The Undoing

by Jean Hanff Korelitz

  “You’re not bothering us. Look, it’s too cold to stand here.”

  “All right,” she said, giving in. Forgetting that she was on a residential street in Long Island, she locked her car door. Then she followed him up the walk.

  “Mom?” Mitchell called, holding the door back for Grace.

  Jonathan’s mother was standing in the doorway to the kitchen. She was a tiny woman—Jonathan had inherited his slightness, his narrowness, from her—with a thin face and indigo circles beneath her dark eyes. She looked far older than the last time Grace had seen her, in the hospital when Henry was born. She also looked far older than the age Grace knew she was—sixty-one. She looked terrified, though whether to see anyone or Grace in particular, Grace couldn’t have said.

  “Look who I found,” said Mitchell. She hoped he knew what he was doing.

  “Well,” said a voice from across the room. Jonathan’s father, David, was standing at the foot of the stairs. “Hello!” And then, when she couldn’t respond even to that, he said: “Grace?”

  “Yes.” She nodded, just to confirm. “I apologize for the intrusion. I was nearby.” And she stopped herself there. As if it were possible they didn’t already know she was lying.

  “Is Henry with you?” said Jonathan’s mother. Her name was Naomi, but Grace had never had the opportunity (or, to be honest, the inclination) to be on a first-name basis with her. There was a thread of pain in her voice that was visceral, but then she recovered. Who they were, any of them, Grace didn’t know, only that they had had a hand in making Jonathan. They were not good people, obviously. Or perhaps no longer so obviously.

  She shook her head. “He’s in the city with his … with my father. We’re not … we’ve been living somewhere else.” She wondered if any of them were following this. She was barely following it herself. “I wasn’t nearby,” she heard herself say aloud. “To be honest, I don’t know why I came.”

  “Well, maybe we can enlighten you!” said David, the father. And without warning he took three great steps across the floor from the foot of the stairs and embraced her, enclosing her shoulders with one long arm and her lower back with the other and pressing his rough cheek against her ear. She was so stunned that she could not even step back or aside. Unlike Vita, he had not issued a warning.

  “Dad …” Mitchell laughed. “Don’t smother her.”

  “I’m not,” said his father into Grace’s ear. “I’m making up for lost time. This is my grandson’s mother.”

  “Your grandson you’ve never seen since the day he was born,” Naomi said with palpable bitterness.

  “Not for lack of trying,” said David, finally releasing her and stepping back. “The point is, Grace,” he said, addressing her directly, “whyever you came, I’m very, very glad to see you. And when Naomi recovers she’ll be able to show you how glad she is also. But until that happens, you might need to give her a little space.”

  “More space?” Jonathan’s mother said. “More than the last eighteen years? More than my grandson’s entire life?”

  He shrugged. “Like I said, she might need a little time to recover. Let’s have some coffee. Come on into the kitchen.” He beckoned. “Naomi, we’ve got Entenmann’s, don’t we?”

  “Are we on Long Island?” Mitchell said, grinning. “This is how you know you’re on Long Island, somebody offers you coffee and Entenmann’s. Come on, Grace. Coffee okay?”

  “Okay,” said Grace. “Thank you.”

  In the kitchen, an unreconstructed 1970s Harvest Gold décor with a plain, Formica-topped table, he pulled out a chair for her and went to make coffee. His parents followed, and David sat across the table while Naomi, still brimming with potent silence, opened the refrigerator and extracted milk and the blue-and-white box. The room was very clean—extraordinarily clean, Grace thought—but it was also obviously a kitchen that saw real use. The shelf over the stove held spices in little glass jars, each with a label and a handwritten date. The pots hanging from a pothook on one of the decorative beams were heavy stainless steel and dull with use. Grace looked up at her mother-in-law as the box landed on the table. Naomi gave back nothing. Jonathan had always said how cold she was. A terrible mother. Obviously he had been telling the truth about that, at least. He hadn’t mentioned anything about her cooking, though.

  Mitchell took a knife and cut into the coffee cake. It was an almond ring, dribbled with white frosting. He passed her a piece without asking, and without answering she took it.

  “This must have been terrible for you,” said David, accepting his own piece. “We’ve thought of you, many, many times. I want you to know that. And we did try to call, a couple of times, but no one answered the phone in New York. We imagined you’d gone away, very sensibly.”

  She nodded. It felt so unutterably strange to be talking to them at all, let alone about this. About their own son and what he’d done! And what that had done to her, and Henry. And still, they seemed so … unresponsible. For any of it. Could they possibly ignore, even now, how they had to have caused this, some part of this, by their neglect of Jonathan, their own unexamined addictions (Naomi’s alcoholism, David’s prescription drug abuse), their blatant preference for Mitchell, who had never finished college or had more than a temporary, entry-level job and was still, at his age, living right here at home? Was some acknowledgment of that going to be part of this kaffeeklatsch, this family reunion in suburbia? Looking at the three of them, she caught for a brief moment the wake of Jonathan’s own resentment and sadness about where he had come from, here at the table with a family that ought to have acted more like a family but hadn’t. How harmed he had been by these people. And that had not been his fault.

  “I took Henry to Connecticut,” she told them after a minute. “We have a house there. It’s a summer house.”

  “Where the wedding was,” Mitchell said brightly. He was pouring coffee into brown mugs for them.

  “Yes. You were there, of course.”

  “Of course. I was still trying, back then.”

  “Trying?” Grace said. “Trying what?”

  “To have a relationship with my brother,” he said. He was still smiling. Smiling seemed to be his default expression. “I am the official optimist of this family,” he said, as if to confirm that. “I can’t help it. I don’t know any better. I saw he was marrying a smart girl. I saw she was a nice person. She was interested in psychology. She was going to be a psychologist. I was thrilled.”

  Thrilled, Grace thought, testing the concept.

  “I thought: Grace will encourage him to reconnect with Mom and Dad. Of course, he asked us not to come to the wedding.”

  “You were invited,” she said, surprised. She had addressed the invitation herself.

  “Yes, I know, but he called and asked us not to come. But me, official optimist, I went anyway. I felt badly about leaving in the middle. I hope you know that.”

  Naturally she did not know that. How could she be expected to know how he felt? She murmured something noncommittal and took a sip of her coffee. It had a hazelnut flavor and made her feel a little sick.

  “He told me to leave, you know.”

  Grace put the mug down. “Who did? Jonathan did?”

  Mitchell nodded. “Sure. Right after the ceremony. He came up to me and said: ‘Super. You made your point. Now go.’ The last thing I wanted was to make anyone uncomfortable. So I slipped out.” He was throwing sugar into his own coffee and stirring. “I thought the ceremony was beautiful, by the way. The way your friend talked about your mother. I cried a little. And I barely knew you and I never met your mother. What your friend said, you felt how much love there was, not just between you and your mom, but you and your friend.”

  “Vita,” Grace said. She had not thought about Vita’s tribute to her mother in many years. It had been, in its aftermath, the great pain of one loss magnified by the great pain of the other. “Yes, what she said was beautiful.”

  “So you’ve been living up there? With
Henry? What is he doing about school?”

  “He’s in the local middle school,” she told them. “Actually, that part of things has gone really well. I think he might actually be happier in his new school. He’s made some good friends. He’s in the school orchestra.”

  “He plays an instrument?” Naomi said. It was the first thing she had said since they’d sat down.

  “Violin. He studied it in the city, before we left. Pretty seriously,” she added unnecessarily.

  “Aha!” David said. “Another Sachs fiddler. My grandfather played klezmer music in Kraków. My uncle still plays. He’s in his nineties.”

  “No, no …” Grace shook her head. “It’s classical. His teacher is very strict. He only takes students he thinks …” But then she heard herself and stopped. “Well, I hope he keeps playing. He is talented. Actually,” she told them, “there’s a neighbor of ours in Connecticut who’s offered to teach him fiddle music. Sort of Scottish music. Like bluegrass.”

  “Second cousin of klezmer!” David said delightedly. “My point exactly. Is Henry going to have a bar mitzvah?”

  She looked at him. How was it possible that they were talking about this? This? As if their son, whom they had not seen in decades, had not killed a woman and run away, leaving all of them behind to have this excruciating encounter.

  “No. Not at the moment. To tell the truth, it’s never really been on my radar. And especially not now.”

  “Dad …” Mitchell shook his head. “Come on. She’s going to take time out from Armageddon to plan a bar mitzvah? Grace, it’s good that you took Henry away to Connecticut. It’s good you took yourself. But what about your business?”

  “My practice is suspended for the moment. Maybe … it’s possible I’ll start a new practice. I’ve been thinking about it. But as for New York, no, that’s finished.”

  “And you’re living in the summer house.”

  “Yes. And yes, it’s very cold. If you were going to ask,” she said, looking at them. Maybe they weren’t going to ask.

  “Not insulated?” Naomi asked. “Is that safe for Henry?”

  “We wear a lot of clothing. And sleep under a lot of blankets.” She sighed. “My son wants a dog. He says the Eskimos stay warm by sleeping with a dog.”

  “Well, why not?” David said. “Can’t he have a dog?”

  She nearly said: Jonathan’s allergic. That was the reason. But then she remembered the other reason: the childhood dog named Raven who had escaped from this very house, somehow, and disappeared, and how these very parents had blamed Jonathan for somehow having made that happen, though the dog had been Mitchell’s, not even his. It had ruined dogs for Jonathan. It had been an awful thing for them to have done. One awful thing among who knew how many?

  “You had a dog,” she informed them, as if that were all that needed to be said. “Jonathan told me what happened to your dog.”

  All three of them looked at her. Jonathan’s mother turned to Jonathan’s father. “What did she say?” Naomi asked.

  “Wait,” Mitchell said. He had extended his arm, the way you do in a car sometimes, involuntarily, when you hit the brakes suddenly and want to stop someone from hurtling forward. “Wait a minute. Let me ask.”

  “We never had a dog,” his mother insisted. “He told you we had a dog? And something happened to the dog?”

  “You don’t know that,” David said. He looked at Grace. “We never had a dog. We would have liked it, but the boys were allergic.”

  So that was true, she thought with a strange wave of relief. He had always said he was allergic.

  “And he said what?” Naomi demanded. “About this imaginary dog.”

  “That …” She tried to remember the details. Details seemed very important now. “There was a dog, called Raven. It was Mitchell’s dog. And one day when he was home alone with the dog, the dog disappeared. Got out the gate or something, and nobody ever saw it again. And you blamed him, because he was the one who was here.” She searched for anything she had left out, but there was nothing more. “That’s it.”

  After a long and deeply uncomfortable moment, Naomi spoke. “That’s not it,” she said in a cracked voice. “Not by a long shot.”

  “Honey,” David said. “Don’t be angry. Obviously, that’s what Grace was told.”

  “Please,” she said. Her heart was pounding. It was pounding so hard, she could hear it. She didn’t understand what was happening, but she was terrified of it. “Please tell me.”

  “Not a dog,” said Naomi, who at some point in the last instant had begun to cry, and whose eyes, with their heavy dark circles, were now filled with tears. “Not a dog. A brother. He never had a dog, but he had a brother. I suppose he never mentioned that he had a brother.”

  “Of course. Mitchell!” Grace said. She couldn’t hold on to any of this.

  “Not Mitchell,” Naomi said angrily.

  “Not me,” said Mitchell, almost at the same instant. He wasn’t smiling now, Grace noted. Even his self-confessed optimism couldn’t handle this. “Another brother. Aaron. He was four.”

  She shook her head. She didn’t know why.

  “He really never told you about it?” David said.

  She thought: I can leave right now. If I leave right now, I don’t have to know this. But if I stay, I will have to. And then I will know it forever. Whatever it is, I will have to know it forever.

  But it wasn’t a decision, really. She was in the grip of it, of them. Of whatever the truth actually was, she would tell herself later. By then, of course, she was an altogether different person.

  On a Saturday morning in the winter of the year when Jonathan was fifteen and Mitchell thirteen, the four-year-old Aaron Reuben Sachs—called “Boo” by his mother and “the Caboose” by his father, and nothing at all by his brothers (who were, after all, much older and involved in their own active lives)—came down with a bad cold and was running a temperature. It happened to be the day on which the daughter of David and Naomi’s oldest friends was to be bat mitzvahed, and all five members of the Sachs family were expected at the synagogue and at the reception to follow. But Jonathan refused to go. He had no love for David and Naomi’s friends, or for their daughter, who was two grades behind him in school and not remotely attractive, and he intended to stay home and do whatever it was that he did in his room, with his door locked. There had been a fight about it the day before, and the fight had ended with David’s insistence that however Jonathan might feel about it, he would attend the bat mitzvah along with the rest of his family. The next morning, though, it was as if none of that had happened. Jonathan stayed in his room, insisting he wasn’t going anywhere.

  But Aaron had a fever. That’s what changed everything around. And Naomi saw, in this confluence of events—both bad, neither of which could really be controlled—another possibility. One that would, yes, save face for herself, but also (and she told herself that it might work out this way) give Jonathan a chance to really spend a bit of time with his brother. Maybe it wasn’t too late for him to find a connection, some bond that might outlast the experience of growing up with the same parents in the same house, albeit at different times. She had always hoped for that, though Jonathan had never shown much of what you might call a brotherly feeling, even to Mitchell, who was only two years younger. The arrival of Aaron, though surprising to all of them, had pushed her eldest son even further away from the rest of them.

  And that was what she told herself when she dressed for the synagogue and checked her little boy’s temperature one final time (101 degrees) and tucked him into his bed with a cassette of Fable Forest playing beside him.

  When she phoned home from the reception a few hours later, Jonathan said everything was fine.

  “He said Aaron wanted to play outside,” Mitchell said. “He told us that for a while, and then I think he figured out that that wasn’t working. It wasn’t considered a nice thing you were doing for your little brother, letting him play outside when he wanted to, wh
en your brother’s four years old and running a fever and you’re supposed to be taking care of him. You don’t get sympathy for that. You get disapproval. So then he told people he had no idea Aaron was outside. He thought Aaron was in his room the whole time. He told the doctor he’d checked on him a few times, but he never said that to us. He knew Mom and Dad wouldn’t have believed that, so he didn’t bother.”

  “Wait,” Grace said. She actually had her hands up, to stop them. “Wait, do you mean he … You mean that Jonathan was responsible for something happening to Aaron?”

  “He was.” David nodded sadly. “I fought against that, not nearly as long as Naomi did. She wanted terribly not to believe it was true.”

  Naomi was looking at something past Grace’s shoulder. Her face was so full of pain, it looked swollen.

  Mitchell sighed. “He was definitely outside. Definitely. I don’t think we know how long, or whether he wanted to be there or he was told to go. It’s very hard to imagine the chain of events. And of course, the human brain is very good at making up stories to feel better about something when it gets unbearable. So I’ve always had this little story about Aaron feeling better and wanting to play outside, because he had this swing set out back that he loved. With a ladder and a rope. And he just lets himself outside and goes and has a great time out there on the swing, and when he comes back in he doesn’t have any chance at all to feel sick. He just goes back in his bed and drifts off and that’s where he is when we all get back from the party.”

  “But then it was one hundred and five degrees. We took him right away,” Naomi said tonelessly. “To the emergency room. But they couldn’t do anything. It was too late to do anything for him.”

  “And also that wasn’t how it happened,” Mitchell said. “I just wanted that to be the story, but it wasn’t how it really happened. And the police knew it, too. They took him through it again and again. I mean, Jonathan. He kept changing what he said. He knew where Aaron was. He didn’t know. He might have known. He thought he knew, but he was wrong. No affect. No distress at all. But also there was no real action on his part. There was nothing they could say he’d done. And you know, I think they were trying to think of our family as a whole, and how we were going to survive this, and that holding Jonathan responsible from a legal perspective would make it all so much worse. I think they believed he was going to suffer enough, out of his own guilt, and putting him through an indictment and a trial wouldn’t help him and it wouldn’t help us. But they were wrong about him suffering. He couldn’t suffer. He didn’t know how.”