The Engagements

by J. Courtney Sullivan

  “I never told you this, because I didn’t want to upset you,” he began, and she felt her breath catch in her chest. She wasn’t certain she could live with more secrets.

  “What?”

  “My parents were dead set against me marrying you.”

  Though they had both been gone more than twenty years, Evelyn felt hurt and indignant on behalf of her younger self. “They didn’t like me?” she asked, and then smiled at how childish she sounded.

  “They loved you,” he said. “They thought you were dynamite. Everyone does. They didn’t want me to marry you because they thought it was wrong. They said you couldn’t possibly love me—that you were just trying to keep Nathaniel alive and so was I.”

  “But that’s not true,” she said.

  “And over time, they came to realize it. At least I hope they did. That’s my point. No one can ever know the inner parts of anyone else’s marriage. It’s a strange business.”

  “You can’t possibly equate what Teddy’s doing to what we did.”

  “Why not? I married my best friend’s girl. In most people’s playbooks, it doesn’t get much more rotten than that.”

  She was startled by his words. Perhaps it was surprising that she and Gerald should have come together the way they did, but ever since, theirs had been the most ordinary of marriages. Maybe the way they met was still the most interesting thing about them, but it had happened so long ago. Since then, Gerald had fought in a war and returned home unscathed to become one of the top men in his firm. She had taught hundreds of students. Their son had come into being, and both their grandchildren.

  From time to time, she had imagined what her life would have been like had Nathaniel lived. They would have been happy. They might have struggled with money, something she and Gerald never had to think about. They would have talked about books, and watched less television than Gerald did. Perhaps she would have had more children, though she wasn’t quite sure how all that worked, whether it was decided by the mother’s biology or the father’s, or just Divine Providence.

  But when she let her mind wander down this path, she pictured her Gerald—alone, or married to the wrong woman, someone who would only see the surface of him. And there, her imaginings would stop, for the thought of either one of them without the other simply could not be.

  “It breaks my heart to think of you carrying that around all these years,” she said. “Darling, you have to know you didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “On the one hand, you’re right,” he said. “But on the other, I’ve occasionally wondered what he’ll say when we meet on the other side. Will he be angry? Will he hold a grudge for all eternity?”

  “I don’t think there are grudges on the other side,” she said.

  “Perhaps not.”

  “What will we ever do about Teddy?”

  “We’ve been asking each other that question for thirty years now. Teddy is a forty-year-old man. I don’t think there’s much we can do about him.”

  “But we’re his parents.”

  Gerald said nothing.

  “That woman, Nicole. I couldn’t stand the way she looked at this place. Like she was just waiting for us to die so it could all be hers. She’s awful.”

  When Gerald didn’t reply, Evelyn added, “She’s tacky.”

  “So’s he,” Gerald said.

  Evelyn laughed. Her husband had always been able to make her laugh, even when it seemed impossible.

  “I’ll bet she doesn’t last a year,” Gerald said.

  “But it’s not about her, anyway. A year from now, whatever happens, the damage will be done. I can’t part with the girls,” Evelyn said. “What if Julie really does take them away?”

  “Then you’ll write letters. We’ll visit them, and they’ll come see us. You’re their grandmother. Nothing Teddy does or doesn’t do can ever change that.”

  She wondered if he was right. She hoped he was.

  “It will all work out, you’ll see,” he said. “Why don’t we take a drive down to the Cape tomorrow? I know you love the ocean in the fall. What do you say?”

  “All right,” she said weakly. She couldn’t quite bring herself to feel excited, but she was grateful that he was there to try to cheer her, and this, at least, was something.

  “Perk up, kiddo,” Gerald said. He extended his hand, and she took it.

  “Come on, Evie. Let’s take a walk outside before it gets too late.”

  2003

  The taxi ride to JFK never looked the same twice. Delphine had made it five times in the past year with P.J., and each time she had spent a few minutes wondering if perhaps they were about to be kidnapped. Neither of them could ever say where they were.

  Today was no different. The driver was African. He had the windows rolled down, the air-conditioning turned off. He talked into his cell phone in some foreign language, yelling at the person at the other end of the line.

  Her own cell phone lit up. P.J. was calling. She ignored it.

  “What airline?” the driver asked.

  “Air France.”

  When Delphine discovered the truth about P.J., she went straight to a hotel. She could not stand the thought of spending one more night in his apartment. For two weeks, she lay in bed, never eating or speaking to a soul, feeling herself coming unglued. She was a middle-aged woman, but somehow she felt like a child, as if at any moment she could yell out for her father and be saved.

  Her phone rang again now, and once again she ignored it.

  The taxi slowed down at a red light. They were in an ethnic neighborhood she didn’t recognize, packed with low apartment buildings and storefront churches. The fire hydrants had been turned on. Children splashed around in the spray.

  Her phone vibrated in her lap. A text message: What did you do to my apartment? WHERE IS CHARLIE, you crazy bitch??

  She switched the phone off, and tucked it into the pocket of her suitcase.

  Inside the airport a few minutes later, Delphine passed a Muslim woman in a headscarf and smiled. She thought of how many Americans must hate or distrust her on sight, and wanted to tell her, They hate me too, as soon as I open my mouth.

  She got her ticket from the machine and took her place in the security line. Most of the other travelers wore sweats or pajama pants. Delphine smoothed the front of her blue dress.

  A man in a uniform was shouting, “Remove all shoes, jewelry, belts. Remove all shoes, jewelry, belts.” Over and over again. He seemed to be getting a lot of satisfaction from telling them what to do.

  Delphine took off her watch. Drawing her hand away from her wrist, she realized with a sickening sensation that the ring was gone.

  She stepped out of line, then retraced her steps to the door, with her eyes on the ground. Nothing. She sat down on a bench outside and unzipped her suitcase, even though she knew it couldn’t be there. She searched the entire thing and shoved her fingers into the pocket where she had put her phone. She felt cool metal, and with it came a rush of relief, but when she pulled the object out it was only a penny.

  Delphine felt frantic, searching the floor a second time, getting down on her knees at the ticket machine.

  Maybe the ring wasn’t in the airport at all. Maybe she had lost it even earlier.

  She tried to remember the last time she saw it. It had probably been hours. Had it gone down the garbage chute? Into the fireplace? Her fingers had gotten so thin that it might have slipped off anywhere. She let herself ponder insane scenarios, in which everyone was suspicious. The doorman had been overly friendly. Perhaps the alleged father from Connecticut was actually a pickpocket and had slid it off her hand as they exchanged Charlie’s leash.

  “I’ve lost my ring,” she said to a woman now pressing buttons on the machine, but the woman didn’t even turn around.

  In Delphine’s version of justice, all innocent parties would leave this situation with what they brought: the Jews would keep the violin, and his family would get their ring back. Now she had lost it,
and what was theirs would be gone. Delphine felt sorry for P.J.’s mother, but worst of all for his father, who had saved up to buy it all those years ago.

  While visiting P.J.’s parents in Ohio a few weeks earlier, the trip that had set their demise in motion, she had learned more about him in two days than she might have otherwise learned in a year. His parents, James and Sheila, were perfectly kind people, but Delphine had little in common with them. They had no books in their house. They kept the television on at all times, the voices of conservative news pundits and sports announcers a constant backdrop to every conversation. They drank too much diet soda, and ate chips straight from the bag. They had voted for George W. Bush.

  She didn’t want to be a snob, but their decor was incredibly tacky: bric-a-brac on every stationary surface, porcelain figures in the shape of frogs and flowers and children covered in snow and, of course, basset hounds. The walls had borders of stenciled tulips and balloons.

  Sheila was a large woman who appeared to have given up on her looks. Her shoulder-length brown hair was run through with streaks of gray, like the fat that marbles a steak. She wore it pulled back with a plastic clip. She had given birth to five boys in fourteen years, always holding out hope for a girl. She was done with childbearing now, but her stomach would never return to its original shape. Her arms were wide and fleshy. She wore baggy jeans and a Red Sox sweatshirt around the house. You could tell she had once been very pretty. She had big blue eyes and a warm smile. But she worked forty hours a week as a nurse, and still had three children living under her roof, ages ten, thirteen, and sixteen. The boys were loud and wild. The screen porch through which they entered the house was full of hockey equipment and smelled of sweat and mold.

  Her husband, James, was a slim man, much shorter than P.J. He did something with ambulances, working as a dispatcher for a fleet of medics in the city. He didn’t have a college degree. No one in the family did, other than P.J. and some uncle whom they all seemed to hate.

  James’s mother, a frail woman in her eighties, lived with them. For most of the weekend, she sat on the sunporch alone watching religious programs on television.

  “How’s Nana?” P.J. whispered to Sheila, looking at his grandmother through the open door.

  Sheila shrugged. “Same old. Every morning when she wakes up, she has six months to live.”

  Delphine wasn’t sure what she meant. It sounded serious, but Sheila laughed as she said it.

  On Friday night before dinner, they sat in the formal living room. Sheila set down a tray of tiny hot dogs wrapped in pastry.

  “I’ve got some mini quiches in the freezer too if you want,” she said. “They just take five minutes to heat up.”

  “We’re good,” P.J. said.

  The room was like a shrine to him. There was a big table crammed with snow globes he had sent from all over the world. Framed posters highlighting his accomplishments crowded the walls: the classical charts from the times his albums went straight to number one, a solo performance in Dublin with the words Limited Engagement: SOLD OUT printed in red, and newspaper reviews with the most complimentary sentences highlighted in bright yellow marker. “McKeen drew everything from his instrument that a human being is capable of drawing. His playing was masterful, brilliant, otherworldly.”—The New York Times. “Tonight McKeen was not only a master fiddler but also a full chorus of singers, from an operatic soprano to a honky-tonk belter. An outrageous talent.”—The Dallas Morning News.

  Sheila asked P.J. dozens of questions about his work, which Delphine could tell made him uncomfortable. James remained strangely silent through most of the night, as if he too were hoping for a subject change.

  P.J. had told her his parents didn’t get that though his fame was an exciting topic to be bragged about for them, for him it had become just a job. He said they didn’t see him the way they used to, as their son. Now he was an idea to them, not a person. He was the thing they had done right, the promise they had built their world around, and he resented them for it.

  Delphine wondered if they knew how much money he made. He was generous with them—for Christmas, he had sent Sheila a pair of sapphire earrings and James a big-screen TV. She thought he had probably helped them buy the house. P.J. had mentioned once that they were deeply in debt, like everyone else in America, but to her knowledge he had never tried to get them out of it.

  Clearly he was their pride and joy. Their only other grown son, Danny, was a plumber living in Columbus. He made a decent salary, but he couldn’t compare to P.J.

  They called him by his full first name, Parker. Apparently the initials were something he had adopted in middle school, when the kids at a summer music camp made fun of him for having a fake preppy name. “What, did your mother hear that on a soap opera?” some brat had asked, and by the time school started up again, Parker had become P.J.

  When they first met, Delphine rather liked his name, but over time she had come to regard it as childish. She thought he ought to go back to Parker. She sometimes wondered if he was trading on his youth too much. Every time he got written up in a newspaper, the writer would remark on the fact that he was “just twenty-four.” Twenty-four was hardly young as far as musical prodigies went. But they had been writing that about him since he was only seventeen, only eighteen, only nineteen. When would he reach an age where his talents would stand on their own?

  She had once been taken in by what she saw as his rawness, his honesty, and the way these traits seeped into his music. But she no longer thought he was as talented as everyone said. Nor was he raw. Everything he did was cultivated—from the odd charity concert that he’d give only if he was guaranteed coverage in the press, to the way he had built a wall between his family and himself.

  James and Sheila lived in a suburb of Cleveland, in a house with a big backyard, in which an aboveground pool took up more space than seemed reasonable. The house was a good size, but too small for six people, with only four bedrooms. Delphine and P.J. would sleep on a pull-out sofa in the den.

  Over dinner, James asked her, “So what’s it like living in France?”

  Could she sum that up in a word, or a sentence? What would he say if she asked him about living in America?

  He continued, “Is everyone over there really as crazy as they say about Jerry Lewis?”

  “Dad, shut up,” P.J. said lightly, though he seemed embarrassed. “You know that’s just a dumb stereotype, right?”

  “It was a joke,” James said.

  “It’s all right,” Delphine said. “Most of my knowledge of America came from watching I Love Lucy on television.”

  They laughed, everyone easing up a bit.

  Sheila said, “The ring looks pretty on you. You have such long, skinny fingers.”

  Delphine looked down at it, feeling self-conscious. It was Sheila’s ring, really.

  “Do you snag it on things a lot?” Sheila asked. “I had to stop wearing it because it was always getting caught on stuff.”

  “Yes!” Delphine said. “I’m a left-hand writer, so I use that hand quite a bit.”

  “We say ‘lefty,’ ” P.J. said.

  James smiled and shook his head, like she was an adorable yet stupid child. “ ‘Left-hand writer,’ ” he repeated.

  They all drank a lot. The wine was dreadful, but she gulped it down as if it were the best she’d ever had.

  Sheila cleared the plates and P.J. rose to help her. Delphine wasn’t sure if she should also help. She stood up, but Sheila said, “You’re a guest! Sit!”

  Delphine did as she said, still wondering what was really expected as she watched them carry the dishes into the kitchen. Americans so often said one thing when they wanted another.

  James was telling her that his dog, Frank, had been listless all week. “Even for a basset hound,” he said with a laugh. “I may have to bring him to the vet tomorrow.”

  Delphine nodded, but her ear was trained on what was being said in the next room. She could hear the heat in their v
oices, but not the words. And then suddenly their volume increased just enough so that she could make out Sheila saying, “I gave you that ring for Shannon. Not some foreigner who you’d only known for five minutes. Suppose she goes back to her husband and takes it out of the country.”

  “You gave it to me to give to the woman I wanted to marry, and that’s Delphine,” he said. “What are you so upset about, anyway? You never even liked that ring.”

  “It’s not that. It’s not just the ring.”

  “What, then?”

  “It’s the fact that she has this husband,” his mother hissed. “I don’t want you to have to go through the rest of your life knowing you broke up a marriage. You’re just a kid. You don’t understand what it means.”

  A moment later, she came through the swinging door with a big smile on her face, and offered Delphine a slice of ice cream cake.

  When they got into bed that night, she said, “Why did you tell your mother I was married?”

  “I don’t know. Because you were. Or are. It was probably dumb of me to think she would be cool with it.”

  “You never told me that your mother gave you the ring for someone else.”

  “So? I gave it to you.”

  “Well, why doesn’t she wear it herself? I don’t understand.”

  “My father gave her that ring to prove something to himself. It was a stupid thing for him to spend money on when they had none, my mother always thought so. He traded in this old car to buy it. She wore it because she thought it would do something for him—make him feel like more of a man. When they were just kids, he gave her a flat ring that cost nothing, so she could wear it to work at the hospital. That was the ring she loved, not this. This ring is for a totally different kind of woman. Someone like you.”

  She realized that he felt fine giving her a ring that was meant for someone else because he saw it as just an object. It was the same reason he could buy the Stradivarius and never wonder whether the Nazis had killed for it.

  They lay in bed without touching. Delphine couldn’t sleep. She stared at a photo on the wall, in a frame with the words HOME SWEET HOME running around the border. The picture was of a tiny, gray house on the corner of a crowded street. In the background, you could make out a car on cement blocks sitting on the next-door neighbor’s lawn.