As Husbands Go

by Susan Isaacs

  “Daddy’s the best doctor,” one of them said.

  “I know that. He was the best doctor in the world. Except even Daddy couldn’t get someone who is dead to come back . . . to be not dead.”

  I had to stop not because I was still crying, though I was, but because I couldn’t think of what to say next. They hadn’t asked me how he’d gotten hurt, and I didn’t want to tell them it was an accident, because they might soon be hearing words like “killed” or—I prayed not, but I had no reason to believe that at some point they wouldn’t run into a neighbor or relative who would be stupid or cruel enough to say something like “stabbed with scissors.”

  It definitely wasn’t the time to explain that a very bad person had killed Daddy. Or a sick person, a crazy person. Instinct, along with four years as their mother, told me that right then the boys could deal with only one basic fact: Their father was dead. That was all the horror they could take.

  Usually, they had the normal fears that came, went, and sometimes traveled from triplet to triplet: alligators under the bed; automatic flush toilets in restrooms; being the first belted into his car seat, at which point the minivan would slide shut its doors and, driverless, zoom off; Goofy Goober from SpongeBob Squarepants hiding in our basement. They didn’t have to deal with the concept of bad/sick/crazy people who kill daddies.

  “But we have to remember one thing,” I said. “Daddy loved all of us more than anything. Do you know what he called you? ‘Our miracle boys.’ We wanted so much to have a baby, and Daddy said, ‘God gave us a very special present. Not one baby—’”

  “Three babies!” they sang out. We’d been through this story too many times to count, but they loved it.

  “Three wonderful, gorgeous baby boys. And when Daddy looked at all three of you right after you were born, he said, ‘I am the happiest, luckiest man in the world, because I am the daddy of these perfect babies!’” Actually, right after they were born, I’d been fixating on my episiotomy incision and whether the OB had been as careful as she’d sworn she would, so I hadn’t been paying attention to whatever Jonah had been going on about. But this sounded good enough, although way too flowery for Jonah. “So even though Daddy won’t be here to tell you how much he loves you, you know he did. Right? He always said ‘I love you’ when he kissed you good night.”

  “He said ‘Go to sleep,’” Mason piped up.

  “He said—” Dash began.

  I cut him off. “But mostly, he said ‘I love you.’ So even though we won’t see him again, we know how much he loved us. And every night before each of us goes to sleep, we’ll think about Daddy, about saying ‘I love you.’” If I’d expected tears from them, I would have been let down. But Dashiell said he was hungry as a bear, and Evan wanted to know if Jonah would come back when they were five.

  Let me go back to sleep, I thought, wishing there was some way the boys could knock on Ida and Ingvild’s door and say, “Mommy asked us to tell you that Daddy’s dead and not coming back, and could you give us breakfast and take the phone, and she’ll definitely be up by ten-thirty or eleven.”

  As I followed them downstairs, I felt overwhelmed by two warring emotions, grief and anger. Grief that Jonah would not see the boys grow up. Anger at Dorinda Dillon. What had happened in that apartment? It made no sense. What could have made anyone, even a crazy whore, want to kill a wonderful man like Jonah Gersten?

  Chapter Eleven

  Jonah had been wowed by our house before he saw it. Just as the real estate agent announced, “Here it is!” he realized he couldn’t see anything except an old-fashioned green mailbox on a white post, two weeping cherries, and a row of rounded boxwoods, beautifully pruned, standing guard on either side of the driveway. Imposing yet inviting. Tasteful, too. Proof to his Manhattan parents that moving to Long Island didn’t mean he’d chosen a life of LICENSED TO GRILL barbecue aprons.

  When we curved around to the front of the house, Jonah, who’d been sitting in front next to the broker, leaped out to open the car door for me, mainly so he could whisper, “You can’t see the house from the street!” I’d nodded but didn’t really get into picturing his parents’ dropped jaws. I was too hard at work being what I’d set out (and failed) to be, a landscape architect. Already my mind was sketching in . . . what? Oh, perfect! Lavender shrubs. That would soften the tight-ass formality of all that boxwood. It registered, though barely, that Jonah was being cool for the broker—giving the slate roof a critical eye, dilating his nostrils with displeasure at the perfectly fine lunette window over the door, even though his knowledge of construction was limited to the difference between a shingle and a brick.

  Still, both of us must have been throwing off rays of excitement. From that second on, even before we walked between the white columns and stood on the grand front portico, the broker went from nervously chirping, “You okay?” every three seconds to acting so relaxed it looked like she’d been popping Valium instead of Velamints. She knew she’d made the sale.

  So given that long, curving, upwardly mobile driveway, it took me a while to find out what was going on beyond our house. All had seemed quiet enough when I went to the kitchen with the boys shortly after five-thirty, gave them breakfast, and parked them in the den with a Let’s Learn Spanish with Frank & Paco video. I didn’t hear anything unusual when I went back upstairs just after six. I had to tell Ida and Ingvild about Jonah. Tears plus a lot of what must have been “Oh my God!” in Norwegian, and they kept taking turns hugging me, which did nothing except make me realize that Ida, who always looked like she’d just jumped out of a shower, wasn’t very good at washing her neck. I finally slipped away so they could get dressed.

  As I closed their door, I bumped into Andrea in the hall. “When did you get here?” I managed to gasp. “Who let you in?” I was so shocked that there was someone in the house I hadn’t known about that I could hardly catch my breath.

  “What are you talking about? I was here the whole night.” She was already dressed—in pale pink cashmere pants and a matching sweater that had a cowl neck the approximate size of Cape Cod, the sort of getup you’d expect in a Neiman Marcus catalog, not in life. “Remember? I came over with my carry-on.”

  “Sorry. Obviously, I’m not thinking clearly. I guess I assumed you left after I went upstairs.”

  “Why would I do that? You needed someone here with you, right? That’s what the detective told me when he said to come over. What if I’d gone home and at three o’clock in the morning you wanted to talk? Anyway, I went to the guest room and looked through your eight hundred thousand World of Interiors magazines and was fine.”

  “Was everything okay?” I asked. I seemed to be flying on some sort of automatic pilot, making conversation that meant nothing to me. I’d found myself comforting Ida and Ingvild, telling them that Jonah had been so grateful to them for being with us and how he’d thought the world of them, when in fact he’d been pushing to get “a proper nanny,” which showed he’d been having too many hands-free chats with his mother during his drive home from the city.

  “The guest room is fine,” Andrea said, “but you really need to tell Bernadine to put fresh soap in the shower right after a guest leaves. So she doesn’t forget.”

  “I did tell her. She’s like you, always making lists. I can’t believe she forgot. Her urge not to waste is probably stronger than her obsessive—” Automatic pilot must have stopped working, because all my thought processes crashed. So I said, “My husband’s dead.”

  “I know,” she said as gently as she could, which would be a sensitive person’s callous. “I didn’t want to say, ‘Oh, your husband’s dead and we ought to sit down and make a list of what needs to be done,’ because . . . I don’t know. It might sound coarse. Speaking of coarse, Fat Boy is coming over with a few things I need. But you don’t have to look at him this early in the morning. I’ll get rid of him—”

  “No, it’s fine if he comes in.”

  The bell rang, but it was someone from Kroll
, the investigative agency, coming for Jonah’s hard drive. Since I didn’t think of saying it was too late because he was dead, I let Andrea take him to the study.

  When she came back, she was still on Fat Boy. “Don’t say it will be fine if he comes in. It will be awkward and horrible. I know that, you know that.”

  While a nail-gnawing, socially buffoonish, three-hundred-pound, waxy-skinned man wasn’t most women’s idea of a dreamboat, Hugh Morrison wasn’t that bad. All he ever wore, four seasons a year, were short-sleeved Ralph Lauren Polo shirts, but when he came in I noticed he’d put on a black one to show respect in a house of mourning, and the shirt was so spotless that I couldn’t even guess what he’d had for breakfast.

  “Hey, Susie.”

  “Hey, Hugh.”

  He squeezed my shoulder, and I could feel the wetness of his palm through my sweater. Andrea said he didn’t hug or kiss other women because he was shy. I’d always thought the reason was he feared they might misinterpret a friendly gesture, assume he was coming on to them, and not be able to hide their distaste. “Sorry about Jonah,” he said. He spoke so fast that it came out “SarboutJo.”

  “Thank you.”

  He held out a stuffed Vuitton duffel for Andrea. She walked to him with the dread and dignity of an aristocrat going to the guillotine, and they exchanged their usual greeting—puckering lips and kissing on the points of pucker. Then she grabbed the bag out of his blubbery hand. “Did you remember to ask Cora to pack the Louboutin Mary Janes?” He nodded. Side by side, the Morrison-Brinckerhoffs were a perfect ten, she a willowy numeral one, he a jiggly zero. Andrea seemed surprised and perhaps disappointed that he’d remembered the shoes, but she offered him a dour “Good work, Fat Boy.”

  For once I was able to resist watching the awful spectacle of their marriage, and I headed off to the kitchen. It occurred to me that I hadn’t excused myself, but it didn’t matter: Fat Boy shuffled up beside me. (Long ago, I realized I should think of him as Hugh, but my mind had accepted the name his wife had assigned him.)

  “You got a problem out there,” he said.

  Comprehending any sentence of his usually took double time: First I had to break down the whiz of sound that came out into words. Plus, I was now so numb—or maybe paralyzed with grief—that there were whole minutes I really didn’t comprehend Jonah was dead. I was down deep, drowning in pain, and I could make it to the surface, to reality, only when grabbed by someone and pulled up. “What?” I asked. “A problem out where?”

  “End of the driveway.” I panicked for a second: One of the weeping cherries had been uprooted by a blast of winter wind. Jonah would be beside himself because he loved those trees. Also, it would cost thousands to replace it with one of the same size, and we’d have a fight about whether that was necessary.

  Then I realized Jonah was somewhere in Manhattan, ice cold, on his back in one of those stacked stainless-steel refrigerators like on Crossing Jordan. My breath blasted from me like a tire blowout, with such force that I would have careened into the wall of the hallway and crashed to the floor if Fat Boy hadn’t grabbed me from behind. He held me under my armpits. When I glanced down, I could see his huge fingers sticking out, pale and porky like bratwurst waiting to be grilled. He propelled me into the dining room, pulled out a chair with his foot, and plopped me into it.

  “Sorry,” I mumbled.

  “Forget about it. Y’okay?”

  “I know you just told me something, Hugh, but I forget what it was.”

  “The end of the driveway. TV trucks and cameras and a bunch of reporters.” My brain took far too long to get from Why are reporters in Shorehaven? to Oh shit! My face must have finally registered something close to comprehension because he started talking again: “Before I got out of my car, I called the cops. They can’t keep the press off the streets. But they’ll send a couple of guys over to keep them from putting a foot on your property.” I nodded a thank-you. “Your tax dollars at work,” he added.

  Real crime, like big-time burglary or homicide, was handled by the Nassau County PD. But Shorehaven Estates was one of those privileged little incorporated villages that had a police force all its own for lesser offenses. It appeared to be made up entirely of white guys so shiny-faced and clean-shaven they looked like Mormons parachuted in from Utah. My only contact with them had taken place a year before, when I’d called asking what to do about a demented raccoon staggering alongside our house. They arrived three minutes later, shot it with a tranquilizer dart, and carted it away.

  “What do reporters want here at the house?” I asked. “It didn’t happen here.” Had I been thinking straight, I wouldn’t have had to ask, but I wasn’t.

  “They want whatever piece of Jonah they can get,” he said. “Like you. You go to your mailbox, and you’ll see yourself ten times an hour on CNN. And if they get a shot of the boys in the backseat of your minivan? Listen, Susie, they’re pros for a reason. They’re going to swear they’ll go away if someone comes out and talks to them.”

  “A ‘family spokesman,’” I said.

  “Yeah. But they won’t go.” Fat Boy knew about media coverage. His hedge fund was in an overly glassed and marbled office building in Great Neck, fifteen minutes west, but he hardly went there. Not that it was such a depressing place: Unlike so many formerly smart financial types, Fat Boy had not been lured by skyrocketing real estate profits or exotic offshoots like mortgage derivatives. Instead of assuming all those investments were too sophisticated for him to understand, he’d told Andrea that the speculators and bankers “couldn’t tell a pile of shit from a hot rock” and bet big against the boom. And of course he’d won.

  Most of the time, his global dealings took place in the vibrating Barcalounger in his home office. With a headset blinking blue just over his right ear, he was commander of the six-line phone on a table beside him and the notebook computer on his lap. Four feet opposite him was a wall of TV monitors tuned to business and news channels, none of which were muted.

  Fat Boy had the multitasker’s dream brain, seemingly capable of absorbing every stream of data coming at it. Thus, he had the same total recall of Scott Peterson’s murder trial as he did of Goldman Sachs’s estimates for European metals and mining in 2005, and how many million hectares India was devoting to the production of soybeans. He said now, “They’ll send in helicopters. Your house will come off so magnificent in an aerial shot it will make The Great Gatsby look like crap. You know what the crawl will say? ‘Lush Long Island estate of Park Avenue plastic surgeon Jonah Gersten found stabbed to death in NY call girl’s apartment.’” Had Andrea been around, this would have been when she snarled, “Shut your fat mouth, Huge.” But she’d gone someplace—probably up to the guest room to put on her Mary Janes.

  The thing was, Fat Boy hadn’t meant to be cruel. He wasn’t one of those financial freaks who specialized in tactless remarks and had zero knowledge of other people. Not that he’d ever win the Tobey Maguire Male Sensitivity Medal, but at his worst, he was simply a gauche guy who wasn’t helped by being wrapped in layers of fat and decorated with swirls of sweat and splotches of snack food.

  But, God, was he sharp. Fat Boy lived for data and assumed that the more anyone knew, the better. So right there in the dining room, two hours before I heard an awful whomp-whomp, ran outside, and saw the local stations’ news helicopters circling over the house like mechanical vultures, I understood he was right: Jonah’s murder was a nightmare for his family, colleagues, and friends, but it was a media dream. I had better be prepared that, besides being a personal and police matter, the story was public property. Anyone with a TV or computer could savor our tragedy.

  “What am I going to do?” My hands were covering my face, so my voice was probably muffled. Anyway, it was no big deal if I couldn’t be understood. My question was one of those biggies to God, not an inquiry I expected to get answered.

  “You need somebody to go out and talk to the press. A family spokesman.”

  “But you
said that won’t satisfy them that—”

  “It won’t.” Fat Boy pulled out the dining room chair next to me. It was a nineteenth-century reproduction of an eighteenth-century Hepplewhite: in other words, a piece of furniture designed for slender aristocrats. I immediately put all my energy into not stiffening as he sat down. “Look,” he explained, “nothing will satisfy them until a new scandal comes along. Meantime, you’ve got to deal.”

  “Okay, but can you do me a favor, Hugh? Talk a little slower.”

  “Sure, sure, sure. What I’m saying is, you need to deal—now. But hey, there’s no law saying you can’t do it from the bottom of the deck.” He started cleaning under the nails of his left hand with his overlong right pinkie nail. “Here’s the thing: You can have someone you trust strolling up your driveway to a bank of microphones three times a day. Except what will that get you? A guarantee to keep them here in Shorehaven throwing Starbucks cups into your storm sewer. No, you’ve got to give them a spokesman who’ll say . . .” He put on what I took as his idea of a sensitive voice, high-pitched, all R’s and T’s articulated clearly. “She’s devastated. Right now all she can think of is how to protect her kids. No, make that ‘protect her three little boys.’”

  “But isn’t that giving them—”

  “You don’t do it, for Christ’s sake,” he said, cutting me off. “Oh, I forgot. I need to be really nice to you. Sorry.”

  “Don’t worry about nice. Just tell me what you think I should do.”

  “Strategize. Give them their family spokesman. But . . . I’ll tell you what. Give it to them in the city. That way most of them will be out of here in a day or two. The news outlets won’t want to spend the money on two teams of reporters. You’ll get the freelancers, the paparazzi, but between the local cops and a couple of weeks of hired security—I’ll pay for it—you can probably deal.”