You Should Have Known

by Jean Hanff Korelitz

  Grace looked at him.

  “What’s his name?” Mendoza asked O’Rourke.

  “Miguel.”

  “Miguel,” he reported to Grace, as if she weren’t three feet away.

  “No, of course not.”

  “Why ‘of course’?” he asked, frowning at her. “It’s a small school, right? I mean, that’s what I read on the website. That’s why tuition costs the big bucks. All that individual attention? What’s it cost, that school?” he asked his partner.

  Was she allowed to leave? Grace wondered. Was it ever allowed? Or was it like talking to royalty, where the conversation ended only when they said so?

  “Thirty-eight thousand, he said.”

  Grace thought: He?

  “Yowza!” said Mendoza.

  “Well,” O’Rourke said, “you saw that place. Looked like a mansion.”

  That place, she thought crossly, had been founded in the 1880s to educate the children of laborers and immigrants. That place had also been the first private school in New York to admit black and Hispanic students.

  “How do you think she afforded it?” he asked her, serious again. “You got any idea?”

  “Do I…” Grace frowned. “You mean, Mrs. Alves? We barely knew each other, as I said. She would hardly have confided in me about financial matters.”

  “But I mean, she wasn’t a rich lady. The husband…what’s he do?” This was directed at O’Rourke.

  “Printer,” said O’Rourke. “Runs a big print shop downtown. Like, Wall Street area.”

  Despite herself, Grace was surprised, then ashamed of her own surprise. What had she imagined? That Malaga Alves’s husband was handing out postcards on Fifth Avenue announcing a going-out-of-business sale at a “famous brand” showroom? Just because their son was on scholarship, did that have to mean that the father was destitute? Wasn’t the Alves family entitled to its American Dream?

  “I suppose it’s possible,” she said tactfully, “that Miguel was on scholarship. Our school has a long-standing scholarship program. In fact, I think I’m right in saying this, I believe that Rearden has a higher percentage of scholarship students than any other independent school in Manhattan.”

  Christ, she thought. I hope that’s true. Where had she read it? The New York Times, probably, but when? Maybe Dalton or Trinity had slipped past them in the meantime. “Anyway, what I meant about my son not knowing Mrs. Alves’ son is that a seventh grader probably doesn’t have much to do with the fourth grade—not in any school. He might have passed this little boy in the hall or something, but he wouldn’t have known him. I’ll tell you what,” she added, and got to her feet, hoping even this wasn’t a transgression, “let me ask him. If I’m wrong, I’ll call you and tell you. Do you have a card or something?” She held out her hand.

  O’Rourke stared, but Mendoza stood up and removed his wallet. He withdrew a slightly grubby business card and then took a pen and crossed out something on it. “Old cards,” he said, handing it to her. “The city of New York has declined to order me new ones. This is my cell,” he added, pointing with his blue ballpoint.

  “Well, thank you,” she said automatically, and extended her hand, also automatically. She was thrilled to be getting away from them, but he held on to her.

  “Hey,” he said. “I know you want to protect him.”

  He tipped his head, chin up, eyes flicking to the lobby ceiling. Grace, instinctively, looked up, too, and she understood: He was talking about Henry. But of course she wanted to protect him!

  “I know you want to,” he said, his expression bizarrely affable. “But don’t. It’ll only make it worse.”

  Grace stared at him. He still had her hand in his, in his big hand, and she couldn’t leave without it. She thought: Can I yank it away? She thought: What the fuck are you talking about?

  Chapter Eight

  Someone Has Just Sent Your Husband an E-mail

  She was so angry. She was so angry that it took every second of the six-floor elevator ride just to calm herself, at least enough to recognize that she was not having some kind of actual, physical, multisystem shutdown requiring actual, physical, medical attention, but was merely very, very angry. The elevator had a mirror in which she declined to look, for fear of seeing this white-hot version of herself, so she focused instead on the faux finished wood of the ceiling, working her jaw as if she were chewing hard on something that refused to be broken down.

  Still, it bloomed around her, filling the available, enclosed space. How dare they? she thought more than once as the elevator rose. But: How dare they…what, exactly? She had not been accused of anything more nefarious than being, perhaps, a less than welcoming fellow parent and fellow committee member to a new, clearly less affluent arrival at her son’s school, who would happen, in due course, and in a truly unforeseeable turn of events, to get herself murdered. But why single Grace out for that? Why not go for the fourth-grade parents in general or just parade the class mom down the center of Park Avenue and clap her in the stocks if they wanted to set an example? What is their problem?

  The worst of it, she thought, rattling her key into the lock of her own front door, was that she had no obvious outlet for all of this fury. She preferred, as infuriating circumstances went, the kind that offered clear avenues of redress. A booted or towed car, for example, might be profoundly annoying, but at least you knew where to go and whom to yell at. Odious parents of odious children at Henry’s school could be cold-shouldered, meaning that she no longer had to pretend to like them or mix with them at school events. Rude shopkeepers and inadequate restaurants could be passed over in future—in New York, nobody had a monopoly on anything, which was useful; even the can’t-get-into spot of the moment would be replaced, in a week or two, with some other can’t-get-into spot. (The only exception to this rule she’d ever encountered was private school admissions, but Henry had been safely ensconced in Rearden’s Class of 2019 since the age of three, the Manhattan equivalent of being Set for Life, at least educationally speaking.) This was different—because she, of course, supported the police as any law-abiding citizen ought, more than ever since 9/11, when they and the others had literally gone down in flames. It was maddening.

  And even if she somehow identified an appropriate outlet for complaint, what exactly was she supposed to be carping about? That two police detectives, never less than outwardly polite, and trying to comprehend a terrible, dreadfully sad murder that had left two children without a mother, and bring the man responsible (of course it was a man) to justice, had come to her home and asked her some questions? It was nothing she hadn’t seen on Law & Order. It was nothing.

  She wondered, setting down her bag on the hall table and noting the smack of the refrigerator door from the kitchen (Henry, procuring his customary post-school gallon of OJ), whether she ought to be calling Jonathan. It was safe to complain to Jonathan, of course, but perhaps too self-indulgent to interrupt his conference for that purpose. Besides, in his world, the world of dying children, how much sympathy could she expect to extract for a murdered stranger, let alone for herself, the barely inconvenienced acquaintance of a murdered stranger? He would, she knew, be a little annoyed by the thought that two detectives had apparently instructed her not to protect their twelve-year-old son. No—more than annoyed.

  Protect him from what? he would say, and she imagined the tracking of his mood on an EKG ticker tape, starting to prick and roil.

  Protect him from…the news of the death of the mother of a fourth grader Henry had never set eyes on, or at least would not have known by name? I know you want to protect him. It would have been laughable if not for the fact that he—the Irish one or the other one—had actually said it.

  Maybe she should call Robert Conover and yell at him, but she wasn’t really sure what he’d done, apart from send out such an asinine e-mail. That was pretty bad. Still, he’d had to do something, say something; it would have been wrong not to try to get ahead of events. And most people were lous
y writers, even heads of schools, as likely to say something unhelpful (or idiotic) as what they’d actually set out to say. Or maybe she should be yelling at Sally, because she—as head of the benefit committee—had obviously supplied the police with Grace’s name, or just because she was generally objectionable. Maybe she should yell at her father.

  In general, Grace did not even yell around, let alone to, her father, who had long ago made clear that he would not engage with any but her most sedate, cerebral self, a self he had reared and paid to educate and whose acerbic and intelligent commentary on most things was more than welcome. She was not flighty or emotional by nature, which was just as well, but even she had had to navigate adolescence as a female, which made necessary certain episodes of hormonal extravagance, certain scenes in restaurants and in view of the old friends of parents. These incidents had had, Grace knew well, an indelible impact on her father’s sensibilities. It was just as well she’d been an only child.

  Still, he had never wavered in his own brand of paternal devotion. Even after her mother’s death (which took place after Grace had—technically—left home), even after his remarriage, he never let slip that garment of paternal authority he had taken on when he became a father, in that far-from-the-delivery-room way that men had once become fathers. They had, she supposed, a good relationship, if that meant they saw each other frequently, and he let her know when she was looking well, and that he approved her choice of husband and the child she had produced, and perhaps was even proud of what she had accomplished professionally. And neither of them was given to heartfelt declarations, so that was all right. And there were certain rituals they both counted on, like the weekly dinners at the apartment he shared with his new wife—the wife of nearly eighteen years Grace still (maliciously?) thought of as “new.” (These dinners had at first taken place on Friday nights, in deference to Eva’s superior Jewishness, and later on other nights, in deference to Grace and Jonathan’s inability to get with the program of the aforementioned Jewishness, and the fact that Eva’s daughter and son could no longer manage a baseline courtesy in the face of that inability.)

  Now that Grace had thought of her father, she felt an actual need to call him. She had to call him, or call Eva at any rate, to confirm the following night. But she hadn’t done it because she hadn’t yet heard whether Jonathan would be back in time from Cleveland.

  Henry came, bearing a granola bar, the kind marketed as healthy but as fully loaded with sugar as anything in the candy aisle. “Hey, you,” said Grace.

  Henry nodded. He glanced toward his own bedroom door, and it occurred to Grace that she seemed to be actually blocking his way.

  “Walk home okay?” she said.

  “Who were those guys?” said Henry, cutting to the chase.

  “They were from the police department. It wasn’t anything.”

  He stood, holding his granola bar with a stiff, extended arm, the way the eagle on the American seal holds his olive branch and arrows. He frowned at her from under his too-long hair.

  “What do you mean, not anything?”

  “You heard about the little boy at your school? Whose mother died?”

  “Yeah.” He nodded. “But why were they asking you about it?”

  Grace shrugged. She hoped she was conveying some distance. She wanted to convey distance. “The mother was on the benefit committee with me, for the fund-raiser last weekend. But I barely knew her. I think we just spoke once, at a meeting. I didn’t have anything to help them.”

  “Who did it?” said Henry, surprising her. Then it occurred to her: He must think whatever happened to Malaga Alves could happen to his own mother. He had always been a bit fearful. He’d suffered terrors after scary images, even cartoon images, he’d seen as a little boy. At summer camp, the counselors reported, he waited till other boys were heading to the toilets, out behind the cabin back in the woods, and then went along with them rather than go by himself. And even now he wanted to know where she was. She knew it would change eventually, but it just seemed to be the way he was wired.

  “Honey,” she told him, “they’re going to figure it out. It’s awful, what happened, but they’ll figure it out. You don’t have to worry.”

  I know you want to protect him, she thought.

  Well, of course she did. That was her job. And her inclination, thank you very much. Then she pushed back at the thought of those two. Those probing, appalling men.

  Henry nodded. He looked thin—thin in his face, Grace thought, or perhaps it was his face that looked, just, different. The head changes shape as the child grows, jaw and cheekbone and eye socket moving into and out of position. Henry’s cheekbones seemed to have tipped forward just slightly, making the briefest contact with skin, making shadows on either side. He was going to be handsome, like his father, while actually looking very little like him. He was going to look, she was suddenly aware, like her own father.

  “Where’s Dad?” Henry said.

  “In Cleveland. I’m pretty sure he’s coming back tomorrow. Did he tell you when he’s coming back?”

  Then it struck her as noteworthy that she had even asked her son when her husband was returning. But it was too late to take it back.

  “No. He didn’t say. I mean, he didn’t tell me where he was going.”

  “I hope he’s back in time for Grandpa and Eva’s.”

  Henry said nothing. He liked Eva, who—unless some massive transformation took place in the life and psyche of Jonathan’s mother—was all the grandmother he was ever, properly, going to have.

  Both of Jonathan’s parents had spent decades buried in their unacknowledged addictions (Naomi was an alcoholic, Jonathan said; David had not spent a day without Valium since the 1970s) and in their indulgence of Jonathan’s younger brother, a committed ne’er-do-well who had never finished college or held a job and who lived in his parents’ basement, monopolizing their attention and financial resources. Jonathan’s ambitions for himself had been baffling to them, clearly, and his wish to participate in the lives of other people, especially people in dire, challenging circumstances, plainly appalled them. They still lived in Roslyn, but they might as well have lived on the moon. Henry hadn’t seen either of them since infancy.

  Grace herself had spent very little time with Jonathan’s family. There had been the formal introduction, an uncomfortable outing in the city with an awkward meal at a Chinese restaurant, followed by what felt like a forced march around Rockefeller Center to look at the Christmas tree, and only the most careful conversation. Neither parent had attended their wedding. (Only the brother had turned up, standing somewhere to the rear of the small group on the sloping back lawn of the lake house in Connecticut and leaving without actually taking leave sometime during the reception.) After that, she had seen the parents only a handful of times, including during a tense visit to Lenox Hill Hospital the day after Henry’s birth, where they arrived—she had never forgotten this detail—bearing an old comforter, obviously handmade, but not within the current or even previous decade. It might have had some meaning to them, she supposed, but the obtuseness of it appalled her. No, she was not going to cover her adored and long-awaited infant with a worn, faintly malodorous blanket they might have found in a jumble sale or thrift store. With Jonathan’s permission, she had left it in the garbage pail of her hospital room.

  Not one of the three of them—father, mother, or younger brother—had ever shown any real curiosity about Grace herself (which, at the end of the day, wasn’t really a problem) or about Henry when he’d come along. She now understood that Jonathan, who had been a very smart and self-motivated kid, had made himself into a person of his own design, and from a very early age, and this Grace found thoroughly heroic. It was more than she had done. Her own parents might not have been overly demonstrative, but they had always made her feel welcome and valued, and they had been utterly clear in communicating the notion that she needed to move in the world, be educated, live in curiosity about other people, and make he
r mark. Jonathan had had to figure those things out on his own: unguided, unsupported, even unobserved. She didn’t feel sad for him because he didn’t feel sad for himself, but she felt sad for Henry, who deserved at least one real grandmother.

  “How’s the homework?” she asked Henry.

  “Not bad. I did some in study hall. I have a test, though.”

  “Want me to help?”

  “Maybe later. I have to study first. Can we get Pig Heaven for dinner?”

  Pig Heaven was their go-to takeout for nights on their own. Jonathan was of course not religious, but he didn’t care for Chinese. They did not tell her father and Eva about Pig Heaven.

  “Nope. I got lamb chops.”

  “Oh. Good.”

  She went to the kitchen to start dinner. He went into his bedroom, presumably to study. She banished the last of her hostility toward the two men in the lobby with half a glass of Chardonnay from the fridge and dug out the steamer basket for the cauliflower. Once the pot was on the stove and the lamb chops were seasoned and half a head of Boston lettuce was soaking in the salad spinner, she had recovered sufficiently to try Jonathan again, but again his cell went straight to voice mail. She left a brief message asking him to call, then phoned her father’s number, which rang in that drawn-out, old-fashioned way you knew could lead only to the pre-digital species of answering machine, complete with blurry recorded message and extended beep.

  But then Eva answered. “He-low?” she said, and you knew by the question in her voice that she truly did not know who it was. There was no caller ID in her father’s home, no DVR, and no computer. Grace’s father and stepmother had ceased to absorb new technology with the touch-tone phone and the videocassette (for which they were content not to expand their library of 1980s Masterpiece Theatre collections). They did have cell phones, which Grace and Eva’s children had insisted upon, but each of the phones had a bit of paper taped to the back with instructions and important phone numbers. Grace knew not to call her father on the cell, and she had never received a call from it, either.