Toby Lived Here

by Hilma Wolitzer

  Now Anne yelled, “It’s here, it’s here! It’s a limousine!”

  Toby went to the window and saw it, too, a long, sleek black car with a uniformed chauffeur sitting in the driver’s seat.

  “Are you ready?” Sylvia asked. “Let me fix your hat, Anne. We can’t see your face. Is the back of my dress zipped? Oh, my goodness, where are my gloves?”

  Jim winked at Toby. “Don’t even answer,” he whispered. “She’ll wind down once we get in the car.”

  He was right. Sylvia was calm then, sitting back in the plush seat, her white-gloved hands folded in her lap, the orchids rising and falling gently on her breast.

  Anne chose the jump seat, and she rode facing the others, her hat tilted over her eye again. She looked out the window, hoping other people were looking in and seeing them in their splendor.

  At the church, an usher escorted Sylvia to a front pew. The rest of them waited in the rear behind closed doors, with the maid of honor. Her dress was yellow, too. The doors swung open a couple of times, and Toby caught a glimpse of the altar, fringed with yellow and white flowers. The minister and the best man were standing there, and Arnie, too, an elegant giant in a morning coat and striped trousers.

  The organ was playing softly, hesitant ripples of sound, as guests were being shown to their seats. And then the organist pressed hard on the pedals, squeezing excitement into the air with the first strains of the wedding music. Toby’s heart swelled along with it, as Constance came from a side door and stood with them. Was it really Constance? She was as splendid as a queen. Under the veil, her hair had been tamed into gentle waves. The veil drifted over her face, too, making her look mysterious and almost delicate. She lifted it a little to greet them. “Oh, my,” she told Toby and Anne, “you’re gorgeous.”

  Toby wanted to say the same thing to her, but the words stuck. Constance was more than gorgeous, anyway. Nothing that occurred to Toby seemed good enough.

  “Here we go,” someone said, and the doors were pushed open and held. A long white carpet had been rolled down the length of the center aisle and the maid of honor stepped forward and followed it, in time with the organ.

  Then it was their turn, Toby and Anne’s. The music had changed slightly, as their cue, and now it had a thumping little beat. “Come on,” Toby whispered to Anne. And together they walked through the opened doors, clutching their flowers and putting one foot slowly in front of the other, the way they had been instructed to do. The temptation was to run down the aisle as if it were a foot race instead of a wedding. Everyone was looking at them, and there were little cries of admiration. “Sweet!” Toby heard. “Aren’t they darling?”

  “Slow!” she hissed at Anne, who was getting ahead of her.

  Constance had gotten her wish for sunshine. It fell through the stained-glass windows in beams of jeweled light. At the altar Toby could see Arnie, looking so serious and scared it made her smile. He smiled back at her and winked, but his hands were clenched whitely at his sides.

  There was a flourish of organ music and then a long hum like an intake of breath before it broke into the wedding march. Everyone looked to the rear of the church to see Constance on Jim’s arm. When had she become so graceful? She moved as slowly and regally as a sailboat on a windless day, and Jim seemed to move in her tow.

  Through her veil, Constance looked out at friends on either side, and then straight ahead at Arnie, who waited for her. This was the giving away. Jim lifted Constance’s veil long enough to kiss her cheek, and then he stepped back as Arnie stepped forward and took her arm. To Toby, it was like a beautiful ballet. Constance seemed smaller now as she stood next to Arnie and faced the minister. The service was short. Toby had heard most of it before in a movie, or on television. Dearly beloved...Do you take this woman...Once, her mother had told her that Toby had been at her wedding, too, in a way. Her mother meant because she was pregnant at the time. She tried to imagine that wedding, and her mother’s and father’s love for one another, and their hopefulness for the future. Her mother had even put away their wedding picture, as if she could put away all memories, joyous and tragic, along with it.

  The minister pronounced Constance and Arnie husband and wife. They kissed and then turned to face the congregation, who stood to honor them. Then the bride and groom marched back down the aisle. This time they went quickly, arm-in-arm, and smiling brilliantly.

  There was a party later, in a restaurant. A small private room had been set aside for them. When they arrived, an accordionist was playing love songs. Arnie’s parents were there, and his brothers, and some of Constance’s sisters and brothers, too. A blond man in a blue suit came to their table and kissed Sylvia. “Congratulations, Ma,” he said, and when he bent over, Toby saw a cowlick that had defied comb and hair lotion. It was Dennis, the bed-wetter, the boy who had slept in Anne’s room because his mother had died and his father didn’t want him. He still looked like the boy in the photograph album, only taller, of course, and older. There were other guests who had been foster children in the Selwyns’ home, and they all posed for a group portrait, with Anne and Toby in the front.

  22

  THEY WERE GOING TO move back to Brooklyn. Toby had prepared all the arguments she would use in favor of finding a place in Queens. How they were very close to their new friends, and how much they liked the schools they attended. It would be the perfect location for a fresh start for their mother, too. Weren’t there too many unpleasant associations in their old neighborhood?

  But it didn’t do any good. Their mother made the announcement while they were having supper together at a hamburger place not far from where they once lived. It was her second weekend out of the hospital. The first time, she had visited the girls at the Selwyns’ and been given a glimpse of the lives they’d led in her absence. Susan came over to be introduced, but no one invited her parents. There wasn’t going to be the grand get-together that Toby dreamed about. Her mother didn’t stay too long and everyone was a little stiff and nervous about pleasing her, about not rushing her back too quickly into real life. Toby remembered what the Orlandos had said about how sensitive and fragile she was. That description stayed with her and she couldn’t recapture her old image of a super-courageous woman. Before Mrs. Goodwin went back that first time, Susan whispered to Toby in the hallway, “Did you ask her yet? About moving around here?”

  “Not yet,” Toby whispered back. “Sylvia and the social worker said we have to give her a chance to get used to things again.”

  “She’s nice, Tobe. Talk to her soon, okay? I’ll die if you move away.”

  Toby smiled, but she shared Susan’s longing to have her stay.

  And in the restaurant that second Sunday, she presented her case. “But I like it in Queens,” she said. “Anne does, too. We can’t keep going from one place to another. It’s not fair.”

  “Toby, I know how you feel. And I’m sorry. But you’ll get over it. It’s not as if we’re going to some strange neighborhood. You both have friends here, and so do I.”

  Toby was losing her appetite for supper. “I have friends in Queens, too,” she said. “Don’t you care about that?”

  “I care about everything. I care about losing track of you kids for such a long time, about putting you through all that misery. And I want to make it up to you.”

  Anne chewed her hamburger and poured more ketchup on her French-fried potatoes. Why didn’t she say anything? She always had plenty to say, especially when no one wanted to hear it.

  “Listen,” their mother continued, “do you remember how unhappy you were when you first went there, to the foster home? And then you got over it, you adjusted.”

  Toby began to tremble. “I’m tired of adjusting!” she said.

  Her mother put down her coffee cup and reached across the table for Toby’s hand. She wanted to pull it back, but didn’t. “I have to feel secure now,” her mother said. “Old haunts help me to do that. Maybe I’ll be more adventurous later on. It won’t be the way it was a
t the end there, I promise you that. I mean, I think I’m more honest with myself now. And I can be more honest with you, too.”

  When Toby didn’t speak or withdraw her hand, she continued. “I’d like to be close to my friends. And to Daddy’s. Nell is helping me to find a new job. We might even live in their building. Don’t you want to see Rita again?”

  “I guess. But what about Susan?”

  “You’ll see her. Visit back and forth. Sleep over. Once I get straightened out financially, we’ll probably even get a car.”

  Toby didn’t mention Sylvia and Jim, or Constance and Arnie, as if it would be disloyal to her mother to show how much she cared about them.

  Her mother knew, anyway. “The Selwyns were very good to you when you really needed somebody. They won’t just drop out of your life, Toby. You’ll see them, keep in touch.”

  “It won’t be the same,” Toby said.

  “No,” her mother admitted. “It won’t be.”

  Later they went to see Nell and Gene, who would drive the girls back to Rego Park and their mother to the hospital. On the way to the Orlandos’ apartment, they passed the building where their father’s studio had been. Their mother looked up at the windows. “When we get settled in,” she said, “we’ll get some of Daddy’s things back from the Liebmans’ basement. The heads he did of you when you were little, and some of his tools.”

  Back in her room in Queens, Toby sat on the bed and thought things over. They’d be moving from here in a month or so. That’s how much time her mother said she needed to get an apartment ready, to be comfortable with a new job, a regular life once more. It would be just the three of them again. They’d be what Toby had tried so fiercely to protect and preserve, a unit that kept them separate from other people, that made them what she thought of as a real family.

  She knew that didn’t matter as much to her anymore. Her idea of a family was expanding. Someday it might include her own husband and children, and then their children. Now it opened in her mind and in her heart to let Sylvia and Jim in, too.

  The house was quiet. The other bedroom lights were off. Toby tiptoed downstairs to the kitchen and took a small paring knife. She went back upstairs and sat on the side of the bed again. Gripping the knife hard and carefully in one hand, she dug its tip into the night table just below the word CONSTANCE. The knife slipped a few times, until she got used to handling it, and once she nicked her finger, but she sucked it for a moment and it hardly bled. It was a slow process. But she wanted to do it right. She wanted these words to last, too. OCTOBER 16, 1977, she carved, blowing away the small wood chips and dust as she worked. TOBY LIVED HERE.

  A Biography of Hilma Wolitzer

  Hilma Wolitzer (b. 1930) is a critically hailed author of literary fiction. Her work has been described by the New York Times as “often hilarious and always compassionate.” Born in Brooklyn, New York, she began writing as a child. She was first published at age nine, when a poem she wrote about winter appeared in a local journal. She was voted the poet laureate of her junior high school, but after graduating from high school at sixteen she worked at various jobs, from renting beach chairs under the boardwalk in Coney Island to pasting feathers on hats in a factory and holding a position as an office clerk.

  Wolitzer married at twenty-two, and though her family consumed most of her time, she began writing again. Her first published short story, “Today a Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket,” appeared in print when she was thirty-six. Eight years (and several short stories) later, she published Ending (1974), a novel about a young man with a terminal illness. The New York Times called it “as moving in its ideas as it is in its emotions.” Ending was released when Wolitzer was forty-four years old and she was dubbed the “Great Middle-Aged Hope.”

  She followed this success with In the Flesh (1977), a well-received novel of a conventional marriage threatened by an affair. Since then, her novels have dealt mostly with domestic themes, and she has drawn praise for illuminating the dark interiors of the American home. In the late seventies and mid-eighties, Wolitzer also published a quartet of young adult novels: Introducing Shirley Braverman (1975), Out of Love (1976), Toby Lived Here (1978), and Wish You Were Here (1984).

  Following her novels Hearts (1980), In the Palomar Arms (1983), Silver (1988), and Tunnel of Love (1994), Wolitzer confronted a paralyzing writer’s block. Unable to write more than a page or two a day—none of which ever congealed into a story—she did not publish a book for more than a decade.

  After working with a therapist to try to understand the block, she completed the first draft of a new novel—about a woman who consults a therapist to solve a psychic mystery—in just a few months. Upon its release, The Doctor’s Daughter (2006) was touted as a “triumphant comeback” by the New York Times Book Review. Since then, Wolitzer has published two more books—Summer Reading (2007) and An Available Man (2012).

  In addition to her novels, Wolitzer has published nonfiction as well, including a book on writing called The Company of Writers (2001). She has also taught writing at colleges and workshops around the country. She has two daughters—an editor and a novelist—and lives with her husband in New York City, where she continues to write.

  A three-year-old Wolitzer poses for a portrait, taken in 1933.

  Wolitzer with her mother, Rose Liebman, and sisters, Anita and Eleanor, circa 1943.

  Wolitzer drew this picture of FDR in 1945.

  Wolitzer and her husband, Morton, celebrate their wedding day, September 7, 1952, in Brooklyn, New York.

  Wolitzer sits on a park bench with her daughters, Meg and Nancy, in 1964.

  Wolitzer relaxes on the beach in Oyster Bay, New York, with her daughters in the 1960s.

  Pictured here (clockwise): Wolitzer, Linda Pastan, Stanley Elkin (with his back to the camera), and Tim O’Brien talking at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in 1985.

  Wolitzer has frequently visited schools across the country to teach children about writing—experiences that she remembers fondly. Pictured here is a thank-you note from a fifth-grade student in Greenville, South Carolina, circa 1992.

  Wolitzer enjoys time with her grandsons, Charlie and Gabriel, in Springs, New York, in 1996.

  Wolitzer with her husband, now a retired psychologist.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1978 by Hilma Wolitzer

  cover design by Angela Wilcox

  978-1-4532-8794-1

  This edition published in 2012 by Open Road Integrated Media

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