hear the babble and trill of small children playing as I neared the Fifth Avenue exit. For some reason I decided to look in at the playground, and as I approached, I caught sight of a very familiar profile. It was Nicky, still tanned from Easter in Georgia with Avis, sitting on a bench with the Irish and Haitian nannies. For the brief time I watched, when he believed himself unobserved, I t
hought he looked like the saddest man I’d ever seen.
His face lit up when he saw me. “Lindy-hop!” he called to his daughter. “Look who’s here!” We embraced and Lindy looked up briefly from where she was busy filling her shoes with sand. She was wearing a pair of velvet corduroy overalls embroidered with bunnies that had the look of something Avis had chosen.
“What are you two doing way up here?” I asked, taking a seat.
“We have a playdate with Julian. Ginette’s son.” Ginette was a charming young woman with reddish quattrocento hair, a friend of Grace’s from school, whom I’d met at Lindy’s birthday party. She taught music. I could only suppose that a music teacher was able to leave school earlier than a homeroom teacher, and thus could take her own child to his afternoon playdate when Grace could not.
We watched Lindy hoist herself to her feet and careen toward us with a shapely pebble she’d discovered in the sand.
“What is that, Lindy?” Nick asked her.
“Gold!” she cried. Then she bombed off again to her excavation site.
“Did you enjoy Sea Island?”
“Lindy loved it, especially the beach. We have a world-class collection of sand dollars.”
“And how is Grace?”
“Fine.”
“I’m glad. And you? How’s the screenplay?”
“All good. I’m shopping it to agents, and I’m working on a TV pilot.”
My memory was that the screenplay was going to Alvin Grable’s agent. So that hadn’t worked out? Or had my memory failed me?
“Hello, sailor,” said Ginette, who stood before us, extricating Julian from his stroller. She clearly had no memory of meeting me. As I left, they settled down together on the bench, and both children were leaning against Ginette’s knees as she dispensed Baggies of goldfish crackers.
It was getting to feel like a pattern. When Casey Leisure stopped in at the shop one morning a week or so later, she had no memory of having met me either.
We were on the cusp of May, and the weather was warm, unseasonably. The flowering pear trees planted along the streets were dropping drifts of white petals at every breeze, and Casey had some in her sleek streaked hair, like freakish snow that never melts.