by Susan Rieger
—
Harry made up with Eleanor in his way. He said that her willingness to recognize the Wolinskis’ claim had thrown him. How could she be so understanding and accepting unless she had known? He got carried away.
“I’m glad,” Sam said, eager now to move on.
“You do know,” Harry said, “the woman Susanna saw me with, she was just a friend.”
“Do you want to play squash Saturday morning?” Sam said.
—
Eleanor invited Susanna to dinner. She was worried about her. Susanna was already thirty-six. When I was Susanna’s age, Eleanor thought, I had five children, ages five to thirteen, and no career. Eleanor made the meal festive: rack of lamb, asparagus, salad, Chaumes, Barolo. Eleanor always drank Italian or Spanish red wines. French and Californian gave her headaches. White wine tasted like organic mouthwash when it didn’t taste like peat moss.
“Let’s open another bottle,” Eleanor said. “For the cheese.”
“If I drink too much more,” Susanna said, “I’ll get weepy and self-pitying. Or vice versa.”
“I’ll risk it,” Eleanor said.
“Work’s fine. Satisfying,” Susanna said. “But I have no one in my life. I’ve never been in love with anyone who was in love with me.”
“It’s more important to like your husband than to be in love with him,” Eleanor said. “Liking lasts longer.”
“I was so stupid to fall in love with a gay man,” Susanna said.
“Unlucky, not stupid.”
“I am pathetic,” Susanna said.
“Do you want children?” Eleanor asked.
“More than a husband.”
“Then do it without one. We couldn’t in my day, but you can.”
“No. I want to give my children a fighting chance. Two parents,” Susanna said.
“You didn’t have any parents. One would be a major advance. And one good parent is all a child needs, so long as there’s enough money.”
“You’ve thought about this,” Susanna said.
“In a lot of Mom-and-Pop families, there’s often a superfluous parent. I was very lucky. Rupert was a good father. My own father was not a presence in my childhood. I’m glad he lived a long time. We became close after I married.”
“What was your mother like?” Susanna asked. “Sam loved your father but never has a good word for your mother.”
“Boring and mean. Rupert protected me from her.”
“You and Rupert were my ideal couple,” Susanna said.
“Were we?” Eleanor said.
“You were so kind to each other and to the boys,” Susanna said. “The boys being boys are of course cutthroat competitive, but in any other family of five boys, all so smart and talented, all so close in age, it would have been Old Testament, Cain and Abel.”
“I think my mother would have preferred not to have had a child”—she paused—“or sex.”
“You missed the jinx. I’m afraid I’ll be a bad mother,” Susanna said.
“Will you abandon your children?” Eleanor said.
“No.”
“Will you beat them?”
“No.”
“Will you browbeat them?”
“No.”
“What are you afraid of then?” Eleanor said.
“Not loving them, not liking them, not wanting them once they’re here.” Susanna started to cry.
Eleanor put her hand on Susanna’s arm.
“Not possible,” Eleanor said.
—
Sam wanted children, or at least a child. It had been a long time coming, this feeling. His father’s death was a great blow, much worse than he’d imagined. It cemented the feeling. He had loved growing up in his family, the only team he’d ever wanted to play on. He wanted a team of his own.
Sam called Will to congratulate him on his big news: Francie was pregnant. He could hear the happiness in Will’s voice. He felt a spasm of envy.
“I’ve been thinking about Dad,” Will said. “Becoming a father does that. I hope I’m as good a dad. He always made me feel I was fine just the way I was. Like Mr. Rogers. Did he ever yell at you? He never yelled at me. He never criticized me. He never said he was ‘disappointed’ in me. When I didn’t go to law school, which might have been a mistake: when I didn’t finish my PhD, which wasn’t a mistake: when I quit publishing to become an agent and moved to L.A., so far so good: he never was anything but encouraging. His advice to me was always the same: ‘Jack knows the secret: his work is his play, his play is his work.’ ”
“What was Mom’s advice to you?” Sam asked. “Or was she her sphinxlike self?”
“Mom’s advice was similar but more bracing,” Will said. “ ‘Not everyone has a calling. Jack is a rare bird. Aim for being interested, or at least not bored—and never boring. Vote Democrat.’ ”
“They had confidence in us,” Sam said.
“I miss him, even two years on,” Will said. “I didn’t know I would. Stealth Dad.”
Andrew was dead set against having a child for all the usual reasons: their work, their travel, their friends, their sleep. He liked their life the way it was.
“If we had a baby,” he said, “we’d need a live-in nanny, what you and your brothers had.”
“We can afford a nanny,” Sam said.
“That’s not the point,” Andrew said. “I don’t want to have a baby. I don’t want to be a parent. One of the prerogatives of being gay, I always thought, was childlessness without guilt.”
Sam and Andrew had been together more than fourteen years, time for the second seven-year itch. The ardor of their early years had faded, but their attachment to each other, their history together, their common interests, “the en-durables,” Andrew called them, made the relationship still the center of their lives. Life without the other was if not an unthinkable event then one they avoided speaking about. Until Sam wanted a baby, their only other serious bone of contention, the only heated arguments they ever had, had been over Susanna. Andrew never said outright to Sam he didn’t want him to see her; he wanted Sam on his own to give her up. He didn’t understand the relationship; he felt it excluded him. Sam never mentioned to Andrew when he had been to see her. He kept her out of their conversations.
“You never spend time with Harry’s girls,” Andrew said. “Do you even like them?”
“I don’t want Harry’s children. I want my own,” Sam said.
“Does Susanna want a baby?” Andrew asked.
“Why do you ask that? What has that to do with us?” Sam said.
“Does she?” Andrew asked.
“Yes,” Sam said.
“Don’t do that,” Andrew said.
—
Andrew wondered if their relationship would survive. He had drawn the line: no children. He hadn’t liked his parents. His parents hadn’t liked him. They hated his homosexuality. They thought it was an accusation against them: they hadn’t brought him up right.
“Didn’t they know the domineering mother/rejecting father theory had been thrown out?” Sam had asked the first time they talked about Andrew’s family.
“No,” Andrew said. “They’re Catholic. Your parents were practically Jewish in their acceptance.”
Sam shook his head. “It wasn’t Jewish, it was echt WASP. There was no struggle to understand, no discussion of feelings, no looking for causes, no guilt or shame. They never thought they were responsible for our characters or our conduct; we were who we were.” He laughed. “They ignored a lot. I suspect expediency had a part. They were outnumbered. Both of them knew parents could ruin children, by putting cigarettes out on their arms, insulting and belittling them, hovering and undermining confidence, that sort of thing. Beyond that, they didn’t think parents had much influence. I asked my mother, when I was fifteen, ‘Why was I gay, only me, not the others?’ ‘Why not?’ she said. ‘Genetic roulette. Package deal. You’re also the only scientist. Don’t worry. It will work out. Everyone has an awful adolescence
.’ I believed her.”
“My parents are of the lifestyle school,” Andrew said. “ ‘Your choice,’ my father said when I told him I was moving to New Haven to be with you. ‘You’ll never get tenure, either of you.’ I couldn’t tell if he was prophesying or placing a curse.”
Andrew had been and remained in love with Sam. Sam wasn’t sure what he felt anymore but he knew he had never loved Andrew with the same intensity. Sam was used to being loved. And then there was Susanna. Andrew knew that Sam wasn’t sexually interested in her, but she offered a compelling alternative narrative, the possibility of traditional married life.
“I don’t mind your old boyfriends at all,” Andrew said to Sam during one of their talks about having a child, “or even your new ones.” Sam knew he meant Joe, but said nothing. “Only Susanna,” Andrew said. “What is it with her?”
“She’s the Other,” Sam said.
“Are you going hetero?” Andrew said.
“Don’t be an ass,” Sam said. “We’re not lovers, Susanna and I. We have less at stake. We let things ride. She’s like a sister.”
“Another member of Team Falkes,” Andrew said.
“Women’s Auxiliary,” Sam said, wanting to end the argument.
“I don’t want to lose you,” Andrew said. “But I couldn’t stay if you had a child with Susanna.”
Sam didn’t tell Andrew about Harry’s blowup with his mother. Andrew’s interest would verge on the prurient, another blot, after the Wolinskis, on the Falkeses’ escutcheon. Only fair, I suppose, Sam thought. We’ve been too lucky. He told Susanna, but only months later, after he had cooled off a bit. He had thought she would be angry at Harry, and Sam was angry enough at him; he didn’t need backup. He could have spoken to Lea, but that would be feeding the maw. Lea was loyal. For all he knew, she might have come around to Harry’s position. Harry was a fierce partisan, which made him a first-rate litigator but a second-rate husband. Lea regularly gave in to him because she didn’t have his thirst for combat. It was only because her parents were outraged that their daughters weren’t baptized.
“If you marry Jewish,” she said to Harry, “you have to make accommodations.”
“I could say the same thing,” he said.
“Isn’t it enough that they won’t be bat mitzvahed?” she said. “Don’t be greedy.”
Harry wanted to replicate his childhood. Church was a part of it, along with Trinity, tennis and, one day, he anticipated, Princeton. He was incredulous, almost indignant, when he learned that Lea was pregnant with a girl. He had assumed he’d have sons. “Watch it,” Lea said, as his face fell. “Fait accompli. And, it’s your fault.” When the second child was also a girl, he wondered out loud to Sam if it was divine retribution, payback for all his good luck.
“You have been lucky, we all have been,” Sam told him, “but this is about sperm. God isn’t tinkering in your scrotum; he’s off helping college basketball players make their free throws.”
—
Susanna called Sam. “This is it,” she said. “My birthday is in a month. I’ll be thirty-seven. I’ve reached the ‘now or never’ point. I want a baby and I can’t wait any longer. My eggs are decaying as we speak.”
“Andrew is adamant. I feel stuck,” Sam said.
“I know. You were on a fool’s errand thinking it would work out,” Susanna said. “It can’t work out. He doesn’t like me. I don’t like him.”
“Give me six months,” Sam said.
“No. If you and Andrew break up, you’ll never forgive me. We’ve been pretending these last months,” Susanna said.
“I want a baby too,” Sam said.
“We don’t get everything we want,” Susanna said.
“No,” Sam said.
“Have you said anything to your mother?” Susanna asked.
“Sort of. I was embarrassingly indirect, but she caught my drift,” Sam said. “She said I had to choose. She said that she had had to make a choice not so different from mine. I asked her what her choice was, what she had chosen. She laughed and said, ‘Don’t you know?’ ”
“Don’t you?” Susanna asked.
“I don’t want to think about it,” Sam said. “I don’t want either of my parents to have had a life of their own, separate from us, separate from each other. They belong entirely to us.”
“Well, then, you know,” Susanna said.
“Yes,” Sam said.
—
Sam had spent the morning feeling agitated. The day was hot and humid; his research wasn’t going well; he and Andrew were fighting. He was still cross with Harry even though they’d made up. He needed a break, from work, from Andrew, from himself. A Sam Mendes film was playing at Lincoln Plaza. Like his mother, he was a moviegoer. Most of the time he went alone; now and then, he invited Susanna. His favorite time was after lunch, instead of a nap. He caught the crosstown bus. He hated riding with New York cabbies. Most of them drove like drunks.
He found Road to Perdition creepy and perverse, a disappointment after American Beauty. I must be ready to be a father, he thought as the credits rolled, looking forward to the next Pixar. Standing up to leave, Sam saw his mother at the back of the theater, moving toward the exit. She was with a man he didn’t recognize. When he got outside, his mother and her companion were gone.
Sam called her that evening.
“Is there a man in your life?” Sam asked. “Other than Carlo?” Even when their father was alive, the boys teased their mother about her old boyfriend, Carlo Benedetti. He had a dashing, piratical quality they admired and he clearly admired Eleanor. “Do you wish you were married to my mom?” Jack asked him at a summer luncheon party. He was seven; his older brothers had egged him on. “You always hang around her at our parties.” Carlo laughed. “I think she’s meravigliosa,” he said.
“A man? Other than you and your brothers?” Eleanor said.
“I saw you at Lincoln Plaza today, at Road to Perdition, with a tall, dark stranger. I couldn’t see him, but I don’t think I know him.”
“Jim Cardozo,” she said, “an old acquaintance. I ran into him at the theater.”
“Is he a romantic interest?” Sam said.
“No,” Eleanor said. “Children. Friends. Grandchildren. That’s enough. Wonderful news about Will. They were trying for a long time. Another girl. All-of-a-kind grandchildren.”
“What does he do, this Jim Cardozo?” Sam asked. Eleanor didn’t answer.
“I’m sorry,” Sam said. “Childish question.”
“Has Harry been talking to you?” Eleanor asked.
“Yes,” Sam said. “I told him he was wrong. I was very angry with him. He said he apologized.”
“A Harry apology,” Eleanor said. “It was my fault he thought what he thought, and he would now stop thinking it. I don’t believe the word ‘sorry’ crossed his lips.”
“Are you still mad at him?” Sam asked.
“At the moment, I prefer the Wolinski boys,” she said.
Anne Lehman fell in love with Jim Cardozo when she was a freshman at the Spence School. She was fourteen; he was twenty, a junior at Yale. She was walking down Madison Avenue with her mother. Jim was walking up, his arm around a girl. They were so beautiful, the pair of them, she had to turn away, not to be caught gaping. They looked so much alike they might have been sister and brother, except they couldn’t be, not the way they were together, their bodies magnetically entwined. Later, Anne would wonder if it was Jim’s happiness as much as his beauty that had ensnared her.
Anne saw him again the following September, at Rosh Hashanah services at Temple Emanu-El. He was sitting with a man and a woman—his parents, she decided, plain versions of him—the beautiful girl was not there. Anne followed him around at the reception until she learned his name. She went home and practiced writing “Mrs. James Cardozo.” On her wedding day, Anne confessed to her mother that she had been in love with Jim for sixteen years, long before she met him. “I saw him on the street and I knew he was it.
I would have him or no one.” She didn’t mention the girl. Her mother, a practical woman, argued with her. “You don’t fall in love with strangers,” Mrs. Lehman said. “Love at first sight is chump’s love, not worthy of the name. So many things can make your heart beat faster. Almost anything at fourteen.” When Anne insisted it was love, her mother said, “Oh, my dear, I must feel sorry for you, then. ‘When the gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers.’ Oscar Wilde.” Anne didn’t think her mother was wrong. She had no sense of triumph, only one of ill-fated inevitability. Jewish tribalism and Christian anti-Semitism had made the match.
Mrs. Lehman, née Ethel Lewisohn, had gone to Vassar. Devoted as she was to her alma mater—she endowed a chair in her grandmother’s name and sent her three daughters there—she had resisted its efforts to educate her. She had read only to fill her commonplace book. Her head was stuffed with epigrams, which she would summon, as she had on Anne’s wedding day, to end a conversation she thought had drifted off track. They were her “trouncing bon mots,” in family parlance, and she had a gift for calling up the right quote at the right time. Generally, she won her point, touché without irony. At bedtime, her preferred reading was Bartlett’s. She was still, at sixty, collecting quotations. The night after the wedding, she browsed in the marriage section. “Happiness in marriage is entirely a matter of chance.” Jane Austen. “Marriage is an adventure, like going to war.” G. K. Chesterton. “Marriage is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.” Oscar Wilde. She sighed as she read the last: if only she’d had it at hand when she was speaking with Anne. Too late, she thought, closing the book, years too late.
Mrs. Lehman preferred English sources; they were wittier than the Americans. The French were mean, which some occasions called for. All her wit was borrowed. She couldn’t tell a joke, she often confused a cliché with a witticism, and she collected only those sayings and quotes that confirmed her stout good sense. But she was so good-natured and cheerful that her family and close friends never minded, and her trove was, after forty years, impressive: Nietzsche, Tolstoy, Montaigne, Thackeray, Machiavelli—writers and thinkers she’d never think of reading. There were some in her crowd who thought she was the cliché, a character out of a Restoration comedy or Jane Austen, like Mrs. Malaprop or Sir Walter Elliot, his nose in the Baronetage; but there was nothing ridiculous about Ethel Lehman despite her highbrow illiteracy. She had a kind of Will Rogers shrewdness about people and a generosity of spirit. She believed the rich should pay taxes; she thought the state should support the poor; she marched against the Vietnam War; she supported the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. She was contented in her own marriage and wished her children the same estate. She had tried to talk Anne out of marrying Jim Cardozo, if not out of loving him. She liked Jim, the whole family did, but the relationship seemed so one-sided. Hopelessly smitten, Anne didn’t argue. “You’re right,” she said to her mother. “I can’t help myself. No exit.”
