What Is Missing

by Michael Frank

  It didn’t help that he was already talking to her as though she were a patient.

  “What if we try for just one more month? I think I’ll be ready after another month. I hope I’ll be ready.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “I don’t know, Henry. It’s just a feeling I have.”

  “Thinking, hoping, feeling. None of this is very scientific.”

  * * *

  A few days after her period began in that second month Costanza opened the Sunday Times and, as often, turned first to the Book Review. There, on the cover, was Morton staring out from the Avedon photograph, staring—she immediately felt—at her. The merciless focus, the plain white background: Sarnoff (she could not think of him as Morton in this context), battered. Sarnoff, lined and liver-spotted. Sarnoff with those sly piercing eyes. She’d seen the picture a hundred times, but on the hundred and first it still made her jump.

  She read the headline: “Sarnoff’s Secret.”

  Sarnoff’s what? And published already? That could only mean that the project had been well underway by the time Howard sent it to her in Florence, or else (or in addition) that it had been hurried into print.

  From what we’ve known up to now about the elusive writer Morton Sarnoff, he would seem the least likely author of one of the most personally revealing diaries to be published in recent years, but Sarnoff’s intimacies are just one among many surprises to be found in the aptly titled “Last Words: Diaries, 2007–2013,” which has been edited down from the nearly five hundred (manuscript) pages found among the writer’s papers by his brother, Howard, and Ivan Ellison, a poet who worked as Sarnoff’s personal assistant in the last years of his life.

  It is nearly impossible to have followed the unfolding story of late twentieth-century American letters without being aware of Sarnoff’s famous reclusiveness—

  Yes, yes, Costanza thought. All that again. With a thumping heart she hurried ahead:

  —but as any close reader of Sarnoff’s fiction knows, in even the most circumscribed lives there are always revelations or denouements—

  Why not just come out and say it? Because that wasn’t the reviewer’s mandate, was why.

  Along with Sarnoff’s dying—and I will return to those anguished, meticulously anatomized entries in a moment—the writer’s courtship of, marriage to, and separation from the translator Costanza Ansaldo provide the greatest suspense and drama in “Last Words.” They are also the source of the diary’s deepest heartache and—eventually—biggest dilemma: Should the writer, in his sixties and convinced he is in declining health, commit to bringing new life into the world?

  Costanza’s heart tightened as she skipped ahead one more time:

  While it’s true there are qualities in all the best diarists that make us cringe—Pepys’s blithe infidelities and Virginia Woolf’s barbed cruelty and anti-Semitism are two examples that leap to mind—we do not read a diary as we do a novel. We read a diary to know the inner life of a man who, because of his work, accomplishments, or personal story, makes us curious to know his most private thoughts.

  As a reviewer, I’ve debated whether to lay out what “Last Words” helps us to see about Morton Sarnoff, but as this particular information is now on the page and soon, doubtless, will be disseminated in the press, I’ve decided to report that I was surprised, as many readers are also likely to be, to learn that Sarnoff, for all his tortured deliberation about parenting, was already a father—to a child he chose not to own.

  And so here it is: Sarnoff’s secret. He confesses it to his diary one evening soon after he and Ms. Ansaldo separate, when he opens a bottle of bourbon and in rushed staccato prose tells the story of the affair he had with his longtime Guatemalan housekeeper in Columbia County; pseudonymously named here Maria Hernandez, she gave birth to a baby boy just before Sarnoff published “The Life to Come” and returned (one might now posit, fled) to Manhattan. Sarnoff never even saw the child, though in exchange for this woman’s silence, he provided …

  Here Costanza stopped reading. She could no longer see the print through the blur of her raging sobs.

  * * *

  Columbia County in winter was a bleak place. The skeletal trees, the brown fields wearing a thin crust of blue-tinged frost, the clouds hanging low overhead: everything about it struck Costanza as leaden and dull. She preferred an open sweep of sky or water—water most of all. This landlocked countryside was where Morton had exiled himself for nearly twenty years: crumbling farms, roadside diners, gas stations and beauty salons and tattoo parlors. How did he not find it all insuperably grim? She tried to imagine it all under a warming sun, a blue sky … cows nibbling in green fields … birdsong. Maybe in summer, yes, it was bearable, but there would still be those low confining hills, that long belt of highway laid down among them like a gash.

  An endless unfurling landscape for a man with a life—an afterlife—that didn’t seem to end: looked at that way, he belonged. If elusive Morton Sarnoff belonged anywhere—and she wasn’t sure that he did—he belonged to his fiction, to his words. His words with their secrets, his words with their ability to send out one last lash from beyond the grave.

  And his actions? A sharper lash still. A lash, a kick. In her stomach—her womb. Yes, her womb.

  The missing piece of information clarified so much. Its simplicity had a certain beauty. She and Morton had tried to conceive for a year and a half, and failed. He and his housekeeper had a baby together after a “brief” affair. Now she had tried with Henry, already a proven father, and she had failed with him too. What that added up to, for Costanza, was a problem. Her problem. And she was going to deal with it head-on. She was going to tell Henry that she wanted to come to his clinic for treatment, and as soon as possible.

  But she had to do one thing first.

  * * *

  Ivan had moved to Brooklyn, Cobble Hill. He sent her a change-of-address card, printed and impersonal, which she had tucked into her phone book. He lived on the third floor of a medium-size brown brick apartment house off a commercial street. She waited outside for twenty minutes, until a neighbor arrived, then she slipped in behind her and made her way upstairs. She didn’t want to risk buzzing and being turned away without seeing him, face-to-face.

  As she raised her hand to knock on the door, she had a vision of herself from behind—standing there, her dirty hair tucked under a hat of Henry’s she’d grabbed from the closet, a short jacket thrown over a long sweater, her shoulders, her whole body, tautly curled in on itself. It wasn’t a pretty picture.

  Ivan didn’t seem that surprised to see her. Even though he wasn’t wearing one of his trademark gray suits, he still gave her a little bow, ever the majordomo, and asked her in. The neat, clipped way he stood aside as she walked by was enough to remind her how relieved she was not to have him in her life any longer.

  The apartment was pristine. In the background a table was set for dinner—for one, Costanza thought, until she stepped farther into the room and saw that another place was set, with a person sitting at it, a small whippet of a man who looked oddly like Ivan. Somehow that made sense, another piece falling into place.

  “Kevin, would you give us a moment,” Ivan said to the man at the table.

  “Of course.”

  After he left the room Ivan said, “My brother comes to dinner once a week.”

  So much for pieces falling into place.

  “I have a feeling I know why you’re here,” Ivan said. “It’s about Ricardo, isn’t it?”

  Ivan said the boy’s real name in such a familiar way that it made Costanza flush.

  “Yes.”

  He blinked at her. “You never liked me much, did you, Mrs. Sarnoff?”

  Before she could reply he added, “Answer truthfully.”

  “No, Ivan. Not so much.”

  Who smiled at an answer like that? Ivan did. That was who.

  “Ricardo means powerful and brave ruler. Mr. Sarnoff liked the name. We looked it up togethe
r. ‘May he be all of those things,’ he said when I told him what it meant.”

  She refrained from saying, much as she would have liked to, Save it for his Boswell.

  “He had nothing to do with choosing the name, in case you wanted to know.”

  Costanza nodded. “Is it true that Morton never met … Ricardo?”

  “He preferred not to.”

  “He preferred not to see his own son.”

  How she loathed having to come to this man for information about her husband.

  “He saw photographs. Several, over the years.”

  The years. She tried to imagine how Ivan filed away those photographs and the letters, because surely letters accompanied them, among Morton’s compendious papers. Under “Sarnoff: son”? “Sarnoff: bastard”? “Secrets Morton Sarnoff Is Keeping from His Wife Who Yearns to Have a Child of Her Own”?

  “Ricardo knows nothing about his father. That was part of the agreement. Obviously the names in the published version of the diaries have been changed.”

  “Obviously.”

  Costanza had not even thought to buy a copy. Would she ever? She wasn’t sure. She was so through with Morton Sarnoff. Except for this last—what?—coda. This last image. She had to have the image of the boy’s face. She had to see him for herself.

  Ivan went over to his bookshelves and took down a book: The Life to Come. “Mr. Sarnoff inscribed this to me after I’d been working for him for a month. I asked him to. It was my own copy. That’s why it’s so beat-up. I used to take it everywhere with me.”

  He opened the book and read, “‘For Ivan Ellison, at the beginning of what is sure to be a memorable relationship.’”

  Then he flipped through the pages and extracted a tiny sheet of paper. He looked down at it for a moment.

  “You know how Mr. Sarnoff liked to say that he never read the reviews of his own books? Well, that wasn’t quite true. There was one he mentioned to me often. The reviewer—a woman, a novelist herself—said that, insightful though he was about human nature, and accurately though he wrote about all kinds of people, Mr. Sarnoff had one great shortcoming. Having never been a father, he did not portray parental love very convincingly. Mr. Sarnoff was troubled by that. I think it, more than anything else, drove him to write the last novel. ‘A writer must be a shape-shifter, Ivan,’ he used to say to me. ‘He must be able to become anyone, he must be able to feel anything…’”

  Ivan unfolded the paper. “It wasn’t my place to disagree with Mr. Sarnoff while he was alive. But I did have my own—take. Yes, that’s it. My own take. On things. My own ideas about what was right and what wasn’t. I grew up—well, let’s just say, I grew up, Kevin and I both did, in an unhappy situation. And I think that when people have children, they should really want them. Be interested in them. Otherwise they are burdened … well, they are burdened. Let’s leave it at that.” Again he looked down at the paper. “Of course I knew what you two were trying to do, hoping to do. There was very little I didn’t know really. I have to say this was the one time I was disappointed in Mr. Sarnoff. I felt it wasn’t fair to—”

  He hesitated. “When I imagined saying this to you one day, it didn’t come out so tangled up.”

  He handed her the paper. On it was a name and an address in Hudson, New York.

  Costanza looked at the piece of paper for a moment. “Thank you, Ivan. I don’t know—”

  He put up a long thin hand. “Don’t say anything, please. And whatever you do, please don’t start liking me. Not now.”

  * * *

  At least Hudson, the town, had water, a stripe of river at the far end of the main street, beyond a steep embankment: the Hudson itself, gray, slow-moving, but moving nevertheless. A few boats bobbed sleepily midriver. And ducks—not many—floated by.

  She had gone to seek out the river first, just to get her bearings. The town must once have turned all of its attention riverward; now it turned in on itself, on its shops. They weren’t what she expected, row upon row of storefronts displaying expensive antiques, gleaming, gracious objects. There were art galleries and jewelry stores too, and restaurants that looked as if they had been transplanted from Tribeca or the Village.

  That was the main street. But the address Ivan had given her was on a street two blocks north, an entirely different world. The spruced-up storefronts were replaced by bedraggled houses with sagging porches and flaking paint. Even the pavement was made of a different, more faded asphalt. Instead of French fauteuils there were bodegas with neon signs pushing lottery tickets and beer.

  The house she was looking for stood a distance away from the river end of town. The small attached wood-frame building, like the others nearby, was in disrepair. But at least it was tidy. The garden hedge was trimmed if dormant. On the porch a pair of plastic chairs were drawn up to a small round table. The table and chairs struck Costanza as a hopeful sign, a sign that, in summer anyway, people sat and ate there, or visited there, or from there sat and watched the boy—Ricardo—play in the yard.

  She remained in her rental car and surveyed the scene. The street was quiet. A garbage truck rolled by but did not stop to pick up any garbage. A woman two houses down came outside to collect her mail.

  As she sat in the car, Costanza thought about the last chapter of Morton’s life, which looked very different to her now that she had this new piece of information about him. She thought in particular about the afternoon about four months into their separation, when her Swedish translator friend Annelie found her paralyzed in bed in her apartment and surmised that she had been lying there for days. Annelie had her own set of keys because she had been using the place as an occasional office ever since Costanza had moved in with Morton, and when Costanza failed to show up for their yoga class, Annelie showed up at Costanza’s place instead.

  “You must never let a man do this to you,” Annelie said in that firm Swedish way of hers. Then she pretty much hoisted Costanza out of bed and threw her into the shower.

  Annelie, Costanza knew, was no fan of Morton’s. “He reeks of ego,” she said of him soon after they first met. “He gives you the feeling he’s always stripping you in his mind. Not like other men, because he wants you physically, but because he wants to use you. Your story.”

  Sitting at her small table, where Annelie had somehow made a sandwich materialize out of the bare cupboards, Costanza said, “You don’t know what it’s like to try to conceive a child, the pressure it puts on your intimate life…”

  “Having trouble screwing on schedule doesn’t justify summarily ending a marriage. Not even if you’re the great Sarnoff.”

  “You haven’t lived through what I have, Annelie.”

  “Which means what, exactly, in this context?”

  Costanza remembered almost to the word what she had said to Annelie because she had said it, thought it, several times to herself before—and since: “I believe it’s because of my father, because of what happened. When I let myself become interested in a man, the regular checklist isn’t so meaningful to me. I don’t feel I have to look for this or that quality in a companion. He can be married. Older. Younger. Difficult. ‘Unsuitable.’ None of it matters. When the father you grow up loving can extinguish all that love just like that, what do you have to gain by being cautious or careful? Nothing.”

  “If all this is true,” Annelie said when she had finished, “then why did I find you nearly catatonic in bed this morning?”

  This question wasn’t as easy for Costanza to answer. “My reasoning doesn’t make me happy. And besides, I’m tired. Deeply tired.”

  “Quite honestly, this doesn’t look like fatigue to me.”

  “What does it look like?”

  Annelie merely gave Costanza a look. The look had such heart in it, and such concern, that tears flooded into Costanza’s eyes.

  Annelie took Costanza into her arms. “Sadness is good, but personally I think anger would serve you better.”

  Anger: Where had it gone, what had she done with
it? Costanza had buried it. That’s what she’d done. She’d buried it when Morton suggested they move from separation to divorce. She’d buried it when he encouraged her to make a plan to return to Italy for a while. She’d buried it when, after Morton called to tell her that he had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, she unmade that plan. And she buried it when, at his request, she’d moved back in to see him through to the end.

  She had not thought long or hard about the decision: that too was part of dispensing with the regular checklist. She saw him through because it was the right thing to do and because, despite everything, she still loved him. When near the end he said to her, “I made a terrible mistake, I wish we’d tried harder to make a baby together,” she let him say it. She even let him believe it was still possible, and with great effort, they made love for the first time in a long time, and the last. Afterward in a quiet and sadly confused voice he said, “Did I come? I couldn’t even tell.” “You came,” she lied. He asked what day it was in her cycle, and she said, “It’s day thirteen. I expect to ovulate at any moment.”

  It was in fact only day five. But these words appeared to bring him some peace.

  Three weeks later he died.

  He died with his secret intact and unshared. He’d died without telling her that he knew he could conceive a child, which meant that possibly—probably—the issue was at her end. He died as selfishly as he had lived.

  * * *

  After forty-five minutes the front door opened. A seven-year-old boy in a red hooded parka stepped out onto the porch. He was holding a soccer ball. He bounced the ball down the steps alongside him. The ball beat him into the yard and skidded across the patch of wintry lawn. The boy followed the ball and began kicking it and chasing it around.

  Now and then he looked back over his shoulder to see if anyone was standing in the open doorway, watching him. No one was.