by Caitlin Macy
“Cara, I’m not mad. I’m not mad”—she tilted her chin up—“but I do think that what you did was low.” Kate looked the older girl in the eyes quite calmly. “I know that we aren’t good friends, but I would never, ever have done the same thing to you—or to any woman. I believe that there are standards, you see, moral standards …” But the patrician mask fell away for an instant as she snapped, “Frankly, Cara, I would have gotten an abortion!”
For all my mainstream notions, the word was uglier on her lips than I ever could have imagined.
“You can forget about that,” Cara retorted, but Kate was hurrying on.
“What I’m about to say may sound incredibly tacky to you at first. But I’ve talked it over with both my mother and my father and we feel it’s the right thing.
“I know you’re—” Kate started and then paused, with distaste. “I know you don’t have—” It was fascinating to watch her struggle to bring up the subject. She shot a peremptory glance at Cara, as if she expected Cara to have the good manners to finish the thought and save her having to wallow. Cara, however, didn’t know the code. There was the pathetic sound of her slurping up the end of her drink, after which Kate laughed and said, quite directly, “The point is, we want to give you some money.”
A curious look crossed Cara’s face then, which she quelled as fast as she could. But in the moment that she seemed to prick up her ears, I realized that the idea of a bribe had never occurred to her. Once the opportunity came, she had plotted a scheme around it but never once had money entered into it—at least not that kind of money. She had contrived and connived, with the oldest trick in the book, and yet I stood there, ashamed, in the face of her relative innocence.
Once it was out, Kate seemed to enjoy the idea. She stood very naturally, as if they were haggling over Broadway and Park Place. “I was thinking … a hundred thousand,” she offered.
It was just as ridiculous as one would expect, hearing someone put a price on a life, as dismal and funny at the same time; and coarse, ultimately—that, too. But an even coarser thought immediately occurred to me: that a million would have been more like it. A connection established itself in my mind, but I managed to refrain from asking if Nick Beale had gotten severance when they cut him loose.
“Forget it. He’s marrying me.”
“Yes, Harry has—has spoken to me of his honorable intentions,” Kate said, “but you see I’m appealing to your sense of what’s fair, Cara. You know that we have been engaged for some time and that Harry wishes to marry me.”
“I don’t know that. I certainly do not know that. What I know is he wants to marry me.”
Kate pressed her lips together patiently. “He would say that, you see, because he knows he has to—”
“No!” Cara said. “He wants to!”
“You’re wrong, you see,” Kate said. Her voice was growing quieter and quieter, milder and milder. “He’s wanted to marry me for years and years. And he’ll be miserable—”
“Says who? You don’t know the first thing about us! Henry doesn’t want a prissy girl like you. I bet you’re no good in bed! Otherwise why would he come to me? Answer that! Answer me that!”
For a moment no one said anything.
Then Kate said, “George,” appealing to me, as one adult to another, to reason with a stubborn child.
“Kate,” I said gently, “why don’t we get your father to take you home now.”
Kate argued a little while longer; she was a good competitor, after all, and hated to lose an argument. Then, when it dawned on her that her case was hopeless, she clutched at the wall. “Daddy!” she sobbed. “Oh, Daddy! Daddy!” She began to shudder, as if the sudden return to the winter weather was too much for her.
“Kate!” I said.
“My God,” cried Cara, pushing herself to the edge of the bed. “Are you all right?” I think she was genuinely worried. She hurried unsteadily to the alcohol cupboard as I made for the door to get Mr. Goodenow. “I’m gonna find you some whiskey. You’re overwhelmed, I know, at losing Henry. I was, too.” Cara went on, chattily, rummaging through her collection, oblivious to the tone in the room. “Girls understand these things! Kate,” she said, bringing the little bottle. “You and I have a lot in common.”
The repugnance on Kate’s face when she raised it was so bald that Cara took a step back. But even after Mr. Goodenow had cursed her name and taken his daughter into his arms, Cara wasn’t quite ready to relinquish the fight. She had discovered the winner’s graciousness; she had taken that from Kate, and she was determined to act graciously toward the Goodenows.
“Leave it alone, Cara,” I said.
But she tottered after them out to the landing. “Can’t we talk this over? Don’t you wanna have a drink or something?”
In response, Mr. Goodenow turned from the top stair and viciously batted the shot bottle of whiskey from her hand.
“Hey!” said Cara, relinquishing her politesse at last. “I collect those!”
“Do you. Well, I’ll be damned if I’m going to drink dime-store hooch with a two-bit whore!”
“Watch what you say, you hear me?” Lunging for him, Cara tottered on her high heels.
“George!”
Mr. Goodenow was not too hungover to recoil from contact with the flailing figure. Shielding Kate, he pressed himself to the railing. I caught a glimpse of Cara’s stomach-flesh as she tripped off the top step and the tunic billowed out like a sail. “Fucking Christ!” With the added weight, the fall made a loudish noise, part whack and part thud.
“Cara?”
The landing now seemed quite far down indeed. Cara’s neck was skewed at a ridiculous angle—a wildly obtuse angle that a geometry teacher would make up for the test, an obnoxious angle that you would never see in real life. And there wasn’t one of us looking down at her who didn’t think the silence that followed her scream might have been for effect.
CHAPTER 24
So few days into the new year, and yet when I got home I had no idea what day it was. Only by counting intermissions of darkness and light could I figure that I had been at the hospital one full night, at the precinct house one full day, back at Lenox Hill another full night, and that it had been three nights and three days since I’d left for New Year’s Eve with Chat.
Chat Wethers. The very name seemed part of a social experiment, a comic utopia in which I had dwelled a very long time ago. I could not remember, or had never known, what had become of him. Perhaps he was stranded still in Jersey City, hunting around the party for cigarettes, trying to beg a ride back to the city with a couple of girls.
I sat in Toff’s armchair in the weak winter light and wondered idly if I had, at last, been fired. My excuse wasn’t so great after all: “My roommate’s girlfriend—” “The one-night stand of a guy I know—” The answering machine was blinking like mad, and that would have Toff worried. It made him nervous when I didn’t play the messages and write them down in a timely fashion, the way he did. Then I remembered that Toff would not be worried about the answering machine at all. It was difficult; there had been two camps at the hospital—the extended McLean family, who referred to Toff as their daughter’s fiancé, and Harry and Mr. Lombardi and Rhonda and I. So I hadn’t had much opportunity to talk to Geoff.
I was stumped. I couldn’t see myself going in to work, but there was no real reason to stay home, either. I went to lie down on my bed. Then I thought of what to do. It was all I could do to force myself into the shower, make myself shave, find a pair of pants and a clean shirt, lace up my shoes. I had to see Kate. There was something I had to tell her before it was too late. The conviction came to me that she was waiting for me, at that very moment, that she had been waiting for me all along. It was so simple, so obvious, that we hadn’t seen it. But wasn’t that the way it was supposed to be? You never saw what mattered until something happened that was bigger than yourself—like a death, a tragedy—and then you saw it clearly. What was always left for Kate and me was
the way we had been before. If she didn’t see this now, she would never see it. I had to make her understand. I prayed—to my Episcopalian Christmas-and-Easter God, I prayed it wasn’t too late.
The funny thing, if there was anything funny about the eradication of Cara McLean from the universe, was that I still had Harry’s car. I had been using it to chauffeur Harry back and forth to the hospital, to take Rhonda to the grocery store and so forth, and so that morning I had simply driven home. It was parked outside, illegally, but like any good chauffeur I had gotten brazen about that.
So I drove over to Kate’s. I had the idea that I would get her to come out riding in it, and then afterward I would tell her what I had to tell her.
The same roadblock of an aunt was standing guard and I had to plead with her, via a very suspicious doorman, to let me up. She showed me into Kate’s white living room.
“You know Kate has not been very … well.”
I explained that I was an old friend and asked to be allowed to see her.
“Yale friend?” the aunt inquired coldly.
“No. We went to boarding school together.”
“Oh, Chatham?” the woman panted, with a sudden fond interest. “Are you a Chattie as well, then? What year did you graduate, dear?”
The apartment wore signs of being overloaded by visitors, just the way Harry’s did. There were suitcases half open in the foyer, and a cosmetic case resting incongruously on top of a bookshelf. Catching my glance, Kate’s aunt confessed, “I’ve been sleeping on the couch,” and I felt a sudden well of sympathy for the Goodenows, that they should have to camp out for a child in need, like everybody else.
Eventually Kate was produced, and Aunt Kate—Kate was her namesake—removed herself to run errands.
“George,” said Kate faintly. “You came.” It took me a moment to recover from the shock of seeing her. She was wearing a nightgown and slippers, and behind her head a mat of hair stuck out. But I only felt more tender toward her, and more sure of my conviction. “Won’t you sit down? I’ve been hoping you’d come. You know, I haven’t been particularly well.”
I watched, incredulously, as Kate took a feeble seat on the couch and drew her knees up to her chest. “I know I’m not much to look at right now—”
“Kate! Kate!” I cried. I crossed the room and took her in my arms. She let herself be hugged, limply, with a wan smile on her lips. I released her but held her icy hands still. She had begun to weep.
“George—”
“Oh, Kate, it’s been a mess, it’s been a mess!”
“It’s been horrible!”
“I know, Kate! I’m so—I’m just so sorry!”
“But it’s all right now. You came.”
“Come take a ride with me,” I urged. “I’ve got Harry’s car outside. It would do you good to get out.”
“Do you think?”
“I’m sure of it. You’ve been cooped up in here with Aunt Kate …”
She laughed a little. “Should I get dressed?”
“Only if you want to,” I said, stroking the smooth part of her hair. “Park Avenue has seen you nekkid before, remember.”
“Why didn’t you come sooner?” she asked, looking up at me as if she wanted to be kissed.
“I was at the hospital,” I murmured, “with Harry—”
“All this time?” she broke in. “There wasn’t very much to be done, was there?”
“Not to be done, but—” I stopped and looked at her. “You know they saved the baby.”
Kate drew away slightly. “I’m sorry?”
“The baby,” I said gently. “They think it’s going to live.”
“But how could that be?”
It was curious, her tone. It was very much like annoyance.
“After a certain point, the—the fetus has developed enough—”
“I didn’t mean literally!”
“It will be a miracle if it lives,” I said after a moment, though I didn’t believe in them. I just wanted to say something to close the subject.
Kate seemed to be thinking of something very far off. “A miracle,” she repeated thoughtfully. “Do you think so?”
“For Harry’s sake,” I said.
“Hmm. I suppose.”
A black, sobering thought occurred to me. “Were you thinking of going back to him, Kate?”
“Why wouldn’t I have?” She frowned. “We were engaged before all this started, as you may remember. None of this business is my fault.”
There was a long silence. “If you’d rather not go out today,” I began finally.
“It’s just that—” Kate cleared her throat, rather affectedly, and smoothed the old white nightgown over her knees. “Well, I think it’s a bit of a shame, really.” She spoke reflectively, musing aloud: “A child like that … not much of a start in life, really. Do you know keeping children like that alive costs some unbelievable amount of our taxpayer dollars? And is it really worth it?” Her face, clearing, dismissed the unattractive subject. “But shall we? Shall we take that ride?”
It had been so long since I’d had a good night’s sleep. Now it was my hands that grew limp. Kate tightened hers around them, as if to press them into reassurance. “I knew you’d come, George,” she said softly. It was just as I had hoped. She began to say all of the things I thought she would never say. “You and I, we’ve always been the most alike. We think the same. We’re the only ones who realize that what they taught us at school—that’s what matters. Esse quam videri, isn’t that right?” As she spoke she grew more animated. She rose and walked to the bathroom, still chatting as she ran the tap and splashed water on her face. When she returned she had a white robe on over her nightgown. “Look! It’s from the Ritz! Dad got it for me for Christmas. Mom didn’t want me to have it, but I kept begging … George?” She swooped in front of me and struck a pose. “Should I go like this?”
At Chatham they said Kate Goodenow could get away with anything. She could get caught with a bottle in her room, drink blatantly in her room on a Saturday night, and the teacher on duty would say, “When I come back you’ll be at the dance where you ought to be, won’t you?” The more cynical among the students attributed her seemingly unpuncturable state of grace to the fat checks Artie Goodenow anted up each semester, but Kate’s friends never paid attention to the naysayers. We knew it was just Kate. Money had nothing to do with it. She was like that—that was all. It had not occurred to me that without money there would have been no Kate Goodenow. That Kate Goodenow without money would, in fact, have been a different person. And until that moment I think I had always believed that my own upbringing had been just like theirs, like Chat’s or Kate’s, that except for the money we had been raised in just the same way. Anyway, I had tried to believe it. But it was like Nicko had asked me, trying to get a couple of facts straight for his history class in what was to be his last term of school: “So, except for the sun being in the center of the universe, his plan was pretty much the same?” And I wondered, sitting on that white sofa in that white room, if Cara’s parents, when they came to pack up her things and take them away, had enjoyed a moment of comfort when they took the McLean family crest down from the wall, and if her mother had perhaps intimated to Mr. McLean that, unlike other people, they at least had that.
I realized that I was not going to drive Kate anywhere and that, in any case, to do so in Harry’s car was a low notion, badly thought out.
“Well, should I, George?”
She had asked one question, but I answered a hundred. “No, Kate,” I said, my mouth dry. “I don’t think so.”
“All right,” she said indifferently, “then I’ll change.” Her face registered my response, and then she looked a second time: registering my response.
She had been well taught, Kate had, to look beyond the rudeness, the slight, instead of trying to answer it directly. “All right,” she said again. She was trembling slightly, and to steady herself she sat down and laid her hands on a book. It was th
e catalog from Sotheby’s sale of Americana. “It was a good idea, but I don’t much care what I do. I never do. I’ll go for a run or I’ll—I’ll read a book.”
Certain things one did not forget, and they were more real than any religion. At Chatham, it was assumed, fresh air and honest prose could cure the most malcontent of souls.
“They can’t take that away, can they George?” cried Kate, rising again. “We were there. I was there, and you were there. We put our boats away side by side.”
“We did,” I said.
“That’s the truth, isn’t it? And you know, I’m right about you. You’ll see it more, as you get older. You’re just the same as I am—you are! You really and truly are!”
I had been in such a hurry to see her; now I wanted to leave while there was still time, while I could still remember what had brought me there in the first place. When she was sixteen and I was fourteen—
“You’ll know what I mean about what matters!”
As I rose and walked to the door, I could sense her flitting about the apartment, looking into her closet, throwing open a window. I stopped and went back into the room. She had taken out a comb and was working vigorously on the snarls in her hair. I took both of her wrists and stilled her hands.
“Yes, George? Yes, what do you want?”
“Kate, I’ll always—” I started to say.
But her eyes laughed that off. She was better than that and we both knew it. Kate played to win; the other girls could keep the consolation prizes. I dropped her wrists. I would always—nothing.
The elevator took so long I nearly gave up and went down the stairs, but it finally stopped on Kate’s floor.
