A Week as Andrea Benstock

by Lawrence Block

  He said, “Quite a welcome.”

  “Well, I was a bitch on the phone. In fact I’ve been a pain lately, haven’t I?”

  “Oh, not all that much of a pain.”

  “The closest I can come to an excuse for this morning is I just talked to my mother before I called you, and on top of it being the anniversary she wanted to go to the cemetery. I don’t remember if I mentioned that or not.”

  “Yes, you did.”

  “Well, it rattled me a little.”

  “I can understand that.” He put his arm around her waist and they walked to the kitchen where she had fixed herself a drink. She picked it up and they raised their glasses to each other and drank. In the living room he asked her how it had gone at the cemetery.

  “It wasn’t really bad. I didn’t know it before, but this wasn’t her first visit. She went all by herself a few weeks ago and never told me.”

  “She’s quite a gal, your mother.”

  “Oh, more than you know.”

  “I’m sure.”

  “No, much more than you know, more than I ever knew. She told me the most extraordinary thing this afternoon.”

  “Oh?”

  “It’ll keep.” And, with a nod in Robin’s direction, “Little pitchers and all. Anyway, it’s a long story and I want to make sure I tell it right. Incidentally, if I seem a little odd, it’s probably because I’m still reacting to what she told me.”

  “Now you’ve got me hooked.”

  “Well, stay hooked. Right now I’ll get dinner on the table. No, stay where you are, you can read the paper if you want. It’ll be another few minutes.”

  During dinner, and in the time between dinner and Robin’s bedtime, she kept going over what her mother had told her and trying to decide how she would recount it to Mark.

  She was waiting in the living room when Mark finished tucking Robin in for the night. “That kid’s certainly morbid lately,” he said.

  “Morbid? Oh, Lucinda.”

  “And Lucinda’s friends and relations, all of whom seem to have come to a bad end. Maybe you could say something to Lucinda.”

  “We don’t have a terribly verbal relationship. Robin’s the only one she talks to. And I was thinking, I’m not sure it’s Lucinda. What I mean is that Robin’s probably very eager for information on the subject of death and dying. Because of my father. She seems to be handling things well but kids are brilliant at reacting the way they think you want them to. And you know how close she was to Poppa David.”

  “It’s a damn shame she has to learn about death at this age,” he said.

  “Yes, but when’s a good time?”

  “Well, that’s a point.” He was in his chair, an oversized Naugahyde recliner of the type Robin spoke of categorically as Daddy Chairs, and he leaned back in it and elevated his feet. “The goyim have it a lot easier. They can tell their kids that So-and-so went to heaven and leave it at that. They can even believe it themselves if they feel like it. I wonder if the whole concept of Heaven and Hell originated because some kid was making a pest of himself and some parent wanted to find an answer that would shut him up.”

  “What a thought.”

  “I wonder if many of them really believe it. Here I have two Catholic partners and I haven’t got the slightest idea what they really believe in. Kids in college talk about their beliefs but when you grow up you learn not to discuss them. What do Cass and Tony believe in? Now Tony doesn’t go to church and Cass does, but I’d be surprised if Cass even believes in God, while I would guess Tony does, at least on some level. But do they believe in heaven? Probably not, but they’ll tell their kids they do, whereas we can’t take that easy out with Robin.” He yawned. “Well, it’s supposed to be hard to be a Jew, isn’t it? Part of the game. You had something you wanted to tell me, or don’t you feel like talking about it?”

  “No, I want to tell you. I thought it was so extraordinary, but maybe that’s just me.” She paused to light a cigarette. “I told you we went to the cemetery and that wasn’t as bad as it might have been. Not that it was a pleasure, but it could have been worse, and she’s really very good at keeping control of herself, and I think in a healthy way.

  “But that’s not the point. I drove her back to her house—I almost said their house, I’m still doing that now and then. And I went inside for a minute, and we got to talking about Linda.”

  “My sister Linda?”

  “Yes. I don’t know how we got on the subject. Oh, I do, too. Your mother had called earlier and she mentioned that and got onto the subject of Linda from there. She wanted to know if there was any possibility of Linda and Jeff getting back together again.”

  “About as much a possibility as there is that the sun will come up in the west tomorrow.”

  “That’s more or less what I told her, but in a less colorful way. She thought this was terrible, and she had almost as much trouble using the word divorce as she has saying cancer, and she asked why didn’t Linda go out there so Jeff could see the children—”

  “Oh, Christ. If that son of a bitch had the slightest interest in his kids.”

  “That’s what I told her, and without saying so I tried to get across the idea that he is a son of a bitch. I explained what you’d gone through to get him to send child support on a regular basis, and I told her some of the stunts he’s pulled, and she still inclined toward the position that Linda ought to make an effort to keep the marriage together.”

  It surprised her how easy it was to invent this part of the conversation. She felt that she could, if pressed, reconstruct the entire conversation about Linda, when indeed she and her mother had talked about Linda not at all. But she needed a suitable way of leading into what her mother had in fact told her, and this was better than anything else she could think of.

  “So I told her she was just making a blanket defense of the institution of marriage because she had had an exceptionally fine marriage.”

  “A point I would have made if you didn’t,” he said, nodding approval. “A very good point.”

  “That’s what I thought, but wait. I told her how Jeff had been running around, and being very open about it, or at least that’s Linda’s story—”

  “I don’t think there’s any question about it.”

  “—and I asked her how she would have felt if Daddy had ever had an affair with another woman.”

  “And?”

  “Well, can’t you take it from there?”

  “I think I know what you’re getting at but I’m not going to say it.”

  “That’s it, all right, and now I’m having trouble saying it. But I’ll say it. By God, if that woman could say it I think I can. My father had an affair with another woman. No, there’s more. My father fell in love with another woman. And he wanted to get a divorce. He wanted to divorce my mother and marry another woman.”

  He leaned forward, his expression thoughtful. “That’s hard to believe,” he said.

  “Hard to believe? It’s impossible to believe, at least for me. But it’s the truth.”

  “When did this happen, did she say?”

  “Almost twenty years ago. Which means it happened after twenty years of marriage. I guess he was about forty-five at the time. I would have been, oh, I suppose I was a freshman in high school.”

  “Thinking back, did you have any idea at the time?”

  “Are you kidding? Of course not. God, all my life there’s been one thing I’ve always been absolutely certain of, and that’s that my parents’ marriage was made in heaven. That they had a perfect relationship and were completely devoted to each other.”

  “I don’t suppose there’s such a thing as an absolutely perfect marriage.”

  “No, of course not . . . but my parents—well, I’m certain that I’ve always viewed their relationship through rose-colored glasses. And my father has always been a hero to me. But the idea that he wanted to leave my mother, that they actually sat down together and talked in terms of divorce—I’ll tell you
something, I think it rattled me more twenty years after the fact than it did her at the time it was happening. Not literally, but it shook the hell out of me. I questioned her as if she was on the witness stand and I was cross-examining her. You know, it’s shaking me up now to talk about it.”

  “I can see that. Do you want a drink?”

  “I think I do.”

  He fixed drinks for both of them, brought her hers, sat down with his in his chair.

  He said, “Your father was in his forties.”

  “Yes. Around forty-five, I guess. I could figure it out more exactly if it mattered.”

  “I was only thinking that it’s supposed to be pretty common at that age. A man gets to be forty-five or fifty and he starts to worry about, oh, the decline of his masculinity, say. Or general worries about growing old. And then some chick turns up, and she thinks he’s fascinating because he’s a mature and intelligent and successful man, and he goes crazy over her because she’s twenty years younger than his wife and it’s an amazing ego thing for him to realize that she’s interested in him. From what I’ve heard, it happens all the time.”

  “I think this was different.”

  “Oh?”

  “I think so.” She leaned forward. “She wouldn’t tell me who the woman was, but—”

  “Oh, she knew who it was? I didn’t know that.”

  “She knew. This wasn’t what you just described, a middle-aged man and a young girl running around to motels. Did they have motels eighteen or twenty years ago?”

  “Of course. Motels came in after the end of the war.”

  “Well, it wasn’t that. It was pretty serious, or at least everybody involved thought it was serious at the time. He came right out and said he wanted a divorce, and it was all out in the open that he was seeing this woman. I’m pretty sure she was married, too. I don’t think my mother said so but there was something she said about children being involved, and I didn’t have any brothers and sisters, and she definitely said children, not a child. I think this woman was married with children, and I think she was probably about the same age as my mother.” She paused for a sip of her drink. “And I lived right in that house while all of this was going on and I never had the slightest idea.”

  “Do you remember if they had fights? You could have heard loud arguments without knowing what they were about.”

  “I don’t think I ever heard either of them raise their voice to the other. I suppose they were very good at keeping up a good front for me while all this was going on. Another thing, I was probably not very perceptive in that area because it never would have occurred to me to notice anything. I just so completely took it for granted that they were happy with each other.”

  “How did it work out?”

  “What? I was thinking of something, I didn’t hear you.”

  “I just wondered how it worked out. Obviously they stayed together, but did she go into any detail?”

  She nodded. “A certain amount of detail. She said her first reaction was to give him a divorce. She said it was a terrible shock to her pride, and here she was comparing herself to Linda. She said her pride was probably hurt less than Linda’s because Jeff’s affairs were conducted publicly. The whole state of Arizona knew he was fucking around. She didn’t phrase it that way.”

  “No kidding.”

  “Whereas my father was discreet. There was him and this woman, and then my mother knew, and presumably this woman’s husband also knew, although maybe he didn’t. Since she never mentioned that the woman had a husband I can’t know for sure that he knew what was going on. But the point is that nobody else knew.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “I just wonder. There must have been other people who knew. I bet that woman had at least one friend that she told, and I wonder if my father may have had someone he confided in. And in the course of a couple of years I wonder how many other people heard a little gossip on the subject. You know how quickly gossip moves in this town.”

  “Faster than a speeding bullet.”

  “So I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of the people in their little circle knew. But the point is that my mother didn’t know they knew. She didn’t have to face anything. So in that sense it didn’t matter so much whether they knew or not.”

  “You were starting to say how everything resolved itself.”

  “Yes. I wish I could remember exactly what she said and how she said it. There were a million questions I wanted to ask, you know, but I felt I had to restrain myself. Evidently what happened was that they decided to postpone any definite action for the time being. They wouldn’t take steps toward a divorce right away, and he wouldn’t move out of the house.”

  “He never moved out of the house?”

  “No. I don’t know if he slept in the same bed with her during all this. That was one of the questions I couldn’t bring myself to ask her.”

  “I don’t blame you.”

  “But they spent their nights under the same roof, whatever bed he slept in, and appearances were kept up. And I was kept neatly in the dark, which was one of her main arguments. Until everything was absolutely certain one way or the other she didn’t want me exposed to any trauma, and this made sense to him, too, so the appearances were kept up.”

  “But he went on seeing the woman?”

  “Evidently. You see, they didn’t talk about it. There was a sort of agreement to that effect, although I doubt they bothered spelling it out. He went on seeing the woman for a while and then it burned itself out. That’s her phrase, incidentally. It burned itself out. Meaning, I suppose, the passion he and the woman had for each other.”

  “Do you suppose they were in love?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve been wondering about that. On the one hand I want to believe that my father couldn’t have been in love with anyone but my mother, and on the other hand I don’t want to think he’d be capable of wanting to end their marriage over a serious case of the hots.”

  “Knowing your father, I’d say it might be a case of the hots, and where did you get that expression, by the way?”

  “It’s fairly awful, isn’t it? I think I read it somewhere. I’m sure I never said it before.”

  “Well, if you never say it again that’s all right, too. No, the point is that I would guess it might be a basically sexual thing with him, but that he would have to think it was love at the time. And that way it would blow over, or burn itself out I guess you said, because he or even both of them would reach a point where they saw that it was just passion, or the passion would begin to die down a little and they would realize that real love didn’t really enter into it. Do you understand what I mean?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “That sounds more like your dad. From what I know of him, and I think I got to know him fairly well. God knows I thought a lot of him. And I don’t think any less of him on the basis of what you’ve told me tonight, Andrea.”

  “Neither do I.”

  “Are you sure? You shouldn’t, and I hope it’s true.”

  “It is.”

  He seemed relieved to hear that, and she guessed that on at least one level his relief had nothing whatever to do with her father.

  “I think I’ll just freshen this,” she said. “How about you?”

  “Well, make it light. Say, I’ll get them, Andrea.”

  “Oh, you look much too comfortable,” she said.

  She took her time fixing the drinks. She felt shaky and on edge, her mind trembling with an electric tension that reminded her of Eileen Fradin on diet pills. But in her own case the effect was not the result of pills. It was clearly the product of the conversation they were having. It was an enervating conversation, and in a way that was not entirely unpleasant. And she sensed that it was a very important conversation. She might have been an actress playing a scene at the close of the first act, and the whole structure of the third act would depend on how convincingly she played her part now. But she had a burden most actresses were s
pared. She had to make up her own lines as she went along.

  Seated in the living room once again, with her drink in one hand and a fresh cigarette in the other, she said, “Where were we? I was saying that it just ended. Father’s big romance. I don’t know how long it took, a couple of weeks or a couple of months. I would guess no more than a month. It was never what you could call an arrangement, where the marriage is a marriage in name only and the affair is public knowledge, the way it is in English novels. I don’t know how long the affair went on before my mother knew about it, but I would guess it came out into the open fairly soon. And then I would guess it was over within a month.”

  “Not much time in the course of a lifetime.”

  She leaned forward, eyes bright. “That’s exactly it! They were together for almost thirty-nine years, and there were two or three bad months, and what does that mean over the whole course of their lives? I asked her how it had changed things afterward and she insisted it hadn’t changed them at all. That her feelings for my father never changed and that his feelings for her never changed, either. That it was something that just happened, and afterward maybe it made each of them appreciate the other a little bit more, but that was all. Now here was something that must have torn her completely apart, Mark, but remember she was telling me about it almost twenty years later, and even though she remembered it vividly she was able to talk about it as something that was ultimately no worse than a bad cold. What’s so funny?”

  “‘No worse than a bad cold.’ That’s what they say about something else.”

  “What? Oh, I’ve read the expression. It’s syphilis, isn’t it?”

  “God, no. Gonorrhea.”

  “Well, the same thing.”

  “The hell it’s the same thing. Syphilis is a whole lot worse than a bad cold. So is gonorrhea, as I understand it. Another thing they say about gonorrhea is that you’re not a man until you’ve had it.”