The White Rose

by Jean Hanff Korelitz

  “But you’re beautiful!” Oliver insists.

  “Thanks, but it’s a question of age. You know, last summer up in the Berkshires, at one of Farley’s big weekends, we started talking about this.”

  Farley was Henry’s partner, the Prenup Pasha. Between them, they had the state of matrimony covered, before and after.

  “Not just people our age, either. There were a few kids in their twenties, and some couples in their thirties and forties. And an older couple, too—I think the man was sixty and the woman fifty-something. Anyway, we were talking about the feeling of age, you know? And we went around the table: how old do you think you are? Not that we didn’t know how old we were, but the age that feels correct, you know, in your head. Do you understand?”

  Oliver, who doesn’t exactly, nods.

  “The twenty-year-olds thought of themselves as adolescents. The thirty-year-olds thought of themselves as just out of college. The ones in their forties and fifties thought of themselves as a generation younger. Without fail. It’s like a rule: your sense of self lags behind your actual age by a certain factor.”

  “And you think of yourself…,” Oliver said, leading her, setting down his knife and fork.

  “Oh, about the age I was when you were little, I suppose. Mid twenties. I’m always a little bit surprised to discover that I’m in my late forties, with a grown child.”

  “A grown child who’s very fond of his mother,” Oliver says, trying to be reassuring.

  “Yes,” she says and smiles at him. “That’s some compensation.”

  “Some!”

  Caroline does not bother to answer. “Though I wouldn’t mind a daughter-in-law. A daughter-in-law would be nice.”

  “Mom,” Oliver says.

  “And you’re not even dating. Maybe I can help.”

  You can’t, he wants to say, but his goal is to block further conversation. He gets up and takes her plate and his own, then sets them down in the sink. “Want some coffee?”

  “What are you afraid of?” Caroline asks. “Is it rejection? Because I can tell you, Oliver, this city is crawling with women who are not about to reject you. I say this in all modesty, given that you’re my son.”

  “Thanks for the endorsement,” he says. “I didn’t really make dessert, but I have chocolates.”

  She sighs. “Well, I’d love a chocolate, but I’d also like to stay with this.”

  “I’m sorry,” he says. This is both an observation and a dismissal.

  He holds out the Burdick chocolates, snug in their wooden cigar box. Caroline picks out a white chocolate mousse. “I love these. Marian Kahn once gave me these.”

  Me too, he almost says.

  “Do you remember her? We had dinner with her one evening last spring. She was with her husband.”

  “I remember,” Oliver says. He purposely turns away, filling the coffee pot from the tap.

  “Strange man. Very rich and very fierce. I wonder if small men are predisposed to be very fierce.”

  Oliver looks at her, puzzled.

  “His family had nothing, you know. They came over after the war, I don’t know where from. Kahn,” she says and frowns. “That’s German, right? It’s hard to believe there were any Jews left in Germany after the war. Maybe they were from somewhere else. Anyway, Marshall got himself a scholarship to Brandeis, then Yale Law. Afterward, when he got to New York, he had no loyalties.”

  Oliver, despite himself, wants to hear more. Marian is not often forthcoming about Marshall. Oliver finishes preparing the coffee and takes his seat.

  “What do you mean, no loyalties?”

  “I mean, there were no family connections. There was no place ready for him—he made his own place. He didn’t have to be careful of anyone’s history or anyone’s feelings.” She smiles and shakes her head. “And he wasn’t.”

  “You knew Marian first, right?” Oliver says. “Didn’t you know her when you were a child?”

  “Marian?” says Caroline. “God, yes! She’s the oldest friend that I’m still in touch with. Well, not in very good touch, to be honest. We’ve been talking about a lunch date since that day in April, and it hasn’t happened yet. But she’s terribly busy. I think she’s writing another Lady Charlotte book.”

  Oliver contemplates his wineglass.

  “I remember her in ballet class—that’s how far back we go. We met at Fokine, and our mothers knew each other.”

  Oliver can’t help himself. “What was she like? I mean, was she a nice little girl?”

  “Oh, I loved Marian. Her mother was so glamorous. We used to go and play with all her puffs and jewelry and perfume after she’d gone out. I always think of Mrs. Warburg when I hear the phrase ‘society hostess.’ She was the real thing—you get a copy of Emily Post from the 1950s, that was the Warburg apartment. Park and…” She pauses, considering, “Eighty-first. And it had the most elegant dining room, with glorious Zuber paper and little crystal bowls full of nuts everywhere. Oh! And silver boxes of cigarettes on every table,” Caroline says and laughs. “God forbid someone should have to walk across the room for a cigarette! She was on the board of the Jewish Museum and the Henry Street Settlement but, you know, her heart wasn’t really in that. She tried for years to get herself on the board of the Whitney, but they wouldn’t have her. It was a hard blow for someone like her,” Caroline says and shakes her head. “There were some lines you just couldn’t cross, even if you were a Warburg. Of course, she hated that Marian always had her face in a book. Mrs. Warburg believed that intelligence in a girl was wholly unnecessary, and ultimately detrimental. Later on, Marian and I ended up at Brearley together. Of course, Marian flew through Brearley.”

  Oliver, smiling, gets up to pour the coffee. “Are we taking sugar tonight? Or some chemical du jour?”

  “Don’t be fresh,” says his mother. “Sugar is fine, if that’s all you have. What’s the time, by the way?”

  “Quarter past seven. Plenty of time.”

  “We might have trouble finding a cab.”

  “We might take the subway, which goes right there.”

  “I’m not taking the subway, Oliver.” This is a concession to city life that Caroline has never made, as Oliver knows perfectly well. He smiles.

  “We’ll go soon. Have another chocolate.”

  She does, then makes a face. “Oh! It’s…I think there was pepper in that one.”

  “No doubt,” he says. “They have some unusual flavors.”

  Marian, by way of example, favors the ones with clove.

  “Anyway, Daddy and I were already in Greenwich when Marian brought Marshall out. It must have been…oh, I guess around seventy-three. They came down for dinner, from New Haven. Of course, she’d been at our wedding, but Daddy hadn’t really talked with her until that dinner. Afterward, I remember he told me she was my only sensible friend.” Caroline sighs. “Though, to be honest, that had more to do with the girls he didn’t like than with Marian.”

  “What do you mean?” Oliver says. He reacts to anything that smacks of criticism when it comes to his father.

  “Oh, just that the friends I went to college with were a bit silly for him. You know, we’d spent four years at Goucher sitting around eating ice cream in our pajamas—we didn’t have that much to say for ourselves. Marian was doing a PhD at Yale. She was in a different stratosphere, intellectually.”

  Oliver carefully drinks his coffee, then carefully replaces the cup.

  “Marshall was heading straight for New York, just as soon as he graduated from law school. He didn’t mind that Marian was going to teach. He wasn’t macho that way, which is actually saying something, or it was then. Mostly he was consumed by his own plans, I think. He couldn’t wait to get established.”

  “But you and Dad didn’t really become friends with the two of them. I mean, as another couple.”

  Caroline shakes her head. “No. It just never took. They went from New Haven to Manhattan, we already had you, and the next few years…well, I wa
s pretty focused on what was happening at our end. She and I kept in touch, mostly by letter. I think they might have come out once or twice, for parties. I know they met Henry, after we were married. But it just settled into a fond-but-distant sort of thing. I was so thrilled for her when her book took off like it did!” She looks at Oliver. “You read her book, didn’t you?”

  “Yes. You gave it to me for Christmas last year.”

  She nods, remembering. “Don’t you think we should go?”

  Oliver agrees. He knows they should. Now, in a belated moment of insight, it occurs to him that this conversation may one day return to haunt him, that his mother may recall it with anger and that it will signify to her a betrayal. He does not know how he can both avoid this and have Marian, and the realization fills him with gloom.

  “Leave the dishes,” he tells her sadly.

  “All right,” his mother says. She walks to his bed to get her coat.

  “So what’s on at the ballet?” Oliver asks, watching her put it on.

  “Who Cares,” Caroline announces.

  He shrugs, then reaches for her hand. “I guess you’re right,” he says.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Appetite

  The day it began Oliver remembers as especially gray. Marian remembers the rain and the mist after, off—and she knows this would be pretentious were it not absolutely accurate—the cobblestones of his street. But then, it seemed the whole world was steaming.

  It happened by coincidence that Marian and Marshall were getting out of a Sunday matinee at the Cherry Lane Theatre on Commerce Street just at the instant Caroline Rosenthal (previously Caroline Stern and née Caroline Lehmann) was leaving a shop called the White Rose, only a few yards ahead of them. Caroline turned to shut the door behind her, twisting on one foot, which was clothed in a smart Italian boot the color of sand, and stepped onto the sidewalk into the path of her oldest friend.

  The boot is worth mentioning because it was the boot Marian saw first. She has a thing for boots, for shoes in general, though you wouldn’t know it from her actual shoe collection. While most footwear enthusiasts go broad in their prospecting, filling their closets with variant pumps, flats, and heels, Marian’s focus has always been on what she thinks of as the Ur-shoe, the shoe so versatile and so dependable and so flattering that it will never seem wrong. To locate an example of this Ur-shoe (which, to be clear, breaks down into the aforementioned categories of pump, flat, and heel, as well as boot) is a rush she has experienced only a few times: the deep brown T-straps with their gentle lift in a dank little shop near the Piazza della Signoria in Florence, the surprisingly sedate black flats in the punk den on the King’s Road, the wildly expensive Prada boots she visited and visited before buying. When she finds an Ur-shoe, however, she sensibly purchases multiple pairs. Hence her closet contains a limited repertoire of proven entities, with boxed reinforcements in an auxiliary location.

  The boots Caroline Stern was wearing attracted so much of Marian’s attention (they were comfortable-looking, with a luxurious, well-tended glow) that she did not note the wearer until the wearer spoke her name, and with such warmth that Marian looked up in surprise.

  “Caroline!”

  “Caroline!” Marshall echoed. He had always spoken kindly of Caroline. He stepped forward to kiss her. Marian followed with a hug, pressing her friend’s bony shoulders.

  “What are you doing here? You look wonderful.”

  “Oh.” Caroline touched her short hair with self-denigration. “That horrible salon in Greenwich. I don’t know what I was thinking. Tell me it will grow.”

  “Of course it will grow,” Marshall said and laughed. “I think you look great with short hair.”

  “You do,” Marian assured her. “You had it short like this when you were a teenager. You were the only girl I knew who could carry off an Edie Sedgwick look.”

  Then Marian stopped. It had occurred to her that a woman in mid-life with a short, short haircut is quite possibly a woman emerging from chemotherapy. But Caroline was glowing, happy. When Marian’s own hair was this short, she had been bloated and pasty and clearly ill. “Are you well?” Marian said then, soberly.

  “Oh, sure. I just came in to see Oliver. It’s his shop,” she said and nodded, over her shoulder. “You know? His shop?”

  Marian looked. She saw the sign, a white slab of wood with the slender black writing of a Currier & Ives hostelry, and the window displaying a great black urn filled with peach, white, and the palest pink roses. The roses were wrapped in great swaths of elderberry branches, which trailed their droplets of black fruit down the sides of the urn. It was a still life, she thought. English, not Flemish, ripe enough to jump out of the window. But…Oliver? Wasn’t Oliver still in college?

  “Isn’t Oliver in college?” Marian said.

  “Oh,” Caroline said, “I know, we’ve been bad. It’s terrible we haven’t seen each other in so long.”

  “Yes,” Marian agreed. “Terrible. How long has it been?”

  “Well, if you’re thinking my son is still in college it must be a while.”

  “We went to Le Cirque for lunch. It was the old Le Cirque.”

  “At least a year,” Marshall said authoritatively. He knew these things; they were important to him. “Old Le Cirque closed last year.”

  Caroline shook her head, but smiled so broadly her teeth seemed to gleam through the drizzle. “Terrible. Oliver graduated five years ago. This is his shop, the White Rose. Don’t ask me about the name, I have no idea. But he’s doing wonderfully here. Well, he was always so gifted with flowers. Did you see that little piece about him in Elle Decor last fall?”

  “El what?” Marshall said.

  “No!” Marian said. “How great.”

  “Yes. And he lives upstairs.”

  Marian looked up, instinctively. The house was two stories but squat, with a face of pink brick, easily nineteenth century. At the roofline a fringe of vegetation suggested a garden. As she looked, a light went off on the top floor.

  “We’re just going to dinner,” Caroline said. “Will you come with us? Do you have plans?”

  They didn’t have plans, but years as Marshall’s wife had trained Marian to leave the response to him. Caroline might have escaped the censure he had directed at some of her other friends over the years, but Marshall was a man of unchallenged needs—the need, for example, to pursue that mythic Manhattan experience of the “quiet Sunday night at home.” Dinner with her childhood friend and the friend’s son, who owned a flower shop in Greenwich Village, might not conjure his best side, Marian was thinking, but Marshall had already taken Caroline’s arm, and the two began walking, with Caroline’s smart boots treading carefully on the uneven pavement. After an instant, Marian followed, grateful and excited in equal measures, though wondering if she and Caroline would be able to catch up properly with their audience of husband and son.

  “We’re going to Le Rouge,” Caroline was saying. “Do you know it? No reason you should, but Oliver likes it. He sent me on ahead to get a table.”

  “Not very gentlemanly,” Marshall commented, but with indulgence. He was talking to a mother, after all.

  “A client called as we were leaving. He was unhappy about something. Oliver had to take the call.”

  “Roses not white enough?” Marshall said.

  “I don’t know,” she said and laughed. “I guess we’ll find out when we see him.”

  But they didn’t see him, not for a while yet, and Marian nearly forgot him as they turned north up Bedford Street. Or was it west? Though she had lived in the city all her life the neighborhood was confusing to her, with streets taking off at odd angles, variously paved or cobblestoned, and while she thought them beautiful she also found herself unsettled at being off the grid of predictable Manhattan blocks. The sidewalk traffic was young and predominantly scruffy, and even the dogs were notably different from their uptown counterparts—larger, for one thing, and less readily distinguishable by breed. I
t struck her as remarkable that she could travel only a few miles from her ancestral home and feel such a foreigner, while Caroline, who had lived in the suburbs for years, seemed so acclimated. But Caroline was beautiful, Marian thought, had never not been beautiful, and beauty had a way of creating its own comfort zone. Strangely enough, Marian had never resented this about her.

  Le Rouge was unremarkable in appearance, a narrow storefront with a nod toward bistro décor and aggressively red walls. They took a table for four against a banquette and Marian slid onto the seat, with Caroline beside her and the empty chair across the narrow table. Marshall took their coats to hang up in the back.

  “You’re looking great,” said Caroline. “I’ve really missed you.”

  “Me too,” Marian said. “I got your letter. I have it on my bulletin board in my office.”

  “Oh, I’m glad. I just loved the book. Actually, everyone I know loved the book. I’ve acquired real cachet in Greenwich from knowing you. I’m actually supposed to invite you to come speak at the library.”

  “Done,” Marian said. “Just call me with a few dates. I’d love to come out and see your house. And Henry, of course. Maybe we’ll both come.”

  “Both come where?” Marshall said, returning and taking up the wine list, which he immediately frowned at disapprovingly.

  “To Greenwich. You remember Caroline’s husband. Henry?”

  “Of course,” he said, though Marian knew he didn’t.

  “I’ve been reading about his case,” Marian went on. “That woman he’s representing sounds impossible.”

  This was a discreet intramarital cue: We are talking about Henry Rosenthal, Marshall. Pay attention. And he did. He looked up from the wine list and kept silent, waiting for more information.

  “Oh, she is,” Caroline said. “And he’s something like her twelfth divorce attorney. She has a little problem accepting the reality of her situation.”

  “You mean that her husband wants a divorce?” said Marian.

  “No, not that part. She’s been divorced before, and she’s very strong. It’s about what she’s entitled to. They had a watertight prenup, for one thing, but she’s asking for twenty thousand a week to raise their daughter. And that’s joint custody.”