Good Riddance

by Elinor Lipman

  “Who’s Manuel?”

  “My super’s kid. He’s in his last year at Bronx High School of Science, which I understand is for only the smartest kids.”

  What Manhattan lifestyle expertise would be next? I said, “Call me when your shift is over.”

  “I’ll probably take another crew out. You wouldn’t believe how well they all get along.”

  “Come for dinner soon. My freezer can’t fit a fraction of my chocolate homework.”

  After a “Gizmo, no!” and a “Good boy!” my father said okay, soon, but he had to get off—he couldn’t handle the phone and the leashes.

  “Quick, though: This is a reputable company? They’re not taking advantage of you?”

  “Very reputable. Look them up: New Leash on Life. Gotta go.”

  I went straight to my laptop. Sure enough, www.newleashonlife.com featured smiling humans with adoring dogs. I clicked on the tab that said, “We’re hiring!” and read their screening questions. “Love furbabies? Like the outdoors and making your own hours? LOVE being greeted with excitement every day? And how do you feel about unconditional love?”

  Had an absence of unconditional love and an empty apartment turned Tom Maritch into a professional dog walker? Now I had something new to be answerable for.

  A Google alert under “Pickering, New Hampshire” brought the State House noise to Geneva’s attention and the person herself to my door. I’d ignored an earlier email marked with high-priority exclamation points and “Whaaaat the hellllll?” in the subject line. Below that, a link to a Concord Monitor story, dry and dignified, which had expanded on the reporter’s blog.

  I answered Geneva’s knock. There she was in traffic-cone-orange overalls and a houndstooth sports bra. “Did you read what I sent you? It’s about the guy who was at our table at the reunion—Armstrong? The good-looker. And the man who got arrested for trespassing—his name is Maritch.”

  Was she so self-involved that she’d forgotten our Thanksgiving dinner, where the Thomas Albert Maritch of the police log had been found charming and adorable by the entire table of ladies?

  I could’ve said, No, that’s a relative. But I said, “Yes, unfortunately, that was my father, your recent dinner guest.”

  “They arrested him, you know. Is he in jail?”

  I told her that he was released on his own recognizance due to his being a sterling citizen his entire life.

  “I want to talk with him. This could be my break.”

  Her break. How could I stand her? Would I have to move to another building? I told her, as I’d told everyone who’d called or written, that it was all a misunderstanding. Had she noticed how half-hearted, even embarrassed, the newspaper account had sounded, as if reluctantly reporting on a heterosexual bachelor senator’s love life? I could imagine the editorial ethics that the Concord Monitor had to debate—we’re not the National Enquirer so let’s keep it as dignified as possible.

  She reached into her bib pocket, removed her phone, and read, “Quote: ‘I was not involved with Mr. Maritch’s daughter. In fact, we’d met only once, at the most recent Pickering High reunion, where our conversation, if you could even call it that, was limited to establishing a memorial scholarship in honor of her mother, who’d been my yearbook advisor and mentor’ unquote.”

  She touched the screen with a decisive thumb, then returned the phone to her front pocket.

  I told her the whole thing was a misunderstanding, that the senator’s receptionist had overreacted—you know how touchy terrorism has made all of us—by summoning security. Yes, my father had been agitated, but it was politics. He was lobbying on behalf of the teachers’ union—some bill he didn’t like. Whatever arguments he was having with the senator were political.

  “Bullshit.”

  Quite rude but hard to refute, since every other word I’d uttered was fiction. She continued in a new, chummy tone. “I came away with a very strong sense that your senator was a lady-killer. And I think you did, too.”

  “Which applies exactly how to my dad?”

  “Your father was yelling at him for taking up with his daughter. I’m not so naïve that I don’t recognize a cover-up.”

  “By me?”

  “What you just told me—that he was yelling about union stuff.”

  I wasn’t the polished liar I hoped I was. Instead of apologizing for embroidering, I compounded it. We were still in my doorway. I told her I couldn’t talk for long, that I had a project in a double boiler, but, okay, if she insisted.

  Because I was spinning another lie, an even bigger one, I started with “This is totally off-the-record. Do you understand what that means? You cannot, under the sacred rules of the press, repeat this to anyone. Or put it into a documentary.”

  I could tell by the intensity of her squint and her moving a step closer that she was all ears. I said, “Okay. My dad was, in fact, warning Armstrong to stay away from his daughter, but it wasn’t me. It was a sister I never told you about.” And from nowhere, without any premeditated baby-naming effort whatsoever, I came up with “Samantha.” Yes, a Samantha who still lives in New Hampshire.

  “So he was warning him away from a daughter, just not you?”

  I told her I couldn’t talk. I had chocolate tempering, which was a delicate stage, even a critical one.

  “Is this sister married?”

  I hadn’t thought that far ahead. I combined a look with a half nod and half shrug that might have conveyed Sort of.

  “If that’s a no, what’s the big deal if two single people are hooking up?”

  “Age difference. Plus, he’s a lifelong bachelor. As you and I both know—always a red flag.” I repeated, “I have to go. I’ve probably already ruined the chocolate I was melting,” adding for good measure, “You’re never to mention this to my dad,” at the same time I was thinking, I’d better clue him in about made-up Samantha.

  “It still sounds fishy to me.”

  “What part?”

  “This is the father you brought to Thanksgiving, right? He struck me as a really sweet guy, not someone who’d get arrested over his daughter’s love life.”

  Her peculiar phrasing, “This is the father . . .” stopped me. Had I, in my state of shock on the ride back from the reunion, revealed something about my newly dual paternity?

  “Of course that’s the father I brought to Thanksgiving. What an odd question. I can’t help it if the truth sounds fishy. Isn’t that the way life works? I mean, who’d ever believe that someone would want to make a documentary out of a smelly high school yearbook?”

  I’d meant that as an insult, but she smiled as if I’d recognized her particular scouting genius. “Do you have Armstrong’s email address?” she asked.

  “I certainly do not.”

  “Didn’t he give you his card?”

  “Thrown out. I’m surprised you didn’t find it while foraging in the trash.”

  “Sarcasm will get you nowhere,” she said. She reached into her pocket, withdrew her phone, and tapped the bottom of the screen. “Got it,” she said.

  “Were you recording me? Isn’t that illegal? Isn’t that like wiretapping?”

  “Your chocolate,” she said, with a skeptical sniff of the air. “Better get back to your project.”

  I wasn’t actually tempering chocolate at that particular moment. Face-to-face with Geneva, all I did was fib.

  16

  Was This My Life Now?

  Geneva wasn’t the only person with a Pickering, New Hampshire, Google alert. My sister, as ever unapologetic about the time difference between West and East coasts, called just before midnight to ask in condescending fashion, “Did you know Dad was arrested?”

  Even half-asleep, my sibling rivalry kicked in. “Of course I did. He called me from the police station. You know how prisoners get one phone call, just like on TV? Well, I was his.”

  “Good for you. But mainly it’s this: Is he losing it?”

  “You mean is he getting senile? No! He wa
s wrongly arrested.”

  “It sounds as if he charged into the New Hampshire State House!”

  What to say and how much? I began with “Did I tell you I went to a Pickering High reunion?”

  “Don’t change the subject! Is he in jail? The article didn’t say—”

  “No, he’s not in jail. And I’m not changing the subject. I went to the reunion because—”

  “And Dad went with you? I thought he hated those reunions.”

  “No, he did not go. Please shut up. I’m getting to the senator he trespassed against, Peter Armstrong.”

  “And?”

  “So, upon my arrival, I was handed a note from Armstrong saying we’d be at the same table. I’m, like, Who’s he and why does he want—”

  “I don’t need the internal monologue.”

  “Okay. After the first course, he asked me to dance, and next thing I knew, we were out in the corridor—did I say it was the Knights of Columbus Hall?—where he told me he’d been in love with Mom since his senior year in high school. Then on Monday he sent me flowers, and Dad happened to be there when they arrived. Not good.”

  “And that’s why he burst into the guy’s office, because he sent you flowers? Unh-unh. Something’s missing.”

  It certainly was, such as my damn DNA. I’d never give up my spot as number one daughter, undoubtedly with Holly’s gleeful demotion of me to stepchild. I took a sip of two-day-old water from the glass on my night table before admitting, “I may have left out a critical part—that Dad knew about this crush on Mom, which caused some marital troubles.”

  “When? And what kind of trouble?”

  I needed an answer that wouldn’t comport with my exact age plus nine months. “When Mom was young. Before she was married, I think.”

  “That doesn’t sound like Dad—being jealous of a boyfriend Mom had before they were married.”

  “I think Dad suspected the crush wasn’t one-sided.”

  “And the flowers meant what?”

  “A romantic gesture, therefore creepy.”

  “A romantic gesture toward you?”

  I didn’t acknowledge the incredulity in her voice. “As you well know, I look a lot like Mom. So you can connect the dots—he’d been in love with Mom since he was seventeen, and then I show up like he was in some kind of time warp.”

  How was that going over? Not well. Holly said, “Dad would’ve laughed about a student having a crush on Mom. I don’t get the anger part.”

  “Well . . . she went to every reunion that class ever had. And there was that stupid yearbook she had under lock and key.”

  Did I have to bring that up? Because Holly’s next request was for me to overnight it.

  “No can do.”

  “Use our FedEx account. I’ll give you the number.”

  “It’s not the postage. I don’t have it anymore.”

  Holly waited. Surely I’d be explaining where it was and how soon I could retrieve it. I said, “I threw it away during a decluttering phase . . . What did you want it for?”

  First, a lecture: How could I? Was I that unfeeling, knowing Mom wanted me to have it even if we didn’t understand why? Finally: “I want to see what Armstrong wrote to Mom.”

  “He didn’t write anything.” Except dots that probably meant something and an ancient phone number.

  “And his picture? Was he good-looking?”

  I possessed no compassion for—or loyalty to—the man, but she was talking about half my DNA. “Exceptionally good-looking,” I said.

  I confess that I’d been picturing myself in a potential documentary, musing about my life, going deeper, interpreting my mother’s actions and motives. I wasn’t proud of myself for having these filmic daydreams, projecting like a high school glee club soloist crooning into a hairbrush. Even as I resisted Geneva and her cockamamie plan, I’d fallen asleep conducting thoughtful, nuanced analyses of my mother’s moral fiber. One thorny contradiction: As I was growing up, she was never anything but devoted and normal, always interested in me, my friends, my homework; willing to stay up late to proofread my book reports, sew my Halloween costumes, bake for the bake sale. Might the documentary include the home movie of her running alongside me, as best she could, straight from school, in a pencil skirt and heels, laughing and cheering the first time I rode my bike without training wheels?

  I did have this to contribute under the heading “Negatives”: If your mother is a teacher and your father is a principal in a town with one high school, you’re going to be crouching in the back seat of the car, begging to be dropped off a block or two early. And it didn’t take a psychic to guess that my friends’ clamming up when I approached their table at lunch was because they’d been discussing Principal Maritch or second-period American Lit with Mrs. Maritch.

  Might this be of interest to an audience—that my mother had grown up in Derry, New Hampshire, where her physician father served two terms as mayor? And would this induce a much-needed moment of levity: that the surname Winter inspired the doctor and his wife to name their three daughters for the months in which they were born? May, called Masie, came first, then June two years later, and finally my Aunt Augusta.

  These model daughters went to church, to Sunday school, to Brownies, Girl Scouts, 4-H, ballet, piano, baton. All three went to public schools, which looked good in their father’s campaign literature, then to New Hampshire state colleges, with small weekly allowances meant to teach them the value of a dollar.

  I debated whether or not I could riff on this possible paradox: my mother’s prudishness in light of the infidelity factor. She nursed several grudges related to other people’s perceived promiscuity, out of step with the 1960s and ’70s. Did I have an example? Yes. There was the college friend with whom she shared a cabin on a three-night cruise to Virginia Beach. My sister and I were made to understand that the friendship ended because of a shipboard romance—“romance” a euphemism for the friend’s enthusiastically losing her virginity.

  Why tell her daughters this unless it was a morality tale? We heard that the friend had disappeared two of the three nights, her bed untouched. Unapologetically! It hadn’t been a long-term boyfriend, but someone she’d merely danced with the first night. The ship was called the Alice Roosevelt, seemingly an important part of the retelling for the rest of my mother’s life, adding presidential dignity to the voyage lest we think it was a love boat. Had she ever mentioned that the mayor of Darien, Connecticut, and his wife were aboard? Only about a million times. And that my mother, proud daughter of Derry’s mayor, analogous on a smaller, locally elected level to Alice Roosevelt Longworth herself, had dined at their table all three nights?

  I’d never say it on the record, but now that I knew about my illegitimate life, I realized what a good actress my mother had been.

  Another few days passed without hearing from my dad. Was this my life now, worrying about our relationship, treading lightly or not at all? I reached him with the evening news blaring in the background. “Let me turn the sound down,” he said. “There. How’s the chocolate business?” he asked.

  “So far it’s just homework. Still learning. But you sound good. Everything under control?”

  “If you mean up north, it’s over. Julian sent a nice young woman, an associate in his firm, to represent me in court—”

  “Court? You had your hearing?”

  “I told you they wanted me back in a week. The judge dismissed the case. Armstrong dropped the charges.”

  Had we just entered a more relaxed zone where I could work my way toward Samantha the fictional daughter? I decided I could, figuring better me than Geneva catching him off guard with a camera in his face. “By the way, if you get a call from Geneva and she mentions a third daughter named Samantha, just nod and change the subject.”

  “Whose third daughter?”

  “Yours but imaginary. Geneva was snooping around after too much Googling and picked up on the fact that you warned Armstrong to keep away from your daughter.
So I made one up to throw her off the scent.”

  “You can be a little loose with the truth, Daff. Was that necessary? That project of hers will never see the light of day.”

  Considering the powder keg that was the dual topic of Armstrong and Geneva, I didn’t expect his follow-up to be a cheerful “We have ourselves a funny coincidence.”

  “Which part?”

  “The name.”

  For a worried few seconds, I thought, Please don’t tell me I knew on some primordial level that there really is a daughter named Samantha. “In what way the name?”

  “Okay, a piece of news: I met a nice lady.”

  “Named Samantha?”

  “No! But her pooch is named Sammi, a female; Sammi with an i.”

  “One of the dogs you walk?”

  “We call them clients. Yes, three afternoons a week, increasing to five starting Monday.”

  Was it my job as his romantic consultant to point out that a business relationship doesn’t necessarily go off-leash? “How nice,” I said.

  “She’s invited me in for coffee when I bring Sammi back. More than once.”

  “And?”

  “Unless I have another client with me, I stay. And lately it’s been a glass of wine or sherry.”

  “This is good. Not married, I assume?”

  “Never married!”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Kathi with an i.”

  “How old?”

  “Fifty.”

  “She volunteered that?”

  “She served leftover birthday cake last time. Hers. ‘The big five-o,’ she told me.”

  “Fifty’s young.”

  “If you mean too young for me . . . she knows my age.”

  “Does she know you were recently arrested?”

  “She does. I told her the truth after she told me she was worried that Sammi got a substitute walker on Wednesday.”

  “And that didn’t shock her?”

  “No! Just the opposite. I told her that my late wife had had an affair and that the man had met my daughter and was making overtures so I asked him to keep his distance. I think she found it a little heroic, especially the arrest part, like it was an act of civil disobedience.”