by Susan Isaacs
As he was supposed to do, Nicholas nodded. He knew he had to. He knew she would speak again, and then it would be his turn. Maybe he would remember the words, but he would not be able to say them. He didn’t belong with these two women. He looked past the young actress and, in the third row, saw Jane, his mother, his grandmother. “I saw your name on your legal stationery, Mr. Claybourne, and I thought, that name must mean white hair and a homburg.” Her breath blew hot on his face; it had the harsh cinnamon reek of mouthwash.
His brother Thomas was beside his grandmother. Maisie was clasping his hand between hers as if they were watching something momentous: an inauguration or an execution. And beside Thomas, his Uncle Jeremiah, whom he hadn’t seen in three or four years, was sitting at the edge of his seat, his tongue hanging out so far it looked like a third lip. Nicholas’s eyes scanned the small theater. He did not see his father.
He didn’t belong in front of the lights. He should be down there in the third row, waiting for someone to do something interesting on the stage. He’d made such a terrible, wrong decision, wanting to be an actor. Crazy. All at once he understood why his parents had been so appalled. Shame suffused him. Even after he became a lawyer none of them would ever forget his trying to act.
Simultaneously, the actresses touched him and then stiffened, realizing what the other had done. Just as they stiffened, he was supposed to say something. Something to make them competitive. He had no idea what it should be. He was of no use. The actresses might as well be vying over an invisible rabbit. He couldn’t help them. He wasn’t an actor. Even if he could remember his line, he couldn’t say it. Something had happened to his tongue. It had swelled up so that it filled his entire mouth. He tried to move it, but there was no room. It was pushing backward like a finger down his throat. He couldn’t help it. He was going to gag. His mouth flew open to relieve the nauseating pressure.
“I’d appreciate a glass of water.” The words poured out of him. An instant later, precisely as they’d rehearsed it, the women lifted their hands from him and rushed downstage toward a bar cart and, as also rehearsed, collided with each other. Automatically, the small, well-practiced grin crossed his face as he watched them, and a rustle told him the audience had seen it. He inhaled deeply and let the breath out slowly. Then he spoke again, his voice strong and cold. “Julie, why don’t you get it while I have a few words with your mother.” The actress playing the mother scurried back to him, took his arm possessively, and led him across the stage toward a couch. As they walked past the younger actress, her hands, holding the water carafe, began to shake. The ice cubes in the carafe rattled. As they did, he put his arm around the shoulder of the older actress and drew her closer. But at the same moment, he peered over her head at the younger and gave her a slight, knowing nod.
“I’m afraid I find the details of the trust a little confusing,” the older actress said as she drew him down beside her on the couch.
“I’ll be glad to do anything I can to help—” he paused for the exact fraction of a second—“the two of you.” He could feel the damp grip of her hand on his wrist as she tried to hold him. Across the stage, he could sense the other one straining to get close to him. He had them both. And he had the audience. “Whatever I can do to make things easier.”
“Not again, Jane. You’ve already read it a hundred times,” Nicholas said.
“I needed the practice. The hundred and one-th time is always the best. Ready?” She picked up the newspaper.
“Not the whole review.”
“Only the important part.” She held the Times on her palms, as though giving a dramatic reading. “‘The character of Harding Claybourne, the smooth-talking lawyer who comes between the two women, is superficially written. However, Nicholas Cobleigh makes the most of the role and is convincing as the handsome, cold-blooded troublemaker.’ That’s a rave!”
“Read it again. No, not out loud.”
“It is a rave, Nick. They just made a little typographical error and put in ‘convincing’ instead of ‘brilliant.’ Let me read it the way it should be written.”
The heavy chain and padlock did not stop them. Every night at five, the men and boys would climb the eight-foot-high chain link fence that enclosed the playground of St. Catherine’s School on West Forty-eighth Street and play basketball by streetlight. Except for Nicholas, all of them had grown up in Hell’s Kitchen and many of them had gone to St. Catherine’s; they were the ones who made the sign of the cross before taking a foul shot.
Nicholas hadn’t played basketball since he was sixteen, when, overnight, half his class at Trowbridge grew taller than he, but after eight hours cramped in a cab or an afternoon in acting class assuming fifteen different postures of grief, he scrambled up the wire fence faster than any of the others.
“Here, Nicky, over here!”
He passed the ball to one of his teammates for the evening. He was the floater. The teams were divided along ethnic lines, the Irish on one side, the Italians—and one Puerto Rican—on the other. He filled in, since in their eyes he had no real identity. “What are you?” they’d asked him over and over, the evening they’d seen him standing outside the fence watching their game and asked if he wanted to play. “What kind of American?”
Off to the side, a teammate took a bank shot. It ricocheted off the backboard. “It’s still ours,” he yelled.
“It’s out, you dumb fuck!” one of the opposition screamed.
“You got your head up your ass, Parisi.”
“You got your head up your mother’s—”
“You better shut the fuck up, asshole.”
“Nicky!”
He caught the ball. He ran and dodged, and as he hooked it into the basket two of the men slammed into him. The smaller one brought his foot down hard on Nicholas’s instep. Nicholas elbowed him in the side, but not quickly enough to prevent the ball from falling into the larger one’s hands. “Cocksucker,” Nicholas said.
He loved the game. Inside the playground, even in January, they’d throw off their jackets and play in T-shirts or sweatshirts cut off above the elbow. The icy wind from the Hudson cut over the brownstones, across Eleventh Avenue, and slashed up Forty-eighth Street, where it was blocked by St. Catherine’s; vindictively, it would swirl around the playground, gathering dirt, and gum wrappers and bits of glass and hurling them into the faces of the players. They ignored it, just as they ignored the padlock, the no trespassing sign, and the traditional rules and etiquette of half-court basketball. Nicholas loved playing with them because there were no pretenses. It wasn’t the way the game was played, it was winning that counted. He’d stay an hour until, filthy and sweaty and nearly numb, he’d grab his jacket and climb over the fence again, his raw hands clawing at the metal links. Two hours after that, he’d be glowingly clean, standing stage right in a three-piece gray pin-striped suit while a twenty-five-year-old actress playing a seventeen-year-old girl ran to him and flung her arms around his neck.
One of his teammates, a stocky man with a neck so thick it seemed to grow out of his jaw, was about to shoot when someone whistled and called, “Time out.” They stopped, and Nicholas’s head turned with the others as they looked at the figure outside the fence. “Yeah, lady?” one of them demanded.
“It’s all right,” Nicholas said. “It’s my wife.”
“Oh. Didn’t know you were married.”
“Yes.” He walked to the pile of jackets, put his on, and climbed up the fence. “See you tomorrow.”
“’Bye, Nicky.”
“Sorry to bother you.” Jane clutched the broad collar of her winter coat in front of her so it masked her mouth and chin. The tops of her ears were purple with cold.
“Hi.” The minute they were out of sight of the playground, he kissed the bright tip of her nose. “Is everything all right?”
“Well, I guess so.”
“You guess so? What does that mean?”
Jane shrugged.
“The play closed and they
forgot to tell me?”
“Nick, no. That would be awful.”
“Something not so awful.”
“Something—maybe—a little good.”
“Your stepmother died. Just kidding. Tell me.”
“Well—”
“Jane, you got me out of a good basketball game.”
“I’m pregnant.”
Rhodes Heissenhuber opened the door of his hotel suite. “Happy birthday, idiot,” he said. He hugged his sister, accepted her kiss, and waved her into the sitting room.
“You look absolutely gorgeous! Even better than yesterday,” Jane said. “Let me look at you.” She pulled him toward a window. “I knew there was something. Either you lost weight or you matured. Your face looks a little less round.”
“It was never round.”
“A little round.”
“No, moron, it wasn’t. I just let my hair grow a little fuller. Speaking of round, take off your coat. You were wearing that sack yesterday.” For this lunch, she’d put on her best dress. It was a white wool turtleneck with a flared skirt that she’d bought for Christmas. Nicholas had loved it. It still fit her, although she didn’t like to wear it. It had gotten so tight in the waist she could imagine it choking the baby. He studied her for a minute. “You don’t look pregnant.”
“Well, I am. The beginning of my fourth month.” She sat in a club chair so deep she might have trouble getting up. Although she had only gained a few pounds, her center of gravity had shifted, making nearly every move ungainly.
“On the other hand, you don’t look not pregnant. But that’s not news, is it? You’ve looked four months gone since you were ten.”
“That’s not funny, Rhodes. You think just because you’re in New York you have to make wise remarks—”
“Eleven then. You had the biggest bazooms. You did. And just wait. When you’re nine months gone you’ll have to wear a sling to keep them off the floor.”
“Rhodes, I’m not going to sit here and listen to you being a big baby when I could be having a nice, quiet sandwich with civilized people from work.”
“Stow it, ugly. I ordered champagne and caviar from room service.”
“Really?”
“Yes, really.” Rhodes sat on the arm of a couch across from Jane. He drew one leg up, resting his ankle over his knee. He sat straight and elegantly, as if expecting to be photographed. “And poached salmon for lunch, which is something you’ve never had.”
“How do you know?”
“Because it would show on your face.”
“Well, I’ve had champagne.”
“Where?”
“Nick’s father took us out to a French restaurant.”
“Was that after? After she booted him out?”
“Where did you hear that?”
“Clarissa Gray’s her cousin, remember? And apparently everyone is saying that she should have done it years ago, that he’s been having affairs all these years and that’s what gave her those nervous breakdowns. I mean, really public things with all sorts—”
“Did Mrs. Gray tell you that?”
“Calm down.”
“Tell me!”
“No. She wouldn’t talk to me about something like that.”
“Then where did you hear it?”
“Guess.”
“Oh.”
“Well, since he’s about to pay for your caviar, you could at least not make faces.”
“I’m not making faces.”
Rhodes answered a knock at the door, and a waiter rolled in a cart spread with a white cloth. “I’ll set it up,” he told the waiter and scribbled something on the bill. The waiter left, and Rhodes busied himself bringing chairs, opening the cart into a table, and lifting covers off dishes. He opened the champagne with a subdued pop.
“Does Mr. Gray know you’re doing this?”
As she struggled out of the club chair, he offered his hand and hoisted her out of it. Then he pulled out a chair by the table and held it for her. “Doing what?”
“Charging this lunch to his bill.”
“Are you serious? Boy, you don’t know anything, do you? I work for him, dumbo. I have an expense account.”
“You’re not even nineteen.”
“So what?” He spooned a small mound of caviar on a triangle of toast and popped it into his mouth. “Don’t you want to try some?”
“No, thanks.” She looked away from him.
“Jane, please don’t start again. Okay?”
“Where are you going from here?” she asked softly.
“Switzerland for a couple of days. Then he wants to go to Italy to ski.”
“In Italy?”
“It’s very chic.” He poured her some champagne. “Of course, it would be chic-er if I could ski. And I don’t know what he’s going to do. With that awful, gimpy leg. He limps all the time. Can you imagine him going downhill dragging his leg behind him?”
“Rhodes, stop it!”
“You stop it. Maybe they have an extra-wide single ski for gimps. Anyway, speaking of gimps, he’d like to see you and Nick tomorrow night. We’re leaving the next day.”
“We’re on the fifth floor. Do you think he could climb that far?”
“Are you serious? Of course he could, but he won’t. He wants to take us all to some very expensive restaurant after Nick’s show. I mean, what would you do to entertain him, have supper for four around the tub in your kitchen? Hand out blankets if the heat goes off? It’s not exactly La Place Charmante. I know I only had a quick peek yesterday, but I don’t think Philip Gray’s idea of fine taste is decorating the floor with little round ant traps. Of course, I could be wrong.” He paused. “Why aren’t you eating the salmon?”
“I don’t care for fish.”
“You don’t care for fish? You certainly did marry up, didn’t you, Lady Jane? Come on, try it. It’s not like Mom’s fish and potato croquettes. A fate worse than death.”
“This isn’t bad.”
“This is good, you dope. And speaking of dopishness—how could you get yourself…didn’t you ever hear of birth control?”
“If it’s any of your business, yes. It so happens nothing’s foolproof.”
“You’re certainly not. I love your timing. It’s going to be wonderful bringing up a baby in that lovely neighborhood. In such a nice apartment. Get him a pet roach named Spot. Or wake up and the heat’s been off all night and go kootchy-koo to a frozen blue baby. Oh, Jane, don’t start crying. Please.”
“I’m not going to cry.” She covered her face with her hands, rubbing her cold fingers over her eyelids. She felt so weary she could have spent the afternoon in that position. Exhaustion was the only symptom of her pregnancy, but it permeated her life. She woke after ten hours’ sleep longing for a nap.
Rhodes came to her side and led her across the room to a couch. He put his arm around her, something he had never done before, and patted her shoulder, and they sat together silently for a long time.
“It’s that bad?” he asked finally. She drew back and nodded. “How broke are you?”
“We have enough in the bank to pay for the obstetrician and the hospital. And that’s it. They told me I’ll have to stop work when I start getting too big. They don’t think it looks right.” She paused, “It’s a teenage magazine.”
“That’s dumb. How could you go to work at such a dumb place?”
“I didn’t plan all this, Rhodes.”
“Okay, I’m sorry. Anyway, what about Nick? What is he doing?”
“He stopped his acting lessons. I begged him not to, but he said he didn’t need them. But I don’t want him to stop. The people he meets might be important contacts, but he won’t listen. He’s driving a cab days again, except when he has an audition. His play is closing in two weeks, so then he’s going to try and work nights. We have to move. We can’t stay there with a baby.”
“I know.”
“We have no furniture. We have to have money for security for a new apartment
, plus a month’s rent. We owe two months on the telephone bill and I have to go to the dentist and we need a crib. It’s just endless, Rhodes.”
“What about his hotshot family? Or is poverty in such bad taste they won’t talk about it?”
Jane sniffled and sat straighter. “You don’t understand. Acting is in bad taste. For them. Not for everyone else. I mean, it’s okay if I’m an actress, because who am I? But Nicholas Perfect Tuttle Cobleigh an actor? Standing up in public and showing emotion? Deliberately spending time with people from the Bronx?”
“He won’t go to them for help?”
“He did. God, it was awful for him. They’re so—I hate them. No, I don’t know. I don’t hate them, but they’re so smug. His father said he wouldn’t be a party to Nick’s wasting his life. Isn’t that something? He’s spent his whole career doing what he hated doing—practicing law in that big firm—and all he wants is that his sons do the same thing. Oh, and he gave Nick a piece of paper. Do you know what was on it? The name of a doctor who does abortions.”
“His mother’s not at the funny farm any more, is she?”
“No. But she doesn’t have control of the money her father left her because of all her problems. His grandmother has loads of money and she adores him, but she’s over eighty.”
“Did he try her?”
“Well, yes, in his way, which is so indirect you can hardly tell what’s happening. But she’s out of touch. She has no conception of money. She’s never paid a bill in her life. After her husband died she had people to do everything for her. We spent an afternoon with her and Nick let it come out that—well, things were tight. She gave us this sweet, genuine smile and told us not to worry; she was buying the layette. We’ll have the best-dressed baby in Hell’s Kitchen. She’s really a wonderful lady, but even though she talks all the time about how she was a poor girl from the wrong side of the tracks, she’s spent sixty years insulated from reality. She did take Nick aside, though, and told him she had put something nice for him in her will.”