The Undoing

by Jean Hanff Korelitz

  Henry was actually very attached to Eva and his grandfather, though he seemed to grasp their limited range of motion. The undeniable pleasures of dinner at the Reinharts’ (good food, very good chocolate, the praise and attention of two people who clearly appreciated him) came Superglued to formality and the need for superlative manners. To sit at the wide mahogany table in Eva’s dining room or perch uncomfortably on one of Eva’s long finely made couches required focus and effort—from Grace, let alone from her twelve-year-old son. But tonight, perhaps, all that discomfort, and the distraction that came with it, might be no bad thing.

  There were holiday lights on the trees in the Park Avenue medians, blinking yellow and blue in the now clear evening. She and Henry shuffled, only a few feet apart but still not speaking. Once or twice something occurred to her, but even as she opened her mouth to say it, she knew either that it wouldn’t help or that it wasn’t true, and she said nothing. She had no great qualm about lying at this particular moment, which did sound bad, but if it helped maintain the fiction she had already told him, then she could live with it. Unfortunately, Grace was having trouble remembering exactly what fiction that was, and where, exactly, it departed from reality. Unfortunately also, she was hopelessly unclear on the reality itself. She knew nothing, and the murkiness of that opening rift, the constant shifting of its shape and dimensions, was like a howling voice at her ear.

  She pulled her coat even tighter around herself. The wool of its collar scratched the back of her neck.

  Henry walked with his shoulders a little hunched, as if he were not yet ready to be tall, his gaze fixed on the pavement except when they passed a man or a woman walking a dog. Henry desperately wanted a dog and had asked for one, unsuccessfully, for years. Dogs were foreign to Grace, who had never had a pet of any kind, and Jonathan, who as a child had owned a black Lab named Raven (really the pet of his indulged younger brother), had not been at all willing to bring one into their home. Raven, he had told her long ago, had disappeared when he was in ninth grade, on a day everyone else was out of the house, and the mystery of his departure (loose gate? dognapper?) had been a source of ongoing grief for everyone involved, even to the point of accusations: They blamed him, Jonathan had explained to her. They blamed him for the escape or loss or who knew what of a dog that wasn’t even his. So typical of his terribly nonfunctional family, she understood. But still—what a horrible thing to have done to him.

  Besides, Jonathan also had an allergy to dog dander.

  Eva had had a dog when Grace’s father had begun seeing her. Two dogs, actually: somewhat overfed dachshund brothers named Sacher and Sigi, whose primary interest in life was each other and who required coaxing to even acknowledge Henry. Now long gone, they had been replaced first by a Pomeranian (so inbred that his fur had fallen out in patches, and feebleminded to boot), who had died of some purebred Pomeranian ailment, and more recently by Karl, another dachshund whose personality was only slightly more welcoming. Grace’s father seemed to hold the primary responsibility for walking Karl (it still amazed Grace to see her father walking a dog). Her father’s lifelong habit of biweekly tennis had declined with the integrity of his knees and hips, and he needed the exercise.

  She saw them ahead, man and dachshund, as she and Henry crossed Park at 73rd, and Henry ran down the street to greet his grandfather. He was, Grace saw to her mild shock, so tall beside him that for a moment she wondered whether her father was shrinking, and when they embraced, her father scarcely leaned over his grandson. Grace had a momentary image of the two of them continuing to grow in opposite directions, until one disappeared into the ground and the other soared out of sight into the clouds. It made her shudder.

  “Hello, Karl,” Henry was saying when she caught up to them. He had moved on to the dog and coaxed enough interest out of him to gain a faint wagging of the tail, for which Henry praised him rather too much. Frederich Reinhart handed over the leash and Henry began very conscientiously leading the dog to each and every tree along the pavement.

  “Grace,” her father said, giving her a brief hug. “My goodness he’s getting tall.”

  “I know. Sometimes, I swear, I go in to wake him up in the morning and he’s longer on the bed. Like Procrustes got hold of him.”

  “I certainly hope not,” her father said. “Jonathan coming from the hospital?”

  She had forgotten to call Eva, to say that he wasn’t coming. She suddenly felt ill. “I’m not sure,” she managed. “He may be.”

  Maybe neither of these statements was a lie, she told herself. He might come. By some miracle.

  “Fine,” he said. “It’s cold, isn’t it?”

  Was it? Grace felt so hot. The back of her neck itched from the wool of her collar. She was noticing the perfect line of her father’s gray-white hair, a precise half inch above the collar of his own heavy coat. Eva cut it herself, with a pair of long, sharp scissors. It was a skill of hers, carried over from her first marriage, when her late husband (in their shared abstemiousness—which was bizarre in view of their shared wealth) had devised strategies for not spending money. In fact, over the years Grace had more than once allowed Eva to cut Henry’s hair. Eva seemed to notice first (and react most) whenever its length slipped the bounds of propriety, and it seemed to make her highly cheerful to snip away at her husband’s only grandchild. She also happened to be very good with those scissors, making a busy, clinical sound as she moved around Henry’s beautiful head, leaving little piles of his (also beautiful) hair on the tile floor of the master bath. It made Eva cheerful to point out disorder wherever she might find it, and then clean it up.

  Eva had taken good care of her father, Grace thought, looking at that straight line of hair as she followed him into the lobby. Of course, she had thought this many times in the past; if only that were enough to make her love her stepmother. And she had thought that many times as well.

  “Carlos,” her father said to the elevator man as he pulled shut the gate, “you remember my daughter and grandson.”

  “Hello,” Grace said, only a millisecond behind her son.

  “Hello,” said Carlos, eyes on the numbers overhead. It was the old kind of elevator, the kind requiring some skill to land just at the level of the floor. They all rode in the customary silence until the fourth floor, where the elevator man pulled open the grate again and wished them a pleasant evening. Henry reached down and detached the leash from Karl’s collar, and Karl ambled freely to the front door, one of a pair on the same small landing. When her father obliged him by opening it, the smell of carrots reached them immediately.

  “Hi, Nana,” her son said, following Karl to the kitchen.

  Her father removed his coat and then took Grace’s and hung them both up. “Something to drink?” he asked her.

  “No. Thanks. You go ahead.”

  As if he needed her permission.

  The apartment had not changed even slightly since the first time she had come here, the year after her marriage to Jonathan, for a slightly terrifying dinner at which she was to meet Eva’s children and their spouses. Rebecca, who was only a few years older than Grace and had recently given birth to her second son (tended by a nanny in one of the bedrooms), had traveled for the occasion from Greenwich, and Reuven—already considering immigrating to Israel—from 67th Street with his irritable wife, Felice. It was the evening all three of the “children” were to be told that their parents were going to be married—definitely. A date, indeed, had been set for merely two months hence, and Grace’s father, astonishingly, had decided to take an unprecedented two months’ holiday from his firm in order to go on a long honeymoon in Italy, France, and Germany.

  It was hard to say which of the three of them—“the children”—was least elated by this news. She did know that she was glad for her father, glad that he had found a companion and that Eva’s focus, from the outset, seemed to be the care and organization of Frederich Reinhart, who had not quite been managing this on his own since Grace’s mothe
r had died, and could clearly use the help. But Grace had not persuaded herself to love Eva and feared that she never would. She also knew right away that she would never love Eva’s children.

  That had been a Sabbath dinner, of course, and Eva’s son and daughter had scarcely been able to contain their disapproval of Grace and Jonathan’s imperviousness to Jewish ritual. It was a question not of belief (whether she and Jonathan believed, whether Eva’s children believed, that was not the point), but of their insufficiently expressed Jewishness itself, which was obvious to one and all. That evening, she and Jonathan had approached the Shabbos table with de facto good manners and the usual intention to observe and mirror when it came to the unfamiliar, but those two had seen through the ruse immediately.

  “You don’t know the kiddush?” Reuven had asked Jonathan, with such palpable disdain that the mood at the table—tenuous already—had dropped like a stone.

  “Afraid not,” Jonathan said lightly. “Bad Jews. My parents even had a Christmas tree when I was growing up.”

  “A Christmas tree?” said Rebecca. Her husband, also an investment banker, actually curled his lip. Grace watched it happen and, like a coward, said nothing. And neither she nor her father, needless to say, offered the information that they, too, had celebrated Christmas—the marzipan and Handel and William Greenberg’s version of Christmas—all through her childhood. And enjoyed it very much, too.

  “Ah,” said Eva, arriving in the hallway, both Henry and Karl trailing behind her. She kissed Grace politely enough, on both cheeks. “Henry tells me Jonathan isn’t joining us.”

  Grace glanced at her son. He was bent over, patting an indifferent dachshund who completely ignored him. Eva, wearing the more polite of her disapproving expressions, had on one of her many, many cashmere twinsets. She possessed these in a wide spectrum of beige, veering on the pale end to nearly white and on the dark to nearly brown, but concentrated mainly on the shade of manila folder she had chosen tonight. They flattered her in two ways: first by just revealing her rather impressive collarbones, and second by giving the best possible presentation to her bosom, which appeared almost preternaturally youthful and rather voluptuous.

  “What’s that?” her father was saying. He had returned from the bar in the living room with his tumbler of Scotch.

  “Jonathan is apparently not coming to dinner with us,” his wife said crisply. “I thought it was arranged that you would phone me if that were the case.”

  This was true, Grace understood. Yes, she had said that. Yes, she was clearly remiss in not having done it. But really? This degree of disapproval?

  “Oh, Eva,” said Grace, throwing herself on the dubious mercy of the court, “I am so sorry. It just went right out of my head. And I was hoping to hear.”

  “Hoping to hear?” Her father looked nearly affronted. “I don’t understand. Why should you be ‘hoping to hear’ from your husband?”

  She gave them each a warning look that conveyed only a small fraction of her own disapproval, then asked Henry if he had any homework.

  “Science,” he said from the floor, where he was rubbing an ungrateful Karl behind the ears.

  “Why don’t you go to the den and do that, sweetie?”

  Henry went. The dog stayed.

  Perhaps she ought to make light of the whole thing. Perhaps a miracle might occur, and her father and Eva would simply, for once, let it go.

  “I haven’t heard from him.” Grace gave a forced little laugh. “To tell you the truth, I’ve got no idea where he is. That’s pretty bad, right?”

  It was not to be, of course.

  They looked at each other. Eva, with an expression so arctic that Grace practically shivered, turned on her heel and went back to the kitchen. This left her father, still holding his drink and looking nearly furious.

  “I wonder how you managed that,” he said shortly. “I know you are very consumed with the feelings of your patients, but it does strike me as strange that you never concern yourself with Eva’s feelings.”

  He went and sat. She supposed she was meant to do the same, but for the present moment she was so fixated on this notion that she couldn’t quite move.

  Consumed with the feelings of your patients. No, that wasn’t new. Grace’s father had never been sympathetic to therapy in general and certainly had never been warmly approving of the profession as a profession for her. But what, pray tell, did any of that have to do with Eva?

  “I’m so sorry,” she said carefully. “I’ll be completely honest, it just went right off my radar. And I was still hoping Jonathan would check in, so I could ask him about his plans.”

  “And did you not think to check in with him?” her father said, as if she were ten years old.

  “Of course. But …”

  But. But my husband has arranged to be unreachable, hence I cannot reach him. And I am so terrified by that, and what it might mean, because obviously it does not mean nothing, that frankly I am having difficulty functioning at all, let alone concerning myself with whether your wife—who does not like me, let alone love me, and whom I will never, ever care for one tiny bit more than I must, because she is your wife—has set the appropriate number of plates at the table and whether she might actually find it necessary to remove one.

  “But?” her father said, declining to excuse her.

  “I have no excuse. I know how important these dinners are to her.”

  And lo: It was worse. She might as well have said: If it were up to me, we would be over at Shun Lee, munching spareribs and Cantonese lobster instead of trekking here one night a week to endure the formal hostility of Eva, who long ago decided that I am not as good as the fruit of her own loins and therefore not deserving of her highly prized sole and potato croquettes, let alone her general goodwill, and absolutely undeserving of … what do we call that thing a mature woman might have for the only child of her beloved spouse, a child who no longer has her own mother? Oh yes! Affection! Maternal affection! Or even, you know, a halfhearted facsimile of maternal affection, just for the sake of appearances and out of general respect for the aforementioned beloved spouse.

  Certainly not.

  Then she tried, as she sometimes did in situations like this, to imagine a patient standing in for herself. I miss my mother, Grace-the-patient—a woman in her thirties or forties, married, with a child and a moderately successful career—would say to her, to Grace-the-therapist. I love my father, naturally. And when he remarried after Mommy died I was happy for him, because I had worried about him on his own, you know? And I did really want to have a relationship with his wife. I wanted a mother again—I can admit that—though I knew, of course, she wasn’t my mother. But she always made me feel like she was doing me a favor. Or my father a favor—probably more accurate. And all things being equal, she wished I weren’t in the picture at all.

  And then Grace-the-patient would start to cry, because she knew that deep down there no longer was a picture for her to be in. That was the truth.

  And Grace-the-therapist would look at this very heartbroken person on her couch and probably say how sad it was that her father had so emphatically declined his only child’s affection. And they would both—Grace-the-therapist and Grace-the-patient—pause for a moment to really think about how sad that was. But in the end, both of them would reach the only conclusion possible: that this father was a grown-up and he had made a choice. He might change his mind, but not because his daughter persuaded him to.

  And as for the wife.

  She isn’t my mother, thought Grace. My mother’s dead, and that’s that. And now I have gravely offended her by not telling her that my husband isn’t coming to dinner. “Guess who isn’t coming to dinner?” I should have said. And at this, inadvertently, she smiled.

  “I don’t see why this is funny,” said her father, and Grace looked up at him.

  “It’s not funny,” she said.

  No, Grace thought, we do not choose our families, and yes we must—we really must—cult
ivate the ones we actually have, because they are the ones we actually have. And wasn’t that precisely what she had been doing here, at least a few times a month, for years, ever since the day her father had taken Eva Scheinborn out for dinner at the Ginger Man following a performance of Four Last Songs? Yet at no point, ever, in all the years since, had she felt the slightest warmth from Eva or any real interest directed at her or at Jonathan. And yet I keep coming back, she thought: ever dutiful and ever hopeful.

  Silly of me, really.

  Then, with her father still glaring at her and Eva, presumably, now actually lifting and carrying the heavy, heavy extra plate and ponderous napkin and silverware and the unbearably weighty wineglass and water glass back to the kitchen, it occurred to her that she could walk out of here right now and not care at all.

  Or, in the words of that ubiquitous kiss-off, from the probably enhanced lips of every current celebrity, actual or delusional: I am so over this.

  But these words, she did not say. She said, instead:

  Daddy, something’s wrong. I’m really scared.

  Or wait: Maybe she only meant to say those words. Maybe she was only about to say them, when the thrilling sound of her cell phone heralded the narrowest possibility of salvation from deep in her leather handbag; and forgetting everything—her father, her dignity—she ripped it off her shoulder and bent over it, tearing into the purse and pushing aside notebooks, wallet, pens, the iPod she hadn’t actually listened to in months, her keys, the permission form for a class trip to Ellis Island she kept forgetting to return, and the business card of a violin dealer that Vitaly Rosenbaum had recommended for Henry’s recently outgrown three-quarter-sized instrument—all to retrieve this slender ribbon of hope. She must have looked like an animal, burrowing frantically for food, or perhaps an action hero who has only seconds left to find and disarm the bomb, but she probably couldn’t have stopped herself even if she’d wanted to. Don’t hang up! she told it frantically. Don’t you dare hang up, Jonathan!