A Perfect Wife and Mother

by Peter Israel

  He shrugs it off, as though that’s a detail, or maybe a detail he won’t have to deal with personally.

  “The important thing,” he concludes, “is that you’ve got him back, safe and sound. Rest assured, though, we’re not going to quit on Harriet Major. She’s beaten us so far, but that’s not gonna last forever. Someday she’ll have to answer for what she did.”

  Capriello, it occurs to me, has simply been saying what he has to say. All along.

  But so, I realize, have I.

  The house has filled with people, downstairs, and it’s all I can do to keep them away from Justin. Outside, the media have resumed their state of siege. The telephone rings off the hook. Even Helga Harris calls and, later, Selma Brodkey in Helga’s behalf. “She really wants it, Georgia. She wants it exclusive, but she’ll settle for non. Look, sweetie, she did you a favor once, don’t you think you owe her?”

  Somehow I don’t feel as though I owe anyone, not today. I put Selma off. Maybe that’s mean-spirited of me: even though I can’t share in it, the spirit of the day is clearly one of congratulations, that and a sense of relief that it’s all over. Only my father, when I talk to him in his office, asks how Justin is, really, but when I expose some of my anxiety to him, he offers the same prescription as everybody else: “Just give him time, Georgie. He’ll snap out of it, and meanwhile I think your doctor’s absolutely right. Keep him quiet, fatten him up, love him.”

  Quite.

  In the afternoon, my husband accosts me in the upstairs hall. He’s wearing a forest-green shetland over matching corduroys, and an air of weary triumph. The inevitable tasseled loafers. Brown for home, black for business.

  “If it’s okay with you, honey,” he says, “I’d like to spend a little time alone with Justie.”

  “Why?” I ask him.

  “Don’t worry, honey, I’m not going to pump him. I’d just like to spend a little quality time with my son. Maybe we’ll go for a walk.”

  “Are you crazy?” I say. “With that mob outside?”

  “Yeah, you’re right. I forgot.” Ducking his head, the sheepish grin. “Look, honey, it’s all going to go away. Things’ll get back to normal. I’ll just take him down to the den, then.”

  I follow them downstairs, carrying Zoe in her Kanga-rocka-roo. They go into the den, Zoe and I into the kitchen where Helen Penzil now presides, just as Joe, I’ve noticed, has taken over the comings and goings of officialdom.

  I tell Helen my story—Justin’s mysterious appearance—which has now become the official version. I wonder, in passing, if she knows anything more, but if she does, she’s keeping it to herself. She asks how Justin is. I hear myself say he’s just tired, that Ray Braden wants him to rest. We chat on. Once, on some pretext, I walk out past the den. The door is ajar. Apparently they’re watching TV together. I can hear the sound and spot Justin, small in the Stickley chair.

  So much, I think, for quality time.

  I retreat to the kitchen. I play with Zoe while Helen talks at me, but I can’t concentrate. I find myself growing tenser by the minute. Give him time, I keep telling myself, for God’s sake, he’s hasn’t even been back twenty-four hours.

  Finally, I go out into the front hall again.

  The door to the den is wide open.

  I see Larry talking on the phone, but no Justin.

  My God, where is he?

  I must have shouted it aloud. Larry’s standing at his desk, his hand cupped over the mouthpiece.

  “What is it, honey?”

  “Where’s Justin?”

  He shrugs with his shoulders. “I don’t know. I got this call I had to take. I guess he got tired of—”

  “Oh my God!” I scream at him. “You dumb son of a bitch!”

  I stumble as I swerve around, almost fall. I rush through the downstairs, calling out his name. He couldn’t have gone into the basement; the door’s held shut by a hook above his reach. But the front door! People have been coming in and out all day!

  I clamber up the stairs on the run. I call out to him, but there’s no answer, only voices from down below. Where did he go? My God, someone could have taken him again! Right out the front door!

  Then it hits me, where he is. I feel myself start to cry. I don’t even stop to look on the second floor. I keep going.

  He’s standing in her room, gazing out the window. He has Meowie, his cat, draped over one shoulder like some kind of regimental sash.

  I stop a few paces behind him, forcing myself to catch my breath. Surely he knows I’m there, but he doesn’t acknowledge me. Only the cat watches me.

  From his vantage point, the view is bleak, wintry, a gray and sunless sky, the trees bare and brown-gray. The great oaks of St. George, the mulberrys, beeches, down to the spreading split-leaf maples. Our lawns look barren, muddy.

  “What are you doing, Justin?” I ask him softly.

  He doesn’t answer, doesn’t budge.

  “You’re looking for her, aren’t you? Harriet?”

  I see him nod slowly.

  “I don’t think she’s coming back, darling.”

  “Yes her is,” he says.

  “I don’t really think so.”

  “Yes her is.”

  “She is,” I correct automatically. “But I don’t think so, Justin. Chances are she’s a long way from here by now.” He shakes his head. “That’s what I think I’d do in her shoes, don’t you? Tell me honestly, if you were Harriet, wouldn’t you get as far away from here as you could?”

  He shakes his head again. God, does he really not understand? Even at three and a half?

  “Her promise,” he says, his eyes still on the view.

  “What did she promise, darling?” I ask him.

  “Her promise to come get me. Wherever I is. All I got to do … is be brave.”

  His voice has broken now. Even without seeing his face, I can feel the anguish inside him.

  “You are brave, Justin. I think you’re very brave.”

  He turns. Meowie wriggles from his grasp and jumps free. Great globules of tears are welling in his sad, little face. I hold out my arms, and this time he comes toward me, and I think my heart is about to break in two.

  I pick him up. Finally, at long last, I’m able to hug him close. His arms are around my neck, I feel his hands in my hair. We grip each other tightly. We’re both crying now, and somehow there’s no need for words.

  I sit down on the bed, her bed, and hug him. We rock together. At some point Larry appears in the doorway. “Are you all right?” he wants to know, but I tell him to go away. I can’t make Justin stop crying, even though we are there a long time, till it’s almost dark outside and there is nothing more to see.

  He and I may be the only ones in the world who realize that it’s not over.

  Lawrence Elgin Coffey

  8 February

  “Well, I’ve had one hell of time tracking you down,” says the Runt on the horn. “For Christ’s sake, what are you doing in a hotel?”

  “Oh, it’s not so bad,” I say. “Room service, porn movies, minibar, free shampoo.”

  “No shit, Bear, what’s going on?”

  “In a nutshell, she threw me out.”

  “Who threw you out? Georgie?”

  “No, my mother.”

  “Jesus. Since when? What happened?”

  “It’s only been a few days,” I say, though actually it’s been more than that.

  “And you didn’t tell anybody?”

  “I guess I’ve been kind of licking my wounds. Actually, it’s not so bad.”

  “Not so bad? Jesus. Look, old man, what are you doing for lunch today? I can still clear my decks. I’ve got something I want to tell you anyway. Good news. Why don’t you come down and break bread with me?”

  I start to say no—not that I’m that booked up these days—but then I say to myself: Come on, big guy, maybe it’ll do you some good. When the shit hit the fan with Georgie, I went to a hotel over the club so I wouldn’t have to explai
n, but I guess I can’t stay holed up forever, watching daytime talk shows.

  “Hey,” the Runt says, “let me get off. I can still wangle us a table at Windows. Meet me there—what?—twelve-thirty? One?”

  I smile at that, thinking how Georgie would react. She’s very big on class, class differences between people, and it’s true, nobody at The Cross would be caught dead eating lunch at Windows on the World. Whereas, to the Runt, it’s still top of the line.

  But who am I to talk? I haven’t been downtown since the night I tried to strangle the Great White. The twenty-four hours had run out when they were supposed to deliver Justie, and Georgie blew her cork at me, and when they wouldn’t let me upstairs in the building at The Cross, I went a little ape. I hung around outside in the freezing dark, me and the homeless, until the car showed up that takes him home—he didn’t leave the goddamned office till after eight!—and when I saw him walk across the sidewalk in his white socks and one of those black Russian fur hats, I barged in after him. We were on the FDR, almost up to the Triboro, when the call came through on his car phone.

  Well, at least I scared the shit out of him.

  I ride the E train down to the World Trade. That’s part of the new Coffey: subways, no cabs. Low-class stuff. It’s been a long time, except for the PATH train from Hoboken, but ever since Georgie told me I’d better get a lawyer, I’ve started economizing. Sometimes, I admit, I think why don’t I tell her to go fuck herself and spend every last shekel I get my hands on and we’ll all go down the tubes together? But then there are the kids, and who’s going to put them through Dartmouth in the twenty-first century?

  At the World Trade, I ride the elevators up to the top and fight my way through the guys from Keokuk, the wives from Chattanooga, the Japs from wherever the Japs come from, until I can find out where Mr. Penzil’s table is. And there we are, the Bear and the Runt, side by side on our side of the net, with a great view of New Jersey.

  Dewar’s for me. Bass Ale for the Runt.

  “It’s all on me,” the Runt says. “In fact, we’ve got something to celebrate. But first I want to hear what the hell’s going on.”

  Actually, I have trouble telling him. Same as with that therapist I went to. I start at the end: “She threw me out,” because that’s the truth, even though, there too, it wasn’t Georgie in one of her crazy tantrums. She was very cool and collected about it. Cold, I guess. Like she had it all figured out.

  “She just said she doesn’t want me around anymore. Said it’s bad for her, bad for the kids too.”

  “Bad for the kids? Hey—”

  “That’s what she said. Look, she’s all in a stew about Justie. He hasn’t come around yet. He still won’t talk about what happened, not a word, and the little preschool he went to asked Georgie not to bring him anymore.”

  “How come?”

  “I don’t know. Something about him being too disruptive for the other kids. He’s run away from her a couple of times too, outside the house. A regular disappearing act. Not that he’s gotten very far, but it makes her nuts.”

  “Is he still mooning around after Harriet?”

  “Yeah.” I can’t help grinning. “Not that I can blame him for that. She was really something.”

  “Were you shacking with her, Bear?”

  “Me? No. The truth is that I tried—not one of my finest hours—but she turned me down.”

  He laughs at that.

  “Then I still don’t get it,” he says. “What in hell is she talking about? What’s so bad for her, having you around?”

  I know what she said, but I’ve trouble repeating it. Maybe it’s that it’s Joe, maybe that I’m just not used to talking about stuff like this. And the context was different too. It wasn’t even a shouting match so much as me trying to get her to explain.

  “Among other things, she said, ‘Maybe I just don’t like what you do for a living.’”

  “What? You got to be kidding!”

  “No, that’s pretty much a direct quote, but—”

  “Jesus Christ. How long have you been married, anyway?”

  “Something like eight years.”

  “And she suddenly wakes up to the fact that she doesn’t like what you do for a living?”

  “Yes and no. She admits she never paid any attention, before Justie. Now she says she’s lost her respect for me, and she doesn’t think she can spend the rest of her life living with a man she has no respect for.”

  “Boy, I’ve got a lot of trouble with that,” Joe says. “Just who does she think’s been paying her bills all this time?”

  Actually I said pretty much the same thing to her. I was pissed off enough to run them down for her: the house, the help, all her antiques and her jewels and her gardeners and her trainers and her shrinks and her Madison Avenue hairdressers, not to say the charge-card bills that show up every month in scented envelopes. Justie aside, if I hadn’t made my deal with Gamble and Holbrook, who did she think was going to pay for them?

  No, I wasn’t pissed off so much as shook. Shocked. I wanted to beat up on her, I guess, for beating up on me. Wanted to make her cry, except (though this is something I can’t tell anybody) I was the one who ended up bawling.

  But that was later.

  She admitted I was right about the money. She’d been living off the same money, high on the hog. Only now it made her feel dirty. She said she wasn’t going to do it anymore.

  But that’s not it either, exactly.

  “What’s her recommendation?” Joe says sarcastically. “Are you supposed to go out in the fields and plant corn? Join the Peace Corps? What does she want, a fucking university professor?”

  He makes me smile, the Runt. I guess that’s one thing Georgie can’t understand very well, the kinds of bottom-line loyalties that tie men together.

  “It’s more than the money,” I tell him. “It’s pretty complicated stuff. It’s the people too.”

  “What people?”

  “You know, the people I used to work with. Gamble, Schwartzenberg, people like that. Gerry Mulcahy. Frank Holbrook. She can’t believe I’d still talk to Frank Holbrook after what he did to me.”

  “What exactly does she think he did to you?”

  “Look, Joe, let’s not fuck around with each other. They used me, they really did. Frank, Gamble. And whatever you say, your boss was in the middle of it.”

  “I—”

  But I cut him off. “Let’s not go into it. I know what you’re going to say: There’s stuff it’s better I don’t know, and maybe you’re right. The party line is that Harriet ran off with my kid and they got him back, but they sure put my tits in the wringer along the way.”

  “If what you’re saying is that they exploited a situation for their own ends, sure, I’ll go along with that.”

  “They held him for three days, Runt.”

  “That’s right.”

  “And you helped them.”

  “Only at the last minute. I swear it, Bear, I—”

  “You don’t have to swear to anything. Look, I may be naïve, but I’m not a Boy Scout either. I still remember the phone calls in the middle of the night, some son of a bitch telling me I better keep my mouth shut if I want my kid back. That wasn’t Harriet. Maybe it was some buddy of hers, but I doubt it.”

  “What exactly are you saying?”

  “I’m not saying anything. They wanted me out of the way? They got me out of the way. Fine. I did what I had to do, for me and my family, and I’m living with it. I’m just trying to explain it from Georgie’s point of view.”

  “Which is what? I still don’t get it.”

  I wasn’t going to mention it—let Georgie fight her own battles—but if I’m letting it hang out, then I’m going to let it hang out.

  “I’ll tell you this much, Runt. If she knew who I was having lunch with right now, she’d blow her fucking cork.”

  We’re interrupted right then: food. He motions to my drink, but I cover my glass: another sign of the new Cof
fey. He orders another ale. Then, cutlery raised, he says, “Sorry, Big Bear, you better run that one by me again.”

  I try, though it’s awkward as hell. What she actually said, in a cold and pretty much holier-than-thou way, was, “The fact that you still call Joe Penzil your best friend, after what he did to you, strikes me as either beyond belief or beneath contempt.”

  I guess I soften it a little, telling Joe.

  He thinks about it. Finally he says at least it explains one thing: ever since the day Justie came home, Georgie has cut Helen dead. Apparently Helen’s been upset about it, and he, asshole that he is, has been advising her to cool it.

  “Look,” he says, “as far as that goes, we can handle it. Georgie doesn’t want to be friends? Okay, so we won’t be friends. Life’ll go on. But what really sticks in my craw is what she’s doing to you. On the one hand, she’s telling you to get out, get lost, out of her life. She doesn’t like what you do to put bread on the table, she doesn’t like the people you associate with, your friends suck. The idea that you have lunch with Joe Penzil is ‘beneath contempt.’ So what the fuck are you supposed to do, join a monastery?”

  I laugh again, but he’s all wound up. She must’ve seen too many movies, he says. What does she think, that we’re all a bunch of Gordon Gekkos? He’s had it up to here with people who don’t know squat bashing Wall Street. Maybe it’s a dirty system, some of the time, but what’s not dirty most of the time? Who’s kidding whom? And what gives Georgie Coffey the right to stand in judgment on us poor slobs who sweat for a living?

  He says: “You know, when you first started talking, I was thinking you guys ought to see a marriage counselor. But maybe that’s wrong. Maybe you ought to get out while the going’s good.”

  “Funny you should mention it, but I’ve already been to see somebody.”

  “What do you mean, a shrink?”

  “Yeah. Nobody knows about it, not even Georgie, so I’d appreciate—”

  “Sure, I understand. But you, Bear? Going to a shrink? I can’t believe it.”

  “Neither can I, I guess. She’s a lot more into that stuff than I am.”