by Warren Adler
Before any extended conversation could ensue she explained politely that she had been summoned downtown and she thanked the delegation for taking the time to make their views known. On the way, she heard from Harry on her cell phone.
“Me too, babe,” he said with surprising good humor. “The enemy has landed on my shores. Some of the firm’s clients are pissed, especially the public companies. I’m not being fired, just exiled to a Siberian clientele.”
“How awful, Harry.”
She explained that she was on her way downtown where she had been summoned.
“It has not been a happy day,” she sighed.
“There is an upside, babe,” Harry said. “Some of the boys… and a few of the girls… gave me some pretty good reviews.” He laughed. “You, too.”
“Every cloud has a silver lining,” she smirked, but his remark did lift her spirits.
Downtown, she confronted the people in charge of the New York school system. They showed outward signs of understanding and expressed horror at her victimization, but Myra could tell that they were all on the horns of a dilemma. The incident and the resultant publicity had made her a kind of pariah. She imagined she knew what they were thinking.
One of the executives around the table was more forthright than the others.
“The incident has done you a terrible injustice, Mrs. Schwartz. To have done such a thing is beyond awful. But the fact is it has not been good for the school system. It has impacted it negatively.”
“I can imagine,” Myra said. “Dedicated principal turns out privately to be a slut.” Her sarcasm was deliberate and they all knew it, but as she studied the faces around the table she knew that, despite all her good work, she had become a liability. They could, of course, defend her, but it would not change the facts. She had become an object of ridicule, a subject of humor, a target for those who believe her uninhibited exhibition of sexuality could be interpreted as condoning and encouraging loose sexual behavior.
They did offer sympathy and support, but she knew it was merely pro forma. The ball, she knew, was in her court. What they seemed to be saying via their body language and subtle remarks was that the only course for her was resignation. She had reached a threshold for her pension and she could tell that the only sensible move for her was a graceful exit. She hinted that she might opt for this course and noted that the people around the table seemed relieved.
She thanked everyone for their verbal support. Above all, she wanted to demonstrate the sense of her own dignity. She was clearly a victim of a terrible injustice. Yes, she might still ride it out. People would forget as new gossip and scandal would feed the maws of a public greedy for such material.
After the meeting, she called Harry and they agreed to meet at a fancy restaurant in midtown. No one recognized them. They ordered martinis.
“I’m resigning, Harry,” she told him.
“But you loved that job,” he protested.
“It would never be the same,” she replied.
“Without a fight?” he asked.
“Why waste time on anger, lawsuits, and vengeance? Our energy will be drained. I’d always be the porno principal. I’ve had a good run and I can always teach at some private school. Besides,” she reached out and took his hand, “we have each other.”
“That we do. You and me, babe. Forever.”
No crowd of reporters was present when they got back to their apartment house.
“See. We’ve already had our fifteen minutes of fame,” Harry said, embracing Myra as they headed toward the bedroom where they began to undress, kiss and fondle each other.
“Let’s peel the onion,” Myra whispered, flicking on the lamp beside their bed, throwing a golden glow around the room. Soon they were naked.
“The blinds,” Harry whispered as they began to make love in earnest.
“Keep them open,” Myra said, giggling. “That’s their problem, not ours.”
They Always Held Hands
“All in all,” Beth Glazer said, after a long silence, “on a scale of one to ten, I’ll give her a four for nurturing.”
Steve, her elder by two years, shrugged and she wasn’t sure whether he agreed or disagreed with her assessment.
“Well, what’s your view?” she prodded.
“I’m not sure I have a view,” he said, his voice weary. He had come from his home in Los Angeles to the funeral of their mother. Beth had come from Alaska. The funeral ceremony was held at the Riverside Funeral Home. In attendance were eleven people, which included their mother’s housekeeper, a doorman from her Park Avenue apartment, her lawyer, her accountant, her hairdresser, and three representatives from some charities and non-profits to which she had contributed.
The funeral director had arranged for a rabbi who had not known her and the ceremony was quickly disposed of. Beth and Steve followed the hearse to the cemetery and a man with a scraggly beard wearing a skullcap said a prayer and that was that. No one else observed the burial. Of course, she was buried next to her husband. A tombstone already existed with her name and birth date on it beside her husband’s. Only the date of her death had yet to be inscribed.
During the burial, a sob had risen from somewhere deep in Beth’s chest and her eyes had moistened, but she felt no great loss or sense of mourning. Steve stood dry-eyed throughout the brief ceremony and they re-boarded the limousine for the trip back to Manhattan. The black chauffeur was silent throughout the trip. If he listened to the conversation, he showed no sign or interest and they didn’t care.
“Together again at last,” Steve said. “Got to admit, it’s where she wants to be.”
“Never met people so joined at the hip.”
“We were always intruders, Beth.”
She knew exactly what he meant. They had discussed it often, although not lately since they did not speak that often. Their parents had never been mean to them, always kind, concerned, understanding, interested in their upbringing, their welfare. She had never felt unwanted. And yet, something had always been missing and Steve had felt it as well.
“It was all façade. They were too locked into each other.”
“Do you think, Steve?” She hesitated, trying to form exactly the right sentence to match her thoughts. “Do you think that maybe we were jealous, that they loved each other more than they loved us?”
“Could be,” Steve sighed.
“They did give us everything else. I mean materially. We are rich. In fact, now that mother has died, even richer. They made it clear early on that we will inherit everything and the lawyers have indicated that that was the truth.”
“Wealth isn’t love,” Steve said. He bit his lip as if it was necessary to hold back tears. “We were their children, for crying out loud. Admit it, Beth. You feel the same way. It was as if…” He shook his head and closed his eyes. “Once we were grown, it was over.”
“What was over?”
“Their job was done and we were on our own.”
“Isn’t that the way it’s supposed to be?”
“Sure it is. Then why do I feel so damned guilty? Why am I not grieving?”
He turned to look at her and they exchanged glances. “You, too, I’ll bet.”
“I guess you might say we’re ungrateful little brats,” Beth said with a forced giggle.
They lapsed into silence again. Steve closed his eyes.
Steve, who was divorced, had one child, a girl now in college. Since her mother, his ex-wife, was granted custody, his daughter had little contact with her paternal grandparents. Nor had they sought her out, although they were generous with their financial gifts. Beth had never married.
He had taken the red eye from Los Angeles and was jet-lagged and bleary-eyed. She had come in the day before from Juneau and met with the lawyers who were handling the estate. Their father had been an investment banker and had made
a fortune, and both she and her brother were, as the saying goes, trust fund babies, although each had fulfilling lucrative careers, and the large sum that each would inherit would make little difference in their lifestyles.
Both siblings were in their late forties and their lives had long been out of their parents’ social orbit, although they called them dutifully once or twice every month but both knew that the cord that bound them with their parents had been severed long ago.
Their father’s funeral was much better attended than their mother’s. He had been enormously successful financially and many people owed their wealth to his careful and imaginative money management. At his death ten years ago, the Riverside Chapel had been filled to capacity and many stepped up to the podium to provide glowing eulogies.
There was no bad blood between the generations, no family battles, and Beth and her brother had been friendly as children and then took up different pursuits that separated them both emotionally and geographically. Beth had become a geologist working for British Petroleum in Alaska and had settled in Juneau.
Steve was a partner in a West Coast advertising agency. They rarely got together, although there had been sporadic visits to New York on anniversary occasions orchestrated by their parents. Anniversaries had always been the premier celebratory occasions in their parents’ lives. Both Beth and Steve knew that their parents were more devoted to each other than they could ever be to their children. That had been the overriding reality of their parents’ lives.
“Now comes the hard part,” Beth sighed. “Emptying the love nest.”
She knew there was both irony and sarcasm in her statement. She and Steve had long ago acknowledged that the apartment on Park Avenue was indeed more of a love nest for their parents than a family home. Even as children they had discovered that their parents were bound to each other so tightly that there had been little room for strong, demonstrable ties to anyone else, including their children.
“Remember, Beth?” Steven said. “They were always holding hands.”
“Always.”
“Like two kids.”
Their parents’ section of the apartment, their bedroom and sitting room, was a kind of sanctuary, hence their description of it as a love nest. It was the central focus of their living quarters and was, more by assumption than prohibition, off-limits to their children. By the time they were teenagers, Beth and Steve had become aware that their parents were conducting a lifetime love affair, sexually and emotionally.
When their father died, they were concerned that his loss would make their mother a basket case and burden them with responsibilities that neither had any wish to undertake. Although both she and Steve had long ago concluded that they were playing second fiddle in their parents’ lives, they did understand their responsibilities as offspring, acknowledging the traditional obligations and duties to their parents, and to their mother in her widowhood.
To their relief, after her husband’s death, their mother still went about the daily business of her life, narrower than it had been, but she did not appear depressed or anguished, which baffled them since they had expected his death to leave her devastated, inconsolable and a burden on both of them. Their father had died suddenly of a massive coronary in the shower of their apartment. His clothes had been carefully laid out for a day at the office and hung on a hanger on the doorknob of his closet. Years later, they still hung there.
Indeed, nothing, but nothing, of his possessions had been eliminated or rearranged in the apartment since the day their father had died. His clothes still hung in his closet; his study, his desk, his drawers remained exactly as he had left them. A book was still open face down to the page he had been reading. Everything in his bathroom had remained as he had left it, even his toothbrush, his shaving equipment, his toiletries were in the exact place where he had put them on the morning he died. Whatever defined his presence at the moment he expired was preserved as a kind of shrine.
Her mother’s maid dusted and cleaned with a minimum of disturbance and was instructed to put everything of her late husband’s back in its proper place. On a visit a few months after their father’s death Beth had asked her mother when she was going to remove their father’s possessions.
“Someday,” her mother had responded. She asked again on other visits and got the same answer. It had long been obvious to Beth that it would never happen and she ceased asking.
“Leave it alone,” she instructed her brother. “It’s her call.”
“Doesn’t seem normal,” he had said.
“It is for her,” Beth answered.
“It’s weird.”
“Must we?” Steve asked as the limousine approached the Park Avenue building. They had agreed to go through the apartment and check to see if there was anything that either of them wanted before turning it over to appraisers and a firm that did this kind of disposal work. They had already decided to sell any items of real value and give everything else to charity.
“We do owe them some respect. After all, they were our parents.”
She could sense the element of guilt in her tone. Steve shrugged.
“Actually, I doubt I’ll want anything,” he said. “I just don’t feel any connection.”
She knew exactly what he meant since she felt the same way, but she let the comment pass.
“You might want some things for your daughter. Something to remember her grandparents by.” Guilt had turned to sarcasm.
“You’ve got to be kidding.”
The apartment occupied a whole floor and was in reasonably good condition and well maintained. Not much had been done to it over the years.
Beth roamed through the vast apartment aware of her indifference and odd lack of feeling.
“You’re right, Steve. There’s nothing here I want to live with.” She shrugged. “Or remember.” She paused and grew reflective. “I feel so damned cold-blooded.”
“We were strangers here, Beth. Worse. Intruders. We didn’t belong. They had each other.”
“Lucky them.”
She detected an unmistakable air of nastiness in her attitude. Or was it envy? That kind of luck was something that so far had eluded her.
“Yeah, lucky them,” Steve said, perhaps reflecting on his own failed marriage.
He shrugged and they wandered to their parents’ so-called sanctuary. Steve opened the door.
“Behold the love nest,” he said, trying to lighten the mood.
“I can’t remember ever setting foot in this place,” Beth said.
They stood at the entrance to the suite. It was lavishly decorated, the large king-sized bed covered with a brocaded spread and pillows. On the wall was a large nude whose face resembled their mother at a younger age. It might have been her, but they couldn’t be certain. Framed photographs of their parents at various stages in their life together hung on the walls and stood on every flat surface. Heavy drapes, half drawn, covered the windows.
“Note the paucity of pictures of us,” Steve muttered. There was one picture of them as young children, a family portrait, the children in the center, the parents on either side.
“There are lots in the other rooms,” Beth said. Nevertheless, it was a telling observation that seemed to reflect the general feeling that there was no room in this place for anyone but their parents.
They opened closets and found their father’s suits neatly hung in transparent plastic bags. Shoes were stored in compartments. Ties still hung in racks. Their mother’s clothes filled two large walk-in closets. Chests of drawers contained their father’s shirts, socks and underwear, as well as their mother’s stockings and underwear.
In one of their mother’s bottom drawers they found a number of boxes containing jewels, rings, necklaces, bracelets, gold chains, undoubtedly of great value. Papers in her lawyer’s office had validated that they had been insured and would certainly fetch lots o
f money, hardly an issue for either of them. Earlier they had talked of giving the proceeds to charity.
Next to their mother’s bed, her side, they assumed, was an end table, a kind of cabinet. Steven attempted to open it and found it locked.
“Why is it locked?” Beth asked as she saw him struggling to open it.
“Beats me.”
Steven abandoned the struggle and they moved on, opening drawers of their mother’s dressing table, which still contained much of their mother’s makeup, hairbrushes and other various personal grooming items. But before they left the suite, Beth stopped at the door and surveyed the interior. Her gazed rested on the locked end table.
“Curious,” Steve said, noting her interest.
“Why is it locked?” she muttered.
“One way to find out,” Steve said, prying open the cabinet with scissors he found in his mother’s dressing table. Inside was a metal box about the size of a cigar box. That too was locked, and they had to pry it open.
“Oh my God,” Beth screamed looking at the contents with horror.
Steve closed it quickly, then opened it again slowly. The initial shock over, he studied it carefully. It was a man’s hand, severed at the wrist, lacquered but shriveled. Without a doubt it was once a living hand. It was obviously a left hand and on its third finger was a wedding band. They did not question the identity of the hand.
The siblings looked at each other but said nothing, as if the sight of the severed hand explained everything. No further comment was needed.