A Perfect Wife and Mother

by Peter Israel

  Just the other day? When you were here and there?

  She waits for me to answer, or ask, I don’t know which. Don’t I want to know? But I’m thinking: The last thing in the world I want tonight is to relive it. Any of it. Not with my son asleep upstairs, who I just said was at his grandparents’.

  “Holbrook,” she says. “Francis Hale Holbrook.”

  She’s eyeing me, as though watching my reaction.

  “You knew him, didn’t you?” she asks.

  “No. I never met him. Larry knows him.”

  “Yes. And that’s what it was all about, Georgia, don’t you see? He wanted something out of Larry. That’s why I was permitted to come to work for you in the first place. And that’s why I ran away with Justin.”

  Maybe I’m supposed to be shocked. Maybe once I would have been. Maybe the news that Frank Holbrook had been behind it all—my husband’s old “mentor,” the CIA type who, Larry always said, pulled all the strings—would have sent me climbing the walls.

  If she’s telling the truth.

  But no more. It’s over. My husband betrayed us, and my son’s an emotional mess, and I’m dealing with both as best I can.

  For the rest, I no longer care.

  I say as much.

  “I’m sorry, Georgia,” she insists, “but you’re going to have to listen whether you want to or not. It’s too important. You don’t know what they did to me.”

  Now, underneath her level tone, I hear the menace and, in her eyes, see that old, steady, grim expression from when I’d catch her unawares. And suddenly, seeing that brings it all back in a rush—the references I never checked, the double-dealing with Larry, the weirdness of those weekends when she would insist on leaving no matter what was going on.

  To go to him? Robert A. Smith? Frank Holbrook?

  So she said.

  And Justin on the slide! Of all the terrible things that happened, this is what my brain singles out. Why, when I’ve long since forgotten it? That first week, my son all alone at the top of the slide, so small … Her … her recklessness. Her goddamn recklessness!

  Oh God, why didn’t I fire her, that same day? When it was in me to fire her?

  And now she’s back! How do I know she’s not crazy?

  “I’d like a drink,” she says evenly.

  Rattled, I point to the refrigerator, tell her to help herself.

  No, she explains. Hard liquor.

  “Another lie,” she says, laughing. “I know, the whole time I was here, I always refused a drink.”

  I’d forgotten that.

  “You could try the den,” I say. “Though I’ve no idea what you’ll find.”

  I see her glance at the wall phone.

  “Okay,” she says. But then, half-smiling, “I think you’d better come along with me.”

  In a daze—is this really happening?—I follow her back through the dining room to the front hall, the den. All Larry’s stuff, untouched. From the doorway, I watch her find the Scotch and a glass tumbler. She fills the tumbler to the brim, no ice, holds the glass with both hands, sips.

  “Where’s Larry?” she asks.

  “He’s not here.”

  “I know,” she says. “At least his car hasn’t been.”

  I do a double-take at the remark.

  “What do you mean, ‘his car hasn’t been here’?” I ask her. She doesn’t answer. “Just how long have you been hanging around?”

  “The last couple of nights,” she says casually. “I guess I was working up my courage.”

  “Working up your courage?” I repeat. The admission—its casualness—enrages me. “What were you doing, hiding in the bushes? Spying on us? Waiting for him? Well, if it’s him you want, you’ve got a goddamn long wait! I’ll be glad to tell you where you can find him!”

  I see her recoil.

  “Please, Georgia,” she stammers out. “You’ve got it all wrong! It was a setup. I was supposed to seduce Larry, but I couldn’t do it. I swear, I never—”

  This, above all, I don’t need to hear.

  “What makes you think I give a damn whether you slept with him or not?”

  I want her gone now, out. I don’t care if she’s crazy or dangerous or a fugitive from justice or whatever the hell she is. Out!

  But I hear a cry above our heads, then, seconds later, a full-fledged wail. A rush of panic inside. Thank God, it’s only Zoe. But how can I let Harriet upstairs? And she’s not going to leave of her own free will, what am I supposed to do?

  In my own house, damn it! This is going on in my own house!

  I fight to control myself.

  “It’s just the baby,” I say. “She must be hungry. I’m going to run up and get her. I’ll bring her down to the kitchen. Just wait for me there.” I force a smile. “Please don’t worry,” I say. “I’m not going to call anybody. I promise.”

  For a second, I think she’s going to follow me anyway—what will I do then?—but she doesn’t. Upstairs in the nursery I pick Zoe up, all red-faced and soaked, and with my free hand throw the traveling diaper bag, which has everything I need, into the Kanga-rocka-roo. Back in the hallway, listening. Not a sound, either from downstairs or Justin’s room. His door is wide open, though. I put the carrier down, pull his door closed but not all the way shut. He still has trouble with doorknobs.

  I’m not going to let her intimidate me!

  Then down the back stairs, with Zoe, to the kitchen. Where Harriet is waiting for us, her glass already half-empty.

  It’s a long and, I judge, largely self-serving story. Zoe, changed and fed, sleeps through it on the kitchen counter. I listen, distracted. It’s the kind of story, I think, Dickens might have invented on an otherwise dreary day—complete with the punishing mother (still alive, it turns out; I’d always thought she was dead), the callow boyfriend, the seducer-uncle who wasn’t her uncle, the running away and the being brought back, followed by the mental institution and finally the hapless young beauty in thrall to the aging monster.

  Smith. Holbrook.

  It’s not that I disbelieve it entirely (although the idea that she would run off from the institution with a man she claims she’d never seen before stretches my imagination). More likely, I think, it’s a mixture of truth and fantasy. Is that maybe who Harriet is: a mixture of truth and fantasy? Either way, though, my mind keeps wandering off. How am I going to get rid of her? And why is she telling me all this, three months later? What does she really want from me? Is it sympathy, for God’s sake? Absolution?

  There are times, while she talks, when I even find myself lulled by the voice. Not the content—she describes what Holbrook did to her in horrific detail—but the soft, soothing tone. In spite of myself, it takes me back to the Harriet of my pregnancy, the back rubs, the dreamy afternoons when her voice descended on my relaxing body, raising the hairs on my back, my neck, in little prickles. I have to jerk myself back to reality—to my kitchen, to this bedraggled creature, her glass now empty, hands stuffed in the parka pouch, who, if she is to be believed, was stampeded by Holbrook into taking my son away because she was terrified about what he might do to him, and at the same time so panicked that she could tell neither me nor my husband nor the police nor anybody on the planet what was happening.

  She has a reason, it seems, for everything.

  I’m even treated to an account of how great my child was on the road, motel-hopping, such a brave little trouper, and the story, horrendous if true, of what happened when Holbrook caught up with them. And then her phone call to me, the next morning, and finally the scene at the mall.

  “I wanted to bring him home, Georgia,” she says. “I really meant to. I’d even asked him—Holbrook—I’d begged him—to let me take Justin home. But after I called you, I realized they’d be watching the house. It was too dangerous. That’s when I thought of the mall. When I called you the second time, we were already there.”

  I’ve hardly said a word up to now. But like it or not, she’s brought me back to the r
eality of that awful Saturday.

  “Then why weren’t you with him, at The Greenhouse?” I snap at her.

  “But I was! I waited till the last minute, at least what I thought was the last minute. You were late yourself, weren’t you?”

  “Late? All of ten minutes! Why couldn’t you have waited with him?”

  “But I did! I even put a note in his pocket, telling you he was in danger. And I did wait. I didn’t want to be around when you actually got there, but I watched the whole thing from the second level! I saw it all happen, Georgia!”

  Her voice has risen. I guess mine has too. Suddenly we are both shouting at each other. She’s telling me something about the police, that she thought I’d bring the police with me, and I can’t help it, it’s all becoming vivid again—running through the restaurant, my heart pounding, and the crashing sound of the organ, and the goddamned hostess with the southern accent: “But it all happened so fast!”

  “I saw it all!” Harriet is saying. “I saw him pick Justin up! I couldn’t hear it, but I could see Justin calling my name. It drove me wild. But it wasn’t Holbrook, Georgia. It wasn’t Holbrook! It was Mark Spain!”

  She rushes on, something about a pistol, running after them, too late, but I’m just staring at her. Did I miss something? What did Mark Spain have to do with it? How does she know Mark Spain?

  She notices my confusion.

  “What’s the matter?” she says, stopping abruptly. “Don’t you believe me?”

  I shake my head. It’s not that.

  “How do you know Mark Spain?” I ask her.

  “Georgia, haven’t you been listening? Haven’t you heard a word I’ve said? Who did you think I was talking about before? My uncle Mark?”

  I did hear it. It just hadn’t registered. Something about the uncle who wasn’t really her uncle, some old friend of her father’s.

  But Mark Spain? Why should this Uncle Mark of hers be Mark Spain?

  “He was my mother’s lover, for God’s sake! And mine too, at the same time! A regular slimeball. But don’t you see, Georgia? They were in it together! They were in it together the whole time! It used to drive me crazy how Robert—Holbrook—had found me in the first place. He’d never tell me. All he’d say was that he’d had a letter, introducing him as my cousin Robert, although he never had to use it. But a letter from whom? Who’d sent him? He’d never ever tell me. Well, but I know now! It was my uncle Mark, Mark Spain. Mark Spain wrote that letter! He sold me to Holbrook. He—but Georgia, what’s the matter? You don’t know him, do you? Do you know Mark Spain?”

  I nod. For the minute, I can’t get the words out. Yes, I know Mark Spain! The bastard! Yes, he’s Joe Penzil’s boss, and Joe Penzil, oh yes, is, or was, my husband’s best friend. I knew it too, knew Spain was somehow mixed up in the deal they got Larry to agree to, just before Justin came home. At least that’s what Larry always said. But he’d also said—or was it Joe Penzil?—that it was all Harriet’s doing, something about an old Wall Street family, and Harriet was—what? mentally unstable?—and somehow they’d managed to get Justin back from her? Never clear how? But it was complicated, wasn’t it? Oh yes, it was complicated.

  But suppose everything she’s been telling me is true? Her whole, rambling story? Because how else explain the missing whatever it was—seventy-two hours?—between the scene at the mall, the way she’s just described it, and the night I found Justin on my front porch?

  “Don’t you understand, Georgia?” she goes on. “All along I thought it was just Holbrook—Robert A. Smith, I thought then—and it was him. But not at the mall. That was Mark. I saw him! He picked Justin up in his arms and ran with him, and I saw Justin calling my name! My God! They must have been working together the whole time. It freaked me totally. I knew it was Larry they were after, but they’d used me, and now they were going to use Justin. I failed, Georgia, don’t you see? I tried to save him—I … I love him—but I failed!”

  I’ve never seen her like this before. It’s in her voice, the emotion wrenching loose, and tears flood her eyes.

  “I’m sorry,” she stammers. “Every time I think about it, I see Justin. Even though I know he got home okay. But at the mall that day, I couldn’t hear him—there was too much noise—but I could … I could see him. Oh my God, Georgia …”

  I believe her. Finally I think I do believe her. And, momentarily at least, I share her revulsion, her outrage.

  But there’s some kind of failure in me too.

  “What happened next?” I ask, staring back at her. “After the mall?”

  She shrugs, looks away.

  “I did what I always do,” she says, her voice still choked. “I ran away.”

  “And you’ve been running away ever since?”

  “Just about,” she manages. “At least till now.”

  She pauses, still looking away, and her hands are stuffed in the pouch of the parka, and now I see her jaw jut out fiercely. Finally her head turns, and her eyes come back to mine.

  “I went to see him the other day,” she says.

  “Went to see whom?”

  “Mark.”

  “Mark Spain? For God’s sake, what for?”

  “I knew where he lived,” she goes on, “so I went there. I had to—well, I had to find out what had happened. He was—what should I say?—pretty surprised to see me. After all this time. It wasn’t a very pleasant conversation, but I got it out of him. Who Smith really was, and what their connection was. Did you know I was only one of many girls he kept in that house?”

  I nod, remembering, but she doesn’t seem to notice.

  “I don’t think I was the only one Mark found for him either. Anyway, he—Mark—said I was crazy to have come back. Said that if nobody had found me in three months, nobody was going to, and if I was still worried about that, it was sheer paranoia. He laughed at me, Georgia. He actually laughed at me! Well, as I say, it wasn’t a very pleasant conversation.”

  Her voice trails off. She’s dry-eyed again, tense, expectant. It’s as though she’s waiting for me to comment. Instead, I glance at the wall clock. She’s been here almost two hours, and I’m thinking: Maybe what they did to you was as horrible as you say, but I can’t help that. At the end of the day, whatever your reasons, even if they were good ones, you were responsible for my son, and you took him away from me. That’s my reality check. It happened, and now it’s over. All that’s left for me to do is pick up the pieces, which is exactly what I’m trying to do. Larry’s gone, and these men—Mark Spain, Holbrook, Gamble, whoever else was involved—are no longer a threat to me or my children. So don’t ask me for help or compassion or whatever it is you want from me. Maybe that’s a failure on my part, maybe it’s even cruel, but I don’t have room for you right now. All I really care about, you see, are my children and me.

  Maybe I’d even have said these things to her.

  I’ll never know.

  Because now what I was afraid of, and have half-forgotten, has just happened.

  “Mom-mee? Mom-mee?”

  The cry drives right through my heart.

  I glance wildly behind me, at the back stairs, then back at Harriet. She’s half-risen off her stool, her mouth agape.

  “Stay right where you are!” I hiss at her in a half-whisper. Then, to the stairs, my “normal” voice: “It’s okay, darling, I’ll be right there!” An afterthought: “I’ve been on the phone!”

  I’m on my feet, mind racing. God Almighty, what am I going to do?

  She says something like: “But I thought you said he was at his grandparents’?”

  “Shut up!” I command her in a harsh whisper. “Do you think you’re the only one capable of lying?”

  “Mom-mee?” it comes again. “Me need you now!”

  “I’m coming, Justin, I’ll be right there!” Then I whirl on her. “If you try to come upstairs, if you so much as let him see you or hear your voice, I’ll kill you. I swear it!”

  “But please, Georgia! For God’s s
ake! How can you say that? You’ve got to let me see him! It’s why I came! You don’t understand, I haven’t told you everything. He’s the only person I care about in the whole world. Or who cares about me!”

  I can’t shut her up. I’m about to scream, strangle her, and at the same time I can hear him crying. At the top of the stairs now!

  “Just a minute, Justin!” I cry out. My mind is a whirlwind, confused, shrieking. Because suddenly I’m thinking: Give him time, that’s what everybody says, isn’t it? Give him time. But I have no time, there is no time! If anything, he’s worse. And I’m thinking: It’s the last thing in the world I want, the very last twisting thing in the nightmare I’m living, but maybe I’ve got to do it, maybe for him, his sake, save him, stop it, at long last, let him have his goddamn beloved Harriet! Let him see her! Go on, for God’s sake, let him, what do you have to lose?

  But there’s this other voice in me too that’s laughing, crazy, sobbing laughter, how could you do that, Georgia, how on earth, she’s crazy, she’s wrecked your life, she’s ka-ray-zee!

  I turn to her, hand raised, willing myself to stop shaking.

  “Shut up!” I hiss at her again. Then, my voice low: “Maybe I will,” I say. “I’m not promising you anything. You’re to stay right here. I’ll call down to you. But if I let you see him, it’s for one thing, one thing only. You’ve come to say good-bye. That’s all. It’s good-bye, and it’s forever. I want you to promise me.”

  She nods. She’s crying again.

  “That’s what I came for,” she’s saying.

  I’m aware of her face, a white blur. I grab Zoe, her carrier, then I’m on my way up the back stairs.

  He’s waiting for me at the top. I can see his silhouette against the dim light.

  “Mom-mee?” he says again, his arms stretching forward. He’s still half-asleep, drenched in sleep.

  I swoop him up in my free arm. He clings to me. I’m panting, struggling for air, I can’t help it. I manage to ask him if he has to pee. He nods drowsily, buries his head in my neck. I carry him and Zoe into the big bathroom at the end of the hall, put Zoe on the floor, then, both hands free, support him at the toilet while he fumbles for his penis.