The Undoing

by Jean Hanff Korelitz

  Obviously she was peeved, but she got drinks for them both and went off into the kitchen, presumably to work out what to do. It was not a Chop Suey night, more’s the pity, but something far less stretchable—she had purchased, that morning, four and only four lamb chops from the butcher—and all Gracie could think to do was peel and boil more potatoes. Once the baby was down, she got herself a little sherry and went back in.

  They weren’t talking about work, at least. They were talking about George’s sister, who’d married a pretty rough type and thought all college boys were pansies. Gracie, quite to herself, had already decided George was a pansy, but that was not the point.

  “What a shame, for your sister,” she said.

  “Yeah. She’s a smart girl. I couldn’t think why she did it.”

  They had more to drink, and Gracie put the chops on to broil. She set the table in the dining room for three. If she had known, if she’d had even a couple of hours, she’d have made a stew and there would be plenty for all three of them. There was a recipe she’d been meaning to try in The Settlement Cook Book, a Brunswick stew she could have made with chicken instead of beef. Making things for less was a bit of a specialty of hers. In four years of marriage, and four concurrent years of Depression, she had made it her business to leave over some of the housekeeping money—as much as four or five dollars a week. Whenever they needed something—something for the house or for the baby, even for Thomas—she said it would cost a little more than she actually thought it would and then kept the rest back. It was almost like having a job. The previous spring she’d even opened up an account at First Stamford—a joint account, of course, not that Thomas knew the first thing about it.

  “I wish I could,” their guest was saying when she returned with the chops. They were both polite—George, who was ravenous, seemed appreciative enough—though neither of them said a word about her own meal, which now consisted of mashed potatoes. Their guest did not pause in his speechifying to chew the food, and Gracie was forced to observe the mastication of her own much-looked-forward-to lamb chops in a little too much detail, but she focused on her mashed potatoes and tried to follow along.

  There was an apartment in the city, in a place called Tudor City over on the East Side in the 40s, a good walk from the office. He’d been to see it and taken his “lady friend”—Gracie made herself not ask—and it was a sweet little place, and he didn’t need to be told he could have it for a song, things being the way they were in the city now and half the building empty. But that was just it: He didn’t have a song, just his salary and a house nobody wanted to buy, up in the northwestern part of Connecticut.

  “What town?” Thomas asked. He was only being polite.

  The closest was a place called Falls Village. Not too far from Canaan, George said. The house was on a lake and had been his mother’s once, but now it was his. He hadn’t been up there for a couple of years, but he’d put it on the market with a broker in Lakeville. Great timing, right? Nobody’d even been to see it.

  What sort of house? Gracie wanted to know. She had to tell him there weren’t more lamb chops but passed him the bowl of potatoes.

  It was an old house, about 1880s, George thought. Then his own parents had put on a sort of ell about 1905, with a kitchen downstairs and a bedroom over that, so there were three bedrooms upstairs. It had been on a bunch of acres, about four, but he’d managed to sell off those lots, at least, just before the Crash, so the house had only about half an acre, but it ran down to the little lake. The lake was called Childe. That was his own family name: Childe.

  “What are you trying to sell it for?” said Gracie. She had stopped eating.

  When he told her, she got up from the table and went upstairs. She kept the checkbook in the top drawer of her bureau. It had a leather cover, which was stiff to open. She had never written a check before.

  It was hard to say which of the two men was more stunned.

  My wife, the foundress of the feast, Thomas Pierce would sometimes intone, years and years after the night in question, making a grand gesture with his arm. He was a man of property, a squire, and he liked to observe his domain. He liked to sit on the porch with his guests and look down the sloping lawn to the lake’s lapping edge, and to watch the two children, Arthur and Marjorie, play on the little dock, pretending to fish. In the summers, he spent all of August there. It was the place he was happiest. After the war (he managed to return from the South Pacific; his colleague George Childe was not so fortunate), he told his wife that the sound of rain on the lake was what he had listened for when he tried to fall asleep, out in the open and far from home.

  The stone house in Stamford, with the faux-timbered turret, went to Arthur, who sold it and moved, of all places, to Houston. Grace Reinhart Sachs, his niece, never met him at all.

  The lake house went to Marjorie, who would become Grace’s mother, who would spend at least a week of every summer of her life there, except, ironically, for the year in which she gave birth to her daughter, and when she died it went to Grace. Grace loved it, too, like her mother, her grandfather, and her namesake—her thrifty and clever grandmother. But none of the others had ever needed it as much as she did now.

  Where else could she have gone that very afternoon, fleeing her home on 81st Street with a duffel bag of her son’s clothing, a suitcase of books and laptops, an already fraying garbage bag of her own underwear and sweaters and toiletries, and one very expensive violin? Already the front of the apartment building was lit up like a film premiere, with two news vans and a tangle of electrical wires and a waiting, chattering, bellowing firing squad. The wolf had found her door and was settling in to wait her out, but one of the doormen, in an act of unanticipated grace, had wordlessly taken her down into the basement, shouldered the duffel and hoisted the suitcase, and let her out into the alley that ran behind 35 East 81st Street. On Madison, he helped load up a cab and refused to accept a tip. On the other hand, he no longer seemed able to look her in the eye.

  Only three hours after that, she and Henry were driving north on the Saw Mill in a rented car, the atmosphere without (frigid and overcast) perfectly matching the silent chill within. She could only tell him that Grandpa was fine, that Eva was fine, that something had happened, and yes, of course, she would explain about it and not lie (not lie much, she appended to herself), but not now, because now she had to concentrate on driving. And this was wholly true: The Saw Mill, twisty at the best of times, was slick to boot, and once or twice (and it wasn’t her imagination) she saw the patches of black ice on the ground, and once or twice she even imagined the whirl of herself and her son and the car, spinning and splintering into oblivion. It made her grip the wheel tighter, until her back spiked with pain, and think—and she was thinking this for the first time, and it still felt so terrible and new—I hate you for this.

  He was the love of her life, the companion, the partner, the spouse. He was every single thing she urged her male clients to be, and every single thing she had told the imaginary readers of her book they deserved, and now she would never not hate him, not one day for however long she lived. It felt as if she’d had to exchange every individual cell in her body that had chosen and adored and tended to Jonathan for a cell that rejected and despised him, running them through a monstrous dialysis machine that stripped and purified her, but the new and purified Grace didn’t function the way a human body was supposed to function. It couldn’t stand properly or speak or feel or care for Henry or drive at the right speed on a twisty road that might have ice, with her child in the car. It was so focused on where it was going that it had no idea what it was going to do when it got there.

  At least she knew the way. She had been covering this same ground for so long that it felt almost mythic, first in her parents’ faux-wood-paneled station wagon, crammed with a summer’s worth of supplies for herself and her mother. (They collected her father off the Peekskill train every Friday night and drove him back each Sunday afternoon.) She and Vita had
snuck up on their own, in high school, for various illicit activities (sometimes with boyfriends), and once, in college, they’d had their own raucously nostalgic weekend, pulling together their Rearden friends, home from college, to drink Rolling Rock and pore over their yearbooks. She came to write her senior thesis the spring after she met Jonathan, leaving him to his infectious diseases rotation and clinic hours at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and then pining for him so much that she spent her time reading her mother’s stash of yellowing old novels and barely managed a word on Skinner.

  And then there was the wedding, right there on the sloping lawn, only a few months after that. Maybe a little too soon, her mother would have said, but she was old-fashioned that way (in her mother’s view, an engagement of Edith Wharton dimensions ought to be mandated for all couples), and besides, her mother was dead and therefore incapable of objection. And her father … well, it wasn’t as if Grace were asking for a great production. They wanted to marry, not cohabit—it was important to them both. Or at least it was important to her, and Jonathan wanted whatever she wanted. They did not want a religious ceremony or a display of wealth. They were just two people lucky enough to have found each other, starting out in their professions, intent on the same kind of life: comfort and dignity and children of their own, and helping to eradicate human pain in at least a few of its myriad forms. They wanted enough money to be secure, a few nice things, perhaps, but nothing gaudy or undignified. They wanted contentment and of course a sense of accomplishment, the respect of their peers, the gratitude of their patients, obviously, and in return they wanted to feel that their own talents and hard work and altruism were being well spent in the service of others. It was not such an elaborate platform. It was not … she searched, now, driving the Saw Mill north into the early winter darkness … such hubris.

  And as for his family, well, they talked about that at length. She had met with them for that strained and utterly unrewarding Chinese meal, and walk around Rockefeller Center. Jonathan had barely seen them himself since the day he left for Hopkins, and needless to say they had declined to support him financially or in any other way since college. His education had been underwritten by the trustees of the university, his own part-time employment, and also by an elderly woman in Baltimore who had taken an interest in him and had no children of her own. Jonathan had met her while delivering chairs for a party and ended up actually living in her guest room for his final year of college. He had deflected Grace’s natural curiosity about his family by reminding her that these were the people who had declined to love him, who did not grasp his determination to become a doctor, who resisted any notion of responsibility to support his needs. But even so, this was a wedding, by any definition a new start, and worth confronting the obvious discomfort. They were duly invited, but they failed to respond, and it was only later, looking at the photographs when they came back from the developer, that she learned that one particular young man—tall and a little fleshy, with Jonathan’s same curling dark hair but without his ready grin and general sense of ease—was actually Jonathan’s younger brother, Mitchell. He had come, witnessed, and departed, all without ever speaking to her.

  What a family, she’d thought.

  How on earth could they have produced someone like Jonathan?

  She’d worn an old dress found in a vintage clothing store off Harvard Square—Edwardian, the saleswoman thought—and some shoes from Peter Fox in the Village, and a necklace from her mother’s mirrored vanity. And she’d had only Vita for a wedding party, because she wasn’t about to start ranking her college friends: the three she’d roomed with in Kirkland House, the two she’d spent a summer with on the Vineyard, working as cater-waiters, the women from her Virginia Woolf seminar junior year, who’d become so close that they’d kept up with a monthly tea (and cannabis) party for the next eighteen months. Only Vita, whose prior claim trumped every relationship she’d started since leaving home for college.

  Except, of course, for Jonathan.

  Jonathan trumped Vita.

  It had been an issue that same night, that very first night, at the medical school—more accurately, beneath the medical school—when Vita came in search of Grace, who had gone in search of a bathroom and found, instead, this disheveled, smiling, avid medical student with a laundry basket and a book about the Klondike.

  Oh good. Now I can stop dating.

  The two of them, Grace and Jonathan, had barely moved from that stretch of corridor, except for him to deposit his laundry and her to use the bathroom, which was handily right around yet another corner; but even so it was incredible how much ground they’d covered. In half an hour, or maybe even less, she knew not just his essential parameters—the settings of his upbringing, the shape of his family, the narrative of schools and scholarship—but the far more intimate geography of his world and the place in it he wanted to make for himself. And it had been so easy to get there: no tiptoeing around, no pretending not to be that interested. He had not been afraid to ask her outright who she was and what she wanted. And then, when she told him, he had not been afraid to let her small but necessary know that it was what he wanted, too.

  When Vita turned up about half an hour later, she was worried—obviously worried—but Grace had turned a beaming, rapturous face to her friend and said: “Vita! This is Jonathan Sachs.” And had not said, and had not needed to say, not to her—not to her greatest friend, the one who had seen her through a small but necessary selection of lesser men: Look who’s here. This is the man.

  Behold the man.

  Naturally, on being introduced to Jonathan Sachs—disheveled but adorable, smart as a whip, obviously ambitious, compassionate, already settled on pediatrics (the oncology part would come later)—Vita had given him only her best manners. Grace knew and understood these manners, the same ones Vita had once used on her most loathed teachers at Rearden, her barely tolerated father, and the parents of the boy she had been seeing since the previous winter—the one currently upstairs at the party, waiting for her to come back—who thought they were doing her a favor by not quite articulating their obvious anti-Semitism. Polite, polite, polite … loathing. It was worrying, but it would get better, Grace had thought. It had to and it would, because she was not going to give up her oldest friend, her closest friend, and she was also not going to give up this beautiful and kind and brilliant and fascinating man. She tried to make herself wait for this inevitable thing to happen, but it got harder and harder to wait, and she began to get a little irritated. And obviously, that first period when you fall in love—not that she was so practiced in such things as to have a routine—well, it’s not a time that’s known for socializing. She and Jonathan, who already had to contend with his class schedule and rotations and her course work, senior year being no walk in the park, had not done much to include Vita in their activities (their activities being generally of a more private nature and taking place in a more private setting), but on the few occasions they did manage to get together the evenings had been notable for the tension. Lots of tension. Though Jonathan tried—Grace could see how hard he was trying—to ask Vita about herself, and what she cared about, and what she wanted to do in her life, and though he looked at her with the focus and attention that was due only the close friend (and roommate) of the woman he had fallen in love with, Vita never let him in.

  “Have you considered that she’s envious?” Jonathan asked her once, that fall.

  “Don’t be silly,” Grace had said. Vita had approved or disapproved of every single boy she had ever dated, back to seventh grade: Some she had endorsed with wild enthusiasm, and some she had felt were unworthy of Grace in some way (or every way). But the freeze-out, from that first night in the basement of the medical school dormitory to the day after the wedding less than a year later, when Vita took her leave and walked away into an altogether separate sunset—that was total. And, apparently, permanent.

  The car was a Honda, or something that sounded like a Honda; Grace hadn’t paid
attention, she had merely pointed to the yellow laminated chart and thought: Car. She did not know much about cars and cared less. They had owned one for a while, a Saab Jonathan had bought, of all things, from the father of one of his patients, but the garage thing was so crazy expensive, and they really used it only in the summers. For the past couple of years, she had done a long lease from an agency on the West Side, but today the West Side was too far away, and for some reason she couldn’t bear to go back there. She couldn’t stand to go to anyone who knew her, even as a name on a rental agreement every July 1 through August 31.

  She felt for the controls and pressed them randomly until the window went down, then gulped at the cold air.

  It was fully dark by the time they reached Route 22, the road that began where 684 ended at Brewster. There were faster ways. Over the years, she had tried any number of routes, but in the end there was something calming about this one, and the progression of barely there towns that was so familiar: Wingdale, Oniontown, Dover Plains. After Amenia she crossed over into Connecticut. Henry, who had fallen asleep while trying to read, sat up and adjusted his seat belt.

  “Are you hungry?” she asked him.

  He said he wasn’t, but she knew there’d be nothing when they got there, and she knew she wouldn’t want to leave after that, so they stopped in Lakeville, at a pizza place, taking the only booth not occupied by Hotchkiss students. The pizza was shiny with grease, and the salad she ordered for herself came so saturated with dressing that it seemed to liquefy before her eyes. The two of them ate as if there were nothing to discuss. Before they drove away, they went into the general store and bought milk and apples. Walking around, she tried to find one other thing she could imagine eating, but there was nothing. Even the milk and apples were a stretch, thought Grace. She imagined herself telling Henry: Now we will live on milk and apples. He asked for a pint of Ben & Jerry’s, Heath Bar Crunch, but they had only plain chocolate.