“So what’s he going to do now?” I asked.
“Nothing right away,” she said. She took Len’s gardening gloves that he had left there and slipped them on deliberately. “Tomorrow or the next day, I don’t know.”
“What did you do to him?” I asked, a little worried.
“It’s not what I did to him,” she responded. “It’s what I did to his plants. You can do a lot of damage with a pruning saw if you’re not careful. And I wasn’t.” She pulled the leaves off one of the tiny branches carefully, and then squeezed the stalk between her fingers. A sticky white sap appeared. She studied it for a moment, then dipped the stalk into the water and let it soak.
“Oh, you know, that’s not—you know, I was trying to help you,” I said.
“Well, you did,” said Charlie. “You helped me a lot.” She rummaged around in the stack of miniature gardening implements on the shelf above the sink and carefully selected one of the fertilizing needles.
“Look,” I said, finally sick of her and her cool disinterest in the mess she had made for me. “I did this thing, for you and that kid. I was trying to be nice, and you just, you—you’re as bad as he is.”
“You have no idea how bad he is,” she stated. “I do.” She placed the fertilizing needle in the water.
“Then why did you even bring him that plant?” I said. “Why did you ask him for help in the first place? Why did you trust him?”
She looked over at me, unimpressed. “I know a lot of talented botanists, but he is the only one who could have gotten those seeds to grow,” she said, finishing her task with the needle. She touched the slender, glistening leaves of the Madrigalis and smiled with a cloudless and perverse delight. “He’s right, I never could have done it.” She picked up the plant and headed out the door. “Don’t touch those things without gloves on,” she called back to me. “That sap is really quite toxic.”
I didn’t know what she was talking about until the next morning, when I glanced into the kitchen and understood what she had been doing while we talked. She had fed her quickly improvised solution from the sap of the Madrigalis into the irrigation system. Every tray of moss was dead.
25
IT WAS KIND OF NICE TO SEE OLD STUART LONG. I HADN’T LAID EYES on the guy since the day we buried Mom, and there he was, sitting patiently in Ira Grossman’s glamorous waiting room, looking like a friendly egg. He was reading a magazine, something financial and boring.
“Hey, Mr. Long,” I said.
“Hello, Tina,” he said, smiling with real pleasure. “It’s been a while.”
“Yes, a lot has happened,” I agreed, sitting next to him. “What are you doing here, do you have business with Ira?”
“I’m giving a deposition,” he informed me.
“Oh, so am I.”
“Yes, I presumed so.”
“Lucy and Alison are doing theirs tomorrow. They kind of didn’t want me anywhere near the whole deposition thing in general? So we had to sign all these docs saying Lucy was the administratrix. That’s the word, right?”
“I think it’s a fine word.”
“Anyway, they all decided that she should be in charge because I’m kind of a loose cannon, but now I have to give a deposition anyway.”
“Sometimes it happens that way.”
“I can’t really follow it all that well. I pretty much just show up whenever they tell me to and do what I’m told.”
“Very wise.”
“It might be if I really pulled it off. Frankly, I understand why they’d rather keep me under wraps. I keep trying, over at the Edge, to be, you know, a good representative of the family, but it’s not going as well as it might.”
“Really?”
“Is that a surprise?” I asked.
“No,” he said, closing his magazine carefully and setting it back on the table. This is the thing I find curious about lawyers. Even when they want to talk to you, they don’t say very much. Mr. Long was clearly happy to see me and more than willing to talk to me while we waited to be called into our respective depositions; it’s not like he was trying to ignore me so he could read his magazine. But he really wasn’t going to say anything extra. After a moment I got embarrassed and decided to keep this going.
“Are you here for our case?” I asked. “I mean, I assumed you were, but maybe you’re here on somebody else’s case.”
“I’m here on your case.”
“Did I hear that the Drinans were suing you? I think Lucy told me that.”
“Their lawyers have suggested it, certainly. It would be part of the case they need to build around the earlier wills.”
“What kind of a case?”
“It’s just one among several arguments they might make. That perhaps I was lax in probating Mrs. Drinan’s will. The first Mrs. Drinan.”
“I’m sorry about that, Mr. Long. I feel bad that you’re being dragged into this on our account,” I told him.
“Not on your account, no. Bill’s wishes were very clear; he meant to leave the apartment and all his worldly goods to your mother, Tina. I am here because legally, as executor of his estate, I am required to enact his wishes.”
“Yeah, but he didn’t mean to leave the apartment to us,” I said. Mr. Long tilted his head, like he had to sort of dramatically think about that, even though it seemed to me that all the legal shenanigans we were about to embark on were premised on that fact.
“Have you spoken to your lawyer about that thought?” he asked me.
“Not precisely,” I admitted.
“Perhaps you should, in private,” he advised. “Before you give your deposition. Opposing counsel will be present, and the deposition itself will be recorded as a legal document. So the question of Bill’s intent, as you were aware of it, will surely be raised. Haven’t you been prepped on this?”
“They’re going to prep me just before I go in, some underling is going to run through it with me,” I explained. But I was kind of touched that he felt like taking care of me. “What kind of things do they ask you in a deposition?” I asked.
“Well, they’ll probably ask you about your mother, the last time you saw her, what she told you about Bill, things like that.”
“Oh, no,” I said. “I meant you. What kinds of questions will they ask you?”
“Oh.” He nodded, as if that were a really intelligent thing for me to be curious about. “Yes, I will be deposed on completely different matters. Although there will be some overlap. I’m probably the only person who really spent time with Bill and Olivia together, and they’ll want to know about that.”
“You did?” I asked. I don’t know why this hadn’t occurred to me. From the start everybody had said he represented Bill and his estate. And I remembered Lucy saying he was Mom’s lawyer, the day we found out about the apartment. “Of course you saw them together; they had to come into your office and sign things.”
“No, no, they never came into the office,” he corrected me. “Bill wouldn’t leave the apartment. I went to them.”
“You went to them? You went to the apartment?”
“Of course. I had dinner with them many times.”
“You had dinner with them?”
“Yes, your mother was a lovely cook.”
“My mother was not a lovely cook, Mr. Long,” I said, almost laughing out loud. “My mother never cooked.”
“Oh. Well. She cooked for Bill. And for me, when I would come by with a legal matter.”
This was so far out of the realm of possibility I didn’t know what to say. “Well, what did she cook?” I finally asked, trying not to sound utterly incredulous.
“She would roast a tenderloin or a chicken,” he replied. “Once we had salmon fillets with some kind of sauce. I think it was an anchovy sauce, it was delicious. And Brussels sprouts in a Dijon mustard dressing, she made that once. There were concerns about Bill’s diet, which she was quite alert to. No potatoes, whole-grain rice occasionally. Dessert was usually fresh fruit. Pineapple. St
rawberries when they were in season. Or mango! With a little yogurt, we had that several times.”
“Were there napkins? Napkin rings? Was there a tablecloth?” My incredulity had tipped over into a completely childish sarcasm and contempt. Mr. Long the Egg Man tilted his head thoughtfully for a moment and answered the question.
“We used paper napkins. There was no tablecloth because all they really had was that little coffee table next to the television set. I presume you’ve seen it?”
“Of course I’ve seen it.”
“Yes. That’s where we would eat, so mostly we held our plates on our laps. It was quite pleasant, really, sort of like a little picnic, except with lovely food.”
“Made by my mother.”
“Once Bill made the salad.”
“You know what she used to cook for us? Fish sticks. Spaghetti with Ragú sauce from the jar. Hamburgers, the kind that came in those little flat frozen circles. When she really felt like doing something special for us, you know what we’d get? Frozen waffles.”
“Really?” said Mr. Long.
“Yeah, really,” I said. I felt like I was trapped in a cocktail shaker and someone was giving it a go; the inside of my head had become completely dislodged. “She was still drinking, right? I mean, please don’t tell me, I don’t care how shitty it sounds, but I really don’t want to find out that once she was finished with the three of us my mother actually fixed her life. There was vodka all over the apartment when I got there, just vodka and red wine and and and nothing—like nothing else was there when I got there. She was still just a big drunk.”
“They both drank.” Mr. Long nodded, and like everything else it sounded like a fact coming from him. “But I would never have called either of them ‘a big drunk.’ Neither one of them, to my knowledge, drank before six.” He stopped talking, like that was enough facts for now.
“What do you mean, they didn’t drink before six?”
“I don’t know if it was true when I was not present. But whenever I was present they did not drink before six. They had a certain reverence for the phrase ‘cocktail hour.’”
“But then they kept drinking.”
“We would enjoy wine with dinner and then I would leave. I don’t know if they continued to drink after I left.”
“Cocktail hour. When I was a kid, cocktail hour started at noon,” I said. I sounded like a big whiner, and in fact my voice actually cracked in the most horrifying way, as if I were about to start crying. Mr. Long just stared at the floor with a sort of deliberate and embarrassed disinclination to continue the conversation. “I’m happy, no, I mean I’m really happy for them,” I added. “You too. I’m happy you got to have these lovely dinners with Bill and my mom, that sounds terrific.”
“It was, actually. She was a very good cook. Now that you tell me she didn’t cook often before she met Bill, I understand the pleasure she took in it. There was always a real sense of surprise that she was good at it. And now I know why.”
“Yeah, all those lovely dinners sound terrific.” I picked up one of the magazines on the table so I could act like I didn’t care. Like all the rest of the magazines in that swank office, it looked boring as hell; besides which, I knew I was behaving horribly, so I immediately put it back down.
“She was his cleaning lady. So you knew that, right, before he married her? She was just, like, his cleaning lady?”
“Yes, of course I did. I was the one who introduced them.”
“You introduced them?”
“Oh. Yes. It hadn’t occurred to me that you didn’t know. Your mother was doing some cleaning for me, and I knew Bill was looking for someone as well, so I introduced them.”
“Well, how did you know her?” I asked, feeling, inexplicably, more and more outraged by all this.
“She lived a few blocks from me in Jersey City. She advertised her cleaning services in one of the smaller local papers, and I responded to her ad.”
“That’s, this is all just—crazy,” I said.
“Why is it crazy?”
“So you knew her? You really knew her?”
“I knew her in several different contexts and through several rather significant changes in her circumstances. So I know about those events, and her experience of those events. Is that what you mean?”
“I—don’t think—I knew her,” I said a bit lamely.
There was silence at this. I’m sure I was just embarrassing the hell out of old Stuart Long.
“Perhaps you should discuss the gaps in your information with your sisters,” he finally suggested. “They seem to have had more consistent contact with her in the past few years.”
“Yes, that’s a good idea,” I murmured, embarrassed for us both now. “Of course, that’s obviously what I should do. I apologize, Mr. Long, really. Please excuse me. I think maybe I need to use the restroom. I don’t, actually, need to use the restroom. I’m not kidding, you have to tell me. This is not, no. All you can say, go talk to Alison and Lucy because they were around more? I would but I sincerely doubt that they were paying attention. Nobody was paying attention, nobody was talking to her. You should hear the shit I hear from the people who live in that building—they can’t get over the fact that she was a cleaning lady from New Jersey, and that meant something—that she was a thief and a liar and cheating Bill and keeping him drunk. Because there’s no way it was about anything except the apartment, but that’s not her either, it’s not—it’s not … None of it sounds like anything I remember. None of it.” I stopped finally. “Sorry. Sorry. I don’t know why I’m ranting, I really do sound like an idiot.”
Mr. Long waited, probably to see if there would be any further useless outbursts. When there weren’t, he folded his fingers together and considered his response. And then he considered some more. It seemed to take him forever to decide what to tell me that might rise to the level of some truth about my mother’s life.
“She took very good care of him,” he finally said. “His health was quite poor those last few years; that was why he never went out. He was afraid to be left alone, but she didn’t seem to mind how much he needed her. And he appreciated everything she did for him, very much. He wanted her to have a home after he was gone. There was nothing dishonest or dishonorable in their relationship. They took great pleasure in each other. It was my impression that they loved each other very much. That at least is what I will report in my deposition.”
“What was Sophie like?” I asked.
Mr. Long looked at me sharply—at least as sharply as a guy who looks like an egg can look. He didn’t have a chance to tell me to mind my own business, though. One of Ira’s legal underlings suddenly appeared and smiled at me from inside his suit. “Tina? Hi, I’m Jackson, I’m going to be prepping your deposition today. I’m so glad I poked my head out, no one knew if you were here or not!”
“Yeah, I kind of slithered in, forgot to tell the girl at the desk,” I said.
“Not a problem, not a problem,” he reassured me. He held out his hand like he was guiding me to my execution. “Right in here, please, we’ll just get started.”
26
JENNIFER WAS NOT ENTIRELY SYMPATHETIC TO MY POSITION ABOUT my mother, but that may have been because she didn’t understand it. “Okay, so you were mad at her for being a drunk, but now you’re mad because she wasn’t a drunk?” she asked.
“I don’t know that she wasn’t a drunk,” I said. “All he said was she stopped drinking. Which she didn’t even, stop drinking.”
“But she didn’t drink as much.”
“That’s what he said. When I was a teenager, she like drank all the time and then passed out in the middle of the day. Then we grow up and she suddenly gets it together to fall in love with a total stranger and not drink except at like six o’clock, when everybody drinks?” I said, pouring a huge shot of vodka over a couple of ice cubes.
“My parents drink wine,” Jennifer informed me. She was delicately perched on the minuscule counter in my little kitchen
, her plaid skirt falling perfectly over her skinny knees, while she watched me make myself a cocktail. Her geometry book was lying open on the floor, where she had left it when I returned from my torturous afternoon. She had paid Katherine off with a series of minor bribes all week—a Tootsie Roll, a Blow Pop, a two-pack of Mint Milano cookies—so she could visit me for an hour each day while Katherine played in her room with the door locked. I thought it was a pretty clever bit of plotting, and I had come to find it unimaginably delightful to have her there. Lucy and Daniel and Alison were off giving depositions and living their lives, that cloud on the title had scared off the real estate agent for the time being, and Len was probably plotting revenge on me, so it felt pretty lonely in that big apartment. Jennifer was good company in a kind of sardonic teenage way.
“So what was this thing you had to do?” she asked. “You were being decomposed?”
“Yes, that’s exactly what it was, I was being decomposed by a bunch of bloodless vampires also known as lawyers,” I said. “It was endless. This total moron, Jackson, that was his first name, I hate it when people have first names that are last names. That became cool, why? You have to ask yourself. I’m not kidding. This guy, he’s got like the most astonishing suit you’ve ever seen, and even though it’s my deposition, I’m the one who’s supposed to be answering questions, even so he manages to squeeze into the conversation his weekend in the Hamptons and where he gets his suit made. I mean, who cares? It’s my deposition.”
“He sounds like, you know, half of Manhattan,” Jennifer noted.
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