Alternate Side

by Anna Quindlen

  Ricky’s leg was fractured in two places, or three, or four, depending on who was telling the story. Jack had spent the night in a holding cell downtown, had been released immediately to one of his law firm colleagues, was at Rikers, was at home, depending on who was telling the story. Nora spent the day shaking on and off, hearing that sound again in her head, now that she knew what it was and what it had done. “It was an accident,” said Charlie, on his second vodka, and Nora put up a hand and said, “Don’t say that to me again. Don’t.”

  “You are the only person who has been sensitive enough not to ask me a million questions,” Sherry said when Nora saw her at the corner three days later. “You, and Alma. She sent over a pan of chicken tetrazzini, which was nice, although it did suggest that someone had died. Jack ate most of it. He hasn’t left the house since it happened.”

  “He’s taken off from work?”

  “They’ve put him on some sort of leave until, in the managing partner’s words, this is all sorted out. It’s only the second time they’ve done something like that. The other time was a partner who was accused of beating his wife. He never came back.”

  Nora was at a loss. Finally she said, “Do you want to go get a pedicure?” It was all she could think of, what Rachel always said to her friends when they were feeling low. Nora felt foolish as soon as she’d said it.

  Sherry smiled sadly. “I’ll be all right. The good news is that there are enough Fisks in this city that it apparently hasn’t occurred to any of my patients that I’m married to the assailant. At least no one has dropped me yet.”

  Right after the police had pulled away, Charlie had gotten into Jack’s car and backed it into his assigned space in the lot. Nora noticed that he had no trouble getting past Ricky’s van, although she wondered if that was because the van was narrower with the side bashed in and its side-view mirror hanging loose.

  “Jesus Christ,” Charlie had said, looking down at Jack’s car keys and then putting them in his pocket. “Should I leave a note for Sherry that I’ve got these?”

  “Don’t forget we have your keys,” Nora said to Sherry. “I can bring them over.”

  “I don’t need them,” she said. “I’ve got mine, and as far as I’m concerned the car can sit there and turn to rust. I hope I never see it again.” Her voice shook slightly, and she compressed her lips “Have you seen the tabloids?” she said.

  Nora had. So had everyone else. There were only so many dead-end blocks in Manhattan, and everyone they knew knew the one the Nolans lived on. Jenny had called her, every woman in the lunch group had called her, even Bebe had phoned from Florida. Nora had been short with all of them except for Jenny, who knew that Nora was what she called block-friendly with Sherry Fisk and had said, “I’m just calling to say that when you feel like talking about this I’m here, and if you never feel like talking about this, that’s fine, too.”

  “And that’s why you’re the world’s best best friend,” said Nora, who didn’t feel like talking about it.

  She certainly didn’t intend to discuss it with a reporter, although there had surely been attempts. Nora was walking Homer after work and a young man in a down jacket stooped to pet him. “Cool-looking dog,” he said. “I’ve never seen one with eyes like that.”

  “He’s an Australian cattle dog,” Nora said.

  “And you’re Nora Nolan,” he said. “From the jewelry museum.”

  “Do we know each other?”

  “No, I just recognized you from pictures. Can I talk to you for a minute? I’m doing a story on the golf club assault and I understand you were there.”

  “And you seemed so nice,” Nora said sadly, and she turned and took Homer back inside. Naturally, when she looked out the window fifteen minutes later, the reporter was talking to George.

  “You are hateful,” Nora said aloud.

  Charlie and Nora had agreed not to tell the twins what had happened, which Nora realized indicated how naïve they could be. When her phone showed Rachel calling at 8 A.M., Nora snatched it up so quickly that it slipped from her hand and into Homer’s water bowl. “No!” Nora shrieked, fishing it out, shaking it off. Incredibly it still worked, although by day’s end it started to sputter and crackle like experimental music, and by the next morning died, despite an overnight in a bag of rice.

  “I can’t believe Mr. Fisk tried to kill Ricky!” Rachel screamed.

  Both New York tabloids had featured the story prominently, and both sounded remarkably the same. Jack Fisk (whose real name apparently was Joshua—who knew?) was a wealthy partner in a white-shoe law firm. Ricky was a struggling neighborhood handyman who lived with his wife and two young sons in the Bronx. The assault took place on a dead-end block on the Upper West Side. Several years before, one of the tabloids had done a story on dead-end blocks, and had described theirs as so neighborly that on Halloween, candy was placed outside on the stoops for trick-or-treaters. Now neighborly had become isolated, insular, circling the wagons, which was reporter-speak for “residents who won’t talk to us.” Jack was wealthy; Ricky was from one of the city’s poorer neighborhoods. Neither characterization, Nora was certain, was exactly accurate, but it made just the right kind of story that way. Ricky’s leg had been “shattered” by Jack’s golf club, both papers using the same verb. Ricky’s wife, Nita, was at his bedside and said he couldn’t talk because he was in too much pain, although the more florid of the papers said he was in agony. Jack’s attorney, Marcus King, said, “When all the facts are known, my client will be cleared of all charges.” Nita said, “Somebody has to pay for this.”

  “Your father was there. He says it was an accident,” Nora said to Rachel.

  “Mom, please. How do you accidentally break someone’s leg with a golf club? This is all because of that stupid parking lot, isn’t it? Have you gone to see Ricky? Is he going to be okay?”

  Nora had asked Charity the same question. She had refused to answer directly.

  “Faucet dripping in Rachel’s bathroom,” Charity said darkly.

  “Dryer vent not working so good.”

  “Drain slow in back.”

  Charity had a marked tendency to be aphoristic—Charlie had once asked if they could buy her some verbs for Christmas—and when she returned to work Monday it had deepened noticeably. She made it sound as though all the things they would have called Ricky to fix over the course of six months had now happened at once, now that Ricky was gone, his men with him. Charity said that he was still in the hospital.

  “Which one?” Nora asked.

  “Big one,” she said. “Uptown.” Charity seemed to hold Nora at least partially responsible for Ricky’s injury.

  “Charity will be so upset,” Nora told Rachel.

  “She should be upset. Mr. Fisk is a scumbag. We used to pretend he wasn’t, when all he was doing was screaming at Mrs. Fisk, but come on. He put Ricky in the hospital. And Dad is standing up for him? Um, excuse me, but if Dad had been blocking the entrance to the lot Mr. Fisk would have come over and discussed it with him. He wouldn’t have beaten him with a golf club. And Charity won’t quit because, duh, me and Ollie. But she should quit. This is all because Ricky is brown and poor.”

  Nora did not speak. She and Charlie had made a pact long ago that they would maintain a united front with the children no matter what. She had never been so tempted to throw the agreement aside, to say to Rachel, your father is wrong, Jack Fisk is a terrible person who did a terrible thing, I can barely stand to look at your father when he defends him.

  “Mom?” said Rachel.

  “I keep wondering how Ricky is feeling,” Nora said.

  “So go see him and find out. Tell him Ollie and I are worried about him. Tell him none of us believe this ridiculous accident story. I’m going.”

  An hour later it was Christine on the phone. “Have you seen the papers?” she said.

 
“Of course I’ve seen the papers. I’m beside myself. I’m exhausted by the papers.”

  “Exhausted? I’m excited. We’re going to have people working double shifts to meet the demand.”

  “What are you talking about?” Nora said.

  “The First Lady. You didn’t see the First Lady? She led an exercise class wearing the Candide pants and top. We’re going to be swamped.”

  Nora owned both. The pants said “The best of all possible worlds” in the waistband. The shirt said “Cultivate your garden.” Nora sometimes wondered what Voltaire, resurrected, would think of all this, but the shirt was a slim cut with raglan sleeves and the pants had a good rise and laundered well, so she’d decided not to fret about dead French philosophers.

  “What did you think I was talking about?” Christine said.

  “The golf club attack.”

  “You lost me, Non.” Nora was relieved. At least Jack, Ricky, and the block had not gone completely national. Nora narrated the story, and because it was Christine, she also told her she thought Jack’s version was a self-serving lie and that it would serve him right to go to jail.

  “Isn’t Jack Fisk that really obnoxious man with the loud voice?” Christine said. “He was yelling at his wife because she was going to make them late for a restaurant reservation or something?”

  “He’s horrible,” Nora said.

  “Ya think?” Christine said.

  “Mrs. Alma wants you to call her,” Charity said.

  “Mrs. Fenstermacher wants me to call?” Nora asked.

  “What I said.”

  “Obviously I chose a bad weekend to visit the grandchildren,” Alma Fenstermacher said, pouring tea. Nora should have known that when Alma invited you to tea, it wasn’t boiling water and a bag in a mug. There were individual single strainers, tiny cucumber sandwiches, scones, and clotted cream. It reminded Nora of the tea she’d once had at a hotel in Oxford. “The Randolph,” Alma said when Nora said it aloud. “The best afternoon tea in the British Isles. Sometimes we take the train from London just to walk around the colleges and have tea there.”

  Nora realized that what had happened on the block was monumental if the Fenstermachers wanted details. Alma never gossiped, never stood with her dog on the pavement and muttered, “Did you hear what those new people are doing to the backyard of Four forty-five?” Nora described what she’d seen, and Alma sighed and said, “I’m sorry it came to that. I hope Ricky’s injury is not too terrible. We never used him much, but he seemed like a lovely man.” Nora had noticed that the Fenstermachers rarely used Ricky, but she assumed that that was because nothing in their house ever broke.

  She also assumed they never read the tabloids. The Times, The Wall Street Journal—neither had written about what had happened, but the tabloids had sunk their pointed teeth into it and wouldn’t let go. Part of that was bad timing. Two weeks before, the police had stopped a man in upper Manhattan and shot him six times after, they said, he pulled a gun from his pocket. The gun turned out to be a cellphone; there had been a demonstration on 125th Street at which thousands of people had held their phones in the air. An accident at the George Washington Bridge, caused in part by the traffic occasioned by the demonstration, had resulted in the paralysis of a mother of three from Westchester County.

  The Smoking Phone story, as the Post had termed it, had run out of steam several days before. Nature abhorred a vacuum, and so did the tabloids. Their block was such an easy and convenient target. Had none of them ever noticed that everyone who lived there, every single one, even the renters, was white, and that everyone who worked for them, every single one, was black or Latino? Nora remembered telling her sister that when she had advertised for a nanny, not a single applicant was white. “So, wait, you were worried when you hired Charity because you somehow thought it was racist to offer a black woman a good job?” Christine had said. “Does that make any sense? Especially if she wants the job?”

  “All the nannies are black and all the children are white. Does that make any sense?”

  “I guess kind of,” Christine said. “Charity is an immigrant, right? Immigrants work hard for us to someday get to be us. Someday their children will be hiring nannies of their own. Besides, if these women need the work, who are you to second-guess them? That’s racist for sure.”

  “So you have lots of people of color working for your company?”

  There was a silence. “Well, it’s a smallish business,” Christine finally said.

  “So that would be a no?”

  “Are we counting Asians?”

  “No,” Nora said.

  “Why are you suddenly worrying about this?” Christine asked. “This is like the time your lunch group had that big discussion about whether it was wrong to call Charity your housekeeper instead of the housekeeper.”

  (“I don’t understand why,” Suzanne had said. “I call Hal Bancroft my lawyer and Dr. Cohen my gynecologist.”

  “My trainer,” said Jean-Ann.

  “My waxer,” said Elena.

  “Your waxer?” Jenny said.

  “You blondes have no idea,” Elena said.

  “Honestly, Nora, I love you, but you’re overthinking this,” said Jean-Ann.)

  “Or,” Christine added, “that time you called Charity an African-American and she got huffy and said she wasn’t African, she was Jamaican, and you raised her salary by fifty dollars a week because you felt guilty.”

  “I’m just trying to be a good person here!” Nora cried.

  “First of all, you are a good person. And second of all, what does any of this have to do with being a good person? And third of all, I think you pay Charity more than most of our designers here make.”

  “The haves vs. the have-nots,” the Post said. “The deadly dead end.” Charity was annoyed at being described as a have-not. Charlie kept complaining that deadly suggested Ricky had been killed. He was also annoyed by the Daily News, which had come up with a picture of Jack at a golf course somewhere, with the headline WELCOME TO THE CLUB!

  “That’s not even the club he was carrying,” Charlie said at breakfast, when he saw it.

  “Charlie, do you think anyone cares whether he almost beat a man to death with a wood or an iron?” Nora said.

  “He didn’t beat him almost to death. He was hitting the side of the van. He hit Ricky when Ricky stepped in front of the door.”

  “That’s his story and he’s sticking to it,” Nora said, throwing the paper down so that it landed half on Charlie’s cereal bowl and spit milk onto his shirt.

  “I was there, Nora. I saw it happen.”

  “And he’ll have one of those sharpies from his firm represent him and he’ll wind up getting off.”

  “If it was an accident he should get off.”

  “As long as we don’t have to pretend we think that’s what happened.”

  “It is what happened. I told the police that, and if I have to, I’ll say it in court.”

  “Are you crazy? You know Jack Fisk. He’s got a temper so bad that he flies into a rage if a cab doesn’t see him at the corner. He was screaming about Ricky and his van for months before this ever happened. An accident? I took the party line on the phone with our daughter, and I was embarrassed afterward.”

  “I know what I saw, Nora,” Charlie said, putting his suit jacket on. “Just because you have a different version doesn’t mean you’re right.”

  “It’s not a different version,” Nora said as the front door slammed. “It’s the truth.”

  The Fenstermacher holiday party had for many years been a grand tradition on the block. It was always held on the second Saturday of January, and featured the sort of food everyone loved and no one served anymore: baked ham, biscuits, macaroni and cheese that tasted of cheese, not as though it had been leached of all flavor by the roving band of punitive nutriti
onists and gluten purists who had taken New York by storm. The guest list was confined almost entirely to the residents of the block: a judge, a shrink, some finance guys, some lawyers, two doctors, a freelance writer, a freelance graphic designer, a freelance artist, and the director of a museum. There were no public school teachers or police officers, for the obvious reason that by any sensible non-Manhattan standard, everyone in the room was what had once been called rich. They were rich, but they had no money; it was all in their houses.

  At the door Harold Lessman said to Nora, “I’m told you, too, are going to work for the legendary Bob Harris.”

  “That’s what everyone says,” Charlie said.

  “It’s not true,” said Nora, hoping the party hadn’t just been ruined for them both as her husband went in search of eggnog.

  She was frankly a bit surprised that Alma had not canceled the party. It was a month since what had now come to be referred to on the block, if it was referred to at all, as “the parking lot incident,” and although the reporters had moved on, there was still an oddly uncomfortable feeling among them all, as though they were somehow complicit in what had happened. On the other hand, the cancellation of the Fenstermacher holiday party would have been an enormous concession, a dark turning point. Apparently the party had been going on for decades, long before the Nolans had moved onto the block. It was not exactly difficult to score an invitation, but the guest list was selective, composed of what Alma once called habitués. A renter would be hard-pressed to be included unless in residence for some time, usually with a family and a pleasant way of greeting people on the block, almost always with a dog. Even a new buyer of one of the brownstones might have to wait a year or two after taking title. Apparently there had been one couple who had lived on the block for five years and had never been invited because somehow Alma knew that the husband also owned a co-op on Riverside Drive in which his girlfriend and their young son lived, and she was not having any of that.