Well, not pain, exactly. Whatever Grace was feeling right now, right at this moment, flat on her back, numb with cold, blowing smoke up into the brutal night, was not pain. But that did not mean the pain wasn’t somewhere nearby. It was very close, very close. It was just on the other side of the wall, and nobody knew how long the wall was going to hold.
She took another lungful and breathed it out, watching it rise. She had once loved smoking, not that she had ever been in doubt of its lethal reach, not that she had wanted to die, ever. She wasn’t ignorant and she wasn’t a masochist. On the night of the medical school party, she had simply gone back to the apartment she and Vita shared near Central Square and finished off her final pack on the fire escape, thinking about Jonathan and what he meant to do with his life. She had never even told him she smoked. It had been, simply, not relevant to the only thing that really mattered to her after that night, because everything important had only begun that night. Did that make her a liar, too?
How many roads had there been, diverged in that endless dormitory basement, and why had it been such a simple matter to choose the one she had chosen, and did it make a difference whether that road was less traveled or more? Probably not, she thought now. Probably none of those points mattered now. What mattered was that she had made a mistake and somehow trundled along blindly for far too long, and now she was here on a winter night at the end of her own dock, terrorized, paralyzed, and behaving like a teenager, with her own newly fatherless almost-teenager huddled for warmth in an unheated house, ripped away from his own life and in great need of some serious guidance, not to mention a good deal of clarification.
I’ll get right on that, Grace thought, exhaling.
The smoke went up to the hard sky, ink-dark, brilliant with stars. They and the moon made the only light except for a single lamp left on in her own living room, and the porch light, an old lantern with three bulbs, one functional. None of the other houses were occupied except for one, a stone cottage down at the lake’s pointy end, which had a thin stream of smoke coming from the chimney. It was very quiet here. Very, very quiet. Except sometimes she could hear these sorts of wisps of music that seemed to come with the wind, from somewhere. It was unusual music. She thought there might be some kind of violin making it, but not the kind of violin Vitaly Rosenbaum would recognize, or at least credit. The sounds made her think of mountains in the South, people sitting on porches together, looking out into the trees. Some nights she had heard only the one instrument, and sometimes there were more: a second violin and maybe a guitar. Once she thought she heard human voices, human laughter, and when that happened she made herself concentrate on the sound of it, as if she could barely remember what the sound of that was like.
But mostly there was nothing to listen to except the crackling of her own fire or the sound of one of them turning a page.
And then it was nearly Christmas, a day that she had given no thought to at all, and she woke up on the morning of Christmas Eve in the classic state of an unprepared husband. For the first time, she left Henry alone in the house and drove north to Great Barrington to find something she could give him; but when she finally got to the shopping mall she saw that some of the stores were already closing, and she raced around, staring hopelessly at all the useless, illogical, irrelevant, and undesirable objects. Finally, in the bookstore, she found herself wandering the usual aisles, looking for something to interest him, but within the narrow confines of those subjects she herself sanctioned there wasn’t anything—it was plain, now—that he truly cared about. There was nothing here for Henry, nothing he would do more than thank her for, as he had been raised to thank anyone who meant to do something polite. That wasn’t going to be enough for him, she told herself. Not this year.
So she went to the sports section and forced herself to lift book after book. A history of the Yankees. All right. A book on the Negro League—at least it was history. And something about the NFL she chose because when she opened the book to a random page she read a fairly decent sentence. And another book, about basketball, she picked without opening at all, because she already felt awful about being such a snob. And then a DVD set of Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s Baseball series, which perhaps they could even watch together. She had everything wrapped right there at the counter.
The way back to the door took her past the books about marriage and family, and Grace felt herself slow her pace, and she made herself look. It was in an aisle like this one, a few years earlier, on the Upper West Side, that she had stopped to look at what was available to her patients and everyone else. Books about getting the man you wanted to want you back. Getting him to ask you out, commit to you, marry you. Accepting those impediments you yourself had created for the life you deserved. So much delusion. So much concession. Where was the cold clarity you might bring to, say, the search for a bra that really fit or the right breed of dog for your lifestyle? Wasn’t finding a life partner at least as important as that? Didn’t it deserve at least as much discernment and toughness? Why shouldn’t a young woman read a sign for its actual meaning, not just its interpretive rainbow?
Over and over again, the readers of these books about getting and keeping had come into her practice and confessed their own failings, often amid the ruin of their lives. They thought they had failed to properly get or properly keep. A husband’s flirtations with other women must be because of her weight gain. A man’s coldness to his baby (and his in-laws and every one of his wife’s friends and also, incidentally, his wife herself) was because she got off the fast track at work and was probably not going to make partner if they had a second child. The women were responsible for everything. They were guilty of crimes, real and illusory. They had not thought hard enough, tried hard enough, asked enough of themselves. It was as if the plane had fallen from the sky for the sole reason that they had stopped flapping their arms.
And the worst of it, she had thought, standing in the Relationships aisle of the Broadway Barnes & Noble, was that they actually were guilty, just not of any of those things, and they actually had failed, but not at what they thought. They hadn’t gotten wrong and they hadn’t kept wrong. They had chosen wrong. That was all of it. And where was the book that said that?
She had started tentatively enough, one afternoon when a client had failed to arrive and she found herself with an unanticipated hour alone. The couple who had just left were both enraged, and the whole room still thrummed with the stress of that and the uselessness of that. In the hour she suddenly possessed, she sat at her desk and wrote a kind of manifesto about the state of her profession, lamenting the fact that therapists seemed unwilling to state what was obvious to them, or ought to be obvious to them. How many times had they listened to a husband’s or a wife’s litany of latter-day complaints and thought: But you already knew that. You knew that when you met him or dated him. At least by the time you got engaged. You knew he was in debt: You’re the one who paid off his Visa bill! You knew that when he went out at night he came back plastered. You knew he thought you weren’t up to his level intellectually, because he went to Yale and you went to U Mass. And if you didn’t know, you should have known, because it could not have been clearer, even back then at the very start.
For her patients, for any of their patients, it was almost certainly too late; the relationships on display in their consulting rooms could now only be accepted or unraveled. But for her readers—already, by the end of that first hour, she thought of them as her readers—there was time for a caution: You can know these things from the very beginning, if you’re paying attention, if your eyes and your ears and your mind are open, as they should be open. You can know and then, critically, hold on to that knowledge, even if he loves you (or seems to), even if he chooses you (or seems to), even if he promises to make you happy (which no one, not one person on the planet, can possibly do).
And part of her, a big part of her, had obviously wanted to be the one who told them this.
Because I am such a comp
etent and knowing person, she berated herself.
Like every one of her fellow authors, each so willing and ready to climb above the crowd of mere mortals and declaim their ideas to a grateful populace. Hurrah for us! Hurrah for me, thought Grace.
Well, that was over.
Driving home with a bag of marginally festive groceries and another of gifts for Henry, she gripped the wheel so hard that her back began to throb. The temperature had dropped yet again, and she made herself be vigilant against the lethal black ice. There was a patch of it just after the turn onto Childe Ridge, the road that connected most of the houses on the lakefront, and after navigating around it at a snail’s pace, she looked up to see a man at a mailbox. This was the stone cottage, most likely the only other lake house currently occupied, and even her wish to be entirely alone could not stand up to a practical imperative: To be on neighborly terms with the only other human in the vicinity, in the dead of winter, and deep in the countryside, was probably not a bad idea.
He held up his arm, and she carefully slowed and stopped.
“Hello!” he called. “I thought that was you.”
Grace rolled down the passenger window. “Hi,” she said. Her voice sounded unnaturally bright. “I’m Grace.”
“Oh, I know,” he said. He was wearing a down jacket, quite worn, spouting feathers in a few places. He looked about her own age, maybe a bit older, with very short gray hair. He was holding his mail: newspapers, flyers, actual letters. “Leo? Holland? We used to drive your mom crazy.”
Grace laughed, surprising herself completely. “Oh, my God, you absolutely did. I’m so sorry.”
And just like that, she was apologizing for her mother, decades after the fact. Marjorie Reinhart had never forgotten the summers when her own parents’ little house was the only house on the lake. The boys from down at the other end, with their motorboat and water skis, had so unnerved and irritated her that she regularly dropped off notes pleading for quiet. In this very mailbox, Grace thought.
“Please,” he said genially. “Water under the bridge. Water down the lake!”
“Okay.” She nodded. “Are you living here full-time?”
“No, not really.” He shifted the mail to his other arm and put his exposed hand into his coat pocket. “I’m on sabbatical. I was home, trying to finish a book, and they just kept calling me. Department meeting, thesis review. Even disciplinary stuff. So I thought I’d run away for the rest of my leave. You’re not winterized, are you? Sorry, is that a personal question?”
He was smiling. He had a crooked smile.
“Not winterized. Are you?”
“More or less. It’s never exactly warm, but I can take my down jacket off. But how are you getting along, then?”
“Oh”—she shrugged—“you know. Space heaters. Lots of blankets. We’re all right.”
Leo Holland frowned. “We?”
“My son. He’s twelve. I should go, actually, I’ve left him alone there for the first time.”
“Well, if he’s there now, he’s not alone,” said Leo. “There’s a car parked on the road. I just walked past.”
Grace tried to breathe. She was calculating how many hours she had been away—not more than two. Or three. She was terrified.
One state away wasn’t so far after all. Or maybe she wasn’t—the story wasn’t—so unimportant as she’d tried to believe.
“Do you need help?” Leo Holland asked. He suddenly looked very sober.
“No, I … just have to go.”
“Of course. But come for dinner. Both of you. Maybe after New Year’s?”
She might have nodded. She wasn’t sure. She was driving down the road, through the thick woods, the iced-over lake just glittering through the trees on her right, passing the second house and the third, the fourth and fifth very close together. All she could think of was that Henry might be—was—alone with someone, anyone. A reporter. An infamy junkie—one of the legion of interested and highly informed bystanders, minted by People magazine and Court TV, who felt entitled to intrude on somebody else’s nightmare. She thought, and tried not to think, and failed, and thought again, of somebody in the cold little house with her son, sitting on the sofa, asking questions about something that had nothing to do with them, upsetting Henry or perhaps—and then she realized how much of her outrage came from this bit of it—telling him things about his father that he was not (that she herself was not) ready to hear.
But most of all—and this was an idea that came so quickly, it had obviously been there all along—she was terrified that it was Jonathan. Surely it could not be Jonathan. He wouldn’t come back. He wouldn’t do that to them, or at least, she thought fiercely, be careless enough to do that to them.
The road bent to the right, and then, looking frantically ahead into the darkness, she was able to see the house and the car parked before it. Her surprise was nearly as strong as her relief. There, in the patch left vacant by her own departure only two (or at most three) hours earlier, sat a late-model German sedan of a make no sentient Jew should ever drive, but Eva—who controlled the car option—was not one to burden herself with excessive sentimentality. Grace’s father, unexpectedly and against all logic, appeared to have arrived for Christmas.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHRISTMAS IN THE SHTETL
Inside, the two of them were sitting together on the lumpy green sofa near the fire, feet up on an old trunk, big mugs of tea steaming up into their faces. It was actually, she noted, not freezing in the house, and she wondered if there might be some basic thing that she had not understood about the boiler or the heat distribution system. But it was just the fire, after all. He had it going really well. He had always—strangely for a city man—been very good at making fires.
“Well, hello!” said her father heartily enough.
Henry, she saw, was holding an unfamiliar item: a portable DVD player, on which the two of them had been watching something she didn’t immediately identify. For the briefest moment, she felt an intense wave of irritation.
“Dad,” Grace heard herself say, “when did you get here?”
He looked at Henry. Henry, one eye already back on the little screen, gave a shrug. “Maybe an hour ago? I got the fire going.”
“I see. And is this an early Christmas present?”
He looked over at the object in his grandson’s hands. Then he frowned. “Well, no, no. It’s mine, actually. I just thought Henry might like to use it while he’s here.” He turned back to her. “Is it all right?”
“Oh.” Grace nodded. “Yes, of course. Thank you,” she added grudgingly. “Henry,” she asked him, not very nicely (as if he had been the ungracious one), “did you say thank you?”
“He certainly did,” her father said. “This child has excellent manners.”
“It’s 2001,” Henry added. “They just found the domino thing on the moon.”
She frowned at him, momentarily distracted from her own irritability. “Domino?”
“Monolith,” Frederich Reinhart corrected. He turned back to Grace. “I just grabbed what I had. One of the kids gave me this collection. Greatest science-fiction movies of all time.”
One of the kids. One of Eva’s kids, in other words.
You only have one kid, she nearly said.
“Like, ten of them,” Henry chirped. He seemed delighted.
If there was anything—one single thing—she disliked more than sports-obsessed boys, it was science fiction–obsessed boys. Now her cultured, sensitive, violin-playing son was reading books about baseball and watching videos about spaceships. And he hadn’t been near his violin since they’d arrived. And—what was even less comprehensible—she hadn’t said word one to him about that.
“Well,” Grace heard herself say, “that’s very kind.”
“Missed this one,” her father said. He had hooked his arm around Henry’s neck and pulled him closer. He was wearing one of his ribbed turtlenecks, soft and gray. Her mother had once bought them for him. Now
Eva bought them. “Both of you,” he added. “I wanted to come and make sure you were both all right.”
Grace turned and went into the kitchen. Once she had recognized the car, once the awful, liquid fear had left her, she had taken her time gathering up everything from the trunk, because it was too cold outside to make an unnecessary trip. Now she started unloading, slapping each individual can onto the wooden countertop like an isolated element of percussion.
Missed you …
Sure!
Both of you …
Right!
The Berkshire Co-Op had been closed by the time she got to it, so it had all come from Price Chopper, and it did not a Martha Stewart feast suggest. There were two cans of cranberry jelly, the kind you squiggled out whole and cut with a knife. There was a can of fried onions, another of cream of mushroom soup. Obviously, she was going retro this Christmas. The entire holiday had been nearly an afterthought. She hoped her father wasn’t expecting to be entertained.
“Grace?” she heard him. He had stopped in the doorway.
The turkey was at the bottom of the grocery bag, under the frozen string beans, and she was reaching in for it. It was only part of the turkey, actually. Just the breasts. And already roasted.
“What?” she said unkindly.
“I should have asked you first. I am sorry.”
“Yes,” Grace confirmed. “Someone up the road told me there was a car here. I was frightened. You should have called.”
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