“Lots,” I said.
“As in . . . ?”
“As in: I am making this call from the Portland, Maine, Post Office because I am worried that Big Brother might be listening in on my phone line.”
It took around twenty minutes to get through it all—and I must have told it pretty damn well because Margy, one of the world’s great interrupters, said nothing for the length of the story.
When I finally finished, there was a long silence.
“You still there?” I asked.
“Oh, I’m here, all right,” Margy said.
“Sorry if I chewed your ear off with that.”
“No. It was . . . riveting.”
“So what do I do now?”
A long pause. Then she said, “Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“There’s nothing to do. He’s gone. The feds aren’t on your tail. Your husband doesn’t know—and I doubt that sad kid Billy will ever risk losing you as a friend by saying something, and your dad will definitely keep his lips sealed . . . and, by the way, you are going to have to forgive him, but you know that already . . . so . . .”
Another pause.
“You’ve gotten away with it,” Margy said.
“Have I?” I asked, sounding surprised.
“You know you have.”
“But what about the repercussions?”
“If you’ve gotten away with something, there are no repercussions—except those you bring down on your own head.”
“That’s what I’m talking about. How do I live with it?”
“It’s simple: you just do.”
“I don’t know if that’s possible.”
“You mean, you don’t know if you can forgive yourself?”
“I can’t forgive myself,” I said.
“You have to forgive yourself.”
“Why?”
“Because you didn’t commit a crime . . .”
“Yes, I did.”
“A misdemeanor, Hannah. But not a crime. Come on, sweetheart. Your body pulled you one way for a few crazy days, and then that bastard gave you no choice but to do what he said. In my book, the only crime you’re really guilty of is being human and weak like the rest of us.”
“I wish I could see it that way.”
“You will.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Because it’s what happens. You have a secret. It might seem like a terrible secret at the moment. But in time, it will just be a little room that only you know about, and that only you can enter. I promise you, after a while you won’t want to enter it at all. Because it won’t seem that important to you anymore. And because, bar you and me, nobody will ever know that this secret exists.
“And now, hon, I am being called into a dumbass conference. So . . .”
We ended the call, promising to speak again the following week. I hung up. I stood up and paid the telephone operator. I went outside. I got into my car and drove back to Pelham thinking, No one really gets away with anything. Or should that be, no one with a conscience really gets away with anything.
I took my time getting home, delaying my arrival as late as I could. When I finally rolled into town around seven, Dan was already at the apartment with Jeff. My son looked up as I entered, then returned to tossing his wooden blocks around the crib. My husband gave me a light peck on the top of my head, then looked into my bags of Italian goodies and said, “That all looks pretty nice. Get the Parmesan?”
I nodded and began to unpack the bag. The bill came out with a box of pasta. Dan picked it up and whistled loudly when he saw the price.
“Gosh, that was expensive.”
“Don’t you think we deserve to treat ourselves now and then?” I said.
Though I said it without much in the way of attitude, something in my tone made Dan change his.
“You’re right,” he said. “Treating ourselves is a good thing. What’s for dinner, by the way?”
I said that I would be making an authentic Italian lasagne.
“Neat,” he said. “Think we should open a bottle of that Chianti you bought?”
I nodded my approval. As Dan rumbled around for a corkscrew, I turned and stared at my very beautiful son—and thought about the pact I had made with myself and knew that, if Jeffrey wasn’t here, I wouldn’t be here either.
Dan turned around—and must have caught my pensiveness, as he asked, “You okay?”
There is a price to everything.
I smiled. I kissed my husband. I said, “Everything is just fine.”
PART Two
* * *
2003
TEN
THE SNOW WAS starting to fall heavily as I climbed into my car. Only in Maine would you get a near blizzard in early April. Being a hardened New England native, I’ve always liked our ferocious New England winters. Recently, however, all the strange climate change stuff meant that there was one year when we didn’t see a single flake of snow. This winter, on the other hand, the mercury plunged to 15 below in early January—and with Easter now almost upon us, it still refuses to budge above freezing. And the snow keeps coming down.
The engine on my Jeep started on the first go, as usual, and the heating kicked in by the time I had pulled out of the parking lot. The Jeep had been my fiftieth birthday present. Just recently, Dan said maybe it was time we traded it in for the most recent model—or some other kind of SUV. I flatly refused. It’s bad enough that I knock around Portland in such a large vehicle (although it’s great on snowy nights like tonight). But the idea of dumping another ten grand into a new Jeep Cherokee when my current model is still running so well strikes me as unnecessary. Dan, on the other hand, thinks nothing about trading in his Lexus every two years.
“We can afford it,” he gently reminds me whenever I raise a qualm or two.
I turned the radio on to NPR. There was a live relay of a Boston Symphony Orchestra concert—Levine conducting the Second Symphony of Sibelius: perfect music for a dark, wintry evening.
I negotiated my way out of downtown Portland, passing an entire area of old 1930s office buildings that had been left abandoned for years—and were, at one time, scheduled for demolition. But that was before the big boom in the mid-nineties, during which southern Maine benefited from an influx of enervated young professionals, fleeing big-league metropolitan areas. And every time there was some Town & Country article about Portland being one of the most livable small cities in America, the property values seemed to jump by another ten percent. Which is why those abandoned office buildings downtown had all been turned into fashionable lofts, which could now run you up to $500,000 for 1,600 square feet . . . whereas our own house in Falmouth . . .
No, I’m not getting into that topic again. Nowadays in Portland, anytime you’re over at somebody’s house for dinner, real estate becomes a central conversational point. In this sense, I suppose we’ve just managed to catch up with everywhere else. But it also makes me think: Why do we always seem to spend so much time these days talking about stuff we own and stuff we want to own?
It’s only a five-minute shot up the coastal interstate from downtown Portland to the town of Falmouth Foreside, where we live. Maine Medical Center—the state’s best hospital and the place where Dan operates—hovers on a hillside halfway between the city and our home. Dan doesn’t have far to travel—and he likes it that way.
As I signaled for the Falmouth Foreside exit, my cell phone rang. “Hannah, it’s Sheila Platt here.”
“Hi there,” I said, trying to sound enthusiastic. Sheila was a long-standing member of the reading group to which I belonged. Initially, we’d been just a book group. Just a few months ago, I suggested we start alternating a play with a book—because a play gave us the chance to read it aloud, acting out the various parts. What’s more, Portland was full of book groups, and I convinced the six other women in our “congregation” that it would be interesting to try something beyond Pride and Prejudice. Just this evening, we’d read
our way through the first two acts of Measure for Measure—and, per usual, our discussions of the play afterward had turned into one long catfight between Sheila Platt and her bête noire in the group, Alice Armstrong.
Alice was an art instructor at a local junior college; divorced and amusingly bitter about it. Her husband, another art teacher, had left her for a very successful corporate lawyer, who helped him screw Alice in the divorce settlement (“I was so angry at the bastard, I stupidly agreed to his shitty terms, as a way of showing him I didn’t need him anymore. I tell you, pride always costs you dearly”). She was very smart and very thwarted—a talented illustrator who couldn’t find any outlet for her work in Maine, and had to plug away at the teaching job to support her two kids. She was also politically savvy, with a strong streak of mischief—which is why I should have known better than to let her choose one of Shakespeare’s foremost problem plays as our next “group read.” Not only is Measure for Measure predicated on its ethical complexity, but it also raises all sorts of questions about the interrelationship between political and sexual power, as well as exploring the narrow frontier between religious piety and hypocrisy. Given Sheila’s evangelical Christianity and her pronounced admiration for our current commander in chief—and Alice’s equally pronounced “radical secularism” (as Sheila contemptuously dubbed it) and her vocal pro-choice feminism—it only figured that the play would get them rubbing each other the wrong way . . . which, I sensed, was Alice’s exact intention.
“The whole play is about hypocrisy,” I said at the start of our post-read-through discussion. “Puritanical hypocrisy.”
“Now when you say ‘hypocrisy,’” Alice asked, “are you talking about sanctimoniousness or deceit?”
“Both, I guess. Angelo is a man whose moral rigidity is undercut by that most human need for sex.”
“But the sex thing is really a cry for love,” Sheila Platt said.
“No, it’s a total sex thing,” I said. “It’s about power.”
“But Hannah, he does tell her that he loves her,” Sheila said.
“As far as I’m concerned,” Alice said, “Angelo is a typical power-mad male politician who plays the devout-Christian card, moralizing like hell about the weaknesses of others, while simultaneously using his authority to try to force a nun to sleep with him. And what makes the play so damn relevant is that Shakespeare understood that sanctimonious, finger-pointing types are usually the most morally compromised people going. Look at that hypocrite Newt Gingrich, calling Clinton the greatest sinner imaginable after his dumb thing with Lewinsky, while simultaneously carrying on an affair himself . . .”
“The difference is,” Sheila said, “that Mr. Gingrich wasn’t the president . . .”
“Yeah, he was only Speaker of the House,” Alice said.
“. . . and he didn’t lie under oath,” Sheila said.
“No, he just lied to his wife, while trying to bring on the downfall of a political opponent whose sexual transgression wasn’t as serious as his own.”
“Oh, please,” Sheila said, sounding angry. “You don’t think taking advantage of an intern . . .”
“She was over twenty-one, which makes her a consenting adult. And no, I don’t think a blow job is the same thing as leaving your wife . . .”
Sheila and a few of the other women in the room let out an audible gasp.
“Do we really have to put up with such vile talk?” Sheila asked.
“Now, getting back to the text . . .” I said.
I hated sounding like “the teacher.” But though I always ended up playing moderator during these punch-ups—steering a decidedly neutral course between warring factions—I privately enjoyed the fact that Alice had no interest in keeping her opinions to herself. On the contrary, she insisted on confronting Sheila—because (as Alice privately admitted to me) Sheila represented everything she detested in George W. Bush’s America. Just as Sheila once told me that, to her, Alice was “just an old hippie.”
Tonight, however, there had been a certain “to the death” quality to their verbal sparring; a hope that some particularly vindictive comment would have the desired effect, leaving the victim so punch-drunk and embarrassed that she’d have no option but to leave the group.
“Is this a good time to talk?” Sheila asked.
Frankly, it was never a good time to talk to Sheila Platt. She constantly irritated me. I didn’t like her sobby little voice, or the sanctimonious way she always went on about “finding the good in everyone” even though she was the sort of ultraconservative who had campaigned for the return of the death penalty in Maine and for banning gay marriages. She was also known around town as a malignant gossip who dished the dirt on others while maintaining a benign, saintly smile on her face.
I really couldn’t stand her—but took care that she never knew how much I truly disliked her. After thirty years in Maine, I had learned how to keep my opinions to myself.
“Is this a good time to talk?”
“I suppose so,” I said.
“I wanted to have a word after we finished tonight, but I saw you were deep in conversation with Ms. Armstrong.”
She came down heavy with the invective on the Ms. I was going to say something about how we were not deep in conversation, but decided to let it ride.
“So what did you want to talk about, Sheila?”
“I just wanted to let you know that I will be taking a ballot among the other members to see if everyone else feels the same way I do about Alice Armstrong.”
“And if they do, what then?”
“We’ll be asking her to leave.”
“You can’t do that,” I said.
“Oh yes we can. She’s a disruptive influence . . .”
“Sheila, there are many members of the group who consider you a disruptive influence . . .”
“I haven’t heard that.”
“Well, I have. And though you might not like Alice’s politics, they are Alice’s politics—and we must respect them as such. Just as we have to respect yours.”
“Even if you don’t agree with them.”
“To the best of my knowledge, I’ve never had a political discussion with you. Or, at least, I’ve never said anything while you’ve aired your views.”
“Well, it’s pretty darn clear you’re not a Republican—and everyone knows you’re a great friend of Alice Armstrong. And she’s somewhat to the left of . . .”
“My friendship with Alice is not predicated on a shared political perspective. But even if it was, this has nothing to do with the reading group. And I am quite frankly appalled by your implication that I would side with Alice because we might be fellow liberals . . .”
“There!” she said triumphantly. “You admitted it.”
“I’ve admitted nothing. You’re twisting my words—and, quite frankly, I’m beginning to lose track of what this conversation is actually about.”
“The fact that I will be asking for a vote to expel Alice Armstrong from the reading group next week.”
“If you do that, I will call for a vote to expel you—and, trust me, it will pass.”
A little pause. I could tell she didn’t like that one bit. Because she had to know just how much people disliked her.
“Maybe I’ll go off and form my own book group,” she said.
“That’s your prerogative, Sheila,” I said. “Good night.”
And I hit the button that disconnected the call.
There are very few individuals who make me want to lose faith with the human race. But Sheila Platt qualifies because, as with so many people these days, there can be no room for differences of opinions, or lively, contrary debate. Her point of view is the only point of view. Just like those rabid conservatives you see on talk shows, shouting down anyone who disagrees with their hyperpatriotism.
Just like my son, Jeff.
Jeff would have loved our reading group because it would have allowed him to lock horns with Alice Armstrong—locking horns with a liber
al being one of my son’s favorite pastimes. I discovered this the hard way over Thanksgiving, when Jeff and his wife, Shannon, came up from Hartford for the weekend with their baby daughter, Erin. Alice happened to drop by for a glass of wine. I introduced her to my lawyer son, and somehow the conversation turned to Bush’s born-again political agenda. Forgetting that I had told her that Jeff worked as a corporate counsel to Standard Life in Connecticut, was very active in the Connecticut Republican Party, and had become (to my considerable shock) a “committed Christian,” Alice went into one of her witty rants about how it didn’t surprise her that his beloved party was now in the hands of the religious Right, since “most of the corporate creeps who run the party have also become Bible thumpers—to appeal to the God Squad in Dixie.”
To his credit, Jeff didn’t go ballistic when Alice made that comment—“going ballistic” being something my thirty-year-old son can do when he becomes displeased. He used to throw these wild tantrums as a two-year-old. When he was an adolescent, he was always considered a model student and a real team player—but one who could fall into a brief but terrifying rage when a letdown or a small personal failure clouded his path. When he was a senior in college, he came home for Easter with his right hand heavily bandaged. After some prodding from Dan, he admitted that he punched out a window in his dorm when he received a rejection letter from Harvard Law School (he did get into, and eventually graduated from, U. Penn Law, which wasn’t exactly a second-tier school). Shannon seemed to be able to handle these out-of-body mood swings. Then again, she had cast herself in the role of the perfect stay-at-home wife—always going on about how delighted she was about changing little Erin’s diapers, and supporting Jeff in his career, and really getting sniffy about those harridan Women Who Work—knowing full well that, after we left Pelham and Dan started his residency in Milwaukee, I found a job as a teacher and, bar a break when Lizzie was born, haven’t stopped working since then. Too bad I hadn’t invited Sheila Platt around on that Thanksgiving night. She wouldn’t have just loved my son’s Republican politics, but also his wife’s pro-life obsessions—as Shannon’s occasionally bragged to me about picketing abortion clinics in the Hartford slums. I had to wonder if she’d march on a similar clinic in the white-bread West Hartford suburb where she lives—or would that cause the wrong type of talk among all her fellow upscale housewives, who probably vote Republican but still understandably don’t like someone threatening their reproductive rights . . . like my self-righteous daughter-in-law.
The Douglas Kennedy Collection #1 Page 133
