by Susan Rieger
“You never get over your high school sweetheart, even if he didn’t know you existed,” Sam said. “When Joe made a pass at me when I was twenty-nine, I was jelly. I was sixteen all over again.”
“I think that’s a Southern experience. Like a Loretta Lynn song. You may be an outlier. In the North, you never get over your first bad boyfriend.” Susanna gave him a small smile.
“Well, then, I’ve nothing to get over. I’ve never had a bad boyfriend.” Sam laughed. “I’ve been the bad boyfriend.”
“I like Joe,” Susanna said. “He’s a lot of fun, and he’s been a good friend, but actors probably don’t make the best husbands. Too many other bodies around.”
“We keep in touch, a little. You see him more than I do. After we broke up, he started living with a writer. Almost the next day. Since then, there have been at least four others. But who’s counting?” Sam detected a peevish note creeping into his voice and tried to shake it off; he remembered the hard feelings he had toward Joe when they broke up. Joe said he was tired of sneaking around. Sam didn’t believe him. Joe had liked sneaking around. He had liked spending afternoons at the Carlyle and the St. Moritz. Sam knew how to woo when he wanted to. “He was seeing others when he was seeing me. Of course, I couldn’t complain. I kept living with Andrew. Did anyone like Andrew?”
“No,” Susanna said. “No one liked him. They all put up with him for you.” She looked startled. “I shouldn’t have said that. It was cruel.”
“It’s OK. It’s strange. I’m finished with him. Completely. He’s like ‘yesterday’s mashed potatoes.’ I have no feelings toward him. I have no interest in him. How does that happen?” Sam stopped.
“How does it happen?” Susanna said.
Sam took a big breath. “I hated who I was with him. He always had me on the defensive. He never bought me a present. He said I had everything already. So I stopped buying him presents.” Sam paused. “I was myself with Joe, the way I am with you. It was a huge relief. ‘It’s really hard to be roommates with people if your suitcases are much better than theirs.’ ” He gave a small smile. “Holden Caulfield.”
“So that’s been my problem,” Susanna said. “Not liking men with expensive luggage. Except you.”
“Like to like. It’s easier,” Sam said.
“Is there anyone with money you are interested in?” Susanna asked. Sam didn’t answer. “Other than Joe?” she asked. Sam shrugged.
“We have to be responsible and discreet about significant and insignificant others in the apartments,” she said. “No uncles showing up for breakfast in a bathrobe.”
Sam nodded. “My doctor said we should go for genetic counseling.”
“What about the Wolinskis?” Susanna said. “Could they find out the results?”
Sam looked surprised. “Do you really think they could be Dad’s sons?”
“I don’t know,” Susanna said. “I don’t know.”
When she first saw the five Falkes boys, standing in front of the Hotel des Artistes, Anne Cardozo knew Jim was their father. They looked so much like him. Eyes didn’t lie. She started to hyperventilate.
The little boys were jostling each other and pulling on their mother’s arms; the bigger ones were trying to talk to her. Rooted to the sidewalk, riveted and winded, Anne struggled to regain mental footing. She hadn’t been expecting five children, five boys. She had imagined two, maybe three. People didn’t have five children anymore, not since the pill. She took in a deep breath and held it for ten seconds. They couldn’t be Jim’s, she told herself. Eleanor might have had one child with Jim, the first out of anguish or the last out of nostalgia, but not five, not in her world. She watched the older boys walk down the street. Could those two, the oldest two, be Jim’s sons? The resemblance was spooky. She felt light-headed and panicky. Am I losing my mind? she wondered. She had a sudden vision of her brain cells, resolving into sand and sliding down her spinal column. Education was useless, she thought. Being a neurobiologist had given her no special understanding of her thoughts, feelings, or perceptions; all it had provided was a topographic map of an overactive brain. She leaned against a parked car. It was an old story with her, the triumph of the amygdala over the cortex. The first time she studied the cerebrum and its hemispheres at Vassar, she thought she heard the professor say that the two halves “commiserated” with each other. When she realized, reading her notes, that he must have said “communicated,” she was disappointed—in the professor, in the course, in science. Barely into her major, she already suspected that Freud was more interesting than Broca. There was elegance in science but no poetry. Ten years later, she thought she might benefit from therapy if her Germanic upbringing and her scientific training, a practical redundancy, had permitted it. Her internist prescribed Ativan.
After weeks of spying, on and off the tennis field, Anne was forced to reject theories of Cardozo paternity. In the ways the boys looked like Eleanor, they looked like Jim, at least from a distance, staring into the sun. In the ways the boys didn’t look like their mother, they didn’t look like him. They were not Jewish children. They were Lapp or Cossack. They had high cheekbones and Tatar eyes, lending them an exoticism beyond the genetic possibilities of the Cardozos. These must be Rupert’s contributions, his phenotypes, she decided.
Anne didn’t remember meeting him at her wedding; she barely remembered anything of the day. Had she danced with Jim? What music did the band play? Had she eaten? She didn’t remember having a good time. She remembered that her feet and head hurt. It was a late-morning wedding with lunch. She and Jim left at five, the band played until six, then packed up and left along with her parents. There had been so many people, at least six hundred, more than a hundred of them relatives. Henry Kissinger came; so did Jacob Javits, Charlie Rangel, John Lindsay, and Bess Myerson. Other people she also didn’t know came. She had left the invitation list to her mother, who’d given Jim’s side a hundred guests, more than generous in Mrs. Lehman’s view. They weren’t Cardozo Cardozos.
One of Anne’s cousins, Ben Straus, had sat next to Eleanor at the wedding. At a family dinner, not long afterward, Ben burst out: “There was this gorgeous WASP, thirty-something, with five sons at our table. She sure had Mrs. Robinson beat.” Everyone laughed. Eleanor had come in on the Cardozo quota. Anne didn’t think then to ask who she was.
With Falkeses on the brain, Anne checked the seating arrangements. Eleanor and Rupert had been seated at a table with the Strauses; also at the table were the Javitses and “some et ceteras,” as her mother referred to the B-listers. The tables sat twelve; they were all made up of mixed groups. “That way, there are no good tables, no bad tables,” Mrs. Lehman said. “Every table is good and bad.” She believed that making everyone unhappy to the same degree was better than making only some very unhappy. The one exception she made was with the Cardozos; she had Jim’s mother seat most of them. “I don’t know them,” she said, “I can’t be responsible for them.” She put the Cardozo tables in the middle of the floor.
Anne’s spying was amateurish and boring, like most spying. Her methods, culled from film noir, were shoe leather and perseverance. Occasionally she did library research; she was reluctant to interview anyone for fear of looking insane. When she couldn’t pick out Rupert from the men streaming out of the Hotel des Artistes in the morning, she looked for the Falkses’ wedding announcement in the Times microfiche. Eleanor was beautiful in the photo despite the airbrushing. Rupert was clerking then for Judge Friendly. She asked her father how she could find out where lawyers worked. He raised an eyebrow and sent her to Martindale Hubbell. Maynard, Tandy was an old WASP firm. Eleanor had reverted to type, Anne saw with satisfaction. For two weeks, she stood outside Maynard’s offices on Wall Street in the evening to see if anyone she recognized from West Sixty-Seventh Street came out the door. It was hopeless. The only person she recognized was the delivery boy from the corner coffee shop. She wished she had the spine to hire a private investigator.
She fou
nd Rupert, by accident, after a day of reconnaissance on the Upper West Side. She often loitered at the bar at Gray’s Papaya, in her brown hat, after tennis practice. Most days, the older boys stopped there before going home. One afternoon, as they were eating their hot dogs on the street, a tall blond man came toward them from the subway. “Dad,” Harry said. “What are you doing here? It’s too early.” He pointed at the sun still overhead. “Are you allowed out in daylight?” Will asked, flapping his arms and screeching like a bat. The three headed down Broadway, the boys on either side of their father, chattering and laughing. Anne didn’t follow; she had seen what she needed to see: the cheekbones, the eyes.
“Did we dance at our wedding,” she asked Jim a few nights later. He didn’t remember. “I remember stepping on the glass,” he said. “I remember shaking hands with Kissinger and not saying anything to him, except ‘Thank you for coming.’ ” As Jim talked, Anne remembered the cantor coming through the receiving line. He shook hands with Jim and offered him congratulations. Then he turned to her and, leaning in as if to kiss her cheek, whispered, “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.”
—
Jim thought Eleanor’s boys looked like him, and though he knew they weren’t his sons, he felt cheated. They should have been his. Grieving his loss and feeding his grudge, he took an unhealthy interest in the Falkes boys. He couldn’t help it. At least once a month, he would find himself at Sunday services at St. Thomas. He’d arrive early and take a seat in the back on a side aisle. From there, he’d watch the Falkeses come in and go out. Eleanor would hold the littlest ones’ hands as she walked to their seats. Rupert would keep the older ones moving down the aisle, a sheepdog prodding his sheep. The boys wore their school blazers and ties. They didn’t go to Sunday school. Rupert didn’t believe in it. Religion was music, mystery, and ritual. Bible stories were no different from Greek myths. He left both to the d’Aulaires.
Sometimes after a morning surgery, Jim would go to an afternoon movie at Lincoln Plaza, hoping he would run into Eleanor. Occasionally he did. She was sometimes with Carlo Benedetti—his successor, as he thought of him. They would chat briefly. He would ask about the boys, wanting to keep up. She never kissed him, as friends might on meeting. Eleanor rarely greeted anyone outside the family, other than Susanna, with a hug or kiss. If she was alone, Jim would invite her to coffee; she would beg off. “Boys to fetch,” she’d say. “Take care.” As the boys came along, every two years, Jim kept track. When the fifth was almost four and no sixth appeared, he had a vasectomy. It was an impulsive decision, made more definite when his doctor questioned him. “I don’t want children,” he said. “I don’t like children.” The truth was, he didn’t want children who weren’t Eleanor’s. A vasectomy would make sex easier, safer, more pleasurable. He wouldn’t have to use condoms if he didn’t want to. He feared being trapped by a pregnancy.
To his surprise, the vasectomy was a shock to the system, not physically but emotionally. He felt acutely the ridiculousness of his position. For years, he’d clung to the fantasy that Eleanor would leave her marriage for him. He had to face facts; she wouldn’t do it while the boys were young. He decided he would have to marry, if only temporarily, for self-respect. He shrunk at the thought Eleanor might think him pitiful.
In his twenties, Jim was a serial dater, going through ten or more women a year. They were all exceptionally good-looking, tall and lean, like Eleanor, but not Eleanor; they always fell short. He would pick them up at bars or weddings or subway platforms, never the hospital. He had a reputation to keep up there. He was never a boyfriend, only a date, slippery and noncommittal. He’d call at the last minute, he’d break weekend dates. Heart surgeons had good excuses for not coming across. He rarely took a woman to dinner and he never let a woman cook for him. He didn’t like to talk but he would listen if the woman wasn’t a chatterer. He didn’t understand women; he listened for clues. The women might have been intelligent. His preference was for women who were bankers. They were better-looking than lawyers and not as talkative. He usually took a date to a late movie, then went home to her place, never to his. He was looking for sex, an hour or two. He liked women who liked sex, who were good at it. He was attentive to special tastes. He would ask a woman what she liked and tell her his preferences. “Let’s make each other happy,” he’d say. He never stayed over. “Early surgery, tomorrow, I mean today, in three hours,” he’d say. One woman asked to tie him up. She expanded his repertoire. There were women at the hospital whom he liked, whom he talked to, but until he met Anne, he wasn’t interested in dating any of them. Anne made him feel calm. She was smart, undemanding, and adoring, with translucent skin and wonderful breasts: high and firm and larger than his hands. He discovered he was a breast man, not a leg man. She looked nothing like Eleanor. She was nothing like Eleanor. She knew a stent from a shunt. She was Jewish and still she disliked his parents. She laughed at his jokes. No one before her had ever recognized his stabs at humor. Eleanor’s humor had made him nervous. Everything about Eleanor had made him nervous, nervous and excited. Eleanor had made herself sexually available to him in a way no twenty-year-old ever imagined. It had ruined other women for him, until Anne, who in her own way was as sexually thrilling. Debutantes were the best.
—
The Cardozos had put aside enough money to pay all of Jim’s medical school costs and to subsidize him during his internship and residency. They wanted him to be a surgeon; they didn’t want money worries to drive him into a less prestigious, less demanding specialty. When they said, after he was admitted to Columbia P & S, that he should live at home and not in the dorms—to save money they had saved—he said he would take out a loan and become a dermatologist. They folded. He emptied his closet and drawers, went off in a taxi, and never lived at home again. His father taught accounting at Brooklyn College and did taxes on the side; his mother taught home economics at Washington Irving High School. They had worked and saved all their lives to secure Jim’s future. He was their only child, bright and uncommonly handsome, a Jewish Gregory Peck. They lived in Manhattan, on the Upper East Side, in a small rent-controlled walk-up on East Eighty-Ninth between First and Second. They moved there from Flatbush when Jim was a year old. They wanted him to meet a better class of people. Russian and Polish Jews had taken over Brooklyn.
Jim’s parents thought it useful for his future medical practice for him to know and socialize with gentiles, but their chief goal was to put him in the way of prominent Jews, Lewisohns, Seligmans, Warburgs, people who could make his career. They joined Temple Emanu-El, so Jim could be bar mitzvahed there, even though it was very expensive. “Tax deductible,” Mr. Cardozo would say every time he paid the dues. Jim went to Stuyvesant—private school was beyond their imagination as well as their means—and they expected he would go to City College, then New York Medical College. When he was admitted to Yale, they figured out a way to pay for it and began spinning a fantasy of Columbia medical school. They worked out the numbers. In the long run, they’d be fine; they both had pensions. Their friends envied them. Jim was a credit to the race.
When Jim told his parents junior year he wanted to marry Eleanor Phipps, they threatened to cut him off, no money, no contact. “We’ll sit shiva,” his mother said. Jim who had dated other gentiles and had gentile friends was shocked. His parents had never said anything to him about marrying Jewish. “We assumed you would. We assumed you would want to,” his mother said. “We have been Jews forever, going back to England, to Holland, to Spain, to Babylon, to Solomon for heaven’s sakes. We’ve been in this country for over two hundred years. Your Jewish daughter could join the DAR. You’re Sephardic, not some Ashkenazi arriviste who thinks Leon Uris is a genius and Israel is the pinnacle of Jewish civilization.” His father let his wife do the heavy work, adding only, “I bet she never saw a circumcised penis before.” Jim walked out of the apartment, afraid he would punch his father.
Briefly, Jim and Eleanor plotted to defy their parents. Ove
r Easter vacation junior year, they spun schemes. Plan 1: They would run away to California; Eleanor would work as a secretary, Jim would attend UCLA’s medical school. Plan 2: They would stay in New York and live in the Village. Jim would work for a bank or corporation until he had enough money saved for medical school. Plan 3: They would break their hearts and break up. They chose Plan 3. They couldn’t imagine their lives without their parents’ support.
—
Jim didn’t introduce Anne to his parents until the wedding invitations had been ordered. He invited them to dinner at the Russian Tea Room; he wanted a festive and noisy place, one that didn’t allow for serious conversation. He had put off the meeting for months, dreading his parents’ response. They tended in uncomfortable social situations to be cagey and condescending, like a salesclerk at Cartier, trying to size up a badly dressed customer. He saw, from their turned-down mouths, that they were disappointed. Anne wasn’t as pretty as they would have liked, and she was short. He ordered Champagne.
“We’re getting married in three months,” he said, smiling at Anne, “on Sunday, August twenty-fourth.”
“Won’t it be too hot then?” Mrs. Cardozo said. “September is better. You should do it in September.”
“I’m afraid it’s too late,” Jim said.
A week later, Mrs. Lehman called the Cardozos to discuss their guest list.
“Where is the wedding to be held?” Mrs. Cardozo asked. “And the reception, where will that be?”
Mrs. Lehman was startled by her questions—she had assumed they knew—but she showed no surprise. She never did. “Showing surprise puts you at such a disadvantage,” she told her daughters.
“Temple Emanu-El, of course,” she said, “and the reception at the Harmonie Club.”
“Where’s the Armory Club?” Mrs. Cardozo said.