by Susan Rieger
Rupert had known she wasn’t a virgin when they first had sex, and he wondered, after her tubal ligation, whether she might be sleeping with other men—gamekeepers or cardiologists or Italian lawyers—when she said she was at the movies; the thought aroused him. He was sure the children were his; she was too honorable to cuckold him. Did he love her? He couldn’t imagine life without her. Did she love him? Did anyone?
Their marriage hit a bump in its fifteenth year. They had been together a long time. At the office, Rupert was discontented; at home, Eleanor was at loose ends. Neither acknowledged their unease, waiting for the other to speak, hoping the skies would clear. Rupert couldn’t remember why he had wanted to be a lawyer. His work had become boring, his partners irritating. He thought of teaching instead, perhaps at Yale, and started coming into the office late and leaving early. Eleanor had too much time on her hands. She went to the movies almost every day, sometimes twice in one day. The boys were growing up. The youngest was in kindergarten. The older ones had secret lives. The trip to England made things worse. Rupert hadn’t wanted to go; Eleanor had insisted. “You need to go the first time,” she said. His mood was unhappy the whole time they were there, his premonitions all fulfilled. He hated England and the English. For the first time in their marriage, they didn’t baptize the hotel room. Everywhere he went, he felt exposed and derided for the fraud he was. He was sure everyone, the hotel concierge, the maître d’ at Simpson’s, the taxi drivers, knew he was an orphan and an outcast, their English antennae always alert to the striver, the parvenu. He felt everyone blamed him for not having parents, for not deserving parents, for not being able to keep them. He blamed himself too. And he blamed Eleanor. She had taken all the relatives for herself, generations of Phippses, Deerings, Livingstons, and Porters, going back past the Mayflower Compact to the Domesday Book.
Jim Cardozo’s wedding, coming on the heels of the English debacle, was the trip wire. Rupert wasn’t sure why he had wanted to go. The food was delicious, unheard-of at an English wedding, and the company lively. He liked the Strauses especially. I’m better with Jews than with Christians, he thought. The problem was the groom. His slavering over Eleanor, while offering minor satisfaction, excited jealousy where he hadn’t thought it existed. When he asked Eleanor that evening, whether she’d ever had an affair, she didn’t answer but unzipped his fly, slipped off her underpants, and lay down in her silk dress on the floor, in front of him. “Do you want me to touch myself?” she asked. He nodded. “God is in the details,” he thought, watching her. Afterward, lying on the floor, he remembered lying clothed on his bed in Greenpoint with Vera sitting on top of him, naked, aroused, yielding. He tried to conjure her physical memory but his skin had shed it, leaving behind only the visual, unspooling in his mind as soft-core porn, slightly out of focus. He felt a shaft of terrible longing and loss.
Over the next few weeks, every time he and Eleanor had sex, he thought of Vera. Before long, he was thinking about her all the time. The subway ride became torture. Every blurry young blonde on the train reminded him of her, making him ache. He fought the urge to rub against them from behind, to clutch their breasts and breathe into their necks. After a month, he decided he would have to find her. There was no other resolution.
He wanted to look for her himself, but the risk, he knew, was too great. He wouldn’t be careful enough. He hired a private investigator. He gave him her name and the Greenpoint address. “I want to know everything,” he told the PI. “Where is she living? Where is she working? What does she do? Is she married, divorced, engaged? Has she ever been married? Is there a man in her life? If so, who is he, what does he do? Does she have any children? Did she have any children? And get me a picture. I’ll give you two weeks. I’ll pay for three weeks if you can do it in two. I don’t think she’s strayed far from Leonard Street.”
The PI was back to him in ten days. His report was vague on some points. He had been diligent. Vera was careless:
Vera Wolinski, aka Vera Wolinski Koslowski, still lives at 536 Leonard Street, Greenpoint, with her mother and her widowed sister. She has often claimed that she too is a widow. When she was very young, she told neighbors, she married an old Polish man, Adam Koslowski, a boarder in the family home; he died six months after the nuptials, leaving her $10,000. There is no record of that marriage or any other. There have been many men in her life since then but no certified husbands. She has no known children and no verified pregnancy or birth, though there was gossip that she married the Pole because she was pregnant. Her current boyfriend, Stefan Malinowski, is the director of the Greenpoint YMCA. He seems a decent fellow. Apparently he’s been her on-and-off boyfriend ever since the death of the Polish husband. He always comes back. He’s given her three diamond engagement rings. The first two went missing, likely pawned. She’s a waitress at the Oyster Bar in Grand Central Station. She’s worked there for at least a dozen years. She works both the lunch and rush-hour shifts, coming in at 11:30 a.m., Tuesday through Friday, leaving at 8:30 p.m. Her lunch hour is from 3:30 to 4:30. She makes good money as a waitress, mostly in tips. She also makes extra income on the side. She dates some of her customers, only regulars. The Hotel Coolidge, across the street from Grand Central, is a regular rendezvous spot for illicit couplings. She is known to the clerks, not by name but by her photograph. She makes sure they are tipped regularly and well by her dates. She is very beautiful, as you will see from her picture. She has never been arrested. She does not use drugs. Over the course of the investigation, I was given multiple accounts of events in her life as people heard them from her. Other PIs are said to have investigated her. She was named reportedly as correspondent in two New York State divorces brought on the grounds of adultery, most likely as the designated doxie. I have not found records identifying her as such. She is 37 or 38 years old.
—
A week after he received the report, Rupert went for a late lunch at the Oyster Bar. Catching sight of Vera, he asked to sit in her section. “Less noisy,” he said to the hostess. As he read the menu, he sensed Vera coming up behind him. “Would you like a Greenpoint oyster?” she said. Rupert kept his eyes on the menu. He felt the blood rushing in his ears. “Could you get off work at three thirty?” he said, not looking at her. “Yes,” she said, “if it’s worth my while.” He turned to look at her. She looked scarcely older, still Lana Turner. His eyes went to her cleavage, then to her left hand. She was wearing a cross and a small diamond ring. Keeping his seat, he took out a billfold and handed her five fifties. “It’s three now. Meet me across the street in the lobby of the Hotel Coolidge in thirty minutes.” Vera counted the bills. “Real money,” she said. She leaned down and pressed her hand against his crotch. “Just making sure,” she said. He held her hand there for several seconds.
Rupert arranged for a room in the Coolidge in the name of Robert Fairchild. “I expect you to be discreet,” he said to the clerk, handing him twenty dollars. “No one will know I’m here. Is that understood? Let me know if anyone asks for me or follows me.” The clerk nodded. He had been threatened before by johns but never in an English accent. “Yes sir,” he said. “Good,” Rupert said. “We can do business. I expect to come regularly. I want a different room each time, but I will always see the same woman. You will show her up. I want the room cleaned with fresh bedding. I will call and pay cash, in advance, and I will pay extra for extra services. Is that understood?” The clerk nodded. “Yes sir.” Rupert handed him another twenty. “One last thing,” Rupert said. “You will treat her with respect.”
—
Rupert and Vera met regularly at the Coolidge over the next six months, at least once a week, often twice, occasionally three times. They came to terms quickly that first afternoon. “Would you mind taking off your clothes while we negotiate,” he said. “I want to see all of you. I remember your beautiful body.” Vera obliged with a slow striptease. Rupert talked. They would meet in the morning at eight thirty. He would arrange to pay her a thousand dollars a mont
h, deposited directly in her bank account, or in cash if she preferred. She would make herself available to him whenever he wanted her, Tuesday through Friday mornings. He would accommodate her job. She could meet other men as she wished, but not at the Coolidge and not in the morning. He would be her first of the day. She would take the birth control pill. If she got pregnant, if she ever tried to find out where he lived or worked, if she ever talked about their past, he would break off the arrangement.
“Do you agree?” he said. “We exist together only in this room.”
“Very professional, very businesslike,” Vera said.
Rupert said nothing.
She walked over to him. “Do you want to start now? It seems a waste of”—she gestured to her nakedness—“not to.”
He nodded. “Lie down on the bed for me, will you, on your back.”
“Aren’t you going to get undressed?” she said.
“No,” he said, unzipping his fly. “Like the first time.”
Rupert took feral pleasure in Vera’s wondrous, compliant flesh. With her, it was always the first time, bringing him to the brink of ruination. He thought if he died during sex with Vera, it would have been worth it.
Their sessions always began the same way. She would strip in front of him as he sat on the bed, dressed in his shirt and trousers, watching her. He would then lie down, still in his clothes, his fly open, and she would get on top of him so he might look at her breasts. He was as quick as a youth with her.
The rest of the morning followed no plan. Vera was very adept at sex, inventive and improvisational, and she quickly figured out how to please him. She never refused him, realizing that submission was what he wanted. “I’ll do anything you want,” she’d say. “Everything you want.” If he had wanted a dominatrix, she’d have obliged there as well.
At the end of their sessions, Rupert had her wash him in the shower. He would then get dressed. He left the room first, leaving her naked, on her back on the bed so he could have a last look. He would never tire of her.
The end came as it had come before. The session had begun as usual, Vera on top of him naked, he below clothed, looking at her beautiful breasts. They seemed fuller to him, more beautiful than ever. He knew in a flash.
“Please get off me,” he said.
“What’s the matter?”
“You know what’s the matter,” he said, his voice low, angry, breaking. “You’re pregnant.” She slid off him. He sat up. “Why did you do it? I’d have paid you forever.” He got up and walked toward the bathroom.
Vera shrugged.
While he dressed, he asked her to lie naked on the bed. “A last look, if you will,” he said. He put on his jacket, then sat next to her, stroking her breasts. “God, I love them. You ruined it. You ruined it again.” He took out his wallet and gave her twenty fifties. “This is it,” he said. He got up to go.
Vera sat up and took hold of his jacket sleeve. “Remember,” she said, speaking so softly he had to lean in to hear, “you came looking for me. I never went looking for you.” She let go of the jacket and lay back down on the bed. “You’ll be back.”
—
Straus’s company hired Rupert as their lawyer. The Maynard, Tandy partners elected him to the management committee. Rupert had the PI follow Cardozo. He wasn’t sleeping with Eleanor. Rupert thought fleetingly of hiring the PI to follow Eleanor but rejected the idea on grounds of self-respect and self-preservation. “Are you over whatever it was?” she asked him the evening of his first management committee meeting. They were getting ready for bed. He gave her a thin smile. “What doesn’t kill you makes you unkinder.” He pressed her against the wall and pulled down her underpants. “I always want you,” he said. “Yes,” she said.
The money going to Vera stopped for six months, then resumed.
Sam called Susanna to give her the good news. “An early Christmas present, of sorts,” he said. The reports from the genetic counselor showed no “recessive disorders” percolating in their genes, no AIDS or HIV antibodies steeping in his fluids. Sam wondered why his doctor had insisted on the screenings—probably to scare him. Neither family had a history of genetic diseases, not counting alcoholism and adultery on the Goffe side; nor were they overly inbred for pre-revolutionary whites. The predominant strain in both families was British, but there had been enough German, Scandinavian, French, and Dutch intermarriage to water the stock. Susanna’s mother insisted that her grandmother, Susanna’s great-grandmother, was an Italian opera singer. “Her name was de Campo,” Prudence said. “They changed it to Van Camp to purge the Wop.” Susanna didn’t believe her. She had never known her mother to tell the truth when a lie was more satisfying. Her father, ashamed of his regicide ancestor, claimed his mother was descended from Ivanhoe. She had said so. “Don’t you mean Walter Scott?” Susanna had asked. Her father insisted it was Ivanhoe. “My great-grandfather was Wilfred,” he said. On the Falkes side, Rupert was the only wild card, the secret ingredient in their genetic gumbo. “Probably to the good,” Susanna said. “I hope the baby has your Arctic eyes.”
The report presented a problem, not thought through at the time Sam filled out the forms. At the last minute, he had ordered a DNA test for himself. He wouldn’t have taken the test on his own, at least he didn’t think so, but it had struck him as skulking and mean not to have asked for it when every other body part was being genetically scrutinized. Harry was incredulous. “Why would you do that?” he said. “You chewed me out for even thinking about it. It would be humiliating to our mother and insulting to our father’s memory.”
“It doesn’t tell us anything about Dad, you told me that, only about us and the Wolinskis,” Sam said. “The test can’t prove Dad is their dad, or even our dad.”
“Right,” Harry said. “We’ll find out we’re all brothers but Dad isn’t our common father. Mom and Vera had, between them, seven children with the same man who we don’t know.” He paused. “Or maybe we’re not related to them and none of us are Dad’s sons.”
Sam stared at his brother. “I was curious,” Sam said. “Aren’t you?”
“What do we do?”
“We meet with them, or one of them, and talk about it,” Sam said.
“Do we tell Mom we’re doing this?” Harry said.
“Mom thinks they’re Dad’s, I’m pretty sure,” Sam said.
“That doesn’t answer my question.”
“I think we have to,” Sam said.
“Report back to me after you’ve talked to her,” Harry said. “I’m not getting burned again.”
Eleanor didn’t show surprise when Sam told her he’d been tested. “I would have guessed Tom, in a paroxysm of extreme altruism, to be the one to get the test and then push for a meeting with the Wolinskis. It doesn’t matter. I understand that you would want to know. I prefer not knowing, and doing what I want about them.”
“Do you want to know what we find out?” Sam asked.
“I suppose so,” Eleanor said. “After you’ve gone to so much trouble.”
“Why aren’t you curious?” Sam asked.
“Dad never said anything to me about Vera or the boys. Either it happened and he didn’t want me to know or it didn’t happen. I trusted him, I continue to trust him. We were on a need-to-know basis.”
“But if it did happen, don’t you think he might have said something at some point, before he died?” Sam said.
“Dad and I weren’t confessional, not with each other, not with anyone. We took cues from each other.”
“You didn’t want to know his secrets?” Sam said.
“No. And I didn’t want him to know mine.”
“When do we learn yours?” Sam asked.
Eleanor didn’t answer.
“Weren’t you upset by Vera’s claim?” Sam asked.
Eleanor shook her head. “It came after,” she said. “It didn’t change the life I had with your father.”
“I don’t understand you at all,” Sam said.
&nbs
p; “It’s the angle,” Eleanor said. “You can’t see me from where you’re standing.”
—
Edward Phipps lived to be eighty-four. He died three years before Rupert, a blessing. The loss of Rupert would have pierced his armored complacency. He died at Mrs. Cantwell’s, in her bed. “He said he had a bad headache and went to lie down,” Mrs. Cantwell told Eleanor. “When I went into the bedroom, he was gone.” She wanted his death notice to say he died in her apartment. Rupert told her that wouldn’t be possible.
Mr. Phipps’s widower years were happy ones. He had Eleanor, Rupert, and the boys down the street on the Upper West Side and Marina Cantwell across the park on the Upper East. He was too early for Viagra but he lost weight, worked out with a trainer, and walked with a springy step. Marina was kind to him, admiring and affectionate. She always laughed at his jokes. She had little use for any of the Falkeses, a boon to all of them. She thought Edward might marry her if Eleanor and the boys were out of the way. She kept lobbying him to move “back to the East Side with all your good friends.” When she complained that the Falkeses always came first, ahead of her, Edward would pat her hand. “Now, now, kitten,” he’d say. “Let’s not ruin a lovely evening.”
The funeral was at St. Thomas. The boys took over the planning. Rupert and Eleanor were heartsick. Harry, who had become a serious churchgoer in the hopes of making Christians of his daughters, made all the burial arrangements. Sam planned the service and chose the music. Tom read the Old Testament portion. Will read e.e. cummings’s untitled poem that begins “Buffalo Bill’s defunct.” Eleanor had asked for it. Jack played taps, surprising the priests by reducing most of the mourners to tears. “Danny Boy,” with bagpipes, was usually the reliable weeper. Rupert sat at the far end of the front row so as not to be observed.
