A Fortunate Age

by Joanna Rakoff

  six

  As a child, Sadie Peregrine hated Sunday afternoons, that languorous period when she was meant to start her homework—the homework she’d been avoiding all weekend—and when she began thinking about the tortures of the week that lay ahead. She much preferred Saturdays, at home with her quiet parents, going to matinees, eating Chinese food, or even Sunday mornings, when the entire Peregrine clan—her “immediate extended family,” as she thought of it—gathered around her parents’ table for breakfast. The best part though, was the early morning, before anyone arrived, when her mother slept in and she and her father had the house to themselves, to read the funny pages aloud and eat contraband doughnuts, before running out to the appetizing store on Lex for sable, whitefish, lox, cream cheese, bialys, bagels, and a half loaf of the thin-sliced black bread favored by Sadie’s grandmother, who lived alone in a sprawling apartment off Fifth, tended to by a silent maid named Gretchen, though for as long as Sadie could remember there’d been talk of moving her into the Hebrew Home in Riverdale, if only they could get the lady to agree, which didn’t seem likely. (“To the Bronx,” she rasped whenever confronted with this idea. “You want me to live in the Bronx? With old people?”)

  They would arrive home, lugging brown sacks, and Sadie’s father would put on a pot of coffee—even then, the smell was delicious to her—and bring a cup up to Rose, along with the paper, then return to the kitchen, where he and Sadie would slice tomatoes and onions, wrap the bagels in foil, place them in the oven to warm, and set the dining room table with delicate, gold-rimmed china and thick, white cotton napkins. Sunday was Rose Peregrine’s day off. She emerged from the bedroom just before the first cousins arrived, clad in her weekend costume of wide-legged wool trousers and a dark cashmere sweater (winter), or wide-legged linen trousers and a pale silk sweater (summer). At exactly eleven, Peregrine after Peregrine arrived, interrupted by the occasional Goldschlag—usually, Sadie’s aunt Minnie, a stout, white-haired woman, her pale, watery eyes magnified by thick-rimmed glasses—come up from the depths of the Lower East Side, a neighborhood feared by the Peregrines, most of whom lived within blocks of Sadie’s parents (though in recent years a few had defected to the West Side and even, like Sadie, Brooklyn).

  For a few hours, while her family ate and argued, Sadie could forget that the following day she’d be thrust into that den of snakes known as school, where the grown-ups loved her and the children hated her. But the moment the last Peregrine departed—inevitably, her bachelor cousin Bruce, who never had anywhere else to be and was a little in love with Rose—she settled into a funk, sick with anxiety.

  Now that she was grown, Sadie rarely managed to get uptown early enough to do the shopping with her father, but she never missed breakfast itself, even when she was out late the previous night, and the mere act of getting out of bed seemed as monumental a task as flying up to East Ninety-third Street on the strength of her own arms. Likewise, she still dreaded Sunday afternoons. For she had wound up in a career that carried its own form of homework: the reading of manuscripts, on which she was always, terminally, behind, despite her being—sometimes she thought this her only skill—a pretty quick reader. In the midafternoon, feeling full and sleepy and thirsty (and sometimes drunk), she kissed her parents good-bye and headed home to read the latest coming-of-age tale—for that is what they all were, lately, and all of them set in the Midwest—or memoir of addiction.

  Except often the city got the best of her. On sunny days, she might find herself walking down Madison and browsing in the overpriced, awful shops or strolling through the park, eyeing the dogs in the dog run and the families lolling about in the grass. Or her father might suggest a matinee and, well, she had so little time with him lately, how could she refuse? Rainy days, she often wound up at the Met, sitting in an obscure corner and watching the passers-by study Chinese pottery or medieval armor or the enormous, frightening canoes of the Pacific Islands, with those grim ancestral faces carved into their prows. Night would fall, all too quickly, and Sadie would hurry home, order a pizza or Chinese, put on her pajamas, and sit on the couch, surrounded by rubber-banded manuscripts, which seemed, in her absence, to have reproduced themselves, like rabbits. But then, at nine, she’d think Masterpiece Theatre—which she and her parents had always watched together, her mother driving her mad with questions (“Is that her fiancé or her brother?”)—and turn on her small television, with its clothes-hanger antennae. Or Tal would call and say “Can I come over?” and of course she would say yes.

  Come Monday morning, she’d have nothing read. Though the fact of the matter was Delores didn’t really care these days. She was in her sixties, a holdover from publishing’s slightly less tarnished age, when independent firms, the Knopfs and such, put out serious books and editors didn’t need to seek approval on titles from marketing departments or regional salespeople. Her voice could be heard three offices down, and she dressed in peculiar flowing garments—some invented hybrid of hostess dress, tunic, and caftan—and enormous pendants built around monstrous, irregularly shaped pearls that bubbled and flared in a volcanic manner and left pink indentations in her pale, lined neck.

  Forty-odd years earlier, when Delores had found herself a job in the typing pool, their firm was a largish literary house, with a host of well-reviewed and popular authors, and a Boston office devoted to books on subjects political and texts for college classes. A sharp-witted, chain-smoking Vassar grad, she’d climbed quickly to the top of the editorial heap, and, in the 1960s, discovered a group of popular and controversial neorealists, heirs to Dreiser’s earnest throne, one of whom became her lover. All this Sadie discovered during her first year with Delores, who went to lunch, two or three times a week, with agents or authors (really: old friends) and returned to the office soused (or, at the very least, relaxed) and wanting to chat. These lunches were, like Delores, a relic of the company’s grand and glorious independent past. A year before Sadie arrived in Delores’s outer office, they’d been gobbled up by a British conglomerate (albeit willingly: the company was bankrupt) and forced to move from their book-lined Union Square offices—rooms in which many of the century’s greatest writers had fretted over galleys—to the media giant’s putty-colored midtown headquarters. (“On the West Side,” Delores complained—a refrain not unfamiliar to the daughter of Rose Peregrine. “I wouldn’t mind so much if we were, at least, on the East Side, where things are civilized.”) Now Delores held court in a boxy room, with wide Venetian blinds and black halogen lamps. She’d tried to bring her old desk—a beautiful oak thing, with grapes carved along the legs—but the corporation wouldn’t have it. No one, they told her, could bring in outside furnishings. Not plants, not lamps, and certainly not desks.

  Not surprisingly, Delores—who wore her cedre hair in an archaic puff and covered her watery green eyes with saucer-sized lenses of 1970s vintage—was unhappy with her new digs, despite having successfully dismantled the smoke alarm in her office with a mother-of-pearl-handled letter opener, and converted one of her stainless steel file drawers into a makeshift bar. Over the four years of Sadie’s employment, Delores began coming into work later and later, swaddled in her enormous whiskey mink, and departing earlier and earlier.

  In Sadie’s first year, when she’d still been a little nervous around the lady, Delores had greedily insisted on reading most of the submitted manuscripts herself, staying home Fridays to do so, like many editors, and, though she no longer did any serious editing of the few books she took on (“What’s the point? It’s all crap”), she refused to allow Sadie to try her hand at it. But gradually, the tide had turned, so that now Sadie not only did all the reading and editing (drafting letters to authors, in which she outlined changes, which Delores merely signed without so much as glancing at them), but also handled most of the purchasing of manuscripts. It worked like this: A manuscript came in from an agent. Sadie unwrapped it and placed it on Delores’s desk. An hour or a day later the manuscript turned up on Sadie’s desk, a Post-it n
ote stuck to its top, saying “Looks interesting. Pls. read” in Delores’s slanting scrawl. Sadie read the thing—sometimes that night, sometimes weeks later, depending on the urgency surrounding the manuscript in question—and wrote up a report for Delores, leaving manuscript and report on the woman’s desk. An hour or a day later, the thing, once again, landed back on Sadie’s desk, with another Post-it, saying either “I agree. Terrible. Pls. call Liza and say ‘pass.’” or “Yes!!!! Spend up to 50K. Tlk. to Val if nd. more.” Sadie would then call the agent, make an offer, and complete the negotiations. Once the book was bought, it was she who went through it, line by line, and it was she who asked the writers in for coffee or lunch, passing off her edits as Delores’s own.

  The authors, Sadie suspected, understood exactly what was going on. And so, she thought, did the other editors. Every year she received a decent raise and Val often stopped her in the hallway and said, “Hey, great work on such and such.” And now, of course, there was this business with Tuck’s book and her allegedly imminent promotion, which Delores hopefully wouldn’t sabotage in order to keep Sadie permanently installed in her outer office. Delores was prone to fits—temper tantrums of tornadolike proportions—during which she picked on Sadie’s every alleged mistake: the time Sadie accidentally sent a manuscript back to the wrong agent or the time she had the flu and didn’t read a particular novel in time for Delores to bid on it, and the book—wouldn’t you know?—stayed on the bestseller list for two years.

  Thus, in the weeks before her promotion was announced—before she at last moved her things quietly out of Delores’s court and trained some poor new girl to take her place—she vowed to avoid even the tiniest error. She would read every manuscript carefully and quickly, as soon as they came in, just in case Delores snapped back to life.

  And so it was, that the Sunday after Lil’s party Sadie woke filled with determination. This particular Sunday—of all Sundays—she would simply run uptown, say hello, grab a bagel, and head back home to read. She would tell Tal that he could come over late or the following day, though she’d been aching for him since the previous night, after he’d run off with Dave without even kissing her good-bye. She’d have an hour on the train, each way, which would be good reading time, and then most of the afternoon and evening (No PBS, she told herself sternly). She would not fall prey to her mother’s protestations—“Sadie, you haven’t seen my new tablecloth!” “Sadie, tell me what you think about this dress,” “Sadie, I don’t want any leftovers, eat another chub”—nor would she drink any wine, even if her cousin Bruce brought something nice. She was tired enough from the party, or, really, from dinner with Beth. They’d talked for hours, parting with a long hug and a promise to do the same again soon, and Sadie had left convinced that Will Chase was all right, that she would love him, as Beth did. She hated that Beth had felt Sadie needed convincing. Why had she said all that about Will months back? Beth would always think Sadie skeptical of her marriage.

  And she would, she thought, lying in bed, willing herself to get up and into the shower, she would give him a chance, so as not to let some strange distance develop between herself and Beth, as it had between her and Lil—though they wouldn’t admit it—because she had never quite warmed to Tuck, though there was, of course, still time. Then, like a shot, her head cleared and the party unfolded before her. Tuck. Why should she warm to Tuck when he had spent a whole evening—a party thrown for him by his wife, to celebrate his success, which Sadie herself had orchestrated—hidden away in his own bedroom with Caitlin Green, of all people. Was Tuck having an affair with Caitlin Green? No, it didn’t seem possible. Caitlin was just so awful. No. No. People just didn’t do things like that anymore. They were too busy checking their email or what have you. She glanced at the clock. Nine o’clock. If she got out of the house in half an hour, she’d have time to walk by that optician’s shop at Eighty-first and Lex and see if it was open for a couple of hours on Sunday, like it used to be. The ache behind her eyes was worse.

  Just then the phone rang, and Sadie, without thinking, answered, expecting to hear Tal’s voice, or perhaps her mother’s, on the line. She found, instead, Caitlin Green. “Sadie?” she said, in an odd, muffled voice. “I need you to come meet me this morning.”

  Oh, you do, thought Sadie. “Um, I’m afraid I have plans this morning,” she said, tucking the phone between her shoulder and her ear, and padding to the kitchen. And you’re the last person I’d break them for.

  “Look, we need to talk,” insisted Caitlin, in tones verging on a whine.

  “About what?” said Sadie, with a dismayed sigh. If Caitlin was calling her, then nothing good could have happened in that bedroom the previous night.

  “You know,” said Caitlin. “Listen, I only have a minute. Rob just went to get the paper. Could you come over this morning?”

  Sadie quickly calculated that she could leave her parents by one-ish, spend an hour with Caitlin—an hour with Caitlin!—and be home by three-thirty. But maybe it would be better to just get it out of the way, then try to make it up to her parents for the end of breakfast.

  “Fine,” she said, sighing. “I’ll meet you at Oznot’s in an hour.”

  “No,” said Caitlin. No? thought Sadie. I’m doing what you want! “Just come here. I don’t want anyone to hear us talking.”

  “Fine,” said Sadie, and scribbled down the address in her planner. With dread, she called her parents and told them—they were quite put out—that she’d probably have to miss breakfast. An hour later, she pushed open the door to Caitlin’s building, a lobby-less tenement, its floor and stairs covered in split linoleum, patterned to resemble bricks and mortar, curling away at the walls’ edges. The air inside this little passageway smelled of oil and cabbage. Sadie, sweat pricking at her underarms, began a slow ascent to the fourth floor.

  With much clanking and clacking of locks, Caitlin opened the metal door to the apartment and propped it with her foot. A large black dog with a diamond-shaped head and small piggy eyes snuffled asthmatically at her bare feet, its muscular tail thwacking loudly on some unseen object. Caitlin’s toenails were painted a flat metallic blue, the polish flaking slightly at the rims. Such colors—blue, green, smoke gray—were popular that year, but Sadie thought they looked like mold. “Hi,” Caitlin said. “Come in. Do you want a cup of coffee? I’m just making some.” Sadie squeezed past Caitlin, stepping awkwardly over the hound and into the apartment. “Sure,” said Sadie, looking around her, as Caitlin repeated the loud rigmarole with the locks and chains.

  The front door led into a nice-sized kitchen, with the sort of flimsy, off-brand stove and fridge you saw in every rental in the city, a gleaming new butcher-block counter, and a few shiny wire shelves screwed into the wall above it. A Soviet propaganda poster hung gloomily above the kitchen table, which appeared to be another piece of butcher block, with legs—of unfinished, jaundiced pine—nailed into its corners. On this table and on the wire shelves sat bottles and bottles of vitamins and herbal tonics, outlines of large capsules just visible behind the amber glass. The shelves also held dozens of boxes of soy milk in different flavors, and cloudy plastic bags of rice and beans. In a far corner, three tall paper canisters of something—Sadie stepped closer to make out the words—called “Spiru-tein.” The sort of stuff, Sadie thought, that athletes take to enhance their performances. But Caitlin, with her dark circles and her pallor, didn’t quite look the athlete, and a pack of American Spirits sat on the table. The dog came over and shoved his head between Sadie’s knees. She reached down and petted the creature, running her hand along its short, coarse fur. “What’s his name?” asked Sadie.

  “Mumia,” Caitlin told her, fiddling with the coffee machine, a German drip.

  “Mumia?” Sadie repeated.

  “Yeah, you know, Mumia Abu-Jamal?”

  “Yes,” Sadie said. “I know.” She seated herself at the kitchen table, though Caitlin seemed dead intent on letting her stand for the entirety of their interview.r />
  “He was a stray,” Caitlin explained. Of course he was, thought Sadie acidly, though she herself was against purchasing pets, when there were thousands of unwanted ones in the city’s shelters. “We found him tied up under the bridge, completely covered in blood, and brought him home.”

  “But he’s okay?” asked Sadie, inspecting the dog, who was sweet, sweeter than he looked, for scars.

  “He’s fine. But he infested the place with fleas.”

  Sadie immediately withdrew her hand from the dog, who let out a long whimper and settled, heavily, by her feet. “Really,” she said.

  “Don’t worry,” Caitlin told her. “We bombed. There are still some in the bed—they like warm places—but the rest of the house is clean.”

  “Oh, good,” said Sadie.

  “He’s a great dog,” Caitlin continued. “He’s in love with the little Chihuahua downstairs. Did you see her?” Sadie shook her head. “Mrs. Jimenez brought her up from Puebla. She was quarantined for, like, three months. Did you meet them when you came in?” Before Sadie could answer, she went on, “They’re the nicest family. A mother and father, and eight daughters . . .” Breathlessly—while Sadie irritably wondered whether or not the coffee machine was actually brewing coffee, for it was ominously silent—Caitlin proceeded to provide a comprehensive history of the building’s inhabitants, their ailments and financial problems, and the various ways in which Caitlin and Rob had helped them out at one time or another. The third floor housed a Chinese family. The first had, until recently, been the home of a second Mexican family. But this clan had mysteriously—to Caitlin’s mind—moved out. Caitlin and Rob suspected the landlord of reporting the family, all here illegally, to the Immigration and Naturalization Service, in order to have them deported, thus leaving the apartment empty and allowing him to rent it for three times the price. Last week he had finished remodeling it and yesterday the new tenants had moved in. “Some hipsters,” Caitlin scoffed.