Our Little Racket

by Angelica Baker

Why was he wearing a suit? Where had Isabel even found him?

  “Jesus, Lily, help me!” Isabel barked.

  “I’ll never know,” Bob was howling. “I’ll never get it, not when they put me in the ground. They’ll fucking bury me and I still won’t understand why they let this happen to me.”

  This was private. Lily shouldn’t be here, she did not want to go to them. She’d seen him drunk and jovial, drunk and vicious, they all had. But she’d never seen this and she couldn’t be certain that some part of this wouldn’t be preserved somewhere in some tiny, well-lit room in that black-out-curtained brain, that he wouldn’t hate her the next time he saw her. She had never been afraid of Bob D’Amico before—nervous, anxious, but not afraid. But she watched him lift one leg and then let the foot drop to the ground, watched him keening like an injured animal, and she saw that he no longer had any reason to go along with anything, to tolerate any presence in his life that would remind him of any of these moments.

  Why had Isabel brought him home like this? Her daughter was upstairs, the teenager with frown lines like a middle-aged woman, her shoulders perpetually stiffened lately, as if they were her only protection. The boys, the way they clutched each other in sleep every night. What about this man looked like something you’d want to bring into your home, the place where your children slept?

  “Lily!” Isabel actually snapped her fingers. “Get over here. Please.” She was back on her knees, trying to pull Bob up by his armpits. She gave up, letting him fall back to the floor, and clambered so that she was on top of him, straddling his body, holding down his pinwheeling arms.

  Lily watched Isabel again try to lift her husband. What did you expect? she thought, and it was no longer just the moment, the act of bringing him home. Isabel had made a choice, sometime long before Madison, before the boys. She’d chosen him, and shouldn’t this have been part of it, whatever she expected? Lily saw Isabel’s humiliation, saw her futility, and she knew she should feel something closer to Isabel’s pain. But all she could think was that Isabel had made some egregious error, long ago, and that now Lily and the children she cared for were going to be made to pay for it.

  “Listen to me,” Isabel said. He was still lying on his back with his eyes closed. She must have had a time of it, Lily thought, getting him into the car in the first place. He wrinkled his face in displeasure as Isabel’s voice, so close, hit his ear.

  “Listen,” she said. “I don’t care if you want to do this all night, but you are going to lower your goddamn voice until we get upstairs. Your children are asleep. I’m putting you into your bathtub and then I’ll shut the door and you can scream at the walls all night if you feel like it, because I don’t think they’ll be able to hear you. I don’t care. But not here. Get up.”

  He burped and it seemed to imbue him with a sudden clarity, for he sat up straight and took his wife’s face in his hands. “Us, Iz,” he said. “Happen to us. That’s what I meant. It’s not just me. I know that. I remember.”

  “All right,” Isabel said. “All right, Bob. Let’s go upstairs. Lily, are you going to help?”

  “You shouldn’t take him upstairs,” Lily said. “I’ll go check on the kids. They were sleeping, I don’t know if they’ll have slept through this.”

  She had already turned away and so didn’t see Bob’s face change, the clarity leave him again.

  “I was always thinking of you, Iz. Always. Everything I’ve ever done has been for you,” she heard him whimper, and maybe it was his sudden bellow, followed by a mottled gasp, that made her turn back just in time to see him falling.

  He’d pulled himself up onto his knees, then flailed forward, slamming into the floor with his chin. She heard the crunch of his teeth, heard each of his limbs hit the ground separately. He lay there on the ground, splayed out like a crime scene outline, and Isabel stood just beyond where he could get at her.

  He’d tried to touch his wife. He’d reached for her, Lily saw, and she’d stepped quickly away from him. She’d watched him fall.

  Isabel looked up at her now, her face as blank as a bowl of milk.

  “He fell,” she said. She held Lily’s gaze, for a moment, until Lily nodded. Then Isabel stepped forward, and they positioned themselves on either side of him.

  “Honey,” Isabel whispered, her voice artificially crisp. “You fell, Bob. Are you okay?”

  “You fucking bitch,” he muttered, and Lily gave his arm a little twist as they pulled him to his feet. Just a little bit, not enough to pull it from its socket. Isabel looked away, but Lily could see her twitching, maybe wanting to smile.

  LATER, LILY CARRIED THE TABLE with its splintered legs into the garage. She’d look up the name of the repair place tomorrow, and drive it into town. Into the city, to one of Isabel’s furniture specialists, if need be. She swept up the remaining debris—wood splinters and receipts from Bob’s pockets and coins and glass, though who could say where that had come from—and emptied the bin into the kitchen trash. She thought of the receipts, then, and replaced the bag with a fresh one and buried the old trash bag at the bottom of one of the bins at the side of the house. She took everything that had once lived on the hall table—the sterling silver tray that held keys and phones and the photo frames, the glass for which miraculously had not broken—and placed them in new spots in the living room, in the den. She put the largest wedding photo in a far corner of the den, a room Isabel rarely used herself, on a high shelf, then told herself she was being silly and put it on a side table in the living room.

  She walked back up to the top of the stairs and found her paperback, the book she’d been trying to read when they came home, and closed her eyes for a moment, breathed in, breathed out. When she opened her eyes, Madison stood at the edge of the hallway that led to the children’s wing, just outside the boys’ bedrooms.

  She was wearing, unusually for her, a long white nightgown that matched one of Isabel’s, the outfits they usually wore together on Christmas Eve. The lace detailing at the bodice looked like something growing vinelike up her neck, threatening to choke her.

  Lily almost never told Madison what she ever thought of anything. She knew this was the biggest secret, at least between the two of them alone. That Madison thought they were close, thought of Lily as tough, candid, trustworthy, and loving, when in fact she never really told Madison any single entire truth.

  Lily moved forward and extended one arm.

  “It was an accident,” she said, “but he’s fine, we put him to bed.”

  Madison reeled back down the hallway, her body recoiling more precisely even than it had when Lily had slapped her, on that first morning. Her eyes shone white in the darkness, staring at Lily, anger turning them almost liquid.

  “What are you talking about?” she said. “I’m fine, but you should see if the boys woke up.”

  She turned and ran back down the hallway, the folds of the nightgown in the darkness like white caps in a chopping sea. Lily made her way downstairs, clinging to the banister, and fell asleep on a couch.

  In the morning, when she went to rouse the boys for school, she found Madison in bed between them. Both boys lay curled around their sister like newborn animals, untrusting and afraid of the coming light.

  II

  Scepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer: there is nobility in preserving it coolly and proudly through long youth, until at last, in the ripeness of instinct and discretion, it can be safely exchanged for fidelity and happiness.

  —George Santayana, Scepticism and Animal Faith

  I can look right at you and say, this is a pain that will stay with me for the rest of my life. Regardless of what comes out of this committee, regardless of when the record book gets finally written. That’s all.

  —Richard Fuld, former CEO, Lehman Brothers

  FIFTEEN

  After her father returned to the house, the days grew shorter, but Madison’s afternoons were endless. It
was suddenly October, and the heavy, suspended quality to the air each afternoon reminded you that soon all the curtailed days would feel like slow slides into darkness, the morning sun just a feinting attempt at actual light. But the afternoons lasted forever.

  No one, not even Lily, raised her voice. It was a time of freedoms circumscribed by some unuttered mandate, of moving through the house ready to remove anything that might, left in one’s wake, reveal any information at all to the casual observer. They were all very aware of what it might feel like to be watched.

  From Bob’s study they only ever heard the sibilant consonants of his television, whispers that died somewhere along the hallway. Every so often the rhythm of these whispers would be punctured by something unusual—the smell of a fresh cigar or the lilting shatter, misleading in its vaguely festive air, of a glass against a wooden surface. And then they would freeze, but only for a moment, before everything resumed.

  Madison knew, during this time, that a story was being built up around her. She knew it was far more than the boys at school, their hissing insults, their jokes coughed into cupped hands. She knew that her life was becoming a communal possession, shaped by the world lying in wait beyond the assaulted borders of her own daily routines.

  This had always been true, she’d always needed an awareness of what her life looked like from the outside in. But now, every small detail was potentially treacherous. The empty bottles shimmering green and blue in the hallway outside her father’s study, waiting with frankness for Lily to dispose of them each morning. The glossy black sedans that waited at the foot of the drive each day to follow their car to school, unobtrusive and unmentioned. The cigar ash left in tiny piles by the pool, just next to the diving board. Madison’s home was now populated by people and things whose presences were not to be mentioned. There was no longer any such thing as blissful inattention; each day took on an unfamiliar and unsettling sheen of its own. Everything she chose not to acknowledge remained background, sparkling at the edges of her consciousness, no sooner identified than it disappeared.

  She might have asked Lily, a year ago, what she thought about this. But Lily, since the morning they’d heard the first news, spoke to her with deference and caution and even, sometimes, joking irreverence for the overall mood. But never with candor, and never with warmth.

  And so it seemed even more important that Madison’s behavior not go unnoticed by her mother. During those first few weeks after he came home, she wasn’t always sure of what she needed to survive, to keep up that illusion of forward motion, to match her mother’s stride. She simply did it, tried to, in such a way—she liked to think later—that her mother must have noticed, that must have made Isabel proud.

  SIXTEEN

  Amanda couldn’t believe she was going to this Halloween party.

  The previous afternoon, by the lockers, Zoë Barker had seemed actually to displace the air around them as she approached, sending it swirling past in coconut-scented eddies. Amanda could never tell if the fragrant cloud that seemed always to surround Zoë was her perfume, or something more innate, something that resided in her skin.

  Amanda should have slammed the locker door and hurried down to the pool, because she knew exactly why Zoë was coming toward her. But she was, as ever, just a few seconds too slow to figure out her own life.

  “Hi! Do you have plans tomorrow? For Halloween?”

  “I’m not a big Halloween person,” Amanda said. Which was true, but the truer truth was that she hadn’t been asked, by anyone, to do anything. She liked the other girls on the swim team, but they mostly respected one another, urged one another on during meets, then said cheerful good-byes and went their separate ways. She’d had no new plan in place when she’d set Madison aside that summer.

  “You don’t seem like a costume person, either.”

  “Nope.”

  “Well, Wyatt is having a party,” Zoë had said. “Wyatt Welsh.”

  “I know who Wyatt is.”

  Zoë smiled and let her eyes drift slowly beyond Amanda, to consider each successive group of people walking toward them. You had to admire her, that unruffled acceptance of her opponent’s flint. Amanda could see the appeal, in its way. If you could only keep this girl on your side, she’d frighten so many other, lesser threats away from you.

  “Actually, Madison’s coming. I just thought, you know, she might be more comfortable with you there.”

  She’d left it there between them, Madison’s name, like a poker chip on the green felt.

  So now, like some total idiot, Amanda was in the front seat of her father’s car. She was wearing a Peter Pan costume she’d imagined as clever and effortless, a clear rebuke to all the girls who used Halloween as an excuse to wear lingerie in public. Instead, she feared, she looked like an overgrown (and pudgy and possibly male) elf.

  Her mother had agreed to give her a ride, but had then, at the last minute, tagged her father into the game. It was such a transparent move that Amanda had to admire her mother’s guts, Lori not usually known for being either ballsy or manipulative. They were just such a team, her parents. It was its own form of showing off, really, their constant united front.

  He said nothing for the first ten minutes, not until they were driving up into the quieter, winding roads. It got so dark up here, this time of night, this time of year. Usually she found it silly, that people in Greenwich still wanted to act like they lived in the country. But when you were coming around one of these darkened curves, beneath someone’s gray stone wall, it’s true you could forget this was basically a suburb of lower Manhattan.

  “Which one is that party Suzanne always throws?” her father asked suddenly.

  “The Bruce Museum benefit,” she said. “It’s always in April or something.”

  “That’s right. Your mother was wondering.”

  “Tell her not to worry,” Amanda said, snorting. “I’m just going to this one party, no need for us to make friends with the Wicked Witch of the Welsh.”

  “You know your mother,” her father said, running his hands along the steering wheel. “She likes to have all the information.”

  “Even on people she doesn’t actually care about?”

  “Well,” Jake said, and Amanda could sense him settling in, could sense what he’d been waiting to discuss. “I’ve tried to explain this to you before. You don’t understand what it would have been like, growing up in her parents’ house. They were both the sole survivors from their families. When they met they became all and everything the other one had.”

  “I know all of this,” Amanda said, smoothing her green skirt across her thighs. They were almost to the house.

  “No,” he said, his voice flaring, “you don’t.” It was as sharp as his voice ever got, especially since they weren’t even discussing Bob D’Amico or his cronies.

  Which, though, they somehow always were.

  “You’re always terrified something will pass you by. It makes you desperate to know who has what, so you can keep yourself close to the person who’s going to be able to help you. If it ever happened again. You cling to that idea.”

  “What idea?”

  “Influence,” he said. “Just, influence. You have to be able to get out right away if there’s ever trouble, before it even starts. So you have to know the people who will know when trouble is coming.”

  She didn’t say anything for a minute; the car stayed dark between them. He was wrong. He hadn’t said any of this to her before.

  “Then why would she marry you?”

  She saw a flash of tooth, where his face was in shadow, and knew that her father was smiling.

  “I’m not saying your mother always agrees with my tactics,” he said. “But this is my job, Amanda. That’s what I’ve been trying to get through to you. Your mother understands, it’s my job.”

  “Good for her,” Amanda said. “And good for you, I guess.”

  “Well, yes.”

  And then they’d come to the Welsh gate. They were
silent as her father crawled up the sloping drive, through a second gate, then brought the car to a stop in front of the house. There was an actual fountain lit up in the courtyard, like some ruin they’d forgotten to tear down before they rebuilt their modern, if faux Mediterranean, mansion. The desire to make fun of it out loud, with her father, was so sharp it felt like an actual hunger pang. Amanda reached down to gather her purse from the floor.

  “I’m not totally worthless, Dad,” she said. “I know these aren’t real problems. On the global scale. I know that. But you’re bullying someone I actually know, and then you’re making me stay here, where I see these people everywhere I go.”

  “It’s my job, Amanda. I’ve told you that.”

  “It’s not your job,” she said. “Not all of it. It’s not your job to enjoy it the way you’ve been enjoying it.”

  “It is,” he said, “part of my charter. To speak truth to power.”

  “You know you sound exactly like him,” she said. “When you two start complimenting yourselves, you sound like twins.”

  “This isn’t yours to—” he was saying when she slammed the door. He’d taken her insult in stride; she’d hoped it would land with a bit more fanfare, maybe even unsettle him, to think that she might have been following news about Bob D’Amico from other sources. When she turned back to read his face, though, he was just peering up through his windshield at the big, glowing house.

  WHEN WYATT WELSH ANSWERED the door and appeared to have no clue who she was, Amanda almost turned right around. She’d once sat at a table on the quad and actually told him and some of his idiot friends the story of how her parents met, on a subway platform.

  But all that was waiting behind her was her father, driving home alone, and so she stepped over the threshold and into the house. Sure, whatever, Wyatt Welsh didn’t remember who she was. This was fine.

  There was another fountain inside, emerald tiles wavering beneath the streaming water. The entire entryway seemed designed to fool visitors into thinking that the windows and balconies would offer a sweeping vista of the Italian Riviera rather than a few acres of tidy Greenwich lawns.