Fashionably Late

by Olivia Goldsmith

  But she could see it all from Jeffrey’s point of view. How he had once loved June and perhaps always regretted leaving her. How the divorce from Perry made June available. How June’s money would appeal and how Jeffrey could comfort June over the loss of her child. Jeffrey was getting good at that. How many had Karen and he lost?

  ‘How long?’ she asked. ‘How long?’

  Jeffrey looked away.

  ‘More than a year?’ Almost imperceptibly, Jeffrey nodded his head. Karen thought back to the last year. How often she’d been away for business, how often he’d worked late. She’d made it easy for him. And she’d never suspected. She thought of the Oakley Awards. And their time together in Paris. The way he’d made love to her. Was that their goodbye fuck?

  She was mortified. Did Jeffrey’s family know? Surely Robert-the-lawyer had. When they had come to Westport, had they looked at her with pity? Did they approve of perfect June? Blushes of humiliation washed over Karen like a light show.

  ‘Does Perry know?’

  ‘No. He wouldn’t have sold me the loft if he knew.’

  ‘That was for June? For the two of you?’

  Jeffrey only nodded.

  So Lisa was only a bit of icing on the cake, Karen thought. A way to rub my nose in it, to humiliate not only me but my pathetic sister. Jeffrey might not have wanted me to find out when I did, but he’d want me to know eventually. And he knew eventually Lisa would break down and tell me.

  Karen looked at her husband. And she made her decision. ‘Listen to me, Jeffrey. I could forgive you for cheating, and I could forgive you for lying, but not for ruining my life. You were ready to sell my talent, my name, for your future. Paint? Go ahead and paint. I never stopped you. I wanted you to. I could have found another business manager, Jeffrey, but I didn’t want another husband. You think you’re the big businessman, pulling all the right strings, but you’re wrong. It was my talent that made the company. So, thanks for your help, but I’ll hire someone else to do your job. Robert-the-lawyer has already applied. And I won’t sell to NormCo, and I will continue working. And you can have the Westport house and you’ll still own thirty percent of the business. But that isn’t enough to control it. You’ll never control it again. I’ll run it, even if it doesn’t make a profit. I’ll run it into the ground if I have to. And you won’t see a penny out of it.’ Her fury had built. She wasn’t the kind of person who said unspeakable things, but truths had to be said. ‘So go see if June will marry you without the NormCo money. And see if you can afford to buy your best friend’s loft out from under him without blood money from your wife. And see just how far you get with your pretty little nudes. See how you like being a minor talent.’

  ‘There’s something else you should know,’ Jeffrey said.

  Karen shook her head. She knew more than enough. There was nothing else he could say that could hurt her. But she found out she was wrong.

  ‘June is pregnant. It changes things.’

  It certainly did. Karen’s anger drained out of her and disappeared, like dirty water down a drain. It was replaced with numbness and shock and something that might turn into a suicidal self-pity.

  Her husband was pale, his face almost as white as his hair. Karen didn’t know why she looked away. Angry as she was, she still felt ashamed; ashamed, when he was the one who’d behaved so shamefully. Well, this had happened to other women. It seemed to be the fashion of the times. But, as always, she seemed to catch on late. ‘I’ll fight you on this, Jeffrey. It will be a costly divorce. Now get out.’

  ‘You’ll be sorry, Karen,’ was all he said.

  ‘I already am,’ she told him.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  A Stitch in Time

  Karen lay on the loveseat in her office in the dark, staring at the moving patterns that the traffic from down below made on her ceiling. The rain that had threatened all day and evening had begun, and the lines the raindrops made on the window made the reflected light look like spiders’ webs flung across the expanse of shadowy white. Fuzzily, she tried to remember what spider webs reminded her of, but it wasn’t until a fire truck screamed by and the room was suffused with red that Karen again remembered Madame Renault’s prediction: that Karen would tear away the web of lies but that every strand would bleed. She felt as if she were bleeding now from some internal injury too deep to show. But Madame Renault had been right about other things too. Karen had weaved her way into this corner, but she had no silk left. She was wasted. She cradled her empty belly in her arms and lay there drained.

  Karen slept in her office. And despite her misery, she slept until the phone woke her at seven the next morning. Centrillo’s warm voice was both comforting and confusing. She was too disorientated to say much. He just told her that he had been calling and calling her at home, couldn’t reach her, and that he had news. She had to come to his office. ‘Now?’ she asked. ‘I think it’s worth your while,’ he told her.

  Karen stepped out of the car onto the cracked pavement of Jay Street. She walked up the old wooden stairs to Mr Centrillo’s office. Her heart was pounding in her chest, but it wasn’t from last night’s scene with Jeffrey, or the exertion of climbing the stairs. Centrillo’s call had been brief. She went over it again. ‘I think we found her,’ he had said in his deep baritone. ‘My operative has the information but he insists on giving it to you himself,’ Karen had held the phone, silent, her hand clutching the receiver so tightly that for a moment she thought she had choked off the connection. But then Centrillo’s voice had come through again. What else had he said? She’d been too confused, too overloaded to listen. He had cleared his throat as if he were uncomfortable or embarrassed. ‘Uh, and Mrs Cohen,’ he paused, ‘my operative insists on another payment in advance. In cash.’

  ‘Has he really found her?’ Karen had asked.

  ‘I believe so. But he insists on his payment. The balance. Right now. You know that’s not my way but Mr Paige is a little …’ Centrillo had cleared his throat again. ‘He’s a little unorthodox.’

  So now she stood before the wooden door with the gold painted letters. She waited for a moment, for her heart to stop pounding. It felt as if the skin on her chest was actually jumping. She put her hand up to her breastbone to try and calm herself. But she couldn’t calm herself. Behind the door her mother would be revealed to her. Inside that room, perhaps, lay the secret to her identity. Her breathing wouldn’t slow, nor would her heartbeat, so she took her hand off her chest and reached for the door.

  The same girl with the same big hair sat in the tiny vestibule. She had her head down and was reading from a textbook that was propped on the countertop. But before the girl could even greet her, Centrillo opened the door behind the counter and nodded to her. ‘Mrs Cohen,’ he said, ‘please come in.’

  His office was as clean as ever, though there was no sun this overcast day. In the oak chair across from Centrillo’s desk a small man sat, picking at the cuticles of one hand with the long fingernails of the other. There was something rodent-like about his narrow nose and the set of his eyes, hidden under a bony ridge of brow. He was wearing a gray white shirt that was at least two collar sizes too big, and Karen would have sworn it was a clip-on tie that hung from under his bony Adam’s apple. He looked like Don Knott’s evil twin. Karen glanced back over at Mr Centrillo, his formidable bulk and his cleanliness a bulwark against this little rat-like man. Centrillo held the chair back for her and Karen was comforted to see that he had pulled it away from the other, as if the detective also felt the contamination that rolled off the little guy. ‘Mrs Cohen, this is Minos Paige. I think he’s been quite effective in the investigation.’

  She’d die if they didn’t cut right to the chase. ‘You actually think you found my real mother?’ she asked.

  The man pulled a bent and crumpled manila envelope out of his jacket pocket. ‘I got the goods,’ he said. ‘If you got the cash.’

  She nodded.

  ‘I’ll show you mine, if you’ll show me
yours,’ he proposed.

  Centrillo winced and interrupted. ‘Mr Paige used some methods that are … unorthodox,’ he repeated.

  ‘Since when is a bribe unusual, unorthodox, or uncommon?’ Paige asked. He turned to Karen. ‘Look, I’ve done these jobs before. You get squat from the courts. With a sealed record you got two choices: find someone to talk or spread a few bucks around and maybe get a peep at a file you’re not supposed to see. I did both. I got the goods, and I also got my dick on the line here. I’ve got informants waiting to be paid.’

  Centrillo leaned forward across the desk. ‘That kind of language isn’t necessary,’ he said. In spite of her amusement at his paternalism, Karen was grateful to him. This sleaze-bag was a scary little guy. The question was whether she could trust his word. She reached into her schlep bag and pulled out the sealed FedEx envelope that she had stuffed the money into. She handed it not to Minos but to Mr Centrillo. With the smallest of apologetic shrugs, he took it, opened the envelope, and spread the seven thousand dollars on the table. The bills were hundreds, in seven neat little packets of a thousand dollars each. He stacked them up in front of him and then looked at Minos Paige. ‘Let’s see what you’ve got,’ he said.

  Minos tore open his envelope. First he pulled out a photostat of some type. ‘I found Mrs Talmidge. Old broad living in a retirement home in Saint Augustine. Got my first break. She remembered the name ‘cause there had been some trouble with the adoption. I had to move into the home and pretend I wanted to date her. There’s a cost to that, I can tell ya. Had to look at her whole collection of Hummel figurines, and that wasn’t all she wanted to show me, neither. Got the name of the agency. Had an idea of the date. Went up to Chicago. Used the usual maintenance man cover. Jimmied a lock or two. The files had all been sent to cold storage. Found ’em, though.’ He pointed to the photostat. ‘Here’s the copy of the place, the address of the home you was in.’ Karen looked at the photostat. The number was 2881 Fredericston, Chicago Heights. There was no zip – it was in the days before zip codes. Minos pulled out the little black and white snapshot, the one of her in front of the house. He had bent it, and Karen felt like snatching it out of his hand. But he pulled out another photo, this one a modern color glossy. ‘Here’s the house,’ he said. ‘Same brick, same number.’ He handed them to Karen. She compared the two. The same numbers were arranged in the same slant, screwed into the same bricks. Now, though, they were painted white instead of the black they had been all those years ago. Whoever painted them had gotten a smear of paint on the brick just at the point where Karen’s head would have reached.

  Paige handed her another picture. It was a long shot of the house. ‘Marie and Alfredo Botteglia,’ he said. Karen, her hands shaking, turned the photo over and saw the name written on the back of the photo. ‘He’s dead,’ Paige told her. ‘She’s a widow. Lives there alone. Talked to a neighbor. She remembers they once had a kid – it disappeared.’ He handed her another picture. It was blurry, a shot of a woman behind a shopping cart in the parking lot of a supermarket. She was short, rounded, and her hair was gray. It was hard to see her face clearly because of the shadows cast by a post she was walking by. He handed Karen another photo. It was a profile shot of the same woman loading shopping bags into her blue Pontiac. The woman’s profile certainly didn’t match Karen’s own, but the nose was prominent. Karen stared at the face of her real mother.

  Minos Paige handed her a photocopy of Alfred Botteglia’s obituary. He had died only two years ago. They were Catholics. I’m a Catholic, Karen thought with surprise. An Italian-American. But then, maybe she wasn’t Alfredo’s daughter. She turned to Minos Paige. ‘Did you speak to her?’ she asked.

  ‘I was warned not to make contact,’ he said. ‘Sometimes they pull a runner when you do that. I figure I’d leave it to you.’ Karen nodded. She felt breathless. She picked up the picture of Marie Botteglia again. The rest of the papers she pushed across the desk to Mr Centrillo, who began carefully examining them. But she knew. She didn’t need the nod of approval from him. She turned to Minos Paige, tearing her eyes away from her mother’s face only with great difficulty.

  ‘Thank you,’ was all she said.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  Nothing as it Seams

  Karen stood outside on the sidewalk in front of 2881 Fredericston, paying the taxi driver. She had gone straight from Centrillo’s office to LaGuardia and had hopped onto the two o’clock flight to Chicago. With the time difference it was only three-thirty now, but she felt as if she had lived a whole lifetime in the two hours it had taken her to get here.

  ‘Here’ was a neat, working-class neighborhood. The homes were all of the same period, clearly a postwar subdivision. The Botteglias’ ranch house sat on its flat, manicured plot beside a half-bricked split level on one side and a cape-style shingled job next to it. A blue Pontiac sat parked in the driveway. She remembered it from the photo. Karen had taken the precaution of calling the telephone number that Minos Paige had provided. It had taken all of her courage to ask for Marie, and when the woman had said, ‘This is Marie,’ Karen had hung up the pay phone.

  It was impossible for Karen to believe that in the last few hours she had seen her mother’s face for the first time and heard her mother’s voice. She looked down at the photo in her hand, the old one that Minos had folded and cracked. The crack ran through the center of her snowsuit, at the knee level. Karen looked at the little girl’s face, at her face from so long ago, and looked again at the numbers beside her head. There they were, still attached to the brick wall beside the little entranceway.

  She felt so odd. She knew not to count on acceptance or anything much from Marie, the woman behind the door at 2881. Karen stood there in the suburban Chicago street and felt two things. First she felt blasted by the loneliness that she had carried for so many years: a loneliness so deep that to feel it before might have killed her. It shook her, literally, and she found herself trembling from her toes up through her legs, all along her spine to her neck. Even her head seemed to tremble with the knowledge of her own separateness, her terrible vulnerability. Only now could she admit it to herself. She had always, always felt alone and the burden of carrying that feeling was shaking her. Wasn’t separation the first trauma, the original punishment? Wasn’t it ironic that Belle’s punishment back in Brooklyn had been to put Karen alone in the pantry? And wasn’t it telling that Karen had felt no worse there than she had anywhere else?

  Karen reminded herself that she had gotten this information illegally, and that Mrs Marie Botteglia might be living in terror of this moment, a terror even greater than Karen’s own. She may refuse to talk to me, she may scream at me. She may not acknowledge me at all, Karen told herself. After what Belle had done to her, Karen wondered if she could bear another rejection. The burden of rejection that an adopted child carries for life would never go away.

  But then she felt herself laying the burden down or, more accurately, giving it up. It seemed that merely standing there, only a few dozen yards from her real mother, had the power to melt the boundaries, the glass wall, that had always separated her from everyone else. From Belle, who had never been adequate, from Lisa, who had been the ‘real’ daughter, from friends, who were kind but weren’t adopted, from Arnold, who was distant, from Jeffrey, who had always looked down on her, and from all the people to whom she had been the employer. Her separateness seemed to melt into the thin air of the suburban street and she almost laughed aloud. Her aloneness had been such a trial for so long, but somehow she had known that she could feel differently. Somehow she had known that this moment could be achieved. Now she found the courage to walk down the narrow cement path to the door of 2881. She was forty-two years old, and was doing this so much later than others, but then she had always been fashionably late.

  There was an illuminated doorbell button. Over it, in a neat but faded print, she could read the name: Mr & Mrs Alfredo Botteglia. Karen stuck out her manicured finger and pressed the bell.
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br />   Marie Botteglia was very short. She opened the door with a jerk of her arm and looked up to Karen, who was at least eight inches taller than she. Marie looked younger and better than she had in the snapshots, her hair neatly pulled back into a low ponytail, her face pleasant, and a lot less lined than it had seemed in the pictures from the shopping plaza parking lot. The woman looked at her. ‘Yes?’ she asked.

  ‘My name is Karen Kahn,’ Karen said. She held out the bent photo to Marie. ‘I wondered if you could identify this picture.’

  Marie Botteglia frowned and then, deciding it was safe enough, reached out to take the snapshot out of Karen’s hand. For a moment, Karen felt the woman’s fingers touch her own and she felt an almost electrical shock. Now she had seen, heard, and touched her mother.

  Marie fumbled for the reading glasses that hung around her neck. She didn’t bother to push them all the way up her nose before turning the photo around and glancing at it. Then her face changed, went pale, and she glanced back at Karen and then down to the photo again.