Commonwealth

by Ann Patchett

A tall black man in a charcoal suit came to the table and Kumar stood to greet him. “Our new associate,” Kumar said to the man, holding out his hand towards Franny. “Franny Keating. Is it still Keating?”

  “Franny Keating,” she said, and shook the man’s hand.

  Later, Kumar would say he worked it out on the spot: he would marry Franny, and in doing so solve everything except the unsolvable. He had loved her when they were young—if not in the year she had shared his apartment then at least after she had left with Leo Posen. If she were free he saw no reason he wouldn’t be able to love her again. The problem was time. Sapna’s parents had come from Michigan to take care of Ravi when Amit was born and almost a year later they were still living in his house. Between work and his children, between his life and the enormous burden of grief, there wasn’t a minute in any day that wasn’t devoured. His genius would be to hire Franny rather than date her. He didn’t want to date her anyway. He wanted to marry her. If she came to work in his law firm they would see each other every day. They would come upon each other’s stories naturally, in the elevator or exchanging files. He could make sure that his idea was as good as he thought it was before entrusting her with his children and his life.

  Settled, he thought when he handed her his business card and said goodnight, everything’s settled.

  The bar was still playing the same tape all these years later, or a tape that was remarkably similar to that other tape. Franny would have laughed to think how much it used to bother her. She never heard it anymore. But when Kumar and his client left the bar and she put his business card into her apron pocket, she could half-hear Ella Fitzgerald singing as if in the back of her mind,

  There’s someone I’m trying so hard to forget

  Don’t you want to forget someone too?

  Lying in the darkness of her mother’s house, Franny tried to imagine a world in which Sapna had lived. Maybe Franny and Kumar would have met again, bumped into each other in a bookstore one day, laughed and said hello and gone on, but she never would have married him, and his sons would never have been her sons. If Sapna could have lived then certainly Beverly could have stayed married to Fix, which would mean no Jack Dine, no Dine stepbrothers, no Christmas party in Virginia. It would also mean no Marjorie though, and that would be a terrible loss when Marjorie had given Fix the benefit of great love. But maybe Bert would have stayed with Teresa then, and fifty years later he might have saved her life by insisting she go to the doctor in time. Cal would have missed the bee that was waiting for him in the tall grass near the barn at Bert’s parents’ house. He could have lived for years, though who’s to say another bee wouldn’t have found him somewhere else? With Cal alive, Albie would never have set the fire that brought him to Virginia, though he wouldn’t have come to Virginia anyway because Bert would have stayed in California. Franny, half asleep on top of the bedspread beside her husband, was unable to map out all the ways the future would unravel without the moorings of the past. Without Bert, Franny would never have gone to law school. She would have gotten a masters in English and so she never would have met Kumar at all. She never would have been in Chicago working at the Palmer House and so she never would have met Leo Posen, who sat at the bar so many lifetimes ago and talked about her shoes. That was the place where Franny’s life began, leaning over to light his cigarette. Somehow, out of all that could have been gained or lost, the thought of having never met Leo was the one thing she couldn’t bear.

  The sound of Kumar’s breathing had deepened and slowed, and she got up carefully, felt for her dress and shoes in her suitcase, and changed clothes in the dark.

  When she came down the back stairs to the kitchen, Franny found her mother at the breakfast table by herself, arranging petits fours on a tray.

  “You know there are people here who will do that for you,” Franny said.

  Her mother looked up and gave her an exhausted smile. “I’m hiding for just a minute.”

  Franny nodded and sat down beside her.

  “This party always seems like such a good idea in the abstract,” Beverly said. “But every time I have it I can’t imagine why.”

  They could hear the guests in the other room, the hilarity in their voices raised by the eggnog and champagne. The piano player was playing something faster now, maybe a jazzed-up version of “The Twelve Days of Christmas” but Franny wasn’t sure. Twelve days, she thought, she would have killed herself before she ever got to the five golden rings.

  Beverly put out the last of the tiny square cakes from the box, pink and yellow and white, each one crowned with a sugared rosette. “Rick came after all,” she said, turning the squares to diamonds. “Now he’s drinking.”

  “Matthew said he’d come.”

  “I can’t take them all together,” Beverly said. “One on one the boys are fine, or mostly fine, but when they’re together they always have an agenda. They have so many ideas about the future: what I’m supposed to do with Jack, what I’m supposed to do with the house. They don’t seem to have any sense of what conversation is appropriate for a Christmas party. I don’t know what’s going to happen in the future. I don’t know why they keep asking me. Do you have any ideas about the future?”

  Franny picked up a pale-yellow petit four, the color of a newly hatched chick, and ate it in a single bite. It wasn’t very good, but it was so pretty that it didn’t matter. “None,” she said. “Zero.”

  Beverly looked at her daughter and the look on her face was a pure expression of love. “I wanted two girls,” she said. “You and your sister. I wanted exactly what I had. Other people’s children are too hard.”

  If her mother hadn’t been so pretty none of it would have happened, but being pretty was nothing to blame her for. “I’m going out there,” Franny said, and got up.

  Her mother looked down at the plate of tiny cakes. “I’m going to divide them by color,” she said, pushing them all onto the table with the side of her hand. “I think I’d like them better that way.”

  Franny found Ravi and Amit in the basement watching The Matrix on a television set the size of a single mattress.

  “That’s rated R,” she said.

  The boys looked at her. “For the violence,” Ravi said. “Not sex.”

  “And it’s Christmas,” Amit said, operating on the logic of wishes.

  Franny stood behind them and watched as the black-coated men dipped backwards to avoid being split in half by bullets and then popped up again. If it was going to give them nightmares the damage was already done.

  “Mama, have you seen it before?” Amit asked.

  Franny shook her head. “It’s too scary for me.”

  “I’ll sleep in your room with you,” her younger boy said, “if you’re scared.”

  “If you make us stop now,” Ravi said, “we’ll never know what happens.”

  Franny watched for another minute. She was probably right, it probably was too scary for her. “Your father fell asleep,” she said. “Wait a little while and then go take him a plate for dinner, okay?”

  Pleased by their small victory, they nodded their heads.

  “And don’t tell him about the movie.”

  Franny went back upstairs and did one full loop around the room but there were so few people she remembered. She hadn’t lived in Arlington since she’d left for college. The wives of Jack Dine’s three sons all wanted to talk to her but none of them particularly wanted to talk to one another. The wife of the son she liked the most was the wife she like the least, and the wife of the son she liked the least was the wife she greatly preferred. What was interesting though, not that any of it was interesting at all, was that the wife of the son she had the hardest time remembering was also the wife she had the hardest time remembering.

  At some point in the evening before even a single guest had departed, Franny found herself back in the foyer, and there, without looking for it, she saw her own handbag on the floor, slightly behind the umbrella stand. She must have dropped it there w
hen she came in, putting the luggage down, and without a thought she picked it up and went out the door.

  The dress she’d brought for the party, the party she’d thought was still two days away, was not red. It was a dark blue velvet with long sleeves but still it was no match for the cold, as her shoes were no match for the snow. It didn’t make any difference. She had left the party, slipped away after everyone had seen her. “Where’s Franny?” they would say, and the answer would be, “I think she’s in the kitchen. I just saw her in the other room.”

  The cars were all covered in snow, and hers was a rental, rented in the dark no less. She didn’t know what color it was because she’d never actually seen it. It was an SUV, she remembered that, but all the cars were SUVs, as if SUVs, like vests for men, had been a requirement of the invitation. She went down the hill at the end of the drive and when she was in what she thought might have been the general vicinity, she hit the automatic key. A horn beeped just to the left of her and the lights came on. She brushed off the windows with her wrist and got inside. Once she got the heater running she called Bert.

  “I thought I’d come by and say hello if it isn’t too late.” She worked to keep her voice casual because she felt frantic.

  Bert was always up late. She had to discourage him from calling the house after ten o’clock at night. “Wonderful!” he said, as if he’d been waiting for exactly this call. “Just be careful in the snow.”

  Bert still lived in the last house he and Beverly had lived in together, the same house she and Caroline had lived in during high school, the house that Albie had come to for a year after Caroline was gone. It wasn’t that far from where Beverly lived with Jack Dine, maybe five miles, but in Arlington it was possible to live five miles from someone and never see them again.

  He was waiting for her on the front porch when she pulled up, the front door of the house open behind him. He had put on his coat to come outside. Bert was as old as the rest of them but age arrived at different rates of speed, in different ways. Coming up the walk in the dark, the porch light bright above his head, Franny thought that Bert Cousins still looked like himself.

  “The ghost of Christmas past,” he said when she stepped into his arms.

  “I should have called you sooner,” Franny said. “It’s all been sort of last-minute.”

  Bert did not invite her in, nor did he let her go. He only stood there holding Franny to his chest. Always she was the baby he had carried around Fix Keating’s party, the most beautiful baby he had ever seen. “Last-minute works for me,” he said.

  “Come on,” she said. “I’m freezing.”

  Inside the door she took off her shoes.

  “I made a fire in the den when you called. It hasn’t really caught yet but it’s starting.”

  Franny remembered the first time she’d ever been inside this house. She must have been thirteen. The den was why they’d bought the place, the big stone hearth, the fireplace big enough for a witch’s pot, the way the room looked out over the pool. She thought it was a palace then. Bert had no business keeping this house, it was entirely too big for one person. But on this night Franny was grateful he’d held on to it, if only so she could come home.

  “Let me get you a drink,” he said.

  “Maybe just some tea,” she said. “I’m driving.” She stood up on the hearth and flexed her stocking feet on the warm stones. She and Albie would come downstairs in the winter late at night when they were in high school and open up the flue when it was too cold to go outside and smoke. They would lean back into the fireplace with their cigarettes and blow the smoke up the chimney. They would drink Bert’s gin and throw away the empty bottles in the kitchen trash with impunity. If either parent noticed the dwindling stock in the liquor cabinet or the way the empties were piling up, neither one of them ever mentioned it.

  “Have a drink, Franny. It’s Christmas.”

  “It’s December twenty-second. Why does everyone keep telling me it’s Christmas?”

  “Barmaid’s gin and tonic.”

  Franny looked at him. “Barmaid’s,” she said sternly. Bert had shown her that trick when she was a girl and would play bartender for their parties. If a guest was already drunk she should pour a glass of tonic and ice and then float a little gin on the top without mixing it up. The first sip would be too strong, Bert told her, and that’s all that mattered. After the first sip drunks didn’t pay attention.

  “If you get sloppy you can sleep in your old room.”

  “My mother would love that.” It was always a trick getting out to see Bert. For all the times that Beverly had forgiven him, she couldn’t understand that Franny and Caroline might forgive him as well.

  “How is your mother?” Bert asked. He handed Franny her drink, and the first sip—straight gin—was right on the money.

  “My mother is exactly herself,” Franny said.

  Bert pressed his lips together and nodded. “I would expect nothing less. I hear old Jack Dine is slipping though, that she’s having a hard time taking care of him. I hate to think of her having to deal with that.”

  “It’s what we’ll all have to deal with sooner or later.”

  “Maybe I’ll give her a call, just to see how she’s doing.”

  Oh, Bert, Franny thought. Let it go. “What about you?” she said. “How are you doing?”

  Bert had made his own drink, a gin with a splash of tonic floating on the top to balance her out, and came to sit on the sofa. “I’m not so bad for an old man,” he said. “I still get around. If you’d called me tomorrow you would have missed me.”

  Franny stabbed at the logs with the fireplace poker to encourage the flame. “Where are you going tomorrow?”

  “Brooklyn,” he said. Franny turned around to look at him, poker in hand, and he smiled enormously. “Jeanette invited me for Christmas. There’s a hotel two blocks from where they live. It’s nice enough. I’ve been up there a couple of times to see them now.”

  “That’s really something,” Franny said, and she came to sit next to Bert on the couch. “I’m happy for you.”

  “We’ve been doing better these last couple of years. I e-mail with Holly too. She says that I can come to Switzerland and see her in that place she lives, the commune. I keep telling her I’ll meet her in Paris. I think that Paris is a good compromise. Everybody likes Paris. I took Teresa there for our honeymoon. That would have been what? Fifty-five years ago? I think it’s time to go back.” He stopped himself then, remembering something. “You were out there, weren’t you, when Teresa died? I think Jeanette told me that.”

  “Caroline and I took her to the hospital. We were with Dad.”

  “Well, that was nice of you.”

  Franny shrugged. “I wasn’t going to leave her.”

  “How is your dad?”

  Franny shook her head, thinking of her father. How is old Bert? Fix would always say. “I’d tell you he wasn’t going to make it until New Year’s but I’m sure I’d be wrong.”

  “Your father’s a tough guy.”

  “My father’s a tough guy,” Franny said, thinking of the gun in his bedside table and how she had declined to help him when he asked. She’d done worse than that. She’d taken the gun to the police department in Santa Monica later, turned it in along with the bullets.

  “I’m going to float a little more gin in there,” Bert said.

  “A tiny bit,” Franny said, and handed back the glass. She wasn’t drunk and so she was sadly aware that all the gin was gone now.

  “We’re not even up to half a jigger yet.” Bert made his way to the bar at the side of the room.

  “Just be careful.”

  “I remember seeing your father again after your christening party,” Bert said. “I saw him at the courthouse. I don’t know, maybe I saw him all the time and never knew it before, but that Monday he came up to me and shook my hand, said he was glad I’d come. ‘Glad you could come to Franny’s party,’ is what he said.” He handed Franny her drink.<
br />
  “It was a long time ago, Bert.”

  “Still,” Bert said. “It bothers me to think of him now, so sick. I never had anything against your father.”

  “Do you hear from Albie?” she said, wanting to change the subject. It was a question she could have asked Albie but for some reason she never did. They didn’t talk about Bert. Even all those years ago when they’d lived together under this roof they didn’t talk about him.

  “Not so much. Every now and then one of us gives it a try but we haven’t had a lot of success. Albie was very attached to his mother, you know. That’s the way it happens—girls to their fathers and boys to their mothers. I don’t think he ever got over my leaving his mother.” For Bert the past was always right there with him, and so he assumed that everyone else felt the same way.

  “You should give him a call. It’s a tough time of year now, with Teresa gone.” Franny thought of her own father, of this time next year.

  “I’ll call him on Christmas,” he said. “I’ll call from Jeanette’s.”

  Franny wanted to tell him it was three hours earlier in California and that he could call his son tonight, could call him right now, but Bert wasn’t going to call Albie and there was no sense trying to make him feel bad about it. She tilted back her glass and went past the gin for a second time. She pressed through the fizzy sweetness of the tonic and drained the glass down to the ice and the lime. “I wish I could stay,” Franny said, and part of her meant it. She would have liked to go upstairs to her room and lie down on her bed, though what were the chances that the bed was still there?

  Bert nodded. “I know. I’m just glad you came by at all. I really appreciate that.”

  “What time are you flying out?”

  “Early,” he said. “That way I’ll beat the traffic.”

  Franny got up and gave her stepfather a hug. “Merry Christmas,” she said.

  “Merry Christmas,” Bert said, and when he stepped back to look at her his eyes were damp. “Be careful now. If anything happened to you your mother would kill me.”

  Franny smiled and gave him a kiss, thinking that Bert still saw the world in terms of what Beverly would and would not forgive him for. She stepped into her shoes beside the front door and let herself out into the snow. Inside the house Bert was turning off the lights, and she stood there on the front porch for a minute and watched the snow come to rest on the sleeves of her velvet dress. She was thinking about the night she couldn’t find Albie. Bert was in his study downstairs working and her mother was in the kitchen going over her French homework. It was long past dinner. It was snowing just like this and the house was perfectly quiet. Franny was wondering where Albie was. Usually by this time he had come into her room to do his homework or talk to her instead of doing his homework. She was lying across her bed reading The Return of the Native for AP English. It wasn’t that he came in every night, but if he wasn’t in her room then she could usually hear him, watching television, walking around. She kept listening until finally she put the book down and went to look for him. He wasn’t in his bedroom or the bathroom or the den or in the living room where he never went anyway. When she had looked everywhere in the house she could think of she went into the kitchen.