by Kate Ledger
She dropped the handle of the hairbrush into the trash and dried her face, now cool. Her hands were steady; she was no longer angry. What was there to do about any of it, the piercing, the fighting? Nothing. Noticing water rings on the countertop, Emily rubbed at them with her towel. If they could go back to the beginning of Jamie’s life, start over from scratch, she might be able to do a better job. She would keep her mouth shut more, let Jamie lead, find a way to be more gentle. Jamie knew she was second-born, of course, though Caleb’s name seldom came up for any reason. Things were what they were now. Emily patted a puddle of melted goop from the bottom of the soap dish and peeled cellophane from a fresh bar. She looped two fresh new cream-colored hand towels through the silver rings on either side of the double sink and sifted new petals into the bowl of potpourri. She ran the shower to steam the mirrors. With a swath of toilet paper, she mopped stray hairs from the eggshell tiles of the floor. She picked up the piece of granite, and she fitted it back into the edge of the countertop. Superglue would hold it in place. You wouldn’t even notice it. Looking up, she found Simon standing behind her, framed in the doorway, and she jumped.
“I didn’t hear you come upstairs,” she said. She closed the checker-sized chip of countertop in her fist, blocking the gap with her body.
“Long day.” He looked tired, but his eyes shone with a happy, satisfied gleam. He so thoroughly enjoyed being useful, sometimes she thought he might be in the grip of something like an addiction. “Many patients, many problems.”
Many problems, she thought. Would he consider Jamie’s home-piercing salon a “problem”? She decided not to mention it. He was masterful at being unencumbered by problems, championing the rationales of “What’s the big deal?” and “If it makes her happy.” It wasn’t fair. All of his blithe doting made her feel all the more like the bad guy. She thought about telling him about Will, running into him in the street after twenty-four years, but decided not to.
“Your mother called,” she said instead, remembering, as he turned and headed into the bedroom. “Charles apparently banged up the car.”
Simon sat on the bed, taking off his shoes. He shook his head. “I was telling them the last time we were down there that he shouldn’t be driving. What time did you get home?”
“He’s fine, apparently,” Emily continued. “The car’s banged up, and they’re checking him over at the hospital, but he’s fine.” She could still hear Lucille’s dismissive voice reiterating, He’s fine. “Lorraine left a casserole in the fridge. You can nuke it.”
Simon looked surprised. “They took him to the hospital? Did he hit his head?”
“Lucille just said he’s fine. The nurse was there. She had to go.”
He was shaking his head. “Where’s the number? I’ll call them.”
“No number. She kept saying he was fine. They had everything under control, that’s what she said. I don’t think she wanted us involved, to be honest. Like before, remember?”
Simon ran his fingers through his hair, which he did when he was frustrated. “When you said he banged up the car, I thought you were talking fender-bender. I thought maybe he cracked a headlight. But they’re looking him over at the hospital?”
“He was trying not to hit a dog,” she explained. “Don’t get huffy at me. I’m telling you everything I know. And Lucille said she’d call back. Otherwise, there was nothing to tell.”
He pressed, “What hospital? That’s no bang-up, you realize. That’s a car accident.”
“She said ‘mishap.’ Really, you’re making this much more than it is. You were downstairs, Simon,” she said, chastising. “I was waiting for you to come up.”
But Simon had already turned down the hall. She heard him sit at the computer in the library, already online to figure out the possible Fort Lauderdale hospitals. Then she heard him calling operators. Technically, Charles was his stepfather. Charles had adopted Simon as a baby—Emily had heard the story just once from Lucille, how Charles had married her even though she was a ruined woman. (It was absurd how Lucille had clung to the idea of being ruined, but that was a notion from another generation.)
“What’s the number for the main operator?” Simon asked the person on the other end of the phone.
Emily came to the door of the library and stood with her arms crossed. “She said she’s got everything under control,” Emily interrupted. She felt certain about what Lucille had communicated. “Shouldn’t we respect that?”
“You do?” Simon was saying into the receiver, ignoring her. “Very good. Can you tell me what room number please? This is his family physician”—she winced as he lied—“from Baltimore. Yes, thanks, you can transfer me.”
Emily left as his call was connected to the private room. She could hear him grilling Lucille with questions, his tone growing increasingly impatient. Of course Lucille didn’t know Charles’s blood counts, couldn’t report oxygen readings, couldn’t even remember which rib was broken. Simon’s voice rose until he began to sound like he was talking to a very stupid child. “What do you mean you don’t know what kind of break it was? I don’t understand. Hit his head? Well, did they do a CT? What do you mean you don’t know what tests they’ve done so far?”
For someone who made frequent speeches about empowering his patients, Simon sounded unduly reproachful, she thought. Lucille and Charles were staunch, independent people, boastfully self-reliant. When they’d moved to Fort Lauderdale, they’d refused help, even to pack their belongings. They hated to be the object of anyone’s fussing. She heard a door close down the hall as Jamie made some mysterious movement from one room to the next, and Emily listened but didn’t move. The image of the taut skin around her navel returned, along with a wave of revulsion. Have your revolution, she thought. She looked back at Simon and then returned to the bedroom, sat in front of the vanity and reached for the cream to remove the makeup from her eyes, the foundation from across her cheeks. Then, carefully, in small circles, she began applying moisturizer to her face. Her skin was so dry, the ginger-scented cream seemed to disappear instantly. Will had said she looked the same as she always had, but he must have been saying it to be polite. All those lines, so weathered-looking. Finally, Simon entered the bedroom.
“They have no information,” he said, annoyed. “They don’t know what they’re doing. They’re like sheep, and they’re letting the system herd them around.” His fingers raked his hair again as he got worked up. “I knew he was driving badly the last time we visited. That bastard never listens to anything I say.”
“This is a molehill you’re turning into a mountain.” With a pinky-tip, she worked the moisturizer into a small circle at the edge of her eye. “You’ve got to let them do their thing.”
“He wrapped his car around a pole. He could have died.”
“But he didn’t,” she said, with a grim smile. “He’s hardly dead at all.” She continued smoothing cream across her forehead, but she felt herself flush. He was standing in the middle of the room with his mouth agape. “What?” she asked innocently.
“You’re not taking this seriously.”
“All I said was, we should respect their space.”
Then he made a decision. “We should all go down there. As a family. To support them and help them figure out what’s what. Nobody should be in the hospital without an advocate. I’m a doctor, for chrissake.”
“Jamie won’t want to go,” Emily said slowly. “And I have meetings I really shouldn’t miss.” Oh, horrible hospitals, the movement of the carts, the beds, everything on wheels, nothing anchored down. She hated waiting around so long it felt like you were hanging on each other, like you were breathing in the air you’d only just breathed out. She was not one for blood and gore, for weepy scenes or melodrama. She’d had quite enough of hospitals for a lifetime, she felt. And in the back of her mind, she realized, if they made the trip to Florida, she would not see Will on Thursday. He would return to Philadelphia and they would have no cause to meet. She recognized
suddenly, with a tingle of alarm, that she was curious. Who was the woman he’d married finally? What had he named his daughters?
“Three years ago,” she pointed out to Simon, “I had to remind you to call him when he had his prostate biopsy.”
“This is different.”
The timing was terrible, but Simon would need her in Florida simply to mediate. His parents didn’t understand his forcefulness. In fact, they were visibly put off by his declarations, his conviction of his own importance. He, too, didn’t understand what would help them. Ultimately, however, you couldn’t argue with someone intent on going to great lengths in order to help. Instead, if you understood your role and your particular skills, you chipped in. You did whatever you could to facilitate the goodwill. Not to help, it seemed, would be heartless.
They made their way to Baltimore/Washington International Airport the next morning just after dawn. Was it proof of whose will was stronger, she wondered as she looked out the massive windows of the airport, or was it something else, a shared sense that death had been near, nearer than was comfortable, nearer than they cared to believe? There was no way to prepare mentally for a hospital visit. She had already visualized Charles’s injuries, contusions, bruises, puckered stitches, lost teeth, sunken lips, jaundice, the shock of sudden age that comes with trauma. She knew she was right about how best to help Lucille and Charles—to stay away—and yet she would never be able to persuade Simon. The best thing to do, in fact the only thing, was to make the trip all together, keep it short and under control. She canceled her meetings for Wednesday and Thursday. She had no idea how to reach Will to let him know she wouldn’t be able to meet, and she regretted that he would get the impression she had either gotten cold feet or simply didn’t care.
Standing at check-in, noting that their tickets were grouped two and one, Simon overheard that a seat in first class had come available. Before Emily could say anything, he cajoled the ticketing agent into an upgrade for the single seat. “There really is a difference,” he said, holding out the boarding pass for Emily to take. Any other person, it seemed, would have tried to arrange having three seats together, even asking other people to move out of their row, but he found a way to turn the seating on a plane into a theatrical gesture. She realized resisting would only sound stupid, if she tried to explain that first class felt like she was being exiled. In his typical unconcerned way, he said he’d enjoy sitting with Jamie in the back of the plane. Emily took another glance at Jamie, who glowered. Emily reached out and, without a word, accepted the boarding pass.
Jamie had been surprisingly nonresistant to the idea of the last-minute trip and had packed an overnight bag quickly and without a word. But in the airport her attitude was belligerent again. Like a grudging pet, she trailed a step behind them as they moved toward the line to board. Emily first looked for signs that she was suffering from the freshly pierced navel and was about to ask her how it was healing, but Jamie’s scowls were so forbidding, Emily decided not to mention it. Pushed away, that was what she was. Jamie had made the declaration: It wasn’t Emily’s body to worry about.
“Remember,” Emily leaned into her as they took their places, “this trip is about doing what we can for Charles. And Lucille.” The reminder seemed as much for herself as for Jamie.
“Yeah, so?” Jamie shrugged.
She had a thought to say something about how things could take a turn quickly, people—however you felt about them—could be gone before you said boo and it was worth at least realizing that. That it was important to make an effort. But Jamie’s insolence made her start and what came out was, “So stop glooming around, and try to look like you care.”
Jamie released a long, thin stream of air. They watched a far window, where a jet had just taxied up to another gate, and the accordion walkway stretched out to meet it. Simon, apparently oblivious of Jamie’s mood, recounted the story (for the billionth time) of the flight when he’d had to administer insulin at thirty-five thousand feet to a passenger who’d gone into diabetic shock. The airline had sent him a fruit basket. By the time they were on the plane, she was glad for the peace and the distance of her solo seat. She settled herself and looked out the window. The man in the seat next to her had an amplitude of fat in dimensions Simon might refer to as morbidly obese, and he was making low noises in his throat. He slumped low with his legs stretched out and mixed his own Bloody Mary. He wore long, carefully trimmed sideburns and large princess-cut diamond stud earrings in each ear.
“I’ll take another-a these,” he urged the stewardess, waggling the empty baby-sized bottle of vodka between two thick fingers.
For a split second, Emily and the stewardess locked commiserating gazes. Though the woman’s expression remained pleasant, Emily was certain she read the annoyance that flickered deep in the retinas of the woman’s eyes. It was the stuff and substance of Emily’s livelihood to understand such moments, how people presented themselves and how they were being received. Quite often, multimillion-dollar reputations were at stake. Right now, she was in charge of a case involving the Bandy nut company, accused of using water potentially contaminated with pesticide residue. Protests had ensued, some senators had called for bans of Bandy products. Boycotts of peanut products raged in several states. Frith had been consulted to navigate relations between the company and the public and to win back the confidence of nut consumers by restoring trust in the Bandy brand name. She had approved a plan for the project: There would be committees to establish scientific, point-by-point rebuttals to the charges. Laboratory tests would prove the contamination was negligible. Her deputies would consult with a federally funded environmental agency. She herself would call for a task force to investigate pesticides as a broader problem facing the food industry. They’d learned from the mistakes of other companies. You had to face these crises with your head up, whether you were culpable or not. Attitude was everything. If you appeared to be making a noble effort, people were inclined to assume the best.
It was not a career she’d ever anticipated. She’d once strived to do something artistic in the footsteps of her famous father. Everyone—whether they knew him or had only heard of him—regarded Al St. Bern as a creative genius. He represented near-royalty of the American kind, self-made, bold, eccentric in a way necessary to make things happen. His empire had germinated in 1949 in a cramped shoe store and repair shop on the Lower East Side. He was Alvin Bernstein then, and his store carried a respectable collection of both popular and designer footwear. What the place was famous for, though, was the mannequin in the window, a doe-faced, elegant female figure with lifted, lithe hands, her bearing almost too elegant for the strong smell of epoxy and shoe polish that pervaded the store. The cleverness of the mannequin was that she was privileged to wear a new ball gown each week, and a new pair of fine shoes with each one. People stopped at the window of the little shop just to see her latest attire. The family referred to her as Queen Esther. When the delivery arrived, on loan from Brettelheim’s on Seventh or Zeiselman’s on Broadway in exchange for a sign in the window, she or Aileen would alert their parents: “Queen Esther’s dress is here,” and then hover as Al or Judith tore away the wrapping to see what she would wear the following week. “She’s a practical woman at her core,” Al would repeat to his daughters or any customers who commented on her outfit, “but the right shoes make her fit for a king.”
All those years, even Emily perceived their station in life was only temporary; they were en route to larger fortune and greater fame. In 1970, when Emily was ten and Aileen sixteen, Al Bernstein moved the shop to a site just off Park Avenue, a bright store with a large, honey-colored show-room and velvet-cushioned seats for people to sit on as they sampled sizes of immodestly expensive shoes. Remaking the store, he also remade the family. He relieved his wife of her bookkeeping duties and set her out to do volunteer work and participate in civic projects, as he imagined a socialite would. A woman named Pearl was hired to take orders and keep track of the paperwork. He s
hortened the family name to Bern—and then changed it again to St. Bern. They moved to the Upper East Side, quit B’nai Yisrael shul, left the Hadassah group, dropped out of Sunday morning Hebrew school classes, stopped ordering from the kosher butcher and, almost overnight, shed all signs of being Jewish.
“We’re what?” a teenaged Aileen had shrieked. She had entered a stage of life in which she hated anything and everything phony.
“Unitarian,” Al St. Bern declared. “It fits us better.”
Emily had asked Aileen in private what the change was about since they didn’t go to synagogue anymore and they didn’t belong to a Unitarian church. “Because there are no Jews in New York’s social elite,” Aileen spat. The new identity might have meant a beginning for Al, but it staggered Emily. It was not clear where to side, with the erratic or with the anger, but Emily perceived the rift for the first time: Aileen was drifting from the family.
The new boutique advertised special imports from Paris and Argentina. Its location made it a popular shopping destination for wealthy women, actresses and politicians’ wives. But in 1974, the year Emily turned fourteen (by then Aileen was away from home, a sophomore at Wellesley), he sold the store and launched his ultimate empire: St. Bern Design. High heels, open toes, closed toes, sling backs, pumps, mini boots, thong sandals, moccasins with heels. He hobnobbed with the editors of Vogue and Cosmopolitan. He slept in the stairwells of downtown office buildings, so that in the morning he could push his designs with executives at Chanel. Not until she moved away did Emily consider that he’d been in the grip of a kind of mania during those years, that there might have been something odd, erotic and unwholesome in his obsession with footwear and his craze for upward mobility. There were down times, too. He would yell abusively at anyone in his path, or retreat into his office and refuse to eat, hardly showing his face for days at a time.