“Oh. Well, that part … I did call. I tried to call. There,” he said, pointing to the kitchen phone. “I might have missed you.”
She sighed. She hadn’t the wherewithal to tell him about unplugging the phone. “No. I’m sorry. We’ve been living like recluses. Luddite recluses. But on purpose.”
“So you don’t know what’s going on,” he said, and not as a question. And there was just the tiniest edge of disapproval when he said it. Possibly he was thinking: And hasn’t that been a great part of the problem? Or possibly she imagined that.
“In detail? No, I don’t know. I’ve got the gist, though. I think it’s better we’re here.”
He nodded. He looked haggard, she thought. The skin beneath his eyes was papery, and she could see, even across the room, the tracery of red blood vessels. Ten years older, just in a few weeks. Thanks for that, too, Jonathan, she thought.
“I’d like to help,” said Frederich Reinhart. “I came to see if there was some way I could.”
Grace shuddered. It was an unfamiliar place in which they found themselves. Two solitary travelers on a narrow mountain pass. The question was not which one of them would give way, but which one of them would accept the deference of the other. An absurd problem to have, Grace thought.
To cover her discomfort, she took the turkey to the refrigerator, but when she opened it she found that the shelves inside were crammed with orange-and-white bags. Before she could think, she was elated.
“I went to Zabar’s,” her father said unnecessarily. “I thought I’d bring a bit of home.”
Grace nodded, still holding the fridge door open. She wasn’t at all surprised to note that she was in real danger of crying. “Thank you,” she told him.
“Henry likes the chopped liver,” he said. “I brought extra to freeze. The strudel should freeze well, too.”
“When did you become a domestic god?” Grace laughed, but he seemed to take the question seriously.
“Eva is very capable as a cook, and she does not see the point of places like Zabar’s. I realized a good long while ago that if I wanted cucumber salad and lox to remain a part of my life, I was going to have to get them in myself. I remembered those cookies you used to like.” He pointed. They had moist stripes of green and orange and white cake and were encased in chocolate. They had been her favorite treat, no contest. Now just looking at them made her a tiny bit happier. “I got a bit of everything, I think,” her father added. “I even got matzo ball soup.”
“We’ll have a very Jewish Christmas Eve,” Grace said, smiling.
“I suppose,” he agreed, making room on one of the shelves for her supermarket turkey.
“Christmas in the shtetl.”
“O little star of Bukowsko.” Her father laughed. Bukowsko had been his grandfather’s shtetl in Galicia.
“Ouch.”
“My grandmother wouldn’t mind. Her sister, she was the one who gave me pork to eat for the first time. An absolutely delicious sausage, I remember.”
“And here we are,” Grace said helpfully. “In hell.”
“No. It only feels that way right now.” He stepped back from the fridge and held open the door for her. “You’ll come out of this, Grace. You’re tough.”
“Right.”
“And Henry’s tough. It’s a huge blow, I’m not belittling it. But he’s been a very loved child, one way or another, and he’s smart. If we can all be honest with him, he’ll be okay.”
She was about to say something highly defensive (and probably unkind) when it occurred to her that she hadn’t at all been honest with Henry. In the guise of “protection,” she had told him very little of what had happened—what was happening—to his family. But every time she imagined that conversation, just now included, she fell completely apart. And “together” was the principle of her life right now. “Together” was the mantra.
“We will be honest,” she told her father. “Just not right at this moment. There’s too much I don’t understand myself. I have to get us settled here. I have to make some parameters for us.”
“Parameters are important,” he agreed tentatively. “Stability, security for him, absolutely. I take it you’re staying?”
She shrugged.
“What about your practice?”
“I’ve suspended it,” she said. It felt unreal, saying it aloud. “I had to.”
“And Henry’s school?”
“There are schools in Connecticut.”
“There’s no Rearden in Connecticut.”
“Absolutely right,” she snapped. “Will Hotchkiss do?”
He closed the refrigerator and turned around. “You really are thinking ahead.”
“Yes. I really am.” Though she hadn’t been, not till this moment. That Hotchkiss thing, it had come out of nowhere.
“Your friends?”
Grace went to the drawer, the same drawer where she kept her now half pack of cigarettes, and got a corkscrew. Then she went for one of the bottles of red wine on the top shelf.
What was she supposed to say? That not one friend or acquaintance from what she now laughingly thought of as her “past” had troubled themselves to come after her? She knew this was true. When she scrolled through the call list on her muted cell, she saw that they just weren’t there. Amid the media gnats and the detectives and the relentless calls from Sarabeth and Maud, which she was also trying to ignore, they just weren’t there.
The idea of it—the power of that—was just breathtaking.
“I seem to have misplaced them all,” is what she finally told him.
He nodded sadly, and Grace, watching him, thought that her father must assume they had all deserted her in the scandal. But they hadn’t been there in the first place, that was her point. That was what she knew now.
“Well, Vita called,” he said a bit nonchalantly, as if what he was saying were not utterly stunning. “I told her you were up here. She’s living in the Berkshires somewhere, I think she might have said where, but I’m not certain. Hasn’t she been in touch?”
Grace, short of breath, turned her head to the old wall phone. How many times had it rung before she’d unplugged it? And when she’d picked up the receiver that one time. That woman’s voice, the reporter’s voice … had it actually been a reporter? Her hand shook a little as she dug the end of the corkscrew into the rubbery cork.
“Let me,” said her father, and she handed it over. “You never heard from her?”
She shrugged. She still couldn’t believe it.
“I said how good it was to hear her voice. I think she is very worried about you.”
Well, she can join the club, Grace thought, eyeing the wine her father was pouring. But again, she remembered that there was no club. There weren’t enough people worrying about her to form one. Besides, it was horrible of Vita to have gone away and left her, but even more horrible to come back now.
“Fine, fine,” she said, taking the glass. It was a little bitter, but instantly effective.
“She’s doing something for … well, she called it a rehabilitation center. I didn’t ask for details. Isn’t she a therapist, too?”
I wouldn’t know, Grace thought, but she said: “She was training to be one. That was a long time ago. I really have no idea.”
“Well, maybe you’ll manage to reconnect. It happens that way sometimes. When your mother died, I heard from people I hadn’t thought of in years. Lawrence Davidoff. Remember him?”
Grace nodded. She took another swallow of her wine and was rewarded with a sensation of fuzziness and warmth in the pit of her stomach.
“And Donald Newman. We were in Korea together. We’d lived five blocks apart for years, never ran into each other. He introduced me to Eva, you know.”
She looked at him. “Really?”
“His wife was a real estate agent. Eva and Lester bought the apartment on Seventy-Third from her. So after Mom died he decided to fix us up.”
Grace wanted to ask: How long after? It was
a point of detail she had never been very clear on.
“I don’t need any old friends fixing me up, thanks.”
“I doubt that was on her mind. As I said, she seemed very concerned. And if you ever … became aware … of something like this, in her life, I’m sure you’d want to be in touch with her as well.”
Grace, who wasn’t sure at all, said nothing. She went to the cupboard and started taking down plates. She got the silverware and the napkins. Then she went back to the fridge and tried to figure out what was for dinner.
Her father really had brought a bit of everything. There were spreads and cheeses and plastic containers from up and down Zabar’s long prepared-food display, a skinny baguette and a bag full of bagels and a loaf of sliced rye. Also, on the countertop next to the fridge, a stack of those gourmet chocolate bars they had piled up in the checkout lanes. “Wow,” she said, unwrapping the two-inch-thick wedge of salmon, cut in thin, shimmery slices, folded between translucent sheets. “This is wonderful. I really appreciate this.”
“Not at all,” he said. He had put his hand on her shoulder and was standing behind her, looking into the fridge. “Is it enough?”
“To feed the entire population of the lake? Yes, I think so. Actually, it’s just us at the moment. And someone in the stone house.”
“Down at the end?”
“Yes.”
He smiled. “The boys who water-skied? That house?”
“Yeah. One of them grew up to be a college professor. He said he was on sabbatical, writing a book.”
“Are they winterized?” Her father frowned.
“No, I don’t think so. He asked me the same thing. But it won’t last forever. If I can get us through January, that’ll be the worst of it, I’m sure. And if it gets too bad, I’ll check us into a motel.”
He did not seem mollified. He stood watching her put out the cheese on a board. She poured the soup into a stainless-steel pot and started to heat it up. “I’d really rather you weren’t living like this,” he said seriously, as if this were a radical notion.
No shit. She nearly laughed, but actually it was when she thought of her own home, her own life in the city, that she began to be frantic. This … there was stillness, and naturally isolation, and of course it was cold as hell, but it wasn’t the screaming hell that came over her when she thought of back there. She couldn’t go back there.
“And what are you going to do when the book comes out?” he asked her. “You’ll have to come back then. Weren’t you doing all those interviews? I know you mentioned one of the television shows.”
She stopped what she was doing and looked at her father. “Daddy,” she said, “that’s all over. It’s not happening.”
He looked stricken. He stood straight, looking down at her from his full height, his face lined and slack. “They told you that?” he asked her.
“They don’t need to. They don’t need to explain to me that the only questions anyone’s going to want to ask me will be about my own marriage, and I can’t talk about that. Not with anyone, certainly not on television. I know I’m being laughed at—”
He tried to deny this, but she waved him off. It wasn’t much of an attempt.
“I thought my book could help someone. I thought I had something to say to people, about how they went about choosing a life partner, but I don’t. Obviously, I don’t. I’m a marriage counselor whose husband had a mistress. He might have killed his mistress.”
Her father’s eyes widened a little. “Grace,” he said carefully. “‘Might have’?”
She shook her head. “I’m not trying to be difficult,” she said deliberately. “I just … I need to stop at ‘might have’ for a moment. I’m not ready to go past it.” She looked around the kitchen. The light was all gone now. It had become another winter night outside.
“He had a baby with her,” she heard herself say. “Did you know?”
Her father looked down at the wooden floor. He didn’t answer. From the next room came a thin rendition of The Blue Danube from the DVD player.
“I should have known something,” said Frederich Reinhart. “He came to me for money.”
She felt the now familiar ache of sudden bad news. Fresh, new, bad news.
“When?”
“Oh …” He thought. “May, perhaps? He said you were worried about paying for Rearden this year, you thought you might have to take Henry out.”
“That’s not true,” she told him, amazed. “That was never an issue.”
“So I understand. Now. But he told me you were terribly concerned about money and would never come to me. Of course I told him that neither of you should worry. I only have one grandchild and luckily I’m able to help with his education. But he asked me not to say anything to you about it, so I didn’t.”
She was holding on to the counter, trying to stop swaying. “Daddy, I’m sorry. I would never have asked. I didn’t need to ask! We were fine!”
“I know. He was very persuasive. He reminded me that pediatric oncologists are not at the high end of the earning scale for doctors. He said he couldn’t stand the idea that you and Henry might have to compromise because he hadn’t been a good enough wage earner. That it wasn’t fair to you.”
Grace shook her head. “In May … he wasn’t even working then. They told me—the police told me—there was a disciplinary hearing last February, I think. They fired him. I had no idea.”
Her father was leaning forward on the kitchen table, arms braced, eyes closed. “I gave him a hundred thousand dollars,” he told her. “I didn’t want him to have to ask me again. I didn’t want you to have to come to me. I thought it was for tuition.”
“Well,” she said darkly, “it might have been, but not Henry’s. Jonathan was paying the fees for another child. I worked that out, finally.”
“For … I don’t understand. Wasn’t it a very small baby?”
“The older child. He had been Jonathan’s patient at Memorial. It’s how they met. Then the boy became a Rearden student. The headmaster … I think he believed Jonathan and I were Miguel’s benefactors. Maybe because this boy was a cancer survivor and Jonathan had been his doctor. But I didn’t know anything about the boy. I just assumed he was on scholarship.” Grace sighed. “And I guess he was. But Jonathan paid for the scholarship. I mean, apparently, you paid for it. I’m so sorry.”
Her father shook his head. When Grace looked over at him again, it took her a moment to understand that he was shaking. “Daddy?”
“No, it’s okay.”
“I’m sorry,” she said again.
“No. Don’t be. I’m just … I’m so angry at myself. I’m angry at him, but mostly at myself. How could I have let him do that to you?”
Only then did she understand how wounded by this he, too, had been, and maybe not only at this, or maybe the “this” had begun long ago, and she had not been a bystander to it. For years, she had allowed her father to see her only as a very specific construct: securely partnered, professionally successful, the provider of an excellent grandchild. She had been technically available to her father but never warm, not really. Perhaps, if she was honest about it, she had not even been very interested in him, and what he cared about, and what his life was like—now and in the past. She had been available for dinner and strictly controlled conversation on a weekly basis, but she did not feel close to him at all, and she did not believe he could possibly feel close to her. Then again, this was the first time it had ever occurred to her that her father might actually want to be close.
What if she had been wrong? What if he had wanted—or indeed needed—something from her, and she had declined to provide it, declined even to see it? As if she herself had not needed her father. As if she didn’t still need her mother! As if you got points for doing it all alone, and someone was keeping score to make sure you never cheated. How arrogant to assume that she could make up her own rules and had all the time in the world to play by them.
“You didn’t let him,” s
he said. She put down her wineglass. “He did this all by himself.”
“I thought I was helping you and Henry,” her father said. “I thought, well, I know how private you are. You would never come to me for assistance. I don’t know why. But I was actually grateful to him. I thanked him. For giving me the opportunity.” He shook his head in private, bitter distaste. Then sighed. “Eva loves to give her children things,” he said, as if it were something he needed to apologize for. “But you never wanted anything.”
“Oh, I wanted lots of things,” she corrected him. “But I had all of them. Or I thought I did. You know, wanting what you have is supposedly the secret of happiness.” She smiled. “Somebody said that. I forget who.” There was a sputtering sound from the stovetop. Grace took the wooden spoon from the drawer and gave the soup a stir.
“Having what you want?”
“No, wanting what you already have.”
“Ah! So simple,” her father said. He looked better now. It was a relief. So she put the spoon back down and hugged him.
A moment later, Henry appeared in the doorway, shaking his head. “This movie is so weird,” he told them. “There’s all these colors. And the astronaut just turned into a baby. I don’t get what’s happening.”
“I never did either,” his grandfather said. “Maybe Stanley Kubrick was counting on the whole audience being high on drugs. But your grandmother and I just had a martini before we saw it in the movie theater. I don’t think that was enough.”
She had the two of them set the table. It was the first time they’d used the dining room since arriving. It was the first time she and Henry had not eaten on the couch, off their laps, with a heavy flannel blanket across their shoulders. Actually, it was hardly any warmer now. But it felt warmer somehow.
They ate the soup and then salmon on bagels, because from the moment she saw the salmon and the bagels, she was struck with a convulsive longing for them. And she drank more wine, then started in on the dark chocolate, and it was all surprisingly not terrible. For a Christmas Eve in a freezing house, in flight from her life, and in the inescapable proximity of her father and her son, both of whom had been woefully harmed by Jonathan Sachs, the love of her life, it was surprisingly not terrible. And they talked about baseball, of all things, or at least Henry and her father did, and Grace was amazed to discover that her father had once regularly gone to games and had grown up supporting a team called the Montreal Expos and even knew how to keep score, which was something that sounded as if it ought to be completely straightforward but was in fact seriously complex, and which he promised to teach his grandson, perhaps as soon as tomorrow. And after Henry went up to bed, but before Grace got up to clear the table, they sat for a few moments in a not uncompanionable silence, until Frederich Reinhart asked whether she had any idea where Jonathan had gone or how he was managing to not be found by the police.
The Undoing Page 31
