by Dan Pope
Benjamin had dated only one girl in high school, a day student like himself. Their romance had lasted a few months during his senior spring. She was a tall, green-eyed sophomore named Maureen O’Geary who favored gray corduroy pants. At night Benjamin would pick her up in his father’s Cadillac at her house in Farmington and they would drive to the public library to study. Afterward they would park at the mall or behind the town hall until eleven, her curfew; she had only one rule during these make-out sessions—that her corduroys remain buttoned. Despite his best efforts he’d never succeeded in violating this decree, although after three months those gray cords were loose around the waist. She’d broken up with him suddenly and vehemently for reasons he didn’t understand, and afterward she refused to speak to him.
From downstairs came the sound of his father clanging pots and pans. The old man was making dinner. Benjamin checked his watch: not yet 5:00 P.M. Leonard was getting to be an early diner in his old age. Although he wasn’t hungry yet, Benjamin put away the yearbook and went down to the table. Leonard had made hamburgers, mashed potatoes, and peas.
For dessert he served coffee cake. “You want another piece?”
“Sure. I’ll get it.”
“No. You did enough today, carrying all that stuff.” His father got up from the table and shuffled to the counter, his slippers scratching against the linoleum. “It’s a fine coffee cake. Look how it crumbles.”
Benjamin asked, “Have you started smoking, Dad?”
“No. Never. I never smoked a cigarette in my life. You know that.”
“I noticed a pack in the freezer.”
“Your mother’s,” he said without lifting his head. “Her last pack.”
Of course, Benjamin thought. He should have guessed. His father wasn’t getting senile, just more sentimental. This fact made Benjamin feel even worse about the information he had to impart.
“I have some bad news, Dad. Judy and I are getting a divorce.”
“She asked for a divorce? Judy did?”
“Yes.”
“And you can’t work it out like before?”
“I don’t think so. Not this time.”
Leonard exhaled, nodding slowly. “Have you told the kids?”
“No.” Benjamin had been putting off that task all day, dreading the inevitable, like a schoolboy before the first day of classes. He knew what would happen. Sarah would cry. David would take the news stoically, with barely a word.
“And this is final? This is your mutual decision?”
Benjamin nodded.
“I’ll give Brendan McGowan a call. He’s the best. You’ll need the best.”
McGowan had been his father’s lawyer since the sixties, when Leonard had first opened Mandelbaum Motors. “You need to act quickly on something like this,” said Leonard. “Freeze bank accounts. Put liens on property. There’s no going back once you take that step.”
Benjamin paused, feeling the weight of the decision. Once lawyers got involved, things became permanent. But this had been building for a while, he knew. The way Judy had ranted, she would never take him back anyway. “Yeah, okay,” he told his father. “Maybe you’re right.”
His father went off toward the front hallway, and a moment later Benjamin heard him dialing the rotary phone. Calling his lawyer already. That had always been his nature, to look out for his family above himself. At each whir of the rotary dial, Benjamin felt the weight of his own failure.
You’re just not equipped, Judy had screamed at him during their blowout the night before. She’d found a hotel receipt in his pants while doing the laundry. You’re never going to change, Benjamin. Ironically, this time he was blameless. He’d gotten drunk at an early business dinner in New Haven and had checked into the hotel across the street for five or six hours to sober up, before making the long drive back to Granby. She called him a liar. She said she didn’t believe a word of it. She said he was back to his old ways. She accused him of lacking some basic gene inherent in good husbands like Leonard. She said she was done. Finished with him. He raised his voice, calling her paranoid, and so on, the same long annoying rigmarole, the same petty complaints.
They first met in 1983. She had been hired as a secretary at Mandelbaum Motors, her first job out of high school: Judy Mariani, eighteen years old, in her short denim skirt, answering the phone at the front desk, tapping away at an IBM Selectric with her long, painted nails. She was tall, nearly his height, with a wealth of black hair, teased up to the height of eighties fashion. She was large in the chest and the behind, sticking out in both directions like the Vargas girls in his father’s Esquire. She had big, soft brown eyes. He didn’t know, then, what he was getting into—the extent of her ambition, the plan she had for her life and the role she needed him to play. She’d grown up in a two-family house east of the river, her three brothers living in the same bedroom, the whole family sharing a single bathroom, and she wanted something different for herself, something closer to the beautiful lives she saw on Dallas and Dynasty.
He was twenty-two when they married, she two years younger. He loved her with a sort of mania. He couldn’t get enough of her, her beautiful body, open to him. He found her seventh- and eighth-grade diaries and read them with fascination. He wanted to know everything: her first kiss, her first boyfriend, her first love. It was like pulling teeth, but he extracted from her a detailed history of her sexual life, and with that knowledge came jealousy. How could it bother him? she asked. Things that happened before he even knew her? She’d had a few boyfriends, so what? He couldn’t explain it, but it bothered him. It obsessed and enraged him. Which was odd, because he’d never been a jealous person and he was not jealous of the present Judy, his wife, Judy. He trusted her completely; he didn’t even mind when other men admired her in public, as long as they weren’t rude; he was proud to be seen with her. But the past Judy—that was another story.
What really burned him, and what Judy couldn’t dismiss as ridiculous, was her final boyfriend, an East Hartford fireman named Robert. The overlap burned him. That’s what Judy called it. He called it betrayal. At the start she had wavered between him and the fireman, going on dates with them on different nights. Without explanation she would disappear for a weekend. Later she would admit that, yes, she had been with Robert—at his house or away at some country inn in Massachusetts. Benjamin once found a photograph of the man in her wallet, a mustachioed guy in his thirties. It upset him to the point that he couldn’t say the other’s name; instead he said it backwards: Trebor. Were you with Trebor? Is that why you didn’t call me? He would drive by the fireman’s house in the middle of the night, sometimes spying Judy’s secondhand Volvo in the driveway. This went on for two or three months. It wrenched Benjamin’s heart, a pain wholly beyond anything he’d experienced during his teenage crushes, something close to unbearable. He would drink a six-pack to numb himself, just to be able to get to sleep. Then came his triumph over Trebor: Judy standing beside him at their wedding, him stomping on the glass in celebration. She belonged to him now.
As the years passed, they settled into their routines. He worked at the dealership. She stayed home. The kids came a year apart. They had their television shows. He had his beer, she her wine. When the kids left for college, a silence came between them. She nursed a list of complaints, which seemed to intensify over the years: He lied to her; he made her feel insecure; he watched porno movies after she went to bed; he disliked her family; he didn’t listen to her; he was passive-aggressive; he chastised her for spending money even though she rarely bought anything but necessary household items. In Benjamin’s view they fought about nothing; when there was no reason to be unhappy, they found a reason. I’m missing something, he thought. I’m living someone else’s life.
Maybe she was right; maybe he just wasn’t equipped to be a happy husband, or maybe he hadn’t tried hard enough. Judy, to be sure, was not an easy woman to get alon
g with, with her temper, her longing for nice things, her compulsion to be someone altogether different from her mother. Or maybe they had simply started out too young, with too much responsibility too soon. Still, the end felt wrong to him: wrong and too sudden, and for a nonreason; he was innocent; he hadn’t done a thing. But the result was the same: his marriage finished, his family broken.
At least this hadn’t happened while the kids were still living at home. David was a junior at the University of Tampa, quick and wiry, like his dad. Sarah was a sophomore at BU. They hadn’t had to witness the last couple of months of wordless dinners and door slammings, and they’d avoided the final drama of Judy screaming her head off in the driveway in her black panties and T-shirt, the same clothes she’d been wearing when she found the hotel receipt: “I never want to see your face again! Go! Get out!” She could keep the house in Granby—the Vulcan range and Sub-Zero refrigerator, all the Pottery Barn and Restoration Hardware furniture she’d stuffed into the place, the Williams-Sonoma kitchen gadgets, all of it—but not his dog. Yukon was the only thing he wanted from that house. She’d need a sheriff to get that dog away from him.
Benjamin went into the den and poured a scotch to stiffen his resolve. He would call David first, he decided. He might even put Sarah off until tomorrow. She was eighteen, as pretty as her mother, the same thick black hair, the same deep brown eyes. A beautiful girl. She’d always had boyfriends; they’d been coming around since she was in the seventh grade. He didn’t want to ruin her night. But before he finished adding ice cubes to his scotch, his cell phone was ringing. Speak of the devil.
“Daddy, is it true?” She was crying, her voice shaking. So Judy had already told them. At that moment Benjamin could see his daughter, her eyeliner running, her face contorted. Sarah hadn’t called him Daddy in years. Now it was Dad or Ben. Sometimes David called him Benji to be funny.
“Everything’s going to be okay, honey.”
“No, everything is not okay. Don’t tell me it’s going to be okay.”
Nothing was settled, they still might work it out, he told her weakly, not even convincing himself. What else could he offer his daughter but assurances? And if his wife did go through with it, as he knew she would, what then? Well, so be it, Benjamin decided. Look on the bright side. He would get his freedom, a chance to be himself again. Judy would find someone else; she was forty-two, fit and beautiful as always. But for Sarah and David, there would be no benefit; they would carry the rupture with them, their childhoods abruptly reconfigured, their sense of security shattered.
“We’re still a family. Nothing will change. You’ll see, honey.” But he wasn’t even sure she could hear him over her own sobs. His daughter had always come to him for consolation, not Judy. When playmates betrayed her, when boyfriends didn’t return her phone calls, he’d always been the one to calm her fears and heartbreak.
As his daughter cried, he refilled his glass.
* * *
A WEEK LATER a state marshal knocked at the front door. “Benjamin Mandelbaum?”
“Yes.”
He handed over some papers. “You’ve been served,” the man said.
He phoned her that night and at least ten times over the coming weeks, but she refused to answer. He told her answering machine:
It’s all a mistake, Judy. I didn’t cheat on you.
And:
Look, I know we have issues, but we should at least get the facts straight.
And:
Come on, Judy. Pick up the phone. We don’t need lawyers. We can be reasonable about this. We can go to a mediator. Lawyer bills are gong to cost us both a fortune. Let’s talk about this.
Talk he did, until her machine beeped and cut him off. Instead of calling back, she sent legal letters by certified mail. He even received a letter about Yukon, seeking return of the dog: Defendant has removed the family animal without permission to a new and unknown environment, causing emotional distress to Spouse, her lawyer had written.
That was the nature of divorce, he realized after a month of such frustration: You didn’t get to talk to your wife anymore. You didn’t get to justify or rationalize or talk your way out of trouble. You got served, and then the lawyers did the talking for you.
* * *
LEONARD MANDELBAUM usually said the same thing whenever his son asked for advice about some problem: Always go with the best. Leonard had learned that lesson from his own father, a haberdasher: You can never go wrong with the best. This was the credo he lived by. Back in the sixties, when Leonard opened the dealership with his life savings and loans from the bank, the best meant Cadillac. He had the sole franchise in East Hartford. If you wanted a Cadillac, you came to Mandelbaum Motors. Customers drove off the lot happy, and they were happy when they came back for oil changes and tire rotations—happy because Cadillacs worked; when you got behind the wheel and turned the key, the car started.
Over the years Leonard had many opportunities to expand. He could have acquired the Jaguar franchise in the early seventies, but he’d passed without giving it a second thought. Why? Because Jaguars broke down, because Jaguars meant trouble, and trouble cars—Saabs (“sob stories,” Leonard called them), Mercedes, BMWs—meant unhappy customers. Back then European cars were trouble, Japanese cars were junk. It had all changed since then, of course, and when it did, Leonard had branched out.
Mandelbaum Motors didn’t sell. That was Leonard’s other rule of business. Never use the hard sell. Customers didn’t trust car salesmen who chased them around the showroom, barking like carnival hucksters. Leonard purposefully kept the lot understaffed; he didn’t want his boys charging out the door with their hands out whenever some poor sap drove onto the premises. Just the opposite. You had difficulties finding a salesman at Mandelbaum Motors. You had to wait until someone had a moment to hand out a brochure, hop in for a test drive, quote you a price. Because Leonard Mandelbaum was no pitchman. You came into his office, he gave you his best price, you signed the papers, or not.
For thirty-odd years Leonard had been the first to arrive on the lot every morning, newspaper in hand. Days off didn’t sit well with him. He’d find himself restless and fidgety, even at the country club sitting by the swimming pool with Myra and the kids. “Go already,” Myra would tell him. “You’re making everyone crazy.” So he would drive out to East Hartford, get behind his desk, work the phone.
This went on into his golden years, even after Benjamin had taken the reins. His son knew the business from the ground up; he’d started in the car wash when he was thirteen. College hadn’t appealed to Benjamin. After two years in Pennsylvania he’d dropped out. His grades were so-so, even in economics classes, and Benjamin had always excelled in mathematics; his heart just wasn’t in it. He started full-time when he was twenty, and he’d married Judy a couple of years later. And ever since, father and son had worked side by side, through the difficult eighties, the roaring nineties. Afternoons they would lunch at Shelly’s Deli down the block, then return to their offices across the hall from each other. With his door open, Leonard could see Benjamin, feet up on his desk, fingers flying on the computer. Benjamin worked magic on that computer, bringing in out-of-state customers; once he even sold a fleet of Eldorados to Arabia.
But it all ended when Myra got ill. Leonard nursed her himself and left the house only when she insisted. “Get out of my sight, Leonard,” she would say. “Stop hanging over me like a vulture.” Four years she battled the cancer, holding on long past the time any doctor thought possible. Six months to a year, they’d given her. But they didn’t know Myra Mandelbaum. A stubborn woman, his wife. When it was over, finally, when she called it quits, the fight was gone from Leonard too. He hadn’t considered the possibility of outliving her. It had been a sticking point back when he’d courted her, their ten-year age difference. Her parents hadn’t liked the idea of her marrying an old man—he was thirty-seven at the time; they didn’t
want Myra being left to fend for herself in her old age. They needn’t have worried. Leonard had planned well: life insurance, disability insurance, stocks and bonds. All that was irrelevant now. He’d cashed in the insurance policies and transferred the securities to Benjamin and Sissi. He hadn’t planned to survive Myra, and after she was gone he didn’t know what to do with himself.
In time, he returned to the lot. But five years had passed and almost everything had changed. His first day back, he wandered the showroom, bewildered, looking for his office, which had been relocated when Benjamin renovated the building. His own familiar secretary had retired; new employees roamed the aisles, watching him with curiosity those first few days. Was he a customer? Someone’s uncle? There were new makes and models, new technology. But the biggest change was within Leonard himself: He had lost the desire to sell. What was the point? Benjamin had everything under control; the business was making more money than ever. His son assured him that they needed him—untrue, of course—but Leonard found it difficult to summon the energy to get dressed every morning and make the long drive across the river. To please his son, he came into the office on Friday afternoons, mostly just to have lunch with Benjamin like old times. But he didn’t sell, and people asked for him less and less. He’d outlived his customers, and the ones who were still breathing had no need for cars in their nursing homes and retirement communities. Leonard was a museum piece, like the 1955 red Coupe DeVille they kept in the front showroom. In some ways it was a relief not to be needed.