You Should Have Known

by Jean Hanff Korelitz

  “No, Castle. It’s kind of based on Jonathan Swift and kind of on Hindu legend but also kind of set in Wales. There’s a lot of ‘kind of’ in Miyazaki.” Henry laughed at his own joke, if indeed it was a joke. Grace was already mystified. “But Danny has the Japanese version with English subtitles, which is always better.”

  “Oh. Good. Okay.” She nodded. “So, anime. Since when? I mean, I haven’t heard you mention it.”

  “Dad took me to Howl’s Moving Castle last year,” he said simply.

  “Oh…” She nodded with great false cheer. “Fine.” And they moved swiftly on.

  The next morning, he went back to seventh grade and she went back to bed.

  The other surprise about the school was how strong it seemed to be, academically. Social studies was doing a unit on Margaret Mead’s work in Samoa, and history had begun an intensive period on the Civil War, with, it transpired, lots of primary sources. In English, the reading list for the rest of the year featured most of the usual suspects—The Scarlet Letter, To Kill a Mockingbird, Of Mice and Men—without any of the noncanon alternatives New York private schools had added over the past years to demonstrate their political correctness. And math was actually ahead of Rearden. She was not displeased to discover that Henry already had a French test to study for and a character study of Jem Finch due the following Friday.

  And he wanted to try out for the baseball team.

  What about violin? she asked him. It was the first time either of them had brought it up.

  “Well, I’m supposed to choose between orchestra and band. Or chorus.”

  Grace sighed. A roomful of reluctant violinists scratching out the theme from Forrest Gump was a very great distance from the dusty parlor of Vitaly Rosenbaum, but for now…

  “I think orchestra. All right?”

  Henry nodded glumly. And that, at least, was that difficult conversation over and done.

  She still took him in the morning and went to collect him in the afternoon, and oddly enough he never objected, though he certainly saw his classmates exploding from the yellow buses in the morning and clomping back onto them each afternoon. Maybe, Grace thought, he somehow understood how necessary the drives had become for her, that these two brief but highly ritualized journeys were providing a crucial structure to her own days of lying beneath the covers, staring into the void just beyond the wall of the bedroom.

  Later, she would have to go back and check the calendar to grasp exactly how long this had gone on, but on some morning at the end of January, after Grace dropped Henry off at school, she found herself turning the car not south to the lake and the house and the bed and the alarm clock, but north into Falls Village and the library, where she sat and read, in one of the formal high-backed armchairs beneath the ornately framed nineteenth-century portraits and floral studies, the Berkshire Record newspaper, with its helpful accounts of local teams and editorials about the local zoning board. Then, a few days later, she went back and did it again.

  Sometimes she saw Leo Holland at the library, and one morning early in February Grace went for coffee with him at Toymakers Café, a short walk down Main Street. Leo was not quite a stranger anymore; he had progressed from a barely remembered character from her childhood summers, distinguished mainly by his noise-producing antics and their effect on Grace’s mother. He had come by the house twice since their meeting at the mailbox—once with a large plastic tub of what he called chicken stew (probably because he wasn’t pretentious enough—or didn’t want her to think he was pretentious enough—to call it “coq au vin,” though it was coq au vin) and once with a loaf of homemade Anadama bread. Both items, he told her, had come from the dinners his “group” was holding in the house, every couple of weeks. “Group” was a term offered so nonchalantly that Grace didn’t know what he meant by it. Study group? Therapy group? It might be a knitting group or an Amnesty International group for all the detail he offered, but she was curious enough, when he mentioned it over coffee that morning, to ask what kind of group he meant.

  “Oh, the band,” Leo said. “Well, we prefer ‘group.’ We’re mainly just midlife string geeks. ‘Band’ seems a little teenagers-in-the-basement, you know? Though the other fiddler actually is a teenager. He’s my friend Lyric’s son. Lyric plays mandolin.”

  “Lyric,” Grace repeated. “That’s a great name for a musician.”

  “Hippie parents,” Leo said. “But it suits her. She teaches mandolin at Bard. I’m at Bard. I told you that, I think.”

  “Actually, no.” She was stirring sugar into her cappuccino. “You said you were on sabbatical. You didn’t say where you taught.”

  “Oh. Bard. Great place to teach, not such a great place to be on sabbatical.” He laughed. The little café had a big wooden farm table in one corner, at which some mom-committee (Grace could not help thinking of her own former mom-committee at a similar wooden farm table) was conferring over yellow legal pads. Elsewhere, a stack of motorcycle picture books was actually topped with a signed photo of Liza Minnelli that had to be twenty years old.

  “I’m less than an hour away here, but it’s far enough to get them to stop calling. Otherwise I wouldn’t be getting any work done. And the group, I mean, we’ve been playing together for more than five years, and they were not pleased about having to drive all this way, but after they came out the first time, they kind of loved it. They loved being alone at the lake. Almost alone,” he corrected. “Now we kind of make an evening of it. Or even an overnight if Rory doesn’t have school in the morning. Rory’s our other fiddle player. And we make these big meals.”

  “Of which I am the grateful beneficiary,” she said kindly.

  “Yes. Well, good.”

  “Oh,” Grace said, realizing. “That’s where the music is coming from. You can’t always tell what direction. Sometimes it sounds like it’s coming through the woods. That’s a band? I mean, a group?”

  “We have an extremely modest following around Annandale-on-Hudson,” Leo said with amiable sarcasm. “You know, significant others, co-workers. Students hoping for a good grade on the final. We have a name: Windhouse. It’s a ruin in the Shetland Islands. Very haunted, according to Colum—he’s another group member—he grew up in Scotland, used to go hiking in the Shetlands. Everyone asks,” he said a little lamely, because she hadn’t asked. But she would have.

  “Well, you sound great. What little I’ve heard.”

  He seemed to have decided to stop talking about himself. For a moment, they sat rather awkwardly, contemplating their coffees. Across the room, the women—now Grace recognized one of them from Henry’s school—began to wind up their meeting. When the door opened, two enormous men came in and the cook, a woman with long gray braids wound around her head, came rushing to the counter and leaned over to embrace them.

  “You said you were writing a book?” Grace asked.

  “Yeah. Hoping to finish by June. I have to teach summer session this year.”

  “What’s the book about?”

  “Asher Levy,” said Leo. “Have you heard of him?”

  She started to shake her head. Then she said: “Wait, is he the same as Asser Levy?”

  “Yes!” Leo looked delighted, as if she had specifically indulged him by knowing even this much. “Asher, sometimes known as Asser. I forgot you’re a New York Jew. Of course you know Asser Levy.”

  “But I don’t,” she protested. “Just the name. There’s a school in the East Village named after him, I think.”

  “And a park in Brooklyn. And a recreational center. And a street! The first Jewish landowner in New York and quite possibly the first Jew in America. That’s something I’m trying to settle one way or the other.”

  “I had no idea…” She laughed. “The first Jewish landowner in New York? You think he could ever have imagined the Harmonie Club or Temple Emanu-El?”

  “What, you mean Our Lady of Emanu-El?” said Leo. “That’s what my father always called it. He belonged for a while. Then he became a Q
uaker when he met my mother. He used to say half his bar mitzvah class became Quakers or Buddhists. He said he’d rather meditate on a bench in a meetinghouse than sitting on the floor, so he became a Quaker. Also they had better bumper stickers.”

  “I remember him!” Grace said, because she did, or thought she did. “He had this big droopy sweater, right? Sort of light green?”

  “Ah…” Leo nodded. “The bane of my mother’s existence. For years she’d hide it, hoping he’d forget about it and find something else to wear that didn’t come down to his knees. But he had like a sense about it. He always went right to the cupboard or the shelf or wherever she put it. But you know, after my mom died he just threw it out. I saw it in the garbage one day. I didn’t even ask him why.”

  Grace nodded. She was thinking about her father and the jewelry, the ziplock bag of jewelry, so toxic that he couldn’t look at it anymore.

  “My mother died, too,” she said. She wasn’t sure that it followed, really. Leo nodded.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I’m sorry, too. About yours.”

  “Thanks.”

  They sat in silence for another minute. But it was actually less uncomfortable than it might have been.

  “Never gets old, does it?” Leo said. “The death of your mother.”

  “Nope. Never does.”

  He took a sip of his coffee, then wiped his mouth, unthinkingly, on the back of his hand. “My mother died up here at the lake, actually. She stayed a few days after my father and brother left, to close up the house. This was eleven years ago. We’re not sure what happened—probably carbon monoxide poisoning, but the autopsy was inconclusive. My dad replaced the heater anyway. It made him feel better.”

  “That’s terrible,” Grace said. She could not remember what Leo’s mother looked like.

  “What about yours?”

  She told him about returning to Cambridge after the spring break of her junior year, and how the phone was ringing and ringing in her dormitory room as she fumbled with her key in the hallway, and how she knew—even in that prehistory before cell phones—that this call was going to mean something large and something bad. And it did: Her mother had had a stroke back in New York, no more than an hour after Grace had left for the train station. Grace had turned around and gone back, and over the next few weeks, in which her mother had never regained consciousness, and the possible futures had been of steadily diminishing returns, she had stayed and fluttered around both her parents in the hospital, until she knew she had to either withdraw for the term or go back. So she went back, and—incredibly, horribly, surreally—the exact same thing had happened. The ringing phone through the thick oak door in Kirkland House, the scramble for the key, the something large and something bad news. She had gone back to New York again, this time for the rest of the term, and was only able to make up her course work over the summer.

  That fall, she had moved off campus to live with Vita, and then, almost immediately, she had met Jonathan. It would have been a nice time to still have a mother, she thought now. How would Marjorie Wells Pierce Reinhart—who had met and fallen in love with her own husband over the course of a single blind date in 1961, and whose marriage had not been happy—have responded when her only child phoned, elated, soaring, to describe the young man, ambitious, compassionate, tender, a little disheveled, and thoroughly in love with her?

  She would have said: Be careful. Slow down.

  She would have said: Grace, please. I’m delighted, but be smart.

  Be smarter, in other words.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t get to know her as an adult,” Leo said suddenly. “I mean: me as an adult. I know she didn’t like me very much when I was a teenager.”

  “Oh…,” Grace heard herself say, “it wasn’t you. She wasn’t a very happy person, I don’t think.”

  It was the first time she had said anything remotely like this. Ever. She listened to the silence those words left behind and was amazed at herself. She felt terrible. She felt she had let something terrible out into the world. Her mother had been unhappy. She had just said so. What a horrible thing to have done.

  “Sometimes things happen so…untidily,” said Leo, “that we have to make up a narrative. I think it happens with death a lot, actually.”

  “What?” said Grace.

  “The narrative. You came back to school. The phone rang. You came back to school again. The phone rang again. The way you tell the story, you’ve almost made yourself responsible for her death.”

  “You think I’m being narcissistic?” Grace asked. She was trying to decide whether or not to be offended.

  “Oh no, I don’t mean that. Well, there is narcissism in all of us, of course. I mean, we are the protagonists of our own lives, so naturally it feels like we’re at the wheel. But we’re not at the wheel. That just happens to be where the window is located.”

  She laughed. Then, when she realized that she was actually laughing about this, she laughed again.

  “Sorry,” Leo said. “Chronic failing of professorial types. Always. Be. Professing. To misquote Mamet.”

  “That’s okay,” said Grace. “I never thought of it. And I’m supposed to be a therapist.”

  He looked at her. “What do you mean, supposed to be?”

  But she didn’t answer him, because she didn’t know. Weeks had passed since Grace had even thought of a patient. It had been even longer since she’d last felt she was in a position to instruct another human being on how to better live his or her life.

  “My profession,” she said instead. “I’d rather not discuss it.”

  “That’s fine,” he said carefully.

  “I appear to be on sabbatical, too,” she said.

  “Okay. Not that we’re discussing it.”

  “No,” Grace said, and they left it at that and went on to other things. Leo’s father had not remarried, but he had a lady friend named, of all things, Prudie. Leo’s brother, Peter, was an attorney in Oakland. Leo had a daughter.

  “Well, sort of,” he clarified unsuccessfully.

  “You sort of have a daughter.”

  “I was involved with a woman who had a daughter already. Ramona. The daughter, not the woman. We decided to have the best of all possible breakups, and that meant Ramona stayed in my life, which was a big relief to me, because I adore her.”

  “The best of all possible breakups…” Grace said it wonderingly. “That sounds nice. Voltairean!”

  He shrugged. “It’s an ideal, of course. But I can’t think of a better reason for trying. When you have kids. Even a sort-of kid.” He looked over at her. She could tell he was wondering if he should ask. She was here on the lake, in other words. Her son was here. She had to look down at her own left hand to check whether she was still wearing her wedding ring. She appeared to be still wearing her wedding ring. All these weeks, this had failed to make an impact on her.

  “So…do you see her often?”

  “About one weekend a month. Her mother lives in Boston, so it’s tricky but doable. Then she comes up for a few weeks in the summer, but that’s getting complicated, too. Because of boys,” he said sarcastically.

  Grace smiled.

  “Yes, I said boys! Apparently, this matters to a fourteen-year-old girl. The lack of boys on a beautiful little lake in the country. I have tried to tell her that boys are not worth anything, but she is determined to go to summer camp with the disgusting creatures anyway, and I’m supposed to be content with picking her up in Vermont and taking her to Cape Cod for a week.”

  Grace laughed and drank the last bit of her coffee. “And so you shall be, if you know what’s good for you,” she instructed him. “The fourteen-year-old girl is a very tricky bit of ectoplasm. Be happy she wants to see you at all.”

  “I’m happy,” he grumbled. “Don’t I look happy?”

  He asked them over again, for dinner, and again Grace demurred, but perhaps not as energetically as the last time and the time before. She attributed this, afterw
ard, to Henry, and the notion that Henry would probably not dislike Leo, and that Leo might not be a problematic person for Henry to know, seeing that they all three lived on the same lake in the middle of the woods. And he—Leo—had said that it would be a nice thing if Henry could bring his fiddle (he called it a fiddle, not a violin) when they came, because he—Leo—would love to hear Henry play, or would Henry like to bring his fiddle (violin) over sometime at the weekend to sit in with the band? And Grace had very nearly said that Henry didn’t really “sit in,” that wasn’t really the way he’d been taught to play, and actually just imagining a student of Vitaly Rosenbaum “sitting in” with other musicians (though the grim Hungarian might not even have deigned to consider Leo and the others in Windhouse musicians at all) was pretty hard to do. But she didn’t. On the other hand, she didn’t accept the invitation, either. Instead, she found herself inquiring—with an irreverence in her voice that was supposed to make him forget all about having asked—what the difference was, anyway, between a violin and a fiddle, and he told her, simply: Attitude.

  “Attitude,” she repeated, very skeptical. “Really.”

  “Simple as that,” he said, looking pleased with himself.

  “But…attitude toward what?”

  “Oh, I could tell you, but then I couldn’t be responsible for what happened next. Shall we leave it for a few weeks?”

  Yes, she told him, nodding soberly. A few weeks.

  Then they got up and left the café together, Leo waving back at the woman behind the counter, and Grace, who at the very least had been able to spend the past hour not thinking about what was going to happen next, went back to her car and got inside and drove north.

  Her brief conversation with Vita had taken place a few days earlier, on the phone at the lake house, which Grace had plugged back in for the occasion. Vita’s office number had taken all of thirty seconds at a keyboard in the David M. Hunt Library to procure, but the courage to use it had been far harder to come by. The talk had been…well, a little formal under the circumstances, but when the invitation came—to meet in Vita’s office in Pittsfield, of all places, she had said yes right away.