Ladies, please, she thought irritably.
It would be the last moment of the life she would afterward think of as “before.”
Then she retrieved them.
First, from Sally: “Hi, everyone. Still hearing from people how great it was, and a few late donations came in. We do have some stuff to go over, not too much—I think we can get to it all in an hour, ninety minutes tops. Amanda has kindly offered her home. Next Thursday at 9 AM work for all of us? 1195 Park, apartment 10B. Let me know ASAP.”
Then the school: “With sadness, we need to inform parents that one of our fourth graders has suffered a family tragedy. Counselors will be visiting all three fourth-grade classrooms tomorrow to talk with the students. We would like to request that everyone in our school community be mindful that sensitivity is required from all of us. Thank you. Robert Conover, Head of School.”
Which meant, thought Grace, exactly what? The statement—or e-mail, or announcement, whatever it was—had obviously been so worked over that what emerged was nonsensical. Clearly somebody was dead, but the somebody wasn’t the fourth-grade student. That, she thought, would not have been described as “a family tragedy.” And “family tragedies” had certainly happened before, at Rearden as anywhere else. Last year alone, two fathers in the middle school had passed away, one from cancer and the other in a private plane crash in Colorado; neither death had given rise to an e-mail like this. It has to be a suicide, Grace thought. A parent’s suicide, or possibly a sibling’s death, but not a sibling who went to Rearden—that, too, would have been phrased differently. The whole thing was, actually, highly frustrating. Why bother sending such an e-mail, which would only ignite speculation and endanger the very sensitivity being requested? If you’re not going to communicate anything, why send a communiqué?
Annoyed, she deleted the message.
From Sylvia: “Yes, I can do Thursday. Might be a few minutes late, must drop lovely urine sample at Daisy’s doctor that morning.”
From Sally: “Re: 4th grade family tragedy. Does anyone know anything?”
And she’s off, thought Grace, deleting.
From Sally again: “Grace, call me ASAP.”
From Sally again: “Grace, it’s Malaga Alves. Did you hear?”
This one, she did not delete. Instead, she read it again, and then again, as if it might change or at least make sense. Malaga Alves was “it”? What was “it”?
When the phone in her hand actually rang, she flinched and gripped it tighter, then held it up with an unsteady hand. Sylvia. She hesitated, but only for a moment.
“Hi, Sylvia.”
“Jesus, did you hear about Malaga?”
Grace took a breath. It seemed too much effort to detail what she knew and did not know. “What happened?” she said.
“She’s dead. I can’t believe it. We all just saw her on Saturday.”
Grace nodded. She was aware, briefly, of wanting to say all of the usual things and then just move on. She really didn’t want to know more, or care, or be wounded by the thought of the little boy in fourth grade or the baby who had nursed so extravagantly at the planning meeting a few days earlier. “What do you know?”
“The son … what’s his name?”
“Miguel,” Grace said quickly, surprising herself.
“Miguel went home by himself on Monday, after his mother didn’t show up. He found her in the apartment, with the baby. It’s so awful.”
“Wait—” She was still trying to sort these pieces and still wanting not to know. “Is … was the baby all right?”
Sylvia seemed to give this serious thought. “You know, I don’t know about that. I suppose so. I think we’d have heard, otherwise.”
Ah, Grace thought. So now she was part of an interested party called “we.”
“You got the school’s alert?” Sylvia said.
“Yes. I couldn’t really understand it. I knew it was something pretty bad, of course.”
“Well,” Sylvia said with heavy sarcasm, “it did use the word tragedy.”
“Yes, but … I don’t know. It sort of made a fire and then threw fuel on it. Why did they do it? I mean, this is incredibly sad, of course, but why didn’t they just come out and say that a fourthgrade parent had passed away? That’s what they did last year after Mark Stern died. I don’t think they brought in grief counselors.”
“That was different,” Sylvia said tersely.
“Was it a heart attack? Or an aneurysm? It must have been something sudden. She certainly looked very healthy the other night.”
“Grace … ,” Sylvia said. She seemed to be waiting for something. Later, Grace would decide that she had been indulging her own pleasure at bearing such bad news. “You don’t understand. She was murdered.”
“She was …” Grace couldn’t quite get her brain around this word. It came from paperback mysteries and the New York Post—neither of which, naturally, she read. People she knew, even as slightly as she knew Malaga Alves, did not get murdered. Long ago, the son of her family’s housekeeper, a Jamaican woman named Louise, had fallen in with a gang and murdered someone else. He’d been sentenced to spend the rest of his life in prison upstate, destroying his mother’s health and shortening her life. “That’s …” But she couldn’t say what that was. It was … “Oh, my God, that poor little boy. He found her?”
“The police were in school today, in Robert’s office. It was his decision to get the counselors in. I don’t know, do you think it’s the right thing?”
“Well, I certainly hope they’re not going to explain to the fourth grade that their classmate’s mother was murdered.” She took a moment to imagine this horrific prospect. “And I certainly hope the parents won’t be telling their kids.”
“Maybe not directly,” said Sylvia. “But you know they’ll hear about it.”
Grace, for her part, wanted very badly to stop hearing about it, but she could think of no way to bring this about.
“How are you going to tell Daisy?” she asked instead, as if Sylvia were the expert in human behavior and she were the one calling for advice, instead of the other way around.
“Daisy told me,” she said bluntly. “Rebecca Weiss told her. Rebecca heard from her mother, who heard from our friend Sally Morrison-Golden.”
“Crap,” Grace said automatically.
“So that’s the entire herd of cats out of the bag, basically.”
“You’d think … ,” Grace began, but there was no point in finishing.
“Well, I wouldn’t think. I expect very little of Sally, really. But it’s beside the point. Sally may have the emotional maturity of a middle schooler, and she may be a bitch, but she didn’t murder anyone. This would be devastating no matter who says what to whom. And it’s going to be a mess for all of us. Not just the kids. I’m thinking about the press—there’s going to be the whole ‘Private School Mom Murdered’ thing. Even though she wasn’t really a ‘private school mom,’ you know?”
Grace frowned. “You mean … Wait, what do you mean?”
She could hear Sylvia exhale in sharp frustration. “You know, Grace. Full-tuition-paying private school mom. A mom who is paying full tuition to Rearden at the price tag of thirty-eight thousand dollars per year. And yes, I know how bad that sounds, but it’s true. They’ll come gunning for the school, and then in the last paragraph they’ll write that her kid was low-income and on scholarship, but we still get to be the school where one of our parents was murdered.”
Grace noted that her irritation—with Sylvia for her selfishness, Robert for his histrionics, and Sally for the clear and unsettling fact that she was baldly disseminating the news—had now apparently elbowed aside her shock. This meant distance, and the relief that came with it.
“I don’t think that’s going to happen,” she told Sylvia. “Whatever caused this, it has nothing to do with Rearden. Really, I think we should wait until there’s actual information. We should be focusing on just being available to the kids, if they need
us. Not that either of our kids is going to be affected. But the fourth graders …” This was going to be a really profound thing for them, Grace thought, having the parent of a classmate die suddenly, let alone violently, and the effect of that would certainly ripple upward to the older kids, if not downward, where the younger ones would be (presumably, hopefully) shielded from the news. She thought for a moment of Henry, who had not experienced anything like this (Grace’s mother had died before he was born, and Jonathan’s parents were, while thoroughly absent from his life, at least alive). How to best handle things when he came home from school, today or tomorrow or next week, and said, “Did you hear this kid in fourth grade, his mom got murdered?”
“I’m sure the moms at Dalton are already calling each other up and saying, ‘It never would have happened here!’”
“But it didn’t happen here,” Grace reminded her. “We have no idea what Malaga’s life was like. I never heard one thing about her husband. He wasn’t there at the benefit, was he?”
“You kidding? The way she flirted with all those guys?”
“They flirted with her,” Grace corrected.
“Please.”
She sounded so bitter. Why did she sound so bitter? None of those guys had been her husband. She didn’t even have a husband!
Instead of saying any of this, she said: “But Malaga was married, right?”
“Yes. Well, according to the parent directory. Guillermo Alves, same address. Nobody ever saw him, though.”
How many people, Grace wondered idly, had Sylvia asked in order to produce this “nobody”?
“Did you ever see him?” said Sylvia.
“No.” Grace sighed.
“Yeah. It was always just her, taking the son to school every morning and sitting in the park with the baby, and then coming back in the afternoon.”
And with that, any distance evaporated, redepositing all of the awfulness—murdered mother, orphaned children, poverty (clearly, relatively), and sorrow—at her feet. This was a terrible, terrible thing. Did Sally, did Sylvia, understand how very terrible it was?
“Oh, I’ve got to go,” Grace said. “I hear my one o’clock patient coming in. Thanks for letting me know, Sylvia,” she said somewhat disingenuously. “Let’s try to sit tight till we hear from the police about what actually happened.”
“Of course,” said Sylvia, equally if not more disingenuously. And then, as if to drive the point home: “I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”
Grace pressed the button to end the call, then set down the phone. Her one o’clock had not, actually, arrived but would soon. Bizarrely, she wasn’t sure what to do in the interim. What she wanted, of course, was to talk to Jonathan, but she almost never called Jonathan during the day; his work was too turbulent in itself to be interrupted with trivial matters, and it wasn’t fair to make him worry that there was some emergency. But Jonathan wasn’t at the hospital today. He was in Cleveland, at an oncology conference, and probably had his phone turned off. Which meant that she could call and leave a message without fear of interruption. But what, really, was there to say?
Henry had programmed her phone with photographs: a violin for himself, a stethoscope for his father, a fireplace for their home line, a boat dock for the house in Connecticut. Grace’s father was represented by a pipe (though he hadn’t smoked one in years) and Rearden by the school crest. Everyone and everything else was an ordinary number; clearly, the images were the tent poles of Henry’s existence, and perhaps her own as well. She pressed the stethoscope and held the phone to her ear.
“This is Jonathan Sachs,” her husband said, the voice mail picking up right away. “I can’t answer your call right now, but I will get back to you as soon as possible. If this is an urgent matter, please call Dr. Rosenfeld at 212-903-1876. If you are experiencing a true medical emergency, please call 911 or go to the emergency room. Thank you.”
After the beep, she said: “Hi, sweetheart. Everything’s fine, but something came up at school.” She thought quickly. “Not—Henry’s fine, don’t worry. Just, when you get a chance, give me a call. Hope the conference is going well. You didn’t say whether you were getting back tomorrow or Friday. Just let me know so I can tell Dad and Eva if you’re there for dinner tomorrow. Love you.”
Then she waited, as if he might magically emerge from the other side of the voice mail, out of the cast-iron room into which these disembodied voices were sent to wait until they could be heard—trees falling in the forest, not yet making a sound. She imagined him in a bland but comfortable amphitheater in Cleveland, a bottle of water—provided by some eager drug company in the lobby—uncapped in the cup holder, making notes on a disappointing statistic from the latest trial of a once promising new drug. What was the death of an unknown adult woman—a person neither he nor his son even knew by sight—to someone who routinely tried to comfort children who might or might not know they were dying, and their parents, who always knew? It was like pointing out a smudge of grime to one of those “extreme cleaners” charged with shoveling filth and waste out of foul houses. She pressed the button to end the call and set down her phone.
Now she regretted calling. She regretted the childish impulse to ask him to say some magical thing and make it better. Jonathan, who carried around far more important things, should not be distracted from his own tasks because she needed—and why, again, should she need it?—some sympathy. Like anyone—like Sylvia, obviously—Grace was skilled at the human response of that-would-never-happen-to-me. A woman raped in Central Park? Of course it’s horrendous, but you have to ask, What was she doing going for a run at ten p.m.? A child blinded by measles? I’m sorry, what kind of idiot parents don’t vaccinate? Travelers robbed at gunpoint on a Cape Town street? You’re surprised? You were in Cape Town! But no clear indictment was presenting itself in the death of Malaga Alves. It had not been her fault that she was Hispanic and presumably poor. And it was certainly not a bad thing that she had managed to secure a scholarship for her child at one of the city’s best schools. That’s what scholarships were for! Where were they—where was Grace—supposed to insert the wall that separated her from this poor woman?
Luck. Plain luck. And money, which in her own case had also been luck.
She lived in the apartment she had grown up in, an apartment she could never have afforded at its current market value, and sent her son—who was probably no more, though certainly no less, bright than any of his classmates—to her own school, which looked kindly on the children of alumnae and which her own father had sometimes helped her to pay for, because the tuition was simply, mind-spinningly, high, and practicing psychotherapy and pediatric oncology were not efficient means of acquiring great wealth in the city of Wall Street. Filthy luck. Not like Sylvia, who might also have benefited from her alumnae status, but who worked like a fiend to send her brilliant daughter to Rearden and keep them both in a one-bedroom on York. I should be reaching out more to Sylvia, she heard herself think, as if she were the lady of the manor. Perhaps what she meant was that she ought to have reached out more to Malaga, but then again, maybe it was safe to feel that way now.
And now she really did hear the buzzer from the outer door and pressed the button on her intercom until the door clicked open. There was the sound of talking in the vestibule as the couple settled in the chairs there. She heard the hum of their voices, at ease and subdued, unusually so among her patients, who often came coiled to attack. These two were nice people, open to therapy, earnestly willing and earnestly trying, and she liked them, though they were both so deeply harmed by their early lives that she hoped, in some private way, they would come around to a decision not to have children. Some people should but couldn’t; others could but should not—it wasn’t fair, really. This couple, having found each other, were luckier than most.
She was not accomplishing anything sitting at her desk, staring at her phone, trying and failing to gain some toehold on what had just happened. Nothing prevented her from giving these extra min
utes to the woman and man waiting on the other side of her door—a gift, a gesture on her part. She could get up now, open the door, and greet them early. She could, she ought to, probably, but for some reason she didn’t, and the clock ticked forward as if nothing had changed, and Grace just sat there as if nothing had changed, because she wanted to and because she could. But not for much longer.
CHAPTER SEVEN
A BOUQUET OF USELESS FACTS
Henry was first violin in the Rearden Middle School orchestra, a secret he and his mother conspired to keep from Vitaly Rosenbaum, who technically forbade the influence of any other teacher over one of his students. Rehearsals were on Wednesday afternoons, after classes had ended for the day, and afterward he walked home alone, or at least alone with his cell phone. She worried, of course, but not terribly, because the city was safe now, and even if it weren’t, the Upper East Side was safe. And the phone—that made all the difference.
She made a couple of stops on the way home after her last patient: first to the Duane Reade on Lexington and 77th for gift envelopes (they used them for year-end tips for the doormen and superintendent), then to Gristedes for lamb chops and cauliflower, two items her son could be relied upon to eat. She had been thinking, as she rounded the corner to her building on East 81st, of boiling water and preheating the oven, and then of the name of this new doorman, who stood just outside the door, under the canopy (“The Wakefield,” it said), talking to two large men, one of whom was smoking, and then about whether the holiday bonus for a new doorman had to be the same as the bonus you gave to someone who had worked all year. Was that fair? And then, in the instant before the unnamed doorman looked up, and saw her, and pointed in her direction, and the two men also turned, and the one who was smoking tossed his cigarette (or was it a cigar? it looked tan or brown, like a thin cigar a woman might smoke, or might once have smoked) on the ground, and she thought: Pick that up, you jerk.
The Undoing Page 11