The Real Mother

by Judith Michael

  “Dinner’s made,” Sara said after a moment. “Baked chicken and wild rice in a casserole in the refrigerator, and roasted vegetables in the dish next to it. Abby can finish baking them.”

  “We’ll figure it out. Have a good—”

  Abby grabbed the phone. “Sara, Mrs. Nevins is here, we’ll see you later. Love you.”

  Sara hung up the telephone and stared through the window at the gray street. Far above the solid row of office buildings, the sun shone brilliantly in a clear blue sky streaked with silver where planes caught the light. But in an office on the second floor of City Hall on LaSalle Street, it was almost always gray. A great way to start a day, she grumbled silently, in a bad mood before her work had really begun.

  “Pussy Corcoran called,” Donna Soldana said, coming in with a sheaf of papers. “She said she tried your cell phone.”

  “I forgot to turn it on. Please call and tell her I’m out for the day. And the evening, too, as it happens. And forever, but I don’t suppose telling her that would stop her from calling.” She stared at Donna. “Is that a new bruise?”

  “No, it’s …well, it is. I banged my head on the kitchen counter.”

  “And bruised your neck?”

  Donna was silent.

  “How did he find where you’re living?”

  “Mother told him,” Donna said after a long hesitation. “I might have to find another place.”

  “Yes, you will. Here—” She scribbled a number and handed it to Donna. “This is Nancy’s cell phone; call her now, before she gets to the office. She has a lot of small apartment rental listings; she’ll find you a place faster than anyone I know. And I’ll help you move.”

  “No, Sara, you won’t. I have friends who can help me. Thank you for this; you’re wonderful. I don’t know what I’d do without—” She choked back tears. “Is there anything else you need me for right now?”

  “No, go ahead; call Nancy. Tell her I said it’s an emergency.”

  So now she had to worry about Donna, on top of everything else. The longest, heaviest days were the ones that began with a bad mood. Even here, in her own office, the one place where she knew she was in control, she could feel too much was crowding in. But not that much, she thought. She still was in charge of her day, of the way the hours unfolded, of how she spent her time.

  Everything was entirely manageable. A client needed a conference room that night, set up for fifty people, with PowerPoint, caterer and staff, and Sara there to supervise. She had done it dozens of times; she could handle it. The city of Chicago had no budget for a full-time assistant for her; she could handle that, too. Abby was starring in a play, and Doug and Carrie were really too young to be alone for long chunks of time (or she was unwilling to let them be alone for long chunks of time, though she knew other parents did…and she wasn’t a parent, but what difference did that make at a time like this?), and she could handle that, too; she always did, somehow.

  And Mack? Could she handle him? She had no idea what that meant. But if things went badly, it would be his fault. Blame Mack, she thought, for anything I can’t handle.

  Especially for making me feel uneasy in a dozen different ways.

  When he could have been a lifesaver.

  Her private line rang. Someone’s sick, she thought, and snatched it up.

  “Good morning,” Reuben Lister said. “How are you?”

  “Fine,” said Sara. She made her voice lighter. “Fine, thank you.”

  She turned her chair and sat back, facing the windows. LaSalle Street suddenly had brightened considerably. He called two or three times a week, and each time they talked generally and casually, as if they had decided together that a telephone call is a poor way for two people to share or bare confidences. Once he had asked her to describe her office—“so I can picture you when I talk to you”—and she had asked him to do the same. Now she asked him, “Where are you? Which office?”

  “At home, looking at clouds and rain, and if I look straight down on Sheridan Square I can see a river of black umbrellas. Wouldn’t you think people would buy the brightest colors to fight back on dreary days?”

  Sara pictured him at his steel desk, gazing through the broad windows of the corner office, pushing up his horn-rimmed glasses as they slid down his nose, his lean body absolutely still in his desk chair, while his thin, restless fingers betrayed the fact that, though for the moment quiet and thoughtful, in a moment he would leap into action. She smiled as he asked, “What color did you choose for your umbrella?”

  “Red, to match my raincoat. And yours?”

  “Brown. Not colorful enough. I’ll buy another one today. I might need it in Chicago.”

  Sara felt her heart lurch. “Are you coming to Chicago?”

  “On Sunday, for a month or more.”

  A month, she thought. A month or more. But what she said was, “Your furniture isn’t being delivered until the end of next week.”

  “I’ll be at the Whitehall until then. Will you have dinner with me Sunday night?”

  “Yes.”

  “My plane should get in at five-thirty. Would you choose a restaurant? Just let me know where to meet you. Some place interesting. Elegance is not a requirement.”

  Smiling, Sara jotted down the names of a few restaurants. “Japanese? Korean? Filipino? Mexican? Thai? Vietnamese?”

  He laughed. “All of the above. Sequentially. This is going to be a long process.”

  They discussed restaurants and menus with the serious attention of people who understand good food. “Jin Ju, then,” Sara said at last, when they had settled on Korean food. “It’s some distance from your hotel; I can pick you up.”

  “Thank you. Seven-thirty, if that’s all right, in case my plane is late.”

  Reuben put down the telephone, then remembered that he had meant to ask about leasing a car. He reached for the redial button, then stopped. What he really wanted was to hear her voice again. He shook his head. Like a teenager, he thought, and instead called his regular leasing company, to have them arrange a car in Chicago on Monday morning.

  “Hi,” said Ardis, emerging from the upstairs bedroom, rubbing her eyes. “Thanks for letting me sleep; I was really wiped.”

  She was small and thin: her hair hung limply in pale blond curls, her eyes were pale blue, her face was pale and drawn, deeply scored in lines of dissatisfaction from the sides of her nose to the corners of her mouth. When they had met, twenty-two years earlier, her face had been bright with promise and high color and a smile that Reuben saw as mysterious and enticing, even as his friends called it cunning. She was seventeen, Reuben a year older; she was doll-like and fragile, with a porcelain beauty that caused others to stare when she entered a room. Reuben had stared, and fallen in love.

  “What time did I get to bed?” she asked, dropping into a leather chair near his desk. “Must have been the crack of dawn; I still hardly feel like I got enough sleep. What time is it?”

  “You passed out at nine-thirty. It’s now eight-thirty in the morning.”

  “Nine-thirty? Not two or three in the morning? God, I really was wiped. Passed out? You mean nodded off. Wiped out.”

  Reuben opened a folder and began to read.

  “I’m talking to you.”

  “More to yourself, I think.”

  “To you! To you! I haven’t seen you in six months and I’m talking to you! I love talking to you, Ben, you never lie to me. Well, you did once; you told me you loved me.”

  He looked up, and after a moment said, almost in wonder, “I did love you. I couldn’t think of anything but you. That was why I married you.”

  “You married me because I got knocked up.”

  “I married you because I loved you and wanted to take care of you. There was a vulnerability about you…” He made a gesture of despair. “You couldn’t take the chance of waiting, to find out, but I would have married you if you weren’t pregnant. You could have saved yourself the trouble of an abortion.”

&
nbsp; “That’s a lie.” Her voice rose thinly. “I got pregnant because you started talking all the time about that girl you did blueprints with in that architecture class.”

  “I was trying to tell you about my work. I was trying to believe that you could be interested in what I cared about. I was trying to make you part of my life.”

  She was not listening. “And when a man starts saying this girl’s name every other word it always means the same thing: she was getting her claws in you and I’d be out on my ass and nobody to give a damn about me.” She tucked her legs beneath her and hunched over, fetuslike. “No mama, no papa,” she crooned. “No brothers, no sisters, no cousins, no friends. Nobody but my Ben, my Benny, my Reubenny who was going to be famous and rich—everybody said so—and I was damned if anybody else was going to get her hands on that. Or on you.”

  Reuben’s mouth tightened in disgust, and he picked up the folder, trying to concentrate on it while wondering yet again, still and always, why he wasted time responding to her. And, as always, he came up with the same reasons: at one time he had pitied her, he’d been flattered by the fierceness of her desire for him, he’d ached for her vulnerability in a world she found terrifying, and he had loved her so overwhelmingly that none of his friends’ caustic comments and warnings could pierce the armor of his determination.

  No one had coerced him; he had been the responsible adult. What he had not realized in the miasma of his besottedness was that he had taken on Ardis Fitch not as a wife, but as a project, saving her from the streets of New York and the slums of New Haven, where she had virtually raised herself in the two-room apartment of an alcoholic mother and three brothers dealing drugs and fighting rearguard actions against a larger, better-armed gang. Her father was in prison for knifing a friend forty times in a street brawl (“What’s left to do to your enemies?” the prosecutor had sneered in court).

  They had been married for twenty-two years. For twenty-one years, Reuben had known that, like her mother, she was an alcoholic. She had aborted their first child as soon as they were married, and two more in the five years after that. When he was twenty-eight years old, he moved out, the same day they quarreled over her drinking and she flung at him the story of the third abortion. He gave her the town house on Tenth Street and a monthly income, and moved into a loft apartment half a mile away, close enough to respond when her calls became desperate.

  But the harshness in him that he usually managed to keep submerged had come to the surface. Inexorably, it seemed, he had moved from being her protective savior—endlessly sympathetic, encouraging, ritually armored against diatribes and tantrums—to annoyance and frustration, then to disgust and an anger deep enough to match hers, and finally to cruel indifference.

  Yet, somehow, he still felt responsible. He still, though far less than before, pitied her. She had lost control of her life and, largely, of herself. Reuben, confident of his own steely control, watched Ardis flail about, saw the fear in her eyes, and could not refuse to try to rescue her, before she drowned. “You should have some breakfast,” he said, closing the folder. “There are scones in the warming oven and coffee in the thermos. I’ll make eggs if you’d like.”

  “God, no.” She fingered the sash of his robe, wrapped almost twice around her emaciated form. “I suppose you’ll make me go home today.”

  “You can stay for a couple of days.”

  “I could stay for good.”

  “No.”

  “I could, Ben. I’m fine now; I’d be fine for you. You need a wife— God, this place echoes when you walk through it—couldn’t you get some carpets? If I lived here I’d put thick carpeting all over the place, fuzzy and soft on your bare feet.”

  “What a shame you’ll never get to do that.”

  She winced. Restless, she looked about her, at the space he had created, as different as possible from the town house where she still lived. There he had chosen antiques and rare Oriental rugs; here he had white walls, bare wood floors with a few brightly colored Indian and Turkish rugs, bare windows, couches and armchairs that were deep and comfortable but unadorned, belonging to no period or place but here and now. A long gallery was hung with contemporary paintings and lithographs; at the far end he had hung a dartboard.

  “But I really could,” Ardis said at last, having decided, Reuben thought, that he had to be unhappy in such stark surroundings. “I’m already your wife, so it would be easy. We’d be happy, Ben. Six months in that weird place drying out… I’m fine, there’s nothing to worry about, I’m fine.”

  “You were drinking before you got here last night. You drank in the bathroom instead of eating dinner. Where was the bottle? In your purse, your coat pocket, your makeup kit… maybe all of them. I should have searched you before letting you in.”

  “This isn’t an airport,” she snapped, “and I’m not walking through any fucking security gate to get in. Unless”—she giggled—“you want to pat me down.” In the silence, she took a long shuddering breath. “I didn’t mean that. I mean, it was a joke. All of it. Ben, please, if I promise not to drink anymore, can I stay awhile? Not forever, just…for a while.”

  “Two days, then you go home. I’ll hire someone—”

  “This is home!”

  “—to come to your house every day and cook and clean and do your shopping; you should have let me do that long ago.”

  “I don’t want ‘someone’! I want my husband! I want somebody in my bed when I wake up in the morning! I want to go places at night and have a good time!”

  “You go out every night.”

  “I want to go with you! You’re good-looking, Ben; people envy me for being with you. And I’m not as—” She stopped.

  “Not as beautiful as you once were,” he said bluntly. “Not beautiful at all. Not even close.” He picked up his briefcase, slipped the folder inside, and crossed the library, passing her on his way to the door. “I’m going to work. If you want to stay, you’ll do it on my terms. Two days, and you will not drink. The minute I catch you drinking, or paying the doorman to buy you liquor, as you did last time, you’re on your own. And you will not be allowed in again.”

  He left without waiting for a response, her haggard image, mouth open in dismay or rage or fear—he was not sure which, and he did not care—staying with him as he walked to the subway. But as he rode uptown, to Carrano Tower, he shoved it aside. He had carried the image of that face with him for too many years for it to intrude now on the life he had created alone.

  …shameful behavior on my part that I don’t like to dwell on.

  He had told Sara that much, at dinner, and it was true, though evidently he was not sufficiently ashamed to contain himself with Ardis when he reached a certain point of anger and disgust.

  …a situation from which I’m trying to extricate myself with the least possible damage.

  Also true. That much he had told Sara; how much more he would tell her, he did not know. Oddly, he wanted her to know the whole story, but at the same time, and just as strongly, he wanted to keep it from her. (And why did he think she even wanted to hear it?) He might never tell her. Probably he should not. He had never been good at revealing himself to anyone, much less a woman he liked and wanted to know much better.

  Everyone is a moon and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody. Wise fellow, Mark Twain, thought Reuben; captured the whole of humanity in one sentence.

  He wondered what was Sara’s dark side. He liked everything about her, and could not imagine one. Perhaps she’s the exception, he thought. (He did not believe in exceptions to what seemed incontrovertibly true, but he could be wrong.)

  In his office, he pushed to one side the work his secretary had laid out for the day, and called Sara again. She was not at her desk, so he called her cell phone. “Is this a bad time?” he asked when she answered.

  “No, I’m in my car, between clients. Is something wrong? You sound distracted.”

  Because Ardis’s voice was still in his head, he thought,
and Sara’s voice, low and pleasant, could not wipe it out, at least not right away.

  “Just a lot to get through before I leave.” He cast about for some reason he could give for his phone call. “I forgot to ask you earlier if you’d heard anything more about delivery of the two tables for my office.”

  “Wasn’t that in my last e-mail? I’m sorry if I left it out; the repairs on the conference table are finished; the larger one will be ready Wednesday. I’ve checked on everything, Reuben; the only pieces we won’t have—” She began to list the pieces that needed more extensive repair, then stopped. “I did write you all this. You didn’t get it?”

  “I did get it. I’m sorry.” He wanted to say more, to apologize for giving in to his desire to hear her in the middle of a workday, but in the instant between thought and expression, he backed away from honesty. And then thought, as he had earlier, Like a teenager, angry at himself for his failings. “I shouldn’t have interrupted your day,” was all he said. “Until Sunday.”

  “Yes,” she replied neutrally, wondering at the strangeness of the conversation—as if he couldn’t think of anything to talk about—until she arrived at her destination and saw her clients emerging from their hotel. She handed them two pages stapled together. “Cleaning service, caterer, florist, automobile leasing company. The second page has numbers for a law firm, an accountant, a physicians’ referral service at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, a dental referral service, specialty shopping consultants at several stores. As I told you on the telephone, these are all firms and individuals we have found reliable, efficient, and well priced. If you decide later to buy a house, I’ve added two brokers who are excellent. For today, as we agreed, I’ll take you to the cleaning service and the caterer and help you get set with them; all the others you can easily handle at your leisure, and those on the second page involve matters you’ll want to manage in private. I’ll have to leave you by noon, to meet another client.”