“But what else can you do?”
“There are people who would be willing to pay for my expertise. Hochmayer, maybe Chasen. There are plenty of others, too.”
“You’d leave government then.” Amanda said this with less shock than she once would have.
“I’d certainly consider it.” Bob bit into the side of his cone. “Hell, there’s nothing really to keep me at Justice—”
“Except principle.”
“Yeah, right.” He took another bite. “We saw where that got me.”
“You don’t think Frank was motivated by principle? There was—there is—merit to the Megabyte case.”
“Sure there is. We wouldn’t have acted on nothing. And I’m sure the DOJ will come up with something. But loath as I am to admit it, I think there’s some truth to Frith’s complaint that the investigation was politically motivated. I mean, I’ve been pushing this case for two years. Why did they suddenly pick it up? You start thinking it through—Hochmayer’s and Chasen’s donations to the party, their friendship with the president, Senator Benson’s campaign debt … A lot of Frith’s competitors live in Benson’s state. And Frith has managed to make himself unpopular with practically everyone in Washington.
“I don’t know. Maybe, like the cynics say, it is just about payoff. And if it’s just about payoff, why aren’t I at least being paid off in the private sector where I could make some real money?”
“Because you are principled.”
“Yeah—but maybe I need some new principles.”
Autumn came upon Washington as it always does, in the guise of summer. September was indistinguishable from August; the heat, if anything, was worse. The arrival of fall was evident only in the suddenly purposeful stride of the government workers whose bosses had streamed back into town for the return of Congress.
For Amanda, though, the change of season was dramatic. In the space of three months, her entire personal landscape had been bulldozed and replanted. Gone were the familiar hedges and old trees and mossy stepping-stones. In their place was a field of fresh, overturned soil in which thin, tethered saplings and sparse shoots of grass struggled against opportunistic weeds of doubt. Her whole life seemed as yet an unrealized vision, as mysterious and unknowable as the baby growing within her.
Amanda was keenly aware that Bob, too, was trying hard to adjust. There are certain types of notoriety in Washington that command not even a single-line obituary in the collective political memory: Bob had been obscure—then notorious—and now almost as quickly forgotten. Perhaps Mike Frith’s denunciation of Bob in his Senate testimony might qualify him for a footnote in some future scholarly text, but among the people to whom the case mattered in the here and now, “Bob Clarke” was already a figure of little more significance than the fly that one afternoon briefly disrupted the composure of the Judiciary committee chairman by landing on his nose. In the antitrust division of the Justice building, manila files were passed along, nameplates on offices were switched, and a new Bob took over the old Bob’s desk and chair. For Amanda, however, the scandal left lingering, if perverse, benefits. On the children’s first day back at school, Amanda ran into Dr. Koenig in the hall. Amanda, who had failed to take Ben to a therapist over the summer, was ready with an excuse but to her amazement, Dr. Koenig did not even raise the issue. Instead she greeted Amanda with an ingratiating smile. “What an exciting summer you had!” and then—“I’ve heard Jim Hochmayer is an extraordinary man—quite the philanthropist!”
Bob, meanwhile, discharged his duties with all the passion of a postal clerk. Rather than race out the door in the mornings, he leisurely read the newspaper and took a second and sometimes third cup of coffee; it was Amanda, not he, who shouted at the children to hurry up with their shoes. When Bob returned home again, he would brush aside Amanda’s questions about what he had done that day and instead insist upon hearing about her ordeal with the plumber, the confusion at carpool, the funny thing Ben or Sophie had said. It was as if he were seeking comfort in those aspects of their lives that had survived unchanged, and this interest was in some ways more worrisome to Amanda than his arrogant indifference at the height of the Megabyte case. When she occasionally asked whether there were any “new leads” on the job front, Bob would evade this question as well. Only once did he let slip that Hochmayer and Chasen no longer returned his calls; the upside was that Sherwood J. Pressman no longer did, either.
Gradually the trees tinted gold, and the wind carried the first whiffs of autumn—smokiness, chill, dying things. Amanda’s waistline thickened around the nutshell of her growing baby. She had not heard from her friend Susie since their last meeting at the coffee shop. From a small item at the bottom of a television column, Amanda learned that Susie’s show had been canceled. A few days later “The Ear” reported that “Luscious pundette Susie Morris is moving to Los Angeles to pursue other options.” The item lewdly implied that those options were not entirely related to her career. Some weeks afterward Amanda glimpsed Susie at a bank machine. Amanda was in her car, waiting for a light to change. Susie stepped aside to tuck her wallet into her purse. The autumn sun glinted off her hair and for a moment she reminded Amanda of a maiden in an Old Master’s canvas, if an Old Master had ever painted Woman Making a Withdrawal on a Street Corner. Amanda felt a rush of forgiveness. She wanted to roll down her car window and shout to Susie. But why? Maybe it was not forgiveness but that universal impulse to rescue beauty—to save it from its curses and in doing so, to feel superior to it. Susie would not appreciate her pity, nor would she see Amanda’s forgiveness as anything but her due. The window remained closed. A second later, Susie vanished into a cab.
Amanda saw little more of her mothers’ group friends. She attended only one of their gatherings that fall, at Patricia’s house in Chevy Chase.
Patricia’s sour, mistrustful housekeeper led Amanda downstairs to the playroom. The formal rooms with their dusted tables and arranged cushions were evidently reserved for grander company; Amanda wondered why Patricia did not take the added precaution of erecting velvet ropes.
The playroom, however, was pleasant enough. Sliding-glass doors led to a garden and a pool covered, at this time of year, by a green tarpaulin. The children romped outside in the leaves, and Ben and Sophie dashed to join them.
Patricia offered Amanda her cheek to brush with her lips, but her eyes nervously followed Ben’s progress into the yard. “Just watch that Ben doesn’t climb on the Winged Victory.”
Patricia’s stone statue, which she described as “an authentic Beaux-Arts study” of the famous piece in the Louvre, had been shipped from a Paris flea market the previous spring. Patricia felt its deteriorated condition lent “a tragic, ruined” quality to her otherwise flat lawn, and her pride in it had inspired her to collect other pieces, including a scaled-down cast of Rodin’s Thinker and a doleful concrete bunny (“Meredith picked that one—she has quite a good eye”).
The other mothers greeted Amanda somewhat more warmly. Christine lounged upon a sofa with her legs extended to show off new suede boots.
“How’s Bob doing?”
“Fine, thanks.” Amanda refused a glass of wine.
“We want to hear all about it,” Kim said excitedly. “I can’t believe I was away when you made ‘The Ear.’ ”
“There’s really not much to tell. It’s over now.”
“But you had Jim Hochmayer to dinner!”
“He was seeing a friend of mine. That’s over, too. Patricia, would you mind if I got myself some water?”
“Go ahead. There are glasses above the sink.”
“You have to tell us everything, Amanda.”
“I had Bob and Amanda over during the Senate hearings,” Christine boasted, stroking one of her boots.
Amanda spent longer than she might have letting the tap water run cold. It was the first time she had ever possessed a story that piqued the mothers’ interest, but she could not bring herself to share it. She knew this was a violation
of mothers’ group rules—the foremost being that you must share all personal information, no matter how private or trivial, and that of your husband and neighbors as well. It was not only that Amanda was reluctant to revisit the story, although she was, or to reveal Bob’s changed position at the DOJ—a fact that had mercifully gone unreported. It was, rather, that she had developed an aversion to exposing any aspect of her life to these women. Why this should have overcome her now Amanda couldn’t say; she only knew that for the first two months of the school year, she had avoided their company. She had not at first consciously intended to do so. But when she heard on her answering machine an invitation from Kim to attend their first postsummer gathering, Amanda created an excuse. Something else got in the way of the second meeting—and the third.
Amanda reseated herself with her glass of water.
“How was Portugal?” she asked Patricia.
“I can barely remember, so much has been going on. Too hot, I think.”
“Amanda,” Ellen coaxed. “Don’t be modest. We won’t accuse you of name-dropping. Tell us about Jim Hochmayer.”
“He’s—an interesting man.”
“Don’t push her,” Christine said. “A good hostess doesn’t gossip about the people who come to her house.” She gave Amanda a chummy smile as if to suggest that in return for this protection Amanda would tell her everything later. “Let’s move on. What I’d like to know, Amanda, is what’s the inside dope on the Megabyte case. There hasn’t been much in the news lately. And since I own stock …”
“So do I,” said Patricia, in a way that hinted she would blame Amanda for any further devaluation.
“That’s because there hasn’t been much going on, I guess. I think they’re still trying to get more companies to come forward against Megabyte. But as you know—” Amanda was not sure whether to reveal what she was going to say next, but the anticipation of the other mothers was too keen. “Bob’s no longer on the case.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“I didn’t either.”
“Oh, I thought I’d told you all this,” Amanda said lightly. “Frank Sussman promoted him to an antitrust case in another division. I think he was so pleased by Bob’s work on Megabyte …”
Ellen and Kim nodded credulously, but she could see that Christine and Patricia were buying none of it. Amanda sensed, in that instant, that she had lost the protection of her friend.
“I suppose that’s the problem with working for the government,” Patricia said, examining her nails. “The pay is low, and they’re always shuffling you around.”
None of the women inquired further about Bob’s “promotion.” Amanda sought to compensate Christine’s disappointment by sharing her other news.
“There is something, however, I haven’t told anyone yet—outside of Bob, I mean.” Here she looked directly to Christine, who had resumed her admiration of her boots. “I’m pregnant.”
This news had a stunning effect, although not an overwhelmingly positive one.
“Oh, how wonderful. That’s lovely,” Kim murmured. “How far along are you?”
“Nearly three months.”
Patricia reached for one of the pieces of celery she had put out on a serving plate. “I don’t think I could endure pregnancy again. Not that Meredith wasn’t worth it. But it took me a year to get my figure back.”
Christine simply asked, “Why?”
The question flummoxed Amanda. “I—I don’t know what you mean.”
“I mean that you have the perfect setup, a boy and a girl. I could see it if you had two boys or two girls …”
“To be honest, we didn’t exactly plan it.”
“At our age you don’t get pregnant by accident,” Christine scoffed.
“It just happened.” Amanda had not expected to be defensive about it—not in this crowd—but Christine’s reaction was the most unsettling. How often had she spoken about her satisfaction in giving up work for motherhood?
“Think about it!” Christine continued. “Just the thought of going back to diapers and feedings. And three! It’s just so many …”
They were interrupted by a scream from outside. The women all started in their seats but before any of them could rise, Ben ran in, the left side of his head awash in blood.
“Good God!” Amanda raced to him and began using her shirt to mop the blood from his hair. “Patricia—please, do you have a damp cloth?”
“I’m getting one. Watch the carpet.”
The other mothers clustered around.
“Is he okay?”
“It looks like a bad scrape.”
“They bleed like anything from the head.”
“It’s not deep. I don’t think he needs stitches. The blood’s stopping.”
“Ben, sweetie, what happened?”
“I f-f-fell.” In one hand he clutched a large chunk of stone.
Amanda pried apart his fingers. “What’s this, honey?”
There, plainly, was the carved feathered tip of a wing.
Amanda knew, as Patricia’s door closed behind her, that this would be her last visit with the mothers.
Through the rest of the fall, Amanda would see one or another of them in the hallways of the school, at assemblies, in the three o’clock carpool. Every time they would pause to say hello and effuse how happy they were to see her and gosh, wasn’t she looking well—“Your tummy, Amanda! Can you feel the baby moving yet?”—and every time they expressed regret that “things had been so busy” that they hadn’t been able to get together.
Amanda was not wounded by these exchanges. In retrospect it seemed odd that they should have remained friendly for as long as they had. So many of the friendships Amanda had formed in the early years of motherhood had long since fallen away. She never saw the women she used to know in Sophie’s infant play group, and yet those friendships had felt so intense at the time—like the friendships soldiers form in battle, a camaraderie based on the besieged circumstances of the moment. When the shelling ceases, the smoke lifts from the field, and the troops return home to resume the normal lives they thought they would never experience again, there is little left to say to former comrades-in-arms except “Hell of a time, wasn’t it?” For now, Amanda felt only relief at not having to keep up with the other mothers as her girth expanded and she became ever more preoccupied with the upheaval of the coming spring.
As for Ben and Sophie, after an initial burst of curiosity and an argument over whether the baby would be a boy or a girl, they seemed to have forgotten about Amanda’s pregnancy—except to wonder occasionally where the baby would sleep or whether it would covet one of their toys. Each month Amanda checked in with the midwife; each month the midwife listened for the baby’s heartbeat—a swishing sound like windshield wipers going full speed; each month, the midwife announced that the baby was doing well. Amanda felt the baby’s movements increase in strength: first tiny flutters, then gentle motions like the finning of a fish resting among reeds.
Amanda barely thought about returning to work anymore. She decided to pass her spare hours volunteering at the public library, sorting books and reading stories to groups of school-children. The satisfaction of helping in the library was as ephemeral as that of housework; the smiles and gaping stares of the little faces gathered before her on the carpet lasted no longer than a clean countertop. But the clean countertop did not run up and embrace her or trill excitedly to the other countertops that “Amanda is here today!” For now, the hours she logged among the library’s tiny carrels and overburdened carts would have to fill the space inside her that once held greater ambitions. There would be time later, she assured herself, for dreams that reached farther—and yet those dreams did begin to take shape in her mind. The children’s reaction made Amanda think she could be a teacher, a vocation she had never considered before. It was impossible to consider it now, of course, and Amanda kept the vision to herself; but she found herself looking to it, like a beacon on some distant horizon flashing through
fog.
Sometimes that fog was dense. Often she would awake in the middle of the night, tormented by doubts. The darkness, rather than cloaking her worries, relentlessly exposed all the cracks and fault lines of her daytime logic. It marched out the exhibits of her life thus far: thirty-five—nearly thirty-six—and what did she have to show for it? What sort of return would there be at the end of all these years of investment in her children? Maybe she would be too old to try something new. Who would hire her? Her own mind framed the accusations her mother would hurl at her, if they were speaking. Mercifully, they were not. The morning after their last encounter, Ellie Bright had risen early, said an unrepentant good-bye, and returned home to New York. When Amanda telephoned some weeks later with news of the pregnancy, Ellie said “Huh.” That was it—“Huh.”
When daylight came, however, Amanda’s thoughts would reorder themselves and settle in their places as solidly as her dresser and bed. If any demons persisted, she’d call her friend Liz, her unofficial exorcist. When Amanda repeated Christine’s remark—“you have the perfect setup, a boy and a girl”—Liz sneered that this attitude reflected “pure consumerism—children as items of consumption to adorn a successful lifestyle.” To Amanda’s distress over her fattening figure, Liz declared, “Carry yourself proudly—like a galleon under full sail!” One day Amanda wondered wearily, “Is every mother wondering all the time about whether she’s doing the right thing?” Liz responded with a teacher’s enthusiasm when a slow learner finally masters a lesson. “My point exactly! You’re allowing yourself to be victimized by our anti-mother culture. You know in your heart what you’re doing is right. So stop thinking about it.”
“I try, Liz. I just wish sometimes that I felt more comfortable in my own life.”
Then, in the weeks leading up to Christmas, Amanda began suffering stabbing headaches. “Your blood pressure is fine,” said Sarah Blumstein, removing the Velcro band from Amanda’s arm. “Slightly elevated but within normal range. And my, you’ve put on a lot of weight this month—that’s good so long as it’s from healthy foods. I’d suggest you just lie down when the headaches come. Put on some soft music. Take a bubble bath, or have your husband give you a massage.”
Amanda Bright @ Home Page 25