The Undoing

by Jean Hanff Korelitz

  “God, no,” she said, surprised. “I have no idea. If I knew, I would tell them.”

  “I have to say, I’m amazed he’s managed it. I just think: Today, every time you make a move or spend a nickel, all kinds of people must see what you’re doing. It’s incredible no one has recognized him. He’s been everywhere. His face has been everywhere, I mean.”

  Grace took a breath. She was trying not to process the meaning of this.

  “He might have thought beforehand, about what he would do. I mean, how to disappear. He had some time.”

  Her father frowned. “Do you mean that he planned it? He planned what he was going to do to …” His voice trailed off. Perhaps he had forgotten the name. Perhaps he had simply been unable to say it.

  It was another thing she had been incapable of considering. She shook her head. “I meant that he was losing control. It looks like things were falling apart for him long before the day he left. He could have thought about how to hide. Maybe he already had a place to go,” she said carefully. It was something she had been thinking about. Except that when she said “place,” what she really meant was “person.” Maybe he had a person, or maybe he was a person. Maybe today, tonight, somewhere, her husband was hiding inside another person. Maybe “Jonathan Sachs” had been another person he had hidden inside. The idea of it brought such suffering that she had to close her eyes and let it pass.

  “Jonathan is very smart, you know,” Grace said finally. “That hasn’t changed about him.”

  It was one of the very few things about him that had not changed.

  “But so are you,” her father insisted. “It’s your job to be smart about other people. You wrote a book about it …” He stopped himself, though it hardly mattered now: horse bolted, barn door closed.

  “Go on,” she said tersely. “Don’t worry, you’re not telling me anything I don’t know.”

  He shook his head. He was rolling the wineglass between his long hands, back and forth. His face was slack with grief, and his hair, she noticed, had slipped the bounds of its usual precise cut. Was Eva growing careless? Grace wondered, but even as the question, with all its attendant unkindness, occurred to her, she understood that it wasn’t that. It was, instead, her own cataclysm, so intense and destroying that even Eva was having trouble maintaining the customary duties and rituals, which was nothing for her to be petty about. She also owed her stepmother an apology, and to her own surprise she felt genuinely sorry. In fact, she was sorry about Eva in general. How many times had she suggested to resentful patients that when good marriages ended, surviving partners often sought to be married again, sometimes very quickly. Happily married people liked being married: It was as simple as that. And her father had been happy with Grace’s mother, and he wanted to be happy again, and he had met Eva and seen at least a prospect of happiness with her, and wasn’t that preferable to living in mourning? Would she have wanted him to go on living in mourning? So why had she felt so harmed by it? Therapist, heal thyself! she thought miserably.

  “I think,” said Grace, “I just had an idea of what a good family, a strong family, looked like, from you and Mommy. And I tried to make my own family look like that. I did what Mommy did, and Jonathan seemed …” She was searching for what he had seemed like, but for the moment it evaded her. “And I thought that Henry was happy. I hope he was happy.” It all seemed so brutally past tense now. “I just wanted to be like you. I wanted to be happy like you.”

  For a minute she thought that she had started to cry. She wouldn’t put it past herself to start crying without even noticing—not now. It would take more than that to surprise her now. But in fact, the crying wasn’t hers. It was Frederich Reinhart, attorney at law, who sat across from her at the pine table, weeping into his long hands. Her father: weeping. For the longest time, this simply did not compute. Then she reached across and took one of his thin wrists in her hand.

  “Daddy?”

  “No—” He shook his head. “Don’t.”

  Don’t? Grace wondered. Don’t what?

  He had to finish. It took a long while. And she couldn’t do anything but wait for him.

  Eventually he got up, went to the bathroom. Grace heard the toilet flush and the water run. When he returned, he had reassembled himself, more or less. He looked like his own father, a worn-out man Grace barely recalled, with rheumy eyes: an uncomfortable presence in the corner of the living room at her own birthday parties. Her father—like Grace, like Henry—had been an only child, and the relationship with his own father had not been particularly good. She knew almost nothing about her grandfather apart from a reverse trajectory of addresses (Lauderdale Lakes, Rye, Flushing, Eldridge Street, Montreal, Bukowsko) and a funeral she had furiously wanted not to attend, because it meant missing one of the grander bat mitzvahs in her Rearden class that year. Now she couldn’t even remember whose bat mitzvah it was, but then they had seemed like such unequal claims on her attention.

  “We weren’t happy,” her father said suddenly, with the kind of gulping, shallow breath that caught up with you after tears. “I wasn’t. I know Marjorie wasn’t. I tried to be. First I tried with her, and then I tried without her. I think I would have tried anything.”

  “But …,” Grace heard herself say, “I never saw that. Never,” she insisted, as if he were wrong about his own life and she, the child, had a better grasp of things. “What about …” She thought frantically, looking for evidence to prove his mistake, and found herself remembering the jewelry in her mother’s mirrored vanity, this piece or that, laid out on the desktop. “What about all those beautiful things you gave her? Those pins and bracelets. It was so loving, the way you brought her jewelry all the time.”

  He shook his head quickly. “It wasn’t. It wasn’t about being loving. Not at all. I had a way of going off with people, and then I would decide that it wasn’t the way I wanted to live, and I would come back and apologize, and bring her something.” He stopped to make sure she was still with him, but she wasn’t with him. She was flying wildly overhead, careening around the room.

  “You bought jewelry? For that?” She was sort of amazed that she could respond to this at all; the fact that these particular words were the ones to emerge was barely relevant.

  Her father shrugged. “She never wore any of it. It was like poison to her. She told me once, when I asked about it—we were getting dressed for something. There was a pin, something with an emerald; I thought it would look nice with what she was wearing. She said it would make her feel like she was wearing Hester Prynne’s letter A.”

  Grace closed her eyes. She knew that pin. That pin had been taken away by Jonathan, to some unknown place. She hoped she would never see it again.

  “I should have stopped.” He shook his head briefly. “I should have stopped a number of things. It didn’t make me feel any better, and it certainly didn’t make her feel any better. How could it, looking at those things and knowing what they meant? I’m not even sure I remember my own motives clearly. It’s possible there came a point when I no longer intended them as a kindness. Sometimes I came home and she’d have left something out on that dressing table. I felt as if she was saying, ‘Remember this one? Or this one?’ Why did she put herself through that? I understand why she’d want to put me through it, but herself?”

  “You should have been in therapy,” Grace said tersely. “Did that occur to you?”

  “To be honest? No. For my generation it didn’t seem like an option. If you were in a good place, or you could at least live together, you just stayed put. If not, you called it quits. There wasn’t much of this trying to figure things out. I don’t know why not. We had analysis if we wanted it, but it just seemed crazy to me. Hours and hours, and all that money, lying on a couch and trying to remember some key code from when I was in diapers that would explain everything. The fact was, I didn’t much care about my neuroses. I just wanted to leave.”

  “Then why didn’t you?” she demanded. She seemed to have loc
ated some speck of outrage after all.

  He looked up and met her gaze, which must have shocked him, because he looked away quickly. “I asked for a divorce, but without at least a nominal consent I knew it wasn’t worth separating that way.”

  “And she said no, I take it.”

  “She said absolutely not. I’ve never understood it. It made sense that she wouldn’t advocate for my happiness, but what about her own? And I certainly didn’t want to hurt her. Any more than I already had,” he said. Grace found that she was holding on to the table, pinching the wood between her thumbs and forefingers.

  “So we just went on. After you went off to Radcliffe I tried again, and I think she might have been considering it, but then she had her stroke.”

  They sat there for another few minutes. Grace, to her own surprise, discovered that she was still able to sip her wine, that the house hadn’t fallen down. All systems continued nominally functional. What next? she thought.

  “This makes me incredibly sad,” she offered finally.

  “Me too. For years I asked myself what I could have done better. Or at least differently. I would have liked to have more children, actually.”

  “Wow,” said Grace, stunned. “Why?”

  “I loved being a father. I loved watching you learn things. You were such a curious child. I don’t mean academically—of course you were a fine student,” he corrected himself. “But you just looked and looked at something, and I used to say to your mother, ‘There’s a lot going on in there. She looks at everything.’”

  Looks at everything, Grace thought. And sees nothing.

  “You could have started again when Mommy died,” she said, still not very kindly. “You were only in your fifties. You could have had another family.”

  He shrugged. He seemed to be considering this for the first time. “I suppose so. But I met Eva and I felt this great comfort with her. And comfort was actually what I had been needing. It turned out to be a very basic need, not terribly complex after all. And then I had her kids and grandkids, and eventually I had Henry, and I’ve been very happy.” He looked across at her frankly. “The thought that you based your ideal of marriage on what your mother and I had is terribly upsetting, Grace. I should have talked to you about this many years ago.”

  “I should have insisted on it,” Grace answered. “It was my job as a teenager to pillory my parents, and I never did it. There’s a reason rebellion happens when it does. I must have thought I was above all that.” She swirled the last of her red wine around the base of her glass, following the sediment as it circled the stem. “Oh well, better late than never.”

  “Eva admires you,” he told her. “She knows you resent her. It’s been somewhat painful.”

  Grace nodded. She was not quite ready to embrace Eva as a compassionate, loving soul. But she could try. And then she heard herself ask outright for her mother’s china, which amazed her. Now—with the myth of her parents’ marriage in pieces around her—that she still harbored a desire for its symbols made no sense whatsoever. But the symbols were tactile: They took up space in the world. Now, more than she thought possible, she wanted to surround herself with symbols that took up space in the world.

  “I would like to have it,” she told her father plainly. “It means something to me.”

  “Her what?” he said, mystified.

  “Mommy’s china. The Haviland, from your wedding. It’s hard for me to see it used so casually. I know it’s silly …,” she said.

  “The plates and cups?” he asked, still unclear.

  “Yes. It’s very old-fashioned, I know. But those things, from your wedding, I felt they should have come to me. I know how this sounds,” she said, because she was hearing it out loud for the very first time, and she did, finally, know how it sounded, which wasn’t very nice. “I’m not usually acquisitive, but she was my mother and I was her daughter. It felt wrong to me that they should have gone to your second wife and not to me. That’s all,” she said. She wasn’t entirely sure what “That’s all” meant.

  “But of course you can have the dishes. Whatever you like. Eva is always telling me we should get rid of things, and she has other sets of dishes. I was a little sentimental about them, I suppose. And I thought it would be nice for you to come for dinner and use the same dishes we used when you were a little girl. But of course. Of course. I’ll bring them up here.”

  “No, that’s okay,” Grace said, feeling idiotic. “But when this is over, if it’s ever over, I want Henry to be able to feel connected to things that have nothing to do with his father. I want to have things from my past to give to Henry. I want to have a past to give to Henry. I don’t need it to be perfect, just to be real.”

  And it occurred to her, as she heard these things spoken aloud, that she was a tiny bit closer to being almost ready for that herself.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  THE GREAT MISTAKE

  As a product of private education from the first day of pre-kindergarten to the morning her crimson diploma was put into her hands, Grace was unprepared for the ease with which Henry came to be enrolled in the seventh grade of the Housatonic Valley Regional Middle School. There was no formal application required, let alone the terrifying Manhattan ritual of finding out how many openings the class was likely to have or whom she might know or have some vague connection to on the school’s board of trustees or in the admissions office. And in fact, Grace’s trepidatious call to the registrar a few days after the Christmas holiday yielded only a cheerful request for documents that seemed eminently reasonable and were no trouble at all: Henry’s birth certificate, a utility bill for the lake house in his parent’s or guardian’s name, and a transcript from his prior school, which Robert Conover promptly e-mailed and which consisted of reassuringly unmitigated praise.

  Still, she spent the first days of the new year nursing a private certainty that Henry was about to face a great ordeal, a rapid descent from the Parnassus of Manhattan education to some swamp of lowest-common-denominator institutions. Either the local school would lag so far behind Rearden—with addition and subtraction in seventh-grade math, for example, Dick and Jane in literature—or the other kids would be backwoods degenerates, glue-sniffing video game addicts who’d finger her son as an aesthete intellectual and loathe and shun him with the exquisite unity of seventh graders everywhere (except, that is, for places like Rearden, where school administrations claimed to be passionately vigilant against bullying of all kinds).

  She kept these fears to herself, and it was a good thing she did, because Henry was eager to depart the isolation of their little home on the nearly abandoned lake and return to the world of twelve-year-olds. That first morning, she had driven him down the road in her own car, utterly ignorant of the fact that her son now attended public school and was entitled to pickup and delivery in a municipal school bus, and watched him walk inside. Then she went straight back home, climbed back under the covers, and fell apart.

  Truly fell apart, in a way she had not really allowed herself to do since the first moment of the blinking light on her cell phone and the dismantling of her life and the escape to Connecticut and the practicalities of keeping them warm (enough) and fed and the distraction of Christmas and her father and the getting ready for Henry to go back to school. Through all of that she had remained her recognizable self: the small, capable person who kept things moving and seemed reasonable enough. Henry, whatever else had disappeared, still had his mother, that was obvious, who still took care of him and made sure there was breakfast and he had clean clothes when he got up in the morning. But Grace did not truly understand how much it had taken out of her just to appear functional until Henry began to leave the house and be, presumably, safe for a few hours at a time; and when she did understand it, that centrifugal force that had kept her upright began to slow, then creak to a halt. And then the surface of the earth just seemed to give way entirely.

  In bed she lay mainly on her side, looking at nothing. She did this for
hours, though it made her body actually ache, and she drifted into and out of wakefulness. Then, afraid that she would somehow miss the time when she had to go back and pick him up (because, again, she had not yet grasped that a school bus could bring Henry home), she forced herself upright long enough to set her alarm clock for two forty-five p.m. Then she went back to lying on her side, looking at nothing.

  Days that way. It became like a job: Take him to school, go to bed, lie for hours, rise again, collect him from school. She was very diligent in carrying out her duties. She was very strict with her schedule. She felt nothing but the dull pinch of despair, and some dizziness, because she had to remember to eat, and sometimes she didn’t remember very well. Occasionally she would think: How long is this going to last? But mainly she did not think. The emptiness in the place where her mind had once been was so vast. It was a big room with grimy windows and a dull, slippery floor. She lived there now, at least when he was out of the house. And when the alarm rang at two forty-five, Grace got up, changed her clothes, checked the refrigerator and made a shopping list, and went to pick up her son. It was all there was to her life. It was all she could tolerate. And it went on and on, the same every day. Or at least every school day.