The Undoing

by Jean Hanff Korelitz

  “No,” Amanda said somewhat importantly. “Only for the fourth grade. Only for the kids in Miguel’s class. Like Daphne,” she reaffirmed. “Daphne said they sat in a circle and talked about Miguel and what they could do to be especially nice to him when he comes back.”

  “If he comes back,” said Sally, stating the obvious.

  “God,” said Linsey, who had fished a pair of sunglasses from her Birkin of the moment (a fuchsia ostrich) and was looking up toward the school steps. “Did you see those guys?”

  Grace looked. Her two friends from yesterday, the Irish and Hispanic duo from the lobby, were talking to Helene Kantor, Robert Conover’s second in command, just outside the main door. Neither of the men was taking notes, but they were doing a lot of nodding.

  Mendoza, Grace said, though not aloud. Mendoza of the neck fat.

  “You talked to them?” Grace asked instead.

  “Yesterday morning,” Sally said. “They called to ask about the benefit, and the committee and whatnot. Of course I would have called them, but they came to me first.”

  The friend whose name Grace didn’t know said: “What did you tell them?”

  “Well, obviously, that she came to a committee meeting at my house, and what happened at the benefit on Saturday.”

  What did happen? Grace thought, frowning.

  “What do you mean, ‘what happened’?” Amanda asked helpfully.

  “Well, don’t you think it matters that she had about ten men inhaling her at the Spensers’? I don’t think that’s insignificant. I’m not saying she did anything to invite it. This isn’t ‘Blame the Victim,’” Sally said defensively. “But if it helps them figure out who did this to her, isn’t it important?”

  “Who did it?” Linsey looked appalled. “What are you talking about? The husband did it! He’s vanished, hasn’t he?”

  “Well,” said the woman whose name Grace didn’t know, “you know, it could be a drug thing. Maybe some drug cartel was after the husband and they came looking for him and found her. So he’s in hiding somewhere. He’s from Mexico! That’s all drug violence down there.”

  Not Mexico, Grace thought grimly. Colombia. But if it came down to drug cartels, she wasn’t sure any of them knew the difference.

  She had had about enough, and she started to look around for an escape. The courtyard was covered by these knots of mothers, all—she supposed—exchanging similar shards of non-information. There was very little of the usual merriment going on—that was good. But at the same time, there was something definitely off-putting about the general mood. Note had been taken of the tragedy, concern had been expressed over the needs of their own children, and now, with those preliminaries behind them, Grace was detecting a whiff of actual excitement. The news van was outside on the street; it had to stay outside the school enclosure, but they—the mothers—were inside. As a group, of course, they were not unused to being insiders. They were accustomed to being ushered to their tables and having their phone calls taken. They were accustomed to getting their kids accepted by the city’s best schools, and circumventing the waiting list by ordering through a personal shopper, and driving through the gate of the high-security development with just a friendly wave at the guard. But Grace supposed that very few of them had ever been on the business end of a criminal investigation, and now they were—close enough to the action for the frisson of attention, but not close enough to be, themselves, of interest to the police. It was a rare opportunity for them, a rare … perspective. They were making the most of their moment.

  Then someone was saying her name.

  Grace turned. Sylvia was at her elbow. Grace had not noticed her in the crowd.

  “Did you see Robert? He was looking for you.”

  “Oh?” she said dully. “What for?”

  But she realized that she knew what for. Robert, understandably, was reaching out to the mental health professionals in the parent community, for advice. She wished he’d done it before calling in the counselors and alarming the entire community with his cryptic e-mail.

  “I don’t know,” Sylvia said. “This, I imagine.”

  “I imagine,” she agreed. “Well, I can talk to the kids if he wants.”

  “He said he might open up the back alley tomorrow,” Sylvia said.

  The alley ran between the street and the playground area behind the school and was sometimes used during fire drills. Grace had never known it to be deputized as an alternate entrance. Desperate times, she thought.

  “Oh, I’m sure things won’t get any worse than this,” she told Sylvia. “It’ll calm down. It’s not about the school.”

  “I hope you’re right.” Sylvia shrugged.

  Grace left the scrum of mothers and went into the lobby, then upstairs to the administrative floor. The walls of the stairwell were covered in student artwork, framed class photographs, and posters from the musicals and plays dating back to Grace’s own time at Rearden. Passing one, she glanced automatically at a preadolescent version of herself in costume for her seventh-grade production of The Gondoliers (she had been in the chorus), and she noted for perhaps the hundredth time how sharply the straight line of her middle-parted hair stood out, very white against her very dark braids. She could not remember the last time she had braided her hair. Or parted it.

  His heavy oak office door was open a bit, but she knocked on it anyway. “Robert?”

  “Oh—” He nearly leapt up from the desk. “Good. Oh, good, did Sylvia find you?”

  “Downstairs.”

  “Oh.” He looked a little confused nonetheless. “Why don’t you shut the door.”

  She did, then sat in one of the chairs on the other side of the desk. Inevitably, she thought of being summoned to the principal’s office. Though she never had been, either as a student or as a parent. She had always been dutiful and rule-abiding, and so had Henry.

  After a moment in which he seemed, weirdly, to have forgotten what he wanted to see her about, she said, more to help him out than anything else: “This is a terrible thing.”

  “Awful.” He sat, oddly not looking at her. “How are you?”

  Grace frowned. “Oh, fine. I barely knew her, but you were right to try to get on top of this right away.”

  She did not mention the e-mail. If he wanted to know whether he should have handled things differently, he would ask her.

  He didn’t ask her. In fact, he didn’t seem to be asking her anything.

  Finally, she said: “Do you want me to talk to the kids? I don’t normally work with children, but I’d be glad to help if you need more hands.”

  Robert looked at her directly for the first time. “Grace,” he said, “you know, the police were here.”

  She sat up a little in her chair. “Well, I assumed. I assumed they came to tell you what happened.” She said this very carefully. Very deliberately. But he still looked at her as if he were grasping for some basic meaning. Is he losing it? she thought. He was so altered from the easy, triumphant, slightly drunk Robert she had chatted with on Saturday night. How many days ago was that? She counted back. Not many. He looked traumatized. Well, she reminded herself, of course he did.

  “We’ve had a number of conversations, actually.”

  “About her son?” Grace frowned. “Miguel?”

  He nodded. A ray of morning sun happened to catch his hair in just the wrong way, making his scalp shine through. Poor Robert, she couldn’t help thinking. It’s going to go fast. And you have such a pretty face.

  “They were very interested in Miguel’s financial arrangement with the school,” said Robert. “About his scholarship.”

  “Well, that’s bizarre,” she said, thinking: And so is this conversation. “I mean, why should they care about his scholarship?”

  He pursed his lips, looking at her. He seemed genuinely at a loss.

  “Grace,” he finally managed, “I hope you understand that I need to cooperate fully with the police. I may not understand the methodology, but I’m not in
control of this situation.”

  “Okay,” she said, baffled. “I’m … I can’t imagine how the school’s system of awarding scholarships is relevant, but like you said, they’re in charge.”

  “Miguel’s scholarship was not a conventional arrangement for us. It wasn’t set up through the usual channels.”

  Oh, my God, she thought wildly, abruptly locating her inner adolescent self: Ask me if I care! Then, because she had no rational response to this, she just put up her hands.

  Now he was merely looking at her. He looked and looked, as if he, too, had lost the very slender chain of logic in this unutterably strange conversation. She had been in his office now for how many minutes? And she still had no idea why he’d wanted to see her. And the atmosphere was getting murkier by the second. Frankly, she preferred it downstairs, even among the other freaked-out moms.

  “So … ,” she said finally, “did you want me to talk to the students? I have a pretty full morning today, but I could come in the afternoon.”

  “Oh …” He sat up straight and attempted a very strained smile. “No. That’s kind of you, Grace. But I think we have enough.”

  She shrugged again and thought: Well, all right, then, I’ll just …

  And she just went out. And wished she had spared herself the entire episode. Now she was far from sanguine about Robert and for the first time concerned with how he was holding up under the obvious pressure. Maybe he had wanted help for himself, it occurred to her, passing again the photo of herself as a braided gondolier. Maybe that was what he had found so obviously difficult to say. I’m overwhelmed by what’s happening. Can I talk to you? All at once, she felt so concerned for him and so guilty that she stopped, her hand on the handrail, and looked back up the way she had come.

  But she couldn’t go back. More than anything, she just wanted to get away from here. And air. She wanted air.

  She left by the front gate, turning east along the tree-lined street and then south on Third, heading, she supposed, to her office on 76th. But in fact her first patients weren’t due for nearly an hour, and when she thought about going there and sitting alone in silence (or, worse, opening up her computer again), she understood that she was afraid. Her cell phone, which she had been checking every ten minutes or so, still showed nothing, or nothing that wasn’t maddening. A CNN news alert about an earthquake in Pakistan, an offer from a store she had never heard of for a product she didn’t want, an “update” from Rearden letting parents know that counselors would be available to meet with them in the K/pre-K dining room after three p.m., to “discuss any concerns about your children’s well-being.” What narcissists we’ve all become! she thought, mystified and enraged. What terribly sensitive, terribly important people we are! I have a concern about my child’s well-being? My concern is that there are people in the world who murder women and leave them in “blood-strewn” apartments for their children to find. I think this might be bad for the children. It might give them “issues.” It might signal “dysfunction” in the family and be “traumatic.”

  Also, I don’t know where my husband is.

  She reached her office about ten minutes before her patients were due and went about her customary routine: lights on, bathroom checked, Kleenex replenished, and a final look over her schedule for the day. There seemed to be a theme here, she thought, running her eye over the booking page of her office program. The couple about to arrive had separated the previous year after the husband’s affair, then made a sober, iron-willed decision to attempt reconciliation, though Grace (while lauding their effort) did not believe the husband, a screenwriter, could actually stop pursuing other women. After them came the woman whose husband’s “college experimentation” with men had returned to haunt them both and become the predominant theme in their sessions. Today she was coming alone, and while Grace generally did not agree to see partners individually, she was pretty sure that the joint sessions were now well and truly ended and that the wife would want to keep seeing her alone after they formally separated. And after that was a newer patient whose fiancé had been arrested for embezzlement at the company where they both worked and who was in a very fraught state.

  Then she was supposed to go to her father’s house, for dinner.

  She didn’t know where Jonathan was.

  She opened her e-mail and typed in his address. It galled her that she was doing this, that she had to instruct him to get in touch with her. Yes, he could be absentminded. Over the years, he had slipped up on any number of appointments, dinner reservations, violin recitals, and certainly stupid things like Mother’s Day and Valentine’s Day, which were only manufactured holidays meant to sell chocolate and greeting cards. But always there had been a reason, and the kind of reason that made you ashamed for having demanded a reason—like, for example a little kid dying of cancer.

  “Jonathan,” she typed, “would you please get in touch with me RIGHT NOW. And I mean AS SOON AS YOU READ THIS. Henry’s fine,” she wrote, feeling guilty for the freak-out she would certainly be experiencing upon receipt of this particular communiqué. “Just call me ASAP.”

  And she sent it off into the ether of e-mail, to find him wherever he was, in whichever Midwestern city the pediatric oncology conference was actually taking place. But had it actually been a pediatric oncology conference? Maybe he’d only called it that because his own interest was pediatric oncology, but the conference itself was really pediatrics as a whole or oncology as a whole or even something merely adjacent to one of those. It might be … a conference on new antibody-based drugs or genetic technologies, or a meeting focused on palliative care or even alternative care. Well, probably not alternative care. She couldn’t see Jonathan wanting to attend a conference on alternative care; like nearly every doctor he’d ever worked with, he was firmly trussed to the mast of Western medicine. Grace had only ever known one of his colleagues to show any interest in what the woman herself had apparently called “parallel healing strategies,” and she had left New York long before, to practice somewhere—Grace seemed to recall—in the Southwest.

  No, but the point was, this whole thing might be her own fault, the fault of her general distraction due to … well, a lot of things. Work as a whole, her son, the benefit, her book, for goodness’ sake! She might easily have taken a few disconnected concepts like pediatric … oncological … flyover state, and somehow conjured the fully fledged notion of a pediatric oncology conference in Cleveland. Typical me! she thought almost jovially.

  But it really wasn’t. Typical her. And it never had been.

  Her couple arrived. When Grace asked how their week had been, the husband began a vicious monologue about the producer who had bought his script the previous year but now seemed disinclined to make it into an actual film. His wife sat grim-faced, tautly wound, at the other end of the couch as he went on, gathering many of his other aggravations and resentments to himself in a building fulcrum: the producer’s assistant, who was so passive-aggressive, who obviously did not understand that it was to your own benefit to be kind to people on the way up the ladder, and his own agent, who took four days to return a call, though he’d been seen at Michael’s for lunch on the second day and was obviously not at death’s door, unable to push the buttons on his phone.

  Grace—listening, not listening, not really—head spinning a little, nodded whenever he paused for breath but couldn’t bring herself to interrupt him, and she felt terrible about that. There had been a joke, passed among the students in her master’s program, that she had not found very funny at the time, about two psychotherapists who rode the elevator together back and forth to their adjoining offices for years: up at the start of the day, down at the end of the day. One was dour, depressed, burdened by the burdens of his patients. The other was eternally upbeat. One day, after years of this disparity, the dour therapist said to his colleague: “I don’t understand. Our patients have so many terrible things in their lives. How can you listen to them all day and still be so happy?”


  The other man’s answer: “Who listens?”

  She had always listened.

  But today, right now, she just couldn’t listen. She couldn’t hear.

  The wife was shifting, growing palpably more resentful with each fresh character assassination from the other end of the couch. The actress who was supposed to be considering the part but was obviously too old. The young Tarantino freak in the screenwriting class he taught who had complained about him on Facebook, saying he wasn’t qualified since he hadn’t had a movie made. His wife’s sister, who was insisting they all go out to fucking Wisconsin this year for Christmas, which was ridiculous because she didn’t even like them and had always been a bitch to her older sister, his wife, so why she thought they would go spend a fortune on tickets and deal with the airport on the busiest travel day of the year just showed how deluded she was.

  “Yes?” said Grace.

  The wife exhaled, very carefully.

  “This is all about Sarah’s mother,” the husband went on. “She called Sarah a few months ago and told her to bring Corinne back to Madison and live with her. You know, as if my family is any of her business.”

  “Steven,” said his wife in a warning tone.

  “But my wife politely declines. Because she is my wife, and Corinne is my daughter. And whatever issues we have, we’re working on, no thanks to her mother. But now we’re supposed to pretend that this episode never happened and just fly out to fucking nowhere for figgy pudding.”

  And she knew what she was supposed to say. She knew she was supposed to say something. But she didn’t say anything.

  “They’re worried about me,” said Sarah, his wife. “Just the way you’d be worried about Corinne if she was having trouble in her life. In her marriage.”

  “I moved back in,” he said petulantly, as if this matter of geography swept all attendant issues aside.

  “Yes, and they understand that. They know we’re trying. They just wanted us all”—Grace, glancing at the husband, noted that he was as unpersuaded by this “all” as she herself was—“to feel supported at Christmas.”