Upstairs, a terse and typically unwelcoming Eva led her to the kitchen, where she got the extra little blow of seeing Henry eating cereal out of one of her own mother’s china bowls. That Eva had elected (for this occasion? Grace wondered; or—which was even worse—merely for every day?) to make use of her parents’ wedding china, circa 1955, as a receptacle for Henry’s cornflakes and skim milk was nothing less than a shot across the bows, and even in the present circumstances Grace had to fight herself not to rise to the challenge.
Eva had taken a shine to the china upon her marriage to Grace’s father, but not so much of a shine that it was used for very fine occasions, like Passover or even Shabbos dinner. Instead, the classic Haviland Limoges Art Deco, with its delicate green edge, was trotted out for morning toast, and the Entenmann’s Danish her father consumed before he went to sleep every night, and the canned soup Eva’s grandchildren ate (which was particularly galling), and naturally the weekly visit of Grace’s own family, at which—for years—it had tormented its rightful (in her opinion) owner. Needless to say, Eva was not hurting for dishes. She still had two enormous sets from her own first marriage, to the father of her son and daughter (an extremely wealthy banker, who had died of a ruptured appendix while on an island off the coast of Maine—a terrible story, really): one also Haviland (the less formal, actually) and one from Tiffany, used on the most special of special occasions. There was also, somewhere in her cupboards, a perfectly adequate white pottery set from Conran’s, ostensibly for those everyday occasions when one would not think of using good china. And yet, in accordance with some vicious logic of her own, Eva seemed to make a point of setting out the possessions of her predecessor whenever Grace came to visit.
Of course she had wanted them. She had complained to Jonathan about the injustice of this, about how wrong it was to withhold from an only daughter (an only child!) such an important artifact, one that by tradition (Emily Post tradition, at any rate) ought to have come to her just as soon as her father and Eva joined households. And no, she was not being petty. And yes, her father had given her many things: the apartment, first and foremost, and her mother’s jewelry (none of which—as of this morning—she still possessed). But that wasn’t the point.
Henry looked up when she entered the kitchen. “I forgot my Latin book,” he said after swallowing.
“I’ve got it.” She put the Puma bag on the chair beside him. “And the math.”
“Oh yeah. I forgot about math. And I need clothes.”
“Well, what a coincidence!” She smiled at him. “I brought clothes. I’m sorry about last night.”
Henry frowned. He had a crease between his dark brows when he did that. Jonathan had the same crease. “What about last night?”
She felt such gratitude for the natural narcissism of being twelve years old. Wasn’t it a good thing, thinking so little behind and so little ahead and so little around that the most intense of cataclysms, the greatest ruptures in the fabric of the world, had so little immediate impact? She imagined that if the two of them were walking across limitless space, Henry would be all right as long as she could keep tossing bits of solid mass beneath his feet. How wonderful it must be not to realize that something had gone very, very wrong in the world. At least, for now.
“Did Nana let you stay up late?” she asked him.
“No. I got to watch TV with them, but only till the news.”
Well, that’s a plus, thought Grace.
“Karl slept on my bed with me.”
“Oh, goody.”
“Where’s Dad?” said Henry, upending the equilibrium. It had been nice while it lasted.
“I wish I could answer that,” she said honestly enough. “But I can’t.”
“Isn’t he where he said he was going? To Iowa or wherever?”
“Ohio,” she corrected, before remembering that she herself had most likely supplied the Ohio. She glanced behind her, but Eva had left them alone. “I don’t know. I can’t reach him.”
“Why don’t you just text him?” said Henry, employing the logic of the iPhone generation.
Grace looked around for coffee. The coffeemaker, mercifully, had a half-full carafe.
“I would, but unfortunately he left his cell phone at home.”
She got up to pour herself a cup, using (with very mixed feelings) one of her mother’s teacups.
“I’m scared,” Henry said, behind her.
She went back to him, set her cup on the table, and hugged him. He let her gather him in, and she tried not to let him feel her own hurtling fear. She thought: I’ll take yours, too. Grace let out a long, shuddering breath. She tried to think of something she could tell him, something that might be both helpful and true, but anything she thought of fell down in one of these attributes. True but not helpful, helpful but not true—seldom both. Actually, never both. Were they going to be okay? Would she be able to figure it out? And could she really take care of him? She wasn’t at all sure she could take care of herself.
But even as she thought this, Grace understood that there was a slender, brittle layer of resistance she still seemed to be holding on to. It hadn’t been there the day before, not on that street corner in Hospital Land with Stu Rosenfeld or in the small, overheated room in the 23rd Precinct house with O’Rourke and Mendoza. It certainly had not been there in the hours she had just spent, clawing through her own drawers and closets, raging and distraught at what she’d found and not found. But somehow, somewhere along the way, it had seen fit to materialize and now it was present: a certain edge of resolve, fragile enough, but tactile. It made her feel … not exactly strong. She was not strong, not at all. She was in no position to storm the barricades or face the mothers at Rearden. But she did feel, somehow, lighter now and sort of different. Because, she thought, squeezing the thin shoulders of her child, and pressing her cheek against his, and inhaling the vaguely, newly adolescent smell of his skin, I have less to protect than I did before. It made things easier somehow.
She managed to get them both out of the apartment without seeing Eva again, or her father, and they walked, mostly in silence, to Rearden. Henry seemed to have passed through whatever turbulence of need he’d experienced and now seemed as placidly contained as he did any other morning. When they turned down the street toward school, it took him only a moment longer than her to see that the media presence had intensified. Massively.
“Whoa,” she heard him say.
Whoa is me, Grace thought.
No, she did not want to walk past the vans.
The courtyard gates were shut, which they never, ever were, and the streets were full of mothers: no nannies or babysitters again this morning. They lined the sidewalk in front of the gates, their backs to the school’s marble edifice, their determinedly impassive faces turned toward the cameras. They were beautiful and fierce. They were a herd of some elegant mammal, ready for flight but actually hoping for a fight. Apparently, none of this was fun anymore.
“Look,” Grace said, pointing. “You see where Mrs. Hartman is?”
Jennifer Hartman, the mother of Henry’s once best friend, Jonah, was standing halfway down the block, at the entrance to the alley that ran behind the school, holding a semi-official-looking clipboard.
So Robert had indeed activated the secondary entrance.
“Come on,” she told Henry, taking his elbow.
They arrived with two or three others, and everyone—bizarrely, given how unprecedented any of this was—seemed to know what to do. “Phillips,” said the woman in front of Grace, peering over Jennifer Hartman’s shoulder. “There. Rhianna Phillips, second grade.”
“Great,” Jennifer said, making a check next to the name. “Go on back. It’s kind of ad hoc, as you can imagine.”
“Logan Davidson?” said the mother in front of her, as if she weren’t quite sure. “Kindergarten?”
“Okay,” said Jennifer Hartman. “Go on in.”
“Hi, Jennifer,” Grace said. “I see you’ve been recrui
ted.”
Jennifer looked up, and for the briefest moment not one thing happened. And then came a draft of ice, so sudden and overpowering that it left her almost incapable of speech, her own inappropriate smile stuck (frozen) to her face. She looked automatically at Henry, but Henry was only looking up at Mrs. Hartman, the mother of his lost friend. She was a woman of middling height but extraordinary bearing, with high, sharp cheekbones and eyebrows many shades darker than her ash-blond hair. She had been in Henry’s life since the boys began kindergarten together eight years earlier, when Grace’s practice and Jennifer’s own business (she did publicity for chefs and restaurants) had taken on the heft of real careers. Grace had always trusted her and liked her, at least until the Hartmans’ marriage started to fray. She had tried to give Jennifer some distance, always offering to take Jonah for overnights or outings, but that had been around the time Jonah himself started to pull away.
Now Henry was standing a mere two feet away from her and looking into her stony face, and did he understand? Jennifer Hartman had taken him on dozens of trips to indoor playgrounds and to see countless animated films. She had gotten him through his first sleepovers, some requiring midnight calls home for reassurance. She had twice taken him to Cape Cod in August, herding him and Jonah through visits to the potato chip factory and the Plymouth Plantation. Once she had even brought him to the emergency room with a broken elbow after Henry had fallen off one of the stone perimeter walls in Central Park. And since the split—since Jennifer’s divorce (which was understandable: she was a grown-up and unhappily married) and her son’s denunciation of his once best friend (which was not understandable, but also not within either mother’s power to prevent)—she and Grace had maintained formalized, civilized exchanges, the kind that might characterize relations between two countries that had once been allies and might someday be again. But this.
“Hi, Mrs. Hartman,” said her beautiful son, her sweet, innocent, and good-hearted son.
She barely looked at him. “Go on in,” she said stiffly. Then she looked down again.
Grace took him quickly, rushing them both away.
Down the alley, which smelled strongly of pigeon shit, she walked behind him, letting the sound of the tumult outside fade as they went. Before her, the kindergartner and her mother were stopped again, at the back door of the school, and again admitted, this time by Robert and his assistant, an intense young woman with John Lennon glasses and a French braid. “Welcome, welcome!” Grace heard him tell the kindergartner’s mother. He shook her hand as if this were a normal day, perhaps a normal first day of the year, and the doorway were not the heavy iron always-shut back door but Rearden’s grand front entry into its marble foyer, so impressive to prospective parents. The pair moved past him and up the dark fire escape stairwell. “Henry, hello,” he said when he saw Henry. “Grace.” He nodded.
She nodded back. If there was a script for this, neither of them seemed to know it. But though he said nothing, his foot had moved, barely perceptively, into her path. Grace stared at it, then at him.
“Can I go up to the classroom?” she asked, appalled.
He seemed to consider this, and she watched him, mystified. She could not seem to get her brain around it.
“I’m wondering …,” he began.
“Mom?” Henry asked, turning. He was already halfway up the first flight.
“Wait, I’m coming,” she told him.
“It’s just,” Robert said again, “I think, under the circumstances, Henry ought to go up alone.”
“Mom, it’s fine,” Henry said. He seemed confused and irritated, in equal parts. “I’m fine.”
“Robert,” Grace said, “what the fuck are you doing?”
He took an extended, very careful breath. “I’m trying to get us through a crisis. I’m trying to get all of us through this.” She felt as if she were gazing at him through some kind of film, like glass or Perspex smeared with grime. She could just barely make out the shape of him. “Grace …,” he said, and suddenly he was a different Robert. “Grace, I don’t think you want to be here.”
She looked down. He had taken hold of her. He had placed a hand on her arm, between wrist and elbow. It was not possessive, exactly. It was—it was trying to be—comforting.
And then she understood—finally, finally. Robert knew. Of course, he knew. He knew because they had told him, Mendoza and O’Rourke. He had known even before she—Grace—had known, about Jonathan and Malaga Alves. Jonathan, her husband, and Malaga Alves, the dead woman. He knew at least some of the things she knew herself. Perhaps less. Perhaps, it came to her very horribly, even more. How much more? She had given up counting the things she didn’t know.
Grace made herself look him in the eye. “What did they tell you?” she asked him bluntly. Then she remembered Henry and glanced up at where he’d been standing, on the stairs, but he had already gone on. He had left her behind.
Robert shook his head. She wanted to hit him.
“I want you to know,” he told her quietly, “that this is a safe place for Henry. If he needs to spend time in my office, he can come see me, anytime he likes. Recess and after school, for example. And if anyone says anything to him, he should come see me right away. The teachers will be looking out for him as well. I’ve spoken to everyone.”
I’ve spoken to everyone. She stared at him.
“He’s a Rearden student. I take that very seriously,” Robert said, flagging a little, as if he knew he was losing her. “But … just not to make it worse. I’ve seen this kind of thing before. Not … of course not on this scale. But issues, within a school community. They can’t be stopped once they’ve started. They need to … well, be given their heads, if you know what I mean.”
She nearly laughed. She had precious little idea what he meant, except that it was very, very bad and it had somehow become about her.
“So I wouldn’t hang around. And … if you want to come a little later for him this afternoon, miss the regular pickup crowd, he can wait in my office. It’s no trouble.”
Grace said nothing. She was torn between basic manners—she knew he was attempting to do something nice for her—and awful humiliation. Humiliation made people act in ways severely detrimental to themselves. She knew that; she had seen it so many times. She made herself breathe. There were other parents, she now saw, crowding behind her into the stairwell.
“Okay.” She nodded. “That would be … it’s a good idea.”
“I’ll go get him at the end of period eight and take him to the office. Why don’t you give me a call when you’re on your way? I’ll be here until six, at least.”
“Okay,” she said again, but she still could not bring herself to actually thank him.
She turned and worked her way back through the mothers and the kids and through the doorway into the back alley, where there were more mothers and kids. Most parted amiably enough, and no one seemed to take special notice of her. But when one body seemed to freeze in place, forcing her to move to one side of her or the other, Grace looked up to find Amanda Emery, flanked by her twin daughters.
“Oh,” said Grace. “Amanda. Hi.”
Amanda merely stared at her.
“Hi, girls,” Grace said, though she didn’t really know the Emery girls. They were stocky, with round faces and what Grace assumed was their mother’s natural hair color: light brown. Before her eyes, Amanda grabbed her daughters’ shoulders, matching claws on either one. Grace nearly took a step back. She still said nothing at all, though one of the girls looked up resentfully and said: “Ow. Mom!” It was Celia. The one with the overbite.
Grace saw the backlog. It extended all the way down to the alley’s corner and then went on out of sight. It filled her with the most intense dread.
“Bye,” she told Amanda Emery, stupidly, as if they had just exchanged the most banal of social pleasantries. She had to turn sideways and squeeze, in places, and mainly she was ignored, but not always. There were other Amandas, some she k
new, some she had never noticed before. But in her wake, as she moved, came little expulsions of sound and also something she didn’t identify right away, that turned out to be the opposite of an expulsion of sound, but in its way was just as loud, and that was the silence that came after sound. And it was that silence that followed her, like a building wave.
When she squeezed past Jennifer Hartman and out onto the street, she found that the reporters now formed a rough semicircle around the entrance to the alleyway. She ducked her head and made for the edge of the building, but they seemed disinclined to let her go easily. They made a kind of herd, it seemed to her, with a herd understanding of whose job it was to shout and whose to listen, who got to push forward with microphones and who had to stay back, checking sound levels on their equipment or preparing to write things on the most ordinary of pads. But they communicated as one animal, and what the animal wanted from her was nothing she could part with, not without losing her senses: right here on the sidewalk, right now at eight twenty in the morning of such a very, very long and very terrible day ahead.
“Excuse me,” she told them roughly, and, “Let me through.” And to her own amazement, they did, because by some miracle they had not yet realized that she was any different from the next mother who emerged from the alley’s entrance, whom they also crowded and shouted to.
Not much longer, she knew. Maybe not even one time more. But for now they seemed willing to let her go.
Then someone called: Grace.
Grace put her head down and started to walk, away from them and up the street.
“Grace, wait.”
The Undoing Page 25