Bradstreet Gate: A Novel

by Robin Kirman

  Unfortunately, Mary was all too real, as was her lawyer, Andrew Kleinman—their existences were documented on legal stationery in three letters presented to Alice by Dr. Baum on the day of her release.

  “You should know the authorities have been in contact with me; I told them you were in no state to talk. If you need me to offer a medical opinion, that’s something you should have a lawyer get in touch with me about. Meanwhile, if you feel overwhelmed by any of this, I want you to call me right away. And I think it’s obvious, given what you’re facing, you’ll need to be vigilant in keeping up with your outpatient care. You have someone to take you home?”

  Today, as on the occasion of her first hospital discharge, four years earlier, she was to be escorted out by Charlie. He’d taken off the afternoon from work, he let her know, once they were out on the cold and humming street. She maintained this wasn’t necessary, that she could get home on her own, but Charlie insisted on riding downtown with her, and in fact it proved a good thing that he had. When she arrived at her apartment, she discovered that her key no longer fit the lock.

  She banged at the door, and a paunchy stranger came to answer, dressed in boxers and a yellowed undershirt.

  “You must be Alice. I’m Sam, Bernie’s cousin.”

  “What the fuck are you doing in my place?”

  Charlie stepped between them then, urging her to calm down, and the stranger to go back inside, while he climbed to the next floor to have a word with Bernie. From below the stairwell she could overhear their conversation: Charlie lecturing Bernie about tenants’ rights, speaking with a mature, informed authority he hadn’t been able to pull off back at school. Bernie was scrambling to defend himself.

  “Look, I’m not some rich landlord. I’ve got one floor to let and I rely on that income. She’s four months overdue on rent—and it’s not only about money. Whatever she’s done, Sam tells me there have been some pretty screwy messages on her machine. Lawyers, cops, some guy making threats. We’ve got kids, you understand. And, besides, Sam’s not really a tenant. He’s my cousin.”

  Like she gave a damn who he was, Alice thought, this creep listening to her private messages. She had to grip the banister to keep from charging up those stairs to tell Bernie that she’d have police come by again, have him and his fucking cousin arrested for trespassing.

  But the mention of the problems awaiting her was enough to give her pause. She’d need to ration out her anger if she had any shot at holding on to her hard-won sanity.

  Taking a deep breath, she knocked again at her front door. “Sam,” she told the baffled, half-dressed stranger, “I’ve got business here; go put on pants and take a walk. Please.”

  Among the sixteen messages that filled the tape on her machine, five were from Nick, spread across several days. Furious rants, typically inarticulate: “a severe lazeration, damage to the zygomax…zygomatimax…the fucking smile muscle, you fucking crazy bitch…”

  Another five messages were work-related—from editors and from her agent—she’d missed deadlines on the stories she’d been writing: one about a strangled socialite; the other, a prep-school prostitution ring. The second had been destined for next month’s cover of New York Magazine, but no longer—both stories had apparently been pulled.

  Three other calls were from the bank and a collection agency, and the rest were all from Kleinman, Mary’s attorney, urging her to present herself to the police, and then apprising her of notices she’d receive by mail. Kleinman’s final message, left just the day before, was to congratulate Alice on her discharge.

  “I trust you’ve had a good recovery, Ms. Kovac; maybe you still need a day to settle in, review the documents I sent you. We’ve been patient, but you may hear from officers today; I suggest you retain counsel.”

  Alice’s next move that afternoon was to contact a lawyer: Larry Skinner. She’d seen Skinner’s talents displayed the year before, after a publicist friend of hers had tossed bleach onto gate-crashers at P-Diddy’s white party. Skinner hadn’t just kept the offender out of jail, he’d managed to keep her name out of the press.

  Over the phone Skinner’s voice was gruff and imposing, precisely how a bulldozer lawyer ought to sound, and so she’d expected him to be roused to battle when she showed up at his Midtown office the next day, after spending a sleepless night on Charlie’s couch. In person, though, Skinner proved disappointing: short, with narrow shoulders and a grim disposition—on the depressive side of the two poles it was her fate in life to shuttle between. His professional approach was risk-averse, if not outright defeatist.

  There had been eyewitnesses, he pointed out, after reviewing the materials sent to him by Kleinman. West Broadway had been well lit and crowded at the time of the incident: one man claimed to have been standing right by Mary and to have observed the entire thing, up to and including Alice’s fleeing the scene. The charge would be aggravated assault. Jail time was probable if she were found guilty, and even with her insanity defense, that result couldn’t be ruled out. Opposing counsel would argue that her manic episode was brought on by the stress of what she’d done, and Nick would testify that she’d seemed perfectly lucid earlier that evening. If the matter went to trial, Mary would make a sympathetic witness, more sympathetic, frankly, than Alice. A jury conviction was a risk that Skinner didn’t advise she take and, even if the verdict went her way, a trial would be long and costly, too, and emotionally draining. She needed to consider her mental well-being, to get on with her treatment.

  The good news, or what he considered good news, anyway, was that Ms. Wittmer was open to a fair settlement, which she and Kleinman estimated at four hundred thousand dollars.

  “For a scrape? That’s the rate now?”

  “Depends on the scrape.” Seven stitches had been required for the wound on Mary’s face. A cosmetic surgeon had been called in and, still, there would be a scar. Kleinman was claiming that Mary’s deformity was easily worth a million in lost revenue, and, if they went to court, that was what they’d demand: after all, she wasn’t only a beautiful woman, she was a TV star.

  “Let’s not go that far.”

  “Look, she was on TV. That’s a statement of fact. And I gather there was talk about another series; seems she had hopes of a career in entertainment.”

  “Everyone has hopes of a career in entertainment.”

  “You came to me for my opinion, Miss Kovac, and I’m telling you: four hundred thousand is reasonable given what the girl has suffered.”

  Reasonable or not, she didn’t have it. She didn’t even have enough money to pay off her medical bills or her back rent. Bernie had moved a bed for her into his attic, crammed between a broken Exercycle and bags of his wife’s prepregnancy clothes. A temporary measure, Bernie said, until Alice could become solvent again. How was she ever going to do that now?

  More good news from Skinner: he’d negotiate a billing schedule so that, if need be, she’d be paying off Mary Wittmer for the rest of her indentured life.

  —

  Alice needed money, urgently, and so, ready or not, she meant to throw herself back into work. Her first calls—to her agent and two editors—were to apologize for the deadlines that she’d missed: she’d been sick, she said, avoiding details; the people in her circles had ways of picking those up on their own in any case. The point was she was back and eager to resume where she’d left off: nothing at all had changed.

  Her colleagues, however, were of a different opinion; since the events of that September, everything had changed.

  Surely she was aware of what had happened downtown?

  Yes, she was aware: Baum and his minions couldn’t keep news of the attacks out of the ward forever. As time went on, new patients came in with wild reports and Baum had to organize special group sessions to address “the national trauma and its implications for recovery.” But nowhere in Baum’s remarks was there anything about how it would affect local print media and Alice’s career: no warning that readers had lost interest in so
cialite victims or scurrilous youth. That news came later, most directly from her agent, once Alice finally caught her on the phone: the city didn’t need more dirt—only stories of brave widows and intrepid first responders.

  Apparently America, and New York especially, would never be the same—or not, at least, before the next news cycle. The diagnosis from the trend watchers: the city was postcynical, posttrivial, and thus post-Kovac.

  After two weeks spent chasing an assignment—there must be some scrap somebody could give her—Alice couldn’t even get an assistant to call back. Finally, in a fit of irritation, she hopped a cab to the Condé Nast building. She was apprehensive about showing herself among her former coworkers. Force-fed shitty hospital food, she’d packed on fifteen pounds; the dozen pills she took daily ruined her for exercise; they slowed her movements and, worse, hobbled her wits.

  Only such dullness could account for her mistake: as soon as she’d seen the pity in her colleagues’ faces, she’d realized she was finished. The next day, she received a call from Les Soroty, her editor at Vanity Fair and closest professional friend: “I’m speaking on behalf of everyone when I tell you, you should take advantage of this chance to look after yourself. Forget about your career right now, step back, reassess. Do you follow me?”

  She’d been put on meds, not lobotomized.

  It was all enough to make her long for the asylum, and her old cohort: the dim patients and dimmer orderlies, presided over by unit chief Dr. Baum. Not that she’d ever cared for any of them in particular; least of all Baum, whose egomania she’d glimpsed clearly enough through the fog of medications he administered to her—a drop more Lithium, a pinch more Depakote, until she began to feel like a meal he fretted over, like the carcass he was seasoning to impress a date. No, it wasn’t that self-important prig she missed, only this: the sense of being looked after while she was free to write, whatever struck her fancy, and for as long as she could stay holed up inside her bright, clean room.

  The mood that had gripped her while her fingers cramped around her marker—a round-tipped Crayola was the only implement she was allowed inside the ward—wasn’t what she felt when she sat down at her computer to compose an article. That, her professional writing, was always a task fraught with a mixture of contempt for her subject and for herself—there wasn’t one page she’d penned outside without the assistance of coffee and cigarettes (drugs that had served to keep her motivation outpacing her disgust). Always, her mind was on what her editors would want—Les Soroty the paradigm for all those that followed; “Les” she’d thought, a fitting name for a man determined to fit prose neatly below an ad for Prada—and for a man who wanted her, expected her, to make people who were already so very small look even smaller.

  But in the ward, there was no editor to keep her from embracing the vastest of subjects from the loftiest perspectives: love, envy, violence. The things she’d written during her two-month confinement were more honest, she believed, than anything she’d dared express before; still she couldn’t forgive Dr. Baum for the disappearance of her notebooks. She’d planned on giving them to Charlie, for safekeeping, but Baum had instructed the nurses to confiscate them first. Her writing was interfering with her treatment, he maintained, and when a nurse threw the notebooks out, he refused to see the loss as anything substantial: it was de rigueur, during a manic episode, to imagine that one’s insights were far greater than they were, and better for Alice, anyway, as she prepared to rejoin society, to move beyond such distractions and focus on the practical concerns that she would have to face.

  —

  Her bank account was overdrawn; the hospital was sending bills; already she’d heard Bernie’s wife complaining: “Why are we stuck with her? Doesn’t she have a family?”

  Three weeks after her release, Alice gave in and called her mother, asking for a portion of Vasily’s inheritance. Magazine work had dried up and she was entitled, despite Vasily’s deathbed caprice, to a share of the family money. Her mother replied to her in Serbian, though she knew Alice could scarcely understand her. Had Alice cared to retain those language lessons so important to her mother, perhaps the woman’s response would have been different.

  “Find other work,” her mother told her. She had every advantage: youth, education—what was the problem?

  “Think of it as a loan, to cover me until I do.”

  If she couldn’t support herself on her own, her mother told her, then she could always move back home.

  “I can’t leave the city now; I’m still in treatment. Dr. Baum needs to monitor my medication.”

  Her mother pointed out they had telephones and doctors, too, in Cleveland.

  “I can’t handle a move now, okay, Mom? No shocks, no anxiety. Do you understand me? I need to do everything I can now to stay calm.”

  “So calm here.”

  “I could never calm there. There is the last place I could calm.”

  —

  Alice’s next call was to Charlie: Bernie’s wife had left an empty suitcase at the entrance to her room. “I’ve already started packing,” Alice let Charlie know.

  If it was money she needed, Charlie offered to lend her what he could, but apparently staying with him again wasn’t an option. “Thing is, I’ve started seeing someone and I…I don’t think she’d appreciate it, appreciate us.”

  Us: as if he interpreted her turning toward him as a come-on—which it wasn’t. She was almost sure it wasn’t. And since when had Charlie become involved in a relationship? He hadn’t mentioned anything about a girl before, nor had Alice observed the signs: evening plans he must rush off to, calls answered in a muted voice.

  He was lying to her; he must be. Even if she couldn’t identify the reason—not simply to avoid an inconvenience, or insist upon boundaries—such concerns hadn’t bothered him till now. It hit her then, the one explanation for his acting so strangely. “This isn’t about Georgia?”

  “Georgia? No, of course not.” Georgia had gone back to Washington, he stammered, and then on to India; “It can’t be. Couldn’t be.”

  He paused, exhaling heavily; Alice burst into laughter.

  She went on laughing, drawing out his humiliation. She meant to hurt him: he was refusing her when she most needed him and without the decency even to be honest. On top of everything, she was sure he was doing this for Georgia, even after all she’d done to free him from Georgia’s power, after she’d helped him to become a little less pathetic for a spell.

  “So like I said,” Charlie continued, straining to sound cool, “if you need a loan I’ll be more than glad to help.”

  She hadn’t bothered to reply.

  —

  The next day, Alice did the unthinkable: she registered for New Horizons outpatient care in Broadview Heights and boarded a bus—a fucking bus, to save a hundred bucks—bound for Cleveland.

  “Home” was a brown brick house on Wallings Road, even dingier than Alice recalled from her last visit, two years before. The wall-to-wall carpeting was stained, the shower curtain fringed with mold. Plants—indoor varieties and others brought in from the porch for the winter—cluttered the kitchen and living room; it was a new development, her mother’s penchant for gardening. The house smelled of wet soil and dog food.

  The dogs were not new, or not two of them; the third one looked familiar but was the doppelgänger for a schnauzer mix that had died three months before. Poor Mother: beloved brother Vasily and beloved mutt both dead within weeks of each other, and Alice thought that she had problems.

  It didn’t come as much surprise to Alice that her mother wasn’t dripping with sympathy for what she’d suffered; the woman’s concern seemed reserved for her nonhuman charges. Senka exhausted half her time between walking and feeding and watering and weeding; the rest of her day was occupied with cooking, huge vats of food, more than even she and Peter, at a combined weight of over four hundred pounds, could consume. A few dishes she sold to a local deli or took to Vasily’s widow. By five p.m. she was tir
ed enough to reward herself with an hour’s reading: novels in Serbian. She spoke to the dogs in Serbian as well, which might account for her intimacy with them: they indulged her by responding to a phrase or two.

  For responsiveness, in general, thought Alice, the dogs seemed ahead of the people in that household. Peter, who still hadn’t left home after Vasily’s funeral, was so out of it that she first assumed he’d gotten into drugs. As it happened, Peter wasn’t even curious enough for that; he was content just to spend his days working in a bike repair shop and his nights hanging out in her old room with his ugly girlfriend. Alice could hear them groping and giggling through the walls.

  Yet who was she to criticize Peter or her mother for the vacancy of their lives? Since she’d come to join them, she’d accomplished nothing—despite her vow to start working on a larger project, like she and her agent (assuming the woman was still her agent) had once discussed: maybe a more personal account of her college days, centered—of course—on the ’97 murder: I mean, if you feel comfortable tackling all that.

  Inside the ward, Alice had felt more than up to it, unafraid of this or any subject. She’d had so much to say back then; the fullness of her being threatened to break her at the seams. In Cleveland, however, it was her emptiness assaulting her each time she sat down at her desk. Torturous enough that she even looked forward to the interruption, three times a week, when she was obliged to join her group at New Horizons.

  There, she took her place in a circle of depressed housewives—not even one manic spirit to liven things a little—for sessions led by a therapist who wore leg warmers under skirts. Alice had asked her about them, finally, those repulsive flops of fabric. She’d meant only to be cruel, but after that, the therapist wouldn’t shut up about it: “Do you hate all women? Are there any women you admire?”

  “Dora. Anna O.”

  The therapist looked puzzled.

  “Pop singers,” Alice said flatly, “from the eighties.”

  But as much as she abused her, the group leader wouldn’t let it go. “I’d like you to answer the question, if not to me, then to yourself. Can you name a single woman you like or trust, or, God forbid, might even love?”