Frozen in Time

by Joseph Epstein

  Futterman, whose arm is now under Stacy Shanahan’s head, in his bedroom in his apartment on Schiller, in the bed he and his wife had shared for decades, the sun slanting into the room, does not feel in the least like making the coyote maneuver. Before he had quite come awake, he felt rather pleased, the warm body of a young woman next to his. Then he thinks, “Christ! What have I done!” Through bleary eyes he notes the digital alarm clock on his night table: 11:27 a.m.

  Futterman hasn’t a clear notion how this had come about. He remembers leaving his firm’s offices with Ms. Shanahan, putting her in a cab, getting in beside her. He remembers having a full, just-opened bottle of champagne in one hand and another unopened bottle under his arm, and Ms. Shanahan holding two plastic fluted glasses. After that, things get blurry: there was much laughter, he struggled with the keys to his apartment while trying to hold on to the champagne bottles. The last thing he can remember is deciding, the hell with it, not to put the shoe trees in his shoes . . .

  Futterman is naked, and he looks over to his wife’s antique vanity and sees the two champagne bottles, now empty, and the two plastic glasses. He hears himself groan lightly. This is not like him, David Futterman, a man who writes the wills and plans the estates for wealthy clients, solid, square prudential David Futterman, a grandfather of three, in bed with a young woman he barely knows and with far from less than complete knowledge of how he got here.

  Although it would not be easy to prove at the moment, Futterman was not a player. He had never cheated on his wife during all the years of their marriage, and his experience with women before his marriage wasn’t extensive. Since Ruth’s death, he had gone out with four different women, but never more than twice with any one of them, and with none did he wind up in bed. Futterman did not consider sex a trivial act. Nor was he a drinking man. Last night, for some reason, everything broke loose, and here he is, hung over, naked, with a woman more than thirty years younger than he in his bed.

  Futterman slips quietly out of the bed, puts on pajamas, robe, and slippers, and goes into the kitchen to make coffee. When he returns to the bedroom, Ms. Shanahan is awake, sitting up in bed, the top sheet and blanket tucked under her chin.

  “What’s that old Laurel and Hardy line?” she says, looking down. “‘A fine mess you’ve gotten us into this time, Stanley.’ Except I’m not even sure which one of us is Stanley.”

  “I must be Stanley,” Futterman says, surprised at her old-fashioned movie reference. “You are much too good-looking to be taken for Ollie.”

  “Excuse me for a few moments, please,” she says, “while I get dressed.”

  “I’ve got some coffee going,” Futterman says, and leaves the room.

  In the kitchen, setting out breakfast things, Futterman thinks with relief that Stacy Shanahan would no longer be working at his law firm, thank God for small blessings. He isn’t sure how he will get out of this, but at least he won’t have to face this girl—though in her thirties, she seemed a girl to him—every day in the office. He used to wonder how men who slept with lots of women handled the getaway part. All he wants right now is to have this girl out of his apartment, so that he can work through his hangover and get back to the calm routine of his life.

  When Stacy Shanahan enters the kitchen, Futterman hands her an already poured cup of coffee. She takes her coffee black. She turns down his offer of toast.

  “I don’t know what to say about last night,” she says. “I hope you will believe that I am not someone who ordinarily wakes up in the bed of a man without quite knowing how she got there. And I’m certainly not someone who wakes up in the bed of a man she hardly knows. It’s not my way, really it’s not, please believe me.”

  “I believe you,” Futterman says. “I’m probably more to blame than you. I guess I’ve been lonelier than I thought since my wife died. I didn’t mean to take advantage of you.”

  “I’m more than thirty years old, Mr. Futterman, and ought to be able to take care of myself. Advantage doesn’t enter into it. I don’t think anyone taking advantage of anyone else is the issue here.”

  “Can I get you something to eat?”

  “No,” she says, “I really have to get home. I’ve a thousand things to do today, and it’s already noon.”

  Stacy Shanahan finds and puts on her coat. At the door, Futterman asks if he can get her a cab, but she says she prefers to take the El, which at this time of day is quicker.

  “Good luck in the new job,” he says at the door, sounding silly to himself saying it.

  “Take care,” she says, and is gone. Futterman feels a gust of tremendous relief. He takes his coffee into the living room, flops into the chair in which he watches television, where he falls asleep until four that afternoon.

  Early in March, Futterman’s secretary informs him that he has a telephone call from a Ms. Shanahan.

  “Hello,” he says, apprehensive, “how are things?”

  “Not so great, Mr. Futterman,” she answers. “Seems I’m pregnant.”

  Futterman gulps. Calm is needed here, he thinks, great cool calm. Steady, he tells himself.

  “I see,” is all he says, returning the ball weakly to her side of the court.

  “I’m afraid this is our office Christmas party child,” she says, in a slightly quavering voice.

  “You’re certain?” says Futterman, in his authoritative, lawyerly voice.

  “Yes. I hadn’t slept with anyone for months before, nor have I slept with anyone since. There’s no other possibility.”

  “Look,” Futterman says, “maybe we shouldn’t be talking about this over the phone. Are you free for dinner?”

  They agree to meet at a restaurant in her neighborhood, a hamburger joint on Broadway called Moody’s. The place turns out to be dark, with formica tables and paper napkins. Stacy Shanahan, arrived before Futterman, is seated in a booth along the wall.

  She appears—no surprise—tired, under strain. She is a striking young woman, black Irish, with long brunette hair pulled back in a ponytail, luminous blue eyes. Those eyes are now ringed with a slight shadow, the beginning of bags forming beneath them. She’s wearing jeans and a red T-shirt under a white sweater.

  “How go things at Sidley?” Futterman begins, thinking it best to start with small talk. “Hope the new job is all you expected of it.”

  “Everything there is fine,” she says. “I only wish I could enjoy it, but my mind is of course elsewhere.”

  Futterman has had nearly a full day to think things through. Was Stacy Shanahan a con woman, playing him for money? He decided not. Ought he to demand a DNA test? Here, too, he determined to believe her when she said that the child was his. A pity, he thought, that he couldn’t remember a thing about how he had helped conceive it. What Futterman decided was to decide nothing at all, but hear out her story.

  “I’m sure you have thought about an abortion,” he says.

  “I have and I have had to reject it,” she says. “Even though I no longer go to church regularly, I am still enough of a Catholic not to be able to take abortion lightly. It’s a mortal sin, you know, one of the big ones. Abortion, I’m afraid, is a solution unavailable to me.” Her voice breaks and Futterman notes her eyes beginning to water.

  “Are you able to afford raising a child?” Futterman asks, waiting to hear of any financial demands she is going to make of him.

  “I could,” she says. “I’ve got some savings, though it wouldn’t be easy. Money, though, isn’t the problem, at least not the main one.”

  “What is?” he asked.

  “My family is the problem. They aren’t going to take to my being an unwed mother, no, not a bit, not in the least. They’re very traditional, very old Chicago Irish Catholic.”

  “What’ll you do?”

  “What I am about to do right now,” she says, “which is to ask you, Mr. Futterman, to please marry me.”
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  “You’re joking, right?” Futterman says.

  “Afraid not. You’re unmarried. I don’t know if you’re in any serious relationship at present, but I hope not. And you are the father of my child.”

  “I’m also more than thirty years older than you, and we don’t, if I may say so, know very much about each other. Besides, how is your family likely to take to your bringing home a Jewish husband who for all I know is older than your father?”

  “Actually,” she says, “he’s two years older than you. And my best guess is they’ll say how clever of Stacy to have landed a rich lawyer husband.”

  “I have daughters, grandchildren,” Futterman says, not quite certain of the relevance of bringing this up.

  “I don’t ask that we stay married for very long,” she says. “Just long enough to give our child—who is to be a boy, by the way—a name and maybe stay under the same roof a year or so, after which time I promise to clear out of your life, no questions or money asked. We can even write up a pre-nup to that effect, if you like.”

  “I’ve never been proposed to before,” he says, “especially by the name ‘Mr. Futterman.’ And I certainly didn’t wake up this morning thinking I was going to be the father of, what’s the current stupid term, ‘a second family’.”

  “Forgive me, I meant to say ‘David’.”

  “Look,” says Futterman, “why don’t we change the subject, finish our hamburgers, and take a few days out for me to think further about it.”

  “Thank you, David,” Stacy says.

  “For what?” Futterman asks.

  “For not calling me an idiot, getting up from the table and walking away.”

  They eat their hamburgers, talk—he asks her more about life at Sid-ley Austin, she him about some of the people she liked at Stone, Viner, Futterman and Waller—and afterward he drives her the few blocks to her apartment on Sheridan Road. From the lobby of her building an Indian family emerges through the revolving door, a mother and father and three adolescent children. He thinks about leaning over to kiss Ms. Shanahan on the forehead in a fatherly way before she steps out of his BMW, but instead tells her to sleep well and reminds her that he will be in touch two days from now, a Friday.

  As he drives away, Futterman thinks how preposterous all this is. Here he is, at sixty-six, suddenly to be the father of a new child, a son no less, whose mother is a young woman he scarcely knows. Too crazy, the whole thing makes no sense whatsoever. Futterman’s first thought is to make a straight cash payment to Ms. Shanahan. Twenty-five grand is the figure that comes to his mind.

  The next morning Futterman feels that Ms. Shanahan, as he continues even now to think of her, really doesn’t want his money. He needs to take her at her word. She wants, just as she says, a father for her child, at least officially. Does this, he wonders, mean that she expects him also to live with her? Wasn’t the phrase “same roof” mentioned last night? He does have a large extra bedroom in his Schiller Street apartment, and he supposes that she and the baby could have it. His mind fleetingly feels a strange stab of pride at still being able to produce a child, and a boy, too. Then he thinks, God, the vanity of men. We’re all fucking nuts.

  If the young woman and his infant were to live in his apartment, Futterman’s bachelor routine, now firmly established after his wife’s death, would be completely disrupted. He missed Ruth but, truth to tell, he also liked being free of the social obligations that marriage to her brought with it: charity dinners, theatre tickets to plays he usually found either stupid or incomprehensible, meetings with her friends and their husbands. While his wife was alive, Futterman found himself going out three or four nights a week. Now, after leaving the office at roughly six each night, he ate dinner usually alone in his apartment. He discovered he could cook a few basic things, omelettes, steaks and hamburgers, baked potatoes, spaghetti over which he poured a spicy store-bought sauce called Luchini. After dinner, he read, watched a ball game or an old movie, and usually went to bed after the ten o’clock news.

  With a newborn baby in the apartment, there would be crying in the middle of the night, diapers and toys all over the place, formulas being made in the kitchen, a pram in the foyer. Impossible, hopeless, can’t be done. Futterman decides he will call Ms. Shanahan in the morning and work out some kind of financial arrangement, a child-support payment, in effect, one that provided for the child’s upbringing and even his education. He’d have to think through the numbers. He is a modestly wealthy man, and is prepared to pay reasonably for his single unremembered roll in the hay.

  That night Futterman dreams that his son, now nine or ten years old, small, wearing glasses, braces on his teeth, fragile, obviously no athlete—looking, that is, rather like Futterman did as young boy, is seated in a large auditorium next to Stacy Shanahan. So, too, are hundreds of other boys seated next to their mothers. Futterman is viewing all this from his seat on a dais on the auditorium stage. He realizes suddenly that he is being introduced, in lavishly fulsome terms, by a man named Lester Kravitz, whose bankruptcy he had handled some years ago and from whom he had a difficult time collecting his fee. Seated next to Futterman is Miss Mary Ann Burke, his music teacher at Senn High School, a large women with buck teeth who wore gray sharkskin suits and white silk blouses open at the neck as, seated at a grand piano, she played “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” with many florid arpeggios.

  “Excuse me, Miss Burke,” Futterman asks, “but why is this man Kravitz introducing me?”

  “You’re the featured speaker of the evening, David,” she answers, and lightly pats his knee.

  “What’s my subject?” he asks, feeling a needle of panic in his heart.

  “Why, David,” Miss Burke says, gazing down at him, a surprised look on her large face, “the subject is of course fatherless children. It’s the charity for which we’re all here tonight.”

  “And without further ado,” says Kravitz, “I give you a man who can be counted on always to know whereof he speaks, my good friend, that great humanitarian, the honorable David Futterman.”

  Futterman makes his way hesitantly to the lectern, where Kravitz, grinning, with his hand held out, awaits him. “What would you know about honorable, you creep?” Futterman whispers to Kravitz, who deserts him at the lectern without answering. The applause is thunderous.

  Faltering at first, Futterman suddenly begins to speak in a flood of platitudes. Babies were not to be thrown out with bath water, apples never fell far from trees and, speaking of trees, great oaks from little acorns grow, which, Futterman allowed, might be construed as a case of apples and oranges, with the twain never meeting. Chickens should certainly not be counted before they hatched, nor bridges crossed before one comes to them, he rambled on, because one good turn deserves another. A bird in the hand is still worth two in the bush, no matter what anyone says, the piper must be paid, which makes it possible to separate the wheat from the chaff, for as ye sow so shall ye reap, and, all this being so, therefore the time was at hand to reach out and find the much-needed role model father-figures without whom, divided, we fall.

  Futterman senses a rumbling in the audience. Mothers and sons are walking out. Soon the only people left are Stacy Shanahan and her—their—son and the boy is weeping. At what Futterman isn’t sure. At his father’s embarrassing him with this disgraceful speech? At his abandoning him years before? Does he even know that Futterman is his father? Futterman is determined to find out and steps down into the auditorium seating, when a powerful need to urinate takes hold of him, and he wakes and walks quickly into the bathroom.

  When Futterman was finishing his last year at the University of Illinois, he had had a religious phase, briefly attempted to keep kosher, observe the sabbath, read a Bible portion each morning, and he told the rabbi at Hillel at the university that he was torn between becoming a rabbi or a lawyer. “Become a lawyer,” the rabbi had said, “it’s morally much more challenging.”
At the time, Futterman wasn’t sure what the rabbi meant, but it didn’t take him long in the practice of law to understand completely.

  To be a lawyer, the Lord and the rabbi at Hillel knew, offered many temptations. One saw people in extremis, many of them terrified or confused or with revenge or greed in their hearts. One had people, if one wished so to have them, where one wanted them. At his firm Futterman knew about lawyers who were screwing their clients, literally in the case of vulnerable women undergoing divorce or widowhood, and financially by expensive overbilling in the case of nearly everyone else. Futterman did neither. He acted with probity, counselled his clients with all the prudence at his command. He liked to think that it paid off; a large part of his clientele was composed of referrals, and over the years he had made a handsome living. Above all Futterman needed to think of himself as a decent man, no angel but not a son of a bitch either.

  The right thing, Futterman knew, was not to abandon this child of his accidental making. The cost would be exorbitant—not so much the financial cost, but the cost in disruption and embarrassment. His entire life would be disheveled, upended, blown apart. All that Stacy Shanahan asked was a year or so of marriage, to legitimize her child and please her family. For her it would, in effect, be a marriage of convenience; for Futterman, a marriage of the utmost inconvenience. Ms. Shanahan, though, wasn’t the issue. The unborn child was. Was Futterman a man who could allow a child to walk around the world without knowing who his father was; or if he did know, to know that he didn’t give a damn about him?

  David Maurice Futterman and Stacy Katherine Shanahan are married at City Hall by a judge named John McHugh. Stacy’s sister Mary Beth and her brother Tom are there as witnesses; no one from Futterman’s family appears. The following day Stacy moves into the spare bedroom in Futterman’s apartment. They take their meals together. Ruth’s friends wonder why Futterman has made this marriage. Men at his law firm don’t wonder but merely wink, and tell jokes out of Futterman’s hearing about May and December couples (“Danger, schmanger. Of course I’m going to have sex with her. If she dies, she dies.”) Rachel, Futterman’s oldest daughter, when asked about her father, invariably says, “Dad has a second family on the way,” never without rolling her eyes up in her head.