The next afternoon the car was back, waiting for them downstairs. The driver whisked them and Howard, their witness, back downtown, where the city clerk mumbled fewer than fifty words alongside those dreary but now also somehow endearing red plastic flowers and made them officially husband and wife. Within two hours they were on their way to Paris, where Costanza spent the sweetest ten days of her life.
She was surprised that her memory could revive the sweetness even after everything that followed. It was strange how places, or paths, could hold feelings or bring them back with uncanny acuity. Here she was retracing steps she had taken all those years earlier, and finding them so real and so present that she could have taken them seven minutes instead of seven years ago.
All this when both her frame of mind and the circumstances were so different. Henry had had to ask Wanda to find an hour and a half in his schedule when he could leave his patients and meet Costanza to fill out the license; he had to be back at the hospital immediately afterward. That was on Monday. He had no opening in his schedule again until Thursday, when Wanda blocked out two hours during which Henry and Susan, their witness, would be able to meet Costanza downtown. If they didn’t have to wait in too long a line, Henry might be able to eat a bowl of soup and a sandwich with her afterward, before hurrying back to the hospital for his three o’clock patient. This, in its entirety, was the wedding they had designed.
The details didn’t matter to Costanza. What mattered was what had happened after Maria Rosaria left and Costanza told Henry what her mother had said and she watched his features arrange themselves in an expression of joy. “I didn’t think, I didn’t expect—” His voice choked. “Are you telling me this because you agree with your mother—?” he tried again, and again choked up. When she nodded, and when her tears came, she knew that she was making a good decision, a hopeful decision.
Layering on one more large, though hardly unexpected, life theme, Costanza’s period came on time, and she was started on the drug protocol, at doses nearly fifty percent higher than before.
So Costanza’s decision to walk from the Upper East Side to lower Manhattan was as much about calming her body as her mind. The drugs were already making her feel jittery and heightened. The heightening wasn’t all bad—she was working with unusual focus—but she knew from her previous experience that it was not to be trusted. She knew that the downs were not to be trusted either.
No one who observed her striding along Madison Avenue in her simple wool skirt, beige sweater, and spring coat would have guessed what she was doing with her afternoon. She made only one concession to the day: in the Flower District she stopped to buy some butter-yellow tulips with a splash of pink at the tips of their petals that had been forced in some faraway greenhouse or field, flown to New York, trucked to Manhattan, and displayed in utilitarian but nevertheless luscious mounds at a wholesaler’s warehouse on Twenty-Eighth Street. Costanza was obliged to buy the tulips in bunches of ten, a dozen bunches minimum: what a picture she must have been, she thought as she resumed her walk downtown, her arms cradling a hundred and twenty yellow tulips, a paper cone filled with light like sunlight itself.
She arrived downtown at ten to one. Henry and Susan were already there, waiting for her. They smiled in unison, then laughed at the lavish flowers, half of which Costanza separated and gave to Susan. Costanza and Henry kissed. Costanza and Susan embraced. Costanza changed her shoes right there on the sidewalk. There were no topazes, no limousine, no magnum of champagne, no prospect of Paris, and no socks, just a proliferation of tulips, a grinning Henry, and her own beating heart.
“This feels right,” she said aloud—as much to herself as to either of them.
“Yes, it does,” said Henry.
And in they went.
* * *
Their wedding dinner was Japanese takeout, deliberately chosen by Costanza because it made such a nice bookend to the first meal they ate together in Henry’s apartment. As they had that first time, they sat on the floor and ate off the living room coffee table. They shared a bottle of red wine, which Costanza, because of the fertility drugs, drank sparingly, and afterward devoured a box of berry tarts she had bought at a French patisserie on Madison.
The tulips, arranged in various vases and pitchers and jars throughout the apartment, were droopy but still festive.
Henry was not a natural sprawler, but he stretched himself out comfortably on the living room rug, his back propped up against the sofa. He said one word: “Happiness.”
He reached over and stroked Costanza’s leg. She smiled at him.
“But I do also want us to have a proper celebration,” Henry added. “A dinner, a party. I want to be able to show the world—my world—what a lucky man I am.”
“We can celebrate later. After the cycle. Maybe it will be a double celebration. We could do something when school finishes.”
A shadow crossed Henry’s face.
“You have told the boys about today? You did call them?”
“It’s been such a whirlwind…”
“Oh, Henry.” She sat up. “Justin could pop down anytime. Andrew could wander in tonight. They can’t just walk through the door and find everything changed.”
“But what will have changed for them? Justin doesn’t live here anymore. Andrew will be going off to Philadelphia in the fall. They’re launched, nearly launched, in their own lives. I thought I’d tell them, we’d tell them, when we see them. In person.”
“It’s not right. Obviously I don’t have as good a sense of Justin as I do of Andrew, but Andrew … I knew Andrew…”
“Before you knew me.” Whether Henry said this lightly, or with a forced lightness, wasn’t quite clear. “How about if I send them an e-mail?”
“E-mail? Isn’t that a little—remote?”
“Well, no one sends telegrams anymore. A text maybe…”
“Henry!”
“Okay. I’ll call them. Tomorrow. Tonight I just want…” He leaned over to kiss her.
Costanza put up her hand. “We can’t. You know that better than I do.”
“We can’t kiss? I can’t kiss you?”
She hesitated for a moment. “Yes, you can kiss me.”
* * *
Costanza was no longer a first-timer in Henry’s waiting room; she had stepped across the invisible divide and was experienced now. She was no longer particularly interested in the other patients. All she cared about was having her blood drawn, hearing about the number and size of her follicles, and getting out fast. The tension in the room that had seemed so palpable on her first round now seemed more distant—not less present, which was something quite different, but less infectious, to her. She kept her largest, darkest glasses on the whole time.
This was her fourth morning appointment, which put her about halfway through the first part of the cycle. They had been increasing her drugs every two days. She didn’t know if this was a good or a bad sign, and she elected not to ask. One change she had insisted on was having a doctor other than Henry supervise her treatment. She didn’t want him slipping into the exam rooms as before. She didn’t want to have to observe his work persona or try to decode the truth from his face. She wanted to make these weeks as normal as she possibly could. She never forgot what Dr. Sommers, Henry’s fellow, had said to her at the beginning of the previous cycle, about how women with a steady confident attitude tended to have the highest rates of success. She had asked for Dr. Sommers to be in charge of her treatment, but he had left the clinic, Henry told her. A personality conflict. With which other personality? It was not hard to guess.
Susan arranged for her to see Dr. Woo. She wasn’t the warmest physician Costanza had ever met, but she had Henry’s endorsement, and she was familiar with Costanza’s body.
Costanza drew on her full powers to keep from succumbing to the mental dance. She had learned how pointless it was to try to calculate her chances. There was nothing to be done but endure the experience. So she endured the experience. She read;
she meditated; she breathed. She remained calm until she was horizontal and the ultrasound wand was about to reveal its all-important information—then she felt she might jump out of her body, waiting for Dr. Woo to convey the news.
At the first appointment she had had nine follicles on the left, six follicles on the right.
At the second: seven follicles on the left, six on the right.
At this, her third appointment, she was down to six follicles on the left, five on the right.
In the clearest sign of her accumulated knowledge, Costanza didn’t ask to have the information interpreted. What Dr. Woo said at this one appointment could be invalid by the next. The follicles measured between ten and twelve millimeters. They were growing perhaps a bit too quickly, which was why, as before, Henry’s team was adding ganirelix, the drug that suppressed ovulation. Every night she injected herself; every day, from this appointment forward, she would return to Henry’s clinic. During the intervals she would wait.
* * *
Costanza had never quite got used to the way, in these transitional weeks before the weather warmed decisively, the buildings held on to the damp and the cold. The drugs weren’t helping. At times she couldn’t layer on enough clothing; yet at other times, particularly in the evenings after her nightly injections, she felt her body had caught fire. More than once she’d taken her temperature only to find it register normal. What a treatment: it played with the body; it played with the mind; it gave the soul scarcely five minutes of peace a day …
She was wilting some greens in olive oil and garlic—cooking as therapy—when she lifted off the shiny stainless-steel lid to the saucepan and saw a shadowy figure reflected in its convex surface. She turned around abruptly and saw Andrew standing there, watching her.
“You know I don’t like it when you make those catlike appearances of yours, Andrew.” She touched her hand to her chest. “You really scared me this time.”
“I didn’t mean to. I just like to see people before they see me. See who they are privately.”
“That might work when you’re taking pictures, but in real life it can be kind of … rude.” She returned her attention to the stove. She could feel him watching her again. It felt as if her body temperature was rising. The drugs, surely. The drugs, please. “Do you want to tell me what you saw, in my case?”
“If you insist.”
“I did ask.”
He paused. “A secret keeper.”
She turned to face him. “Well, your eyes deceived you. There’s no secret.”
“My father calls me up and leaves a message on my cell. ‘I thought you’d like to know that Costanza and I went downtown yesterday. We’re married now. We’ll celebrate the next time we can all be together. Bye.’” Andrew waited a beat. “I’m not sure about the ‘bye’ part.” He reached into his pocket, pulled out his phone, and thrust it in her direction. “Want to listen?”
She was relieved to have the greens to keep stirring. After a moment she said, “I’m sorry about the way you heard. It’s not how I would have done it. But, truly, it was decided only a few days ago.”
“You have my phone number.”
It seemed impossible to ignore his tone. “Andrew, what is it? Why don’t you just tell me what’s on your mind.”
“My grandfather hasn’t been dead a month.” His voice cracked. “It just feels—wrong, disrespectful.”
The atmosphere felt as sharp as a blade. “You’re sure it’s Leopold? You’re sure that’s why you’re reacting like this?”
He nodded unconvincingly.
“There is a reason, Andrew, why your father and I decided to get married so quickly.”
“You’re doing another cycle.”
“Yes.”
He nodded again, but remained silent. Too silent, for too long.
“You can’t just hear this and say nothing.”
He looked at her squarely. “You used to tolerate silence before. You’re beginning to take on some of Henry’s habits. He can’t bear when there are gaps in the conversation. I didn’t think you were so easily influenced.”
She put down her spoon, crossed her arms, and stared at him as the kitchen filled with the mild hissing of broccoletti giving up their juices in a partly covered saucepan.
* * *
Henry wasn’t like Andrew. He didn’t make catlike entrances, normally. He came home bustling, dropping keys, bag, coat. The door usually closed behind him with an emphatic bang. But on this evening he stepped into the apartment more quietly than usual, then made his way toward the kitchen. There, before they saw him, he saw Costanza and Andrew standing across from each other, staring at each other—staring each other down. Costanza’s back was to the stove, where thin wisps of garlicky steam were rising into the air. Andrew’s hands were shoved into his pockets. Something awkward or uncomfortable had been said, Henry sensed at once. The connection shared between Andrew and Costanza—his wife—continued to disconcert him, he was surprised to discover. He had not understood it in Florence, or since. For all the talking he and Costanza did, Henry knew that when Costanza and Andrew spoke, their conversation had a different quality. And not just their conversation: even the silence between them could seem charged, more than the sum of its individual parts.
Henry broke into their wordless vignette. “Andy!” He encircled the boy in a hearty bear hug. “What do you think about our news?”
Andrew accepted Henry’s embrace without reciprocating it, and he did not offer his opinion on the news. Instead he turned to his father and said, “It seems like I’ve missed a lot in the few days I’ve been on the West Side.”
Costanza said, “I told Andrew about the new cycle.”
Henry believed he understood now why he sensed such a strong feeling between them. “I would have told you myself, but…”
“But what?”
“But Costanza and I hadn’t yet discussed whether we were going to talk about it this time.”
“You didn’t talk to me about it last time either.”
Henry didn’t know what to say to this. “I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that you and your brother will always—”
“That sounds like the beginning of another platitude, Dad,” Andrew said. “Don’t bother.” Then, not for the first time when a conversation turned uncomfortable, Andrew left the room.
* * *
Five minutes after Henry sat down at his desk on Friday morning, Wanda buzzed to tell him that a woman named Lorna Walker was waiting to see him. “She’s not a patient,” Wanda added unnecessarily.
Lorna and Henry had spoken regularly since Leopold’s funeral, mostly on administrative matters, though Henry had also called several times just to see how she was doing; not very well, she inevitably answered. He had been hesitant to tell her about his marriage to Costanza, but he did, near the end of a brief call they had only a day before; she congratulated him warmly and said that Leopold had told her more than once he hoped the two of them would marry, and sooner rather than later.
In person she seemed fine. She was dressed in a formal outfit that he had not seen her in before, a skirt and jacket and sturdy black shoes, newly polished. It was as though she had come into town to conduct business, as apparently she had.
She sat down in the chair across from Henry’s rather commanding desk. “This is just such a big, big sadness for me,” she said when Henry again asked her how she was doing. Then her hands, which had been clasping a stiff black pocketbook, opened and reached into it. She produced a sealed envelope.
“I’m here on Leopold’s behalf.”
Henry looked at her inquisitively.
“He wrote out some letters for you and asked me to deliver them in person at the beginning of each month, for as long as was necessary.”
“I see.” Henry’s stomach tightened.
“Though I’m not sure how I’m going to know when it’s no longer necessary…”
“Without knowing—” Henry changed direction. “I’ll proba
bly be able to figure that out.”
He watched as she set the letter onto his desk with great care, almost as though it were made of glass. “Are there many of them?” Henry asked.
“Leopold told me not to answer that question.”
“There must be, if that is your response.”
Lorna was fulfilling her duty impeccably. Her face gave nothing away.
“Out of curiosity, can you tell me when Leopold wrote these letters? Was it while he was in the hospital?”
She hesitated. “Yes.”
“You had to think.”
“I had to figure out if that was something I was supposed, or not supposed, to tell you.”
Henry sighed. “My father…”
“Your father.” She stood up more lightly than she had sat down.
* * *
Henry remained at his desk, staring at the envelope. On the outside, in his shaky old-world European handwriting, Leopold had written, “For my son, Henry”—as though there were any other. In the lower right-hand corner, in small block letters and twice underscored, was the word APRIL.
Henry considered leaving the envelope where it was, propped up on his desk, or slipping it into his drawer. He could even throw it away. What was to stop him? Leopold? No one. Nothing. He was an adult, an orphan. He was a grown-up; he was free. He could do whatever he wanted.
A single gesture: that was all it would take. In a single gesture he could pick up the envelope, tear it in half, and toss it into the wastebasket. It would take two, maybe three seconds, at most.
What a beautiful expression of free will that would be. Henry would proceed with his day. He would see patients; at one o’clock he would have a tuna fish sandwich and a cup of soup; afterward he would see more patients. At seven, if the day’s appointments moved along smoothly, he would go home, where another delightful, Costanza-prepared meal would be waiting for him.
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