by Lee Woodruff
Margaret chided herself. These were tough times for the family, for the couple. They all needed to find ways to cope, and whatever was happening currently in Maura’s marriage was not really any of her business. None of her business, that is, unless someone was getting hurt or the kids were involved. Right now, though, Pete was a man having a drink alone at a bar, and it was better left like this, without remark.
Margaret bent her head again and moved briskly past the building. The last thing she needed was to have Pete spot her. But the image of her son-in-law, alone on the barstool, dully worshipping a glass of beer in the middle of the day, was unsettling. Pete had always enjoyed his beer, he was definitely a party person, but Margaret had noted a marked increase in his consumption since her grandson’s death, at least from her limited vantage point. There had been one disturbing night recently when she had observed Maura and Pete tussling over who would drive home after a family dinner, and she had busied herself elsewhere as the tenor of Maura’s voice rose firmly. It had been painfully intimate, too uncomfortable to watch.
Margaret continued briskly on to the upholsterer, examined the pillows, and wrote her out a check for the work. What to leave in and what to leave out? Margaret wondered, her mind pivoting back to Pete as she stepped off the front stoop of the small beige house and walked toward the car, carrying two plastic bags with the newly covered couch accent pillows. As she opened the sedan’s back door to place them inside, her eye lingered on the concrete Mary and the simple carved wooden doors of the church. On impulse she pressed the lock button on her key chain, heading purposefully up the front steps and into the darkness of the church’s interior. It took her eyes a few moments to adjust, and she observed that this was a more simple church than their hometown parish, despite the glory days of the Catholic Church in Chicago. One large stained-glass window loomed above the altar with a depiction of Jesus, arms outstretched, and tapestries hung on the whitewashed walls. The interior woodwork was dark-stained mahogany, lending the sanctuary a hushed, somber feeling. A stone baptismal font stood in front, between the rows of pews, and the stale air inside was redolent with incense, ashes, and neglect that could be found in so many city churches today, she thought with nostalgia. Margaret was relieved to find the pews empty, and there was no sign of anyone, including a priest. In the alcove halfway down the aisle, only a handful of low flames flickered in the red glass votive holders, and above the bank of candles was a small wooden statue of Jesus on the cross.
She reached in her wallet and located a twenty-dollar bill, stuffing it into the metal collection box, and took a taper, lighting it first with a candle and then touching it to the wick of a new votive, solemnly observing the flame catch. Margaret bent her head and offered up a simple prayer, asking God to protect Maura and her family. The familiarity of the ritual relaxed her, and when she opened her eyes, she moved to the front of the church, kneeling slightly while steadying herself with the back of the pew. “Father, Son, Holy Spirit,” she said under her breath, as she made the sign of the cross before turning to walk to the back of the church and exit the front doors.
As Margaret drove home she found herself questioning again how much, if anything, to share with her daughter about seeing Pete. It was still a fragile time. And it wasn’t so much that Pete was doing something illicit. She hadn’t caught him with a woman or trapped him in a lie. He was having a drink alone at a bar in the middle of the day. But everything about it felt wrong and desperate.
She and Roger had actually only discussed Pete and Maura a few times since James had died. Where once they spent much of their dinner conversation dissecting, approving, or disapproving of their children’s choices, when it came to Pete and Maura, right now, it was too painful to examine the collateral. But on one recent weekend, when she’d been at Maura’s and Pete had come home tipsy and belligerent from a Bears game, Margaret confided to Roger that she worried about Pete’s drinking. She was concerned, she said, that he was not being as supportive of Maura as he could in the wake of such a tremendous tragedy. Roger had admitted that he too had worries, but he argued that they all needed to give Pete space. The couple had a solid marriage, had logged enough years together to survive losing a child. They would recover, he assured her, and the surest way was for them both to butt out.
Margaret wasn’t convinced. Her internal mechanisms, the interior sonar a mother has for her child, had been detecting some inchoate restlessness in Maura for the past few years, an unarticulated disengagement with her marriage. Margaret couldn’t pinpoint exactly what it was or when it began, but somewhere along the way, she sensed Maura had ceased her diligence, become distracted. Margaret mostly chalked this up to the often overwhelming tasks of motherhood and running a household. She herself knew all too well how robotic and numb these activities could make one feel at times, how love could be diluted and thinned by domestic annoyances as mundane as routinely leaving a toilet seat up.
In her own early days with young children, Margaret had split herself into many little slivers, especially with a husband who traveled frequently. She had done the best she could, and she imagined her daughter was doing the same.
She knew from her own marriage that people spilled off the path, that sometimes couples wore blinders that rendered them unaware. For example, how satisfactory it would be, Margaret thought, to drop one zinger, to let one barbed comment fly to Roger that revealed what she knew about her husband’s indiscretions. Many times over the years, she had come close. She’d articulated the words and accusations in her head so many times, lobbing a burning spear under her breath in the garden or muttering over the stove about Roger’s secret life. But she understood that the release would be temporary. This kind of outburst would be a gamble. On the one hand it might be a catalyst that could bring him back fully into the marriage. And then again it also had the very real potential to drive them further away or even splinter them apart.
Over the years among their circle of friends in town and at the club, Margaret had witnessed the fragility of love and marriage firsthand. A couple that seemed to have weathered thirty-five years together could all of a sudden surprise you with an announcement of divorce. One pebble tossed on the lake rippled out to disturb the placid rhythm of an entire family. No, even after confirming her suspicions about Roger’s infidelity, Margaret would not roll the dice and possibly lose it all. The rewarding family life they had constructed, their friends and home, their joy at being involved grandparents, everything she held most dear, would be in jeopardy.
Margaret’s intuition about Maura’s distraction was something she would never share with Roger. He would only disparage her about feelings and her lack of facts. Roger had a very large blind spot around his children, and all three of them, even Stu, had deftly and instinctively known how to manipulate him from an early age. He didn’t like to see faults in his children, and they, in turn, viewed him in somewhat mythic proportions, the benevolent largesse often bestowed on the less involved, less present parent. Margaret wondered, smugly, if they could ever imagine their own father being unfaithful.
“I won’t meddle, Roger,” she had assured him when the topic of Maura and Pete’s strained relationship came up in the aftermath of their grandson’s death. “But I won’t stand completely on the sidelines and watch a marriage dissolve while two people grieve side by side in silence.”
“It’s private, Margaret. What goes on with two people is private, and you and I can’t honestly affect it one way or the other.”
They had ended the conversation then. There were a hundred things Margaret had wanted to say to her husband, a dozen questions crowded her lips, but she had suppressed them all. She was not blameless in her own marriage, she knew, but the thin wall that had been constructed, quietly and deliberately, by Roger’s infidelity had kept her from sharing all that was in her heart.
There were other things she wanted to discuss with Roger, things she had observed, memory issues, or his momentary disorientation, often infinitesimal, but they were
aberrations only a wife would notice. Worry chafed at her, and yet she was wary of pointing out frailty. Roger wasn’t comfortable in the face of disability, illness, or degeneration. In her experience, few men were. If she were to raise the subject, he would only call her paranoid and brush off her concerns.
And, of course, part of her job was to preserve his dignity, burnish the illusion of perfection and patriarchy for the children and for him. But she could see it, the spider veins fracturing his memory from time to time, the occasional blank spaces during conversation, as if he were two steps behind for a moment. Perhaps she would gently broach the subject in the months to come. She wanted him to see a neurologist. That was what her intern had suggested when she had confided in him, but the timing wasn’t right yet. This was not the moment to force her husband to confront his deficits or even mortality. Her concern right now would be interpreted as criticism. And so much lately had begun to feel infinitesimally better, like the subtle shifting of radio waves when a satellite moves into position in the sky. She would not do anything to upset the fragile balance.
17
Maura turned the key in the door and slipped it in her purse. The sun was midway in a pale, egg-blue sky, and the temperature was well above freezing. The late afternoon light had begun to thin and wane early now, and Maura was dreading the winter. But it felt good to be heading out to run a few errands. Grief had shrunk her for too long now, it had circumscribed her life like the aperture of a camera. But she was feeling stronger. Maybe she would take a walk or possibly even head to a stretch class at the gym. No, actually not the gym, too many people. A locker room of familiar peppy faces in exercise clothes was still too much to bear. The thought arrested her for a moment that the last time she’d felt vibrantly alive was that final day, five months ago, the last week of walking the kids to school. The memory of her excitement then hit her like a punch.
Maura shook her head. She would not do this to herself today, would not marinate in her own sorrow and guilt and end up somewhere between the couch and the kitchen counter, dreamily lost in the tar pit of her own melancholy. She would go out. Get outside, maybe even to the beach. Her mother was happy for her to drop Sarah off at the house for a few hours after preschool, and Ryan was at school until 3:00 P.M.
Walking to her minivan she felt hesitation turn to a renewed burst of energy, almost as if the molecules of air outside the house propelled her forward. First, she would head to the post office to return a pair of running shoes Pete had ordered online, a package that had sat, neglected on the front hall table, for almost three weeks. She would bring Rascal with her too. They both needed a change of scenery.
In town, the storefronts had turned their focus from Halloween to Thanksgiving, and most of the branches were bare. She was not prepared for winter, not ready for the early arrival of darkness, the plummeting temperatures and the unrelenting wind off the lake. Her mother, the inveterate Weather Channel watcher, had told her they were predicting it would be an unusually harsh season this year.
The post office was crowded, clearly a busy time of morning to be here, but she had come this far. She could wait. Three counter windows were open, and the clerks seemed to be in no particular hurry, chatting with the customers as an occasional chuckle echoed in the marble interior. Standing obediently in line Maura observed a grandmother and a boy of perhaps eleven by the wall of individual mailboxes. He was small, dark hair falling in shaggy layers to his collar, with striking wide-set eyes that lent him the appearance of extra innocence.
The boy was flipping through the “FBI Wanted” pages, hole punched and bound together by a silver circular binder clip and attached to the bulletin board, next to the metal PO boxes with tiny combination locks. He seemed fascinated by the Xeroxed pictures, and as he turned each page he would stop at one that interested him and ask the older woman to pronounce the name, and then repeat it slowly after her. His grandmother, bent slightly at the waist to view the paper, read each word patiently in a tutorial tone, with the cadence of devotion. She patiently corrected him when his tongue stumbled over a syllable.
There was something wrong, Maura realized, something off or slightly dull-witted about the boy, who was much more childlike for his age than his height or weight suggested. Perhaps it was a kind of autism or other disability. “What’s this word, Grandma?” he asked flatly.
“Un-law-full …,” she said, pointing at the word with a gnarled finger and tracing each syllable. A starburst of gratitude, a guilty relief spilled out inside Maura that her children, despite all of their little idiosyncrasies, were healthy. And then the realization caught her ferociously in the throat, like a fishhook, yanking her to the surface of sudden remembrance, that her perfect family was not whole. Her eldest boy was gone.
She understood then just how lucky that grandmother was, because she, Maura, would resurrect her son under any condition, even if he were a silhouette of the boy that she knew. She would desire him under any circumstance, through any illness, difference, or disability and under any terms, so long as he was alive.
The earlier hopeful feeling of the day wobbled, and everything inside Maura’s chest squeezed like a fist. It never ceased to amaze her how grief could suddenly bubble up like a spring or pack the wallop of a sucker punch. She tightened her grip on the package, shouldered her purse, and pushed through the heavy glass doors of the post office lobby and out into the late fall air. She would not cry, she told herself.
Back out in the car she paused, her sterling Tiffany-heart key chain in her hand, as she struggled to keep emotion in check. Each of us held things that weighed us down, to different degrees, she thought. No one was exempt. All of us whizzing by one another on a city street or highway, wearing our polite public masks, while the internal scars, the transgressions and the sadness of egregious loss, clung to us on the inside like trace elements.
As she was about to turn the key in the ignition, her cell phone rang, jolting her out of her reverie and back into the present, still such an unfamiliar sound. It was Pete’s number, and she flipped open the phone and tried to add some enthusiasm to the tone of her voice.
“Hey!”
“Hey, Maura.”
“I’m downtown right now. Just got out of a meeting.”
Maura braced for the inevitable excuse, the backtracking to get a night out with the boys.
“I’m walking right by that indoor farmers’ market. You need anything for dinner tonight? There’s some amazing-looking fish and another stall with fresh bread.”
Maura was stunned for a moment. This was not what she had expected.
“Uh. Sure. I haven’t thought ahead to dinner yet. Fish would be great, fresh bread too, maybe a baguette? Thanks, Pete.” She smiled for a moment, warmed by his uncharacteristic thoughtfulness.
She started the car and began the short drive home, feeling buoyed by Pete’s call. She would return the package another time; it had already waited this long.
“Why do they want O’Connor for the final part of the contract? I’m a senior partner.” Roger’s voice was rising despite his effort at control, and he felt suddenly frantic. The contract was almost inked, he had been the point of contact on the deal, and yet the client was requesting that additional team members fly to Tampa.
“I think they feel more comfortable with a big team,” Bill Kindler offered reflexively. “They just want a few more of us represented in the final negotiation.”
Roger understood instantly that this was a face-saving response from the way Kindler looked down, avoiding his eyes and focusing on meticulously straightening a pile of papers.
“Look, I’m not going to pretend I’m happy about this,” Roger remarked. “I’ve been putting these kinds of deals together since O’Connor had Johnson’s baby soap in his ass crack. This is my territory. And let’s not forget I brought this deal in. It was my original connection through Tom Hiltz.”
“That was the father, Roger, and now his son Jay is running the business.” Kindler smile
d patronizingly and looked down again, letting Roger fume. The message was clear, and although it was obviously uncomfortable for both men, Roger felt no upper hand. He nodded slowly, regrouping, and softened his voice.
“I’m sorry, Bill. This isn’t your fault,” he said. “But it’s tough to be a senior member of the team and have a client ask for a pinch hitter at the ninth hour.”
“I think you’re overreacting, Roger. They just want to be wooed, to see all we’ve got. The full complement of the team.”
Roger nodded again, appearing thoughtful, as if this all made perfect sense. As he wandered down the hall and sat back in his own office, infuriated and humiliated, he absorbed the full impact of the insult. Was this what happened? What thirty years at the same company did to you? In the past decade he had been acutely aware of the thundering herd behind him, nipping at his heels. But this? It felt like being cut from the team or, at the very least, third string on the bench.
Roger knew that there was information below sea level, underneath the tip of the firm’s iceberg, to which he was no longer privy. In the heyday of commercial real estate, he had helped to build this firm, cutting deals and paving the midwestern suburbs with a series of strip malls back when even village idiots could make money in the game.
But the market had changed; the commercial real estate business had been a roller coaster lately. And there were younger partners now, in bespoke suits with different connections to corporate bloodlines that fed the income stream. With their technological gadgets and savvy PowerPoint presentations, Roger understood it was a new playing field, with new rules.
The old ways of selling and of relationships and deals by handshake had given way to a cutthroat price-driven age. There were times Roger felt as if he were keeping current only by his fingernails. Hell, he still quietly dictated things to Cristina, his secretary. He had never quite learned to type proficiently on a keyboard once they’d all made the leap to personal computers.
