The Three Weissmanns of Westport

by Cathleen Schine

  "So you're the famous Annie," Gwen said with a distinct lack of warmth.

  "Dad talks so much about you," Evan said, and Annie got the impression that, like his sister, he would have preferred that "Dad" find a new topic of conversation.

  "Annie, I was hoping I could take you out to a celebratory dinner tonight," Frederick said.

  "Don't you think you should be getting back, Dad?" Evan said. "I don't like the idea of you driving so far at night."

  Frederick laughed. "You guys," he said.

  "It's a six-hour drive," his daughter said sharply. "Six and a half."

  "Isn't it lucky I don't have a curfew?"

  Even as he said it, Annie could see that although Frederick may not have had a curfew, it would be enforced. She and Frederick were not going out to dinner that night. Children were tyrants.

  Felicity had come to the reading to hear her brother, and as Felicity approached the table, her turquoise eyes wide as always, Annie noticed how much Gwen resembled her. Perhaps those eyes remained wide as she slept. Or rolled open like a doll's.

  "You mustn't monopolize the star," she said to Annie.

  "No, of course not."

  "I mean, I am his sister." And she gave Annie a meaningful look, the meaning of which Annie could not make out.

  Annie pointed to her own sister, as if that would somehow justify her standing by the table. "There's my sister," she said, and she waved Miranda over, signaling desperation by the childhood code of tapping her left eyebrow with her right pinky, a gesture distinctive enough for a trained sister to recognize but not quite awkward enough to arouse suspicion.

  "Your father has a beautiful reading voice, don't you think?" Miranda said when she was introduced to Gwen and Evan. "I think this book is extremely powerful. The prose is so vigorous . . ."

  The pro forma remarks, into which Miranda was politely inserting as much sincerity as she could muster, would have gone on, but Annie interrupted her with a blunt "My sister's an agent."

  "Oh yes," Gwen said. "We know." She gave Miranda a cold smile.

  "Infamy becomes me," Miranda said.

  "Everything becomes you, beautiful Miranda," Frederick offered, rather gallantly, Annie thought. "'In thy face I see the map of honour, truth, and loyalty,'" he added in the exaggerated way people do when they are quoting.

  "Lovely family, too," Felicity said, with her pie eyes looking almost challenging. "But then why shouldn't they be?"

  "Where are you off to that's so many hours away?" Annie asked Frederick. She did not even bother to add "after dinner." Somehow that was settled--there would be no dinner. No discussion, no dinner, just settled.

  "The Cape."

  "Why you want to live there I do not understand," said Gwen. "The summer, yes. But winter?"

  "Your father is sentimental," Felicity said. "Not that it has done him any harm. In the way of real estate appreciation."

  "Oh, I love Cape Cod in the winter," said Miranda. "To stand high up on one of those dunes, your bare feet numb in the cold sand, the wind blowing, the crash of the waves . . . It's incredibly romantic."

  "I hope you won't be too disappointed if I tell you that what I like about going up there, especially in the winter, is the quiet. It's so"--he thought for a moment--"so unencumbered."

  Annie turned that unexpected word over in her mind. Unencumbered.

  "Well, that's not romantic at all," Miranda said, and her voice was equal parts shocked and authoritative, as if Frederick had suddenly lifted his shirt and showed her a bad case of ringworm, for which she just happened to have the right tube of cream in her purse. "We'll have to do something about that."

  Unencumbered. Why did that sound so ominous to Annie, so bleak?

  "Frederick is done with romance," Felicity said.

  "You think I'm too old?" Frederick asked.

  "Oh no, age has nothing to do with it. It's temperament, Frederick. And will." And she smiled a private smile, her lips pulled together in a cupid bow.

  Miranda was saying that she had once gone paragliding on the beach in Wellfleet and suggested Frederick might treat his lack of romance by viewing the dunes from so many feet up; then she drifted off to a cluster of people she seemed to know.

  "Why don't you just stay tonight?" Gwen said to Frederick. "With one of us," she added, glancing at Annie.

  "I'm just a homebody, Gwennie. And I've got some kid house sitter I don't altogether trust this week--I have to get back."

  "In that case, you better leave now," Gwen said. She gave Annie a challenging look. "Don't you think?"

  Frederick also looked at Annie. "Maybe you'll come up sometime and see the place."

  Evan said, "You could get three brownstones in Red Hook for that joint."

  "Hardly that," Frederick said. "And you'll just have to buy your own brownstones in Red Hook or wait until I'm dead, because I have no intention of selling the house."

  Evan shrugged. "I was just making an observation."

  "Dad," Gwen said. She looked at her watch.

  And, suddenly, Annie was alone.

  She piled up the six or seven unsold books and thought wistfully of her own children. When would her boys start ordering her around, instead of the other way around?

  She saw Frederick trotting back through the door toward her. He took both her hands, then kissed her on the cheek. Their noses bumped as he unexpectedly kissed her a second time on her other cheek.

  "I had to thank you," he said. "I couldn't leave without thanking you."

  "No, no, thank you for bringing in such a crowd."

  "And don't worry about my driving back tonight," he added as he walked off. "I could do that drive in my sleep."

  "That's not too reassuring," she said. "The sleep part."

  "I'll call you," Frederick said, and he was gone.

  Betty watched her daughter from the other side of the room. How serious she looked. Attractive, in a severe sort of way. Betty remembered giving Annie a sweater with sequins, just a few sequins, very tasteful, very chic. The look on Annie's face--it was so pure, such pure dislike. Betty smiled. It was like the time Annie had wanted a cowboy outfit and they gave her a pink cowgirl skirt. It had offended her, even at five. If she had known the word "garish" at that tender age, she would surely have used it. How Betty and Joseph had laughed that night in bed, embarrassed that they had so misread their daughter, amused by her sickened expression. And touched, too, for just as she had quickly hidden her dislike of the sequins years later, she had even as a tiny child tried to cover her disappointment as quickly as possible. Annie had such a good heart. It must be a burden to be so critical and so considerate at the same time, Betty thought. She was glad Annie seemed so taken with this Frederick Barrow person. He had a twinkle in his eye. Annie could use a twinkle. Poor Annie. She had always been such a grown-up little girl. It had been touching when she was a child, that worried little face watching her heedless, happy sister roar and sob and spin in circles, and it was touching still. Betty watched Miranda now, striding across the room to wrap her arms around Annie. Annie's expression softened. How lucky I am, thought Betty. She felt the damn tears gathering. I'm so lucky, she repeated to herself. But the tears never listened to her these days. Had they ever? It was hard to remember what she had been like before she was like this.

  6

  Miranda lay in her childhood bed and listened to the jingle of cicadas. There must be so many of them to make such a clatter. Cicadas, if she remembered correctly, were the ones that hatched, then rattled, then mated and dropped dead. Miranda felt a stab of sympathy for the noisy insects. It was a pattern she was intimately familiar with. Love arrived; one was lucky enough to feel its warmth; then the season passed, and one shivered in the cold. Still, she had no regrets in that arena, at least. Seasons always returned, and so did love. Love was unchanging, even if the man she shared it with was not, even if she produced no cicada offspring. Love was eternal, even if lovers were not.

  She considered how her moth
er must feel after believing her marriage was eternal, only to find out it, too, had a season, albeit an extraordinarily long one. Was it the same way Miranda felt after each of her own fiery breakups, a desire to move on, to revive the delicious rattle of courtship as soon as possible?

  She crept up to her mother's bedroom and stood in the doorway at the top of the stairs. Moonlight came softly through the open window. How pale Betty looked in the blue light. She breathed evenly, a gentle sound just shy of snoring. Miranda realized that her mother was old, an old lady, her skin loose on her fragile bones. And then suddenly, piercingly, Miranda knew that her mother did not feel the way Miranda felt after a breakup, that she did not feel a desire to move on, to rattle and mate and bask in a new season of love. She knew that her mother felt like what she was: an old lady alone in a bed.

  Within a few weeks, the little cottage underwent a remarkable transformation. Betty's pale-blue-and-cream-colored silk Persian rug lay across the top of the worn old linoleum of indeterminate color. The creamy silk chenille Queen Anne chairs from the living room and leather sofa from Joseph's library had been arranged in cozy proximity in the small space. Even the curtains from the apartment had been adapted to the little room, which now resembled a Connecticut cottage living room in a 1930s movie.

  There were other resemblances to the 1930s that were less welcome. The stove dated from that time. The furnace could not have been much more recent. The dishwasher was from the sixties, but its only function now was to hold up the small kitchen counter. Cousin Lou had offered to update all these appliances, but here Betty had drawn the line on his beneficence.

  "It's all so quaint," she had said. "And as soon as Joseph, may he rest in peace, sorts out all the legalities, I will be back in my apartment and you can tear this sweet little cottage down . . ."

  Cousin Lou winced at the words "tear" and "down" in the same sentence.

  "Beautify," Betty corrected herself. "You will be able to beautify. No sense in beautifying new appliances, though, is there?"

  Betty was very proud of this sacrifice on her part. She wanted to show strength, to reassure her daughters, to reassure the world at large and, perhaps most of all, to reassure herself. Staying at her cousin's cottage as a family guest was one thing. But being given a new refrigerator, like those poor women on Queen for a Day, was more than her self-respect could stomach.

  On weekdays Annie went into the city, surprised by how much she enjoyed the commute. The train rattled on its suburban rails, filled with men and women, but mostly men, in dark suits. The uniformity of the sober colors, the smell of soap, the soft rustle of the newspapers in the mornings, that hour of fresh, gently rocking, clacking repose; then, ten hours later, the weary, wrinkled, communal escape from the long day of responsibility, the comfortable office dishabille of loosened ties and crumpled white shirts--Annie felt herself part of something, a cell in a great breathing bourgeois creature.

  As for Betty, she read books with advice for grieving widows, one of which suggested she decorate a jar and then, with her children, write down happy memories of the deceased on slips of paper and place them inside. To facilitate the decoration of the Memory Jar, she immediately headed to Barnes & Noble to buy a book about decoupage. While there, she saw a book for golf widows and came home to declare that she must take up the game immediately.

  "But, Mother, a golf widow is someone whose husband plays a lot of golf," Annie pointed out.

  "Well, Josie plays golf," Miranda said. "On vacation. It's harder in the city, of course."

  "Exactly," said Betty. "May he rest in peace."

  Annie gave a defeated sigh, but the truth was, she enjoyed their company now as she never had before; more, certainly, than she had while growing up. As a little girl, she had not been unhappy, just cautious, adopting a quiet, personal camouflage to protect herself from her more flamboyant mother and sister. It was something she had always felt she'd shared with Josie: they were the ones who created the drab leafy background against which the other two blazed with gaudy color like tropical birds. Annie and Josie were the practical ones, too, the ones who remembered the napkins when Miranda and Betty decided on an impromptu picnic in the park, who thought to bring the umbrella when Miranda and Betty decided to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge on a cloudy day, who packed the map when Miranda and Betty had a sudden yen to see autumn leaves or spring flowers or Hyde Park or the waves crashing onto the beach at Montauk Point. Annie thought fondly of her stepfather for a moment. She almost wished he had died, she realized with shame, for then she would have been able to remember him as he had been, distant but in a quiet, patient, and reassuring way, someone she admired and looked up to and relied on. Instead, he was a living, unreliable, despicable deserter.

  "I found the most wonderful jet bracelet at the consignment store on the Post Road," Betty was saying, holding out her wrist to her daughters.

  Miranda peered at the bracelet. "Very Goth, Mom."

  "Queen Victoria wore jet when she was in mourning for Prince Albert," Annie said. "Which was the rest of her life."

  Betty nodded her approval.

  "Of course, he was actually dead, unlike other widows' husbands I could name. She started a whole fashion."

  "Well, now everyone wears black already," Betty said. "So I don't see what difference I could make. Nevertheless, the bracelet was only two hundred dollars. See how much I'm economizing?"

  Annie wanted to shake her mother until her pretty little head wobbled on its aged neck. We are broke, she wanted to cry out. We do not have two hundred dollars to spend on baubles. But her mother was so wounded, and she was trying, in her odd and spendthrift way, to be brave. Annie took a deep breath. She put out the white linen napkins bought years ago in France, if she remembered correctly. "When the Mitfords' mother needed to economize," she said, "she found out how much the laundering of their napkins cost per week."

  Normally Miranda would have commented on two pedantic outbursts in such a short period of time, but she was more indulgent of the Mitford family, awed by the number of memoirs, biographies, and scandals the sisters had generated.

  "She thought it was too expensive," Annie continued, "so they just stopped using napkins."

  "But think of the cleaning bills for their clothes," Betty said, clucking. "Although they could have used paper towels, I suppose . . ."

  Betty and Joseph's housekeeper, a Brazilian woman named Jocasta who had retired last year, had always gotten the napkins snowy white and ironed them into crisply folded rectangles. When they first came to the cottage, Betty had suggested sending them to the dry cleaner, or at least the fluff-and-fold laundry downtown called the Washing Well, but Annie had put her foot down.

  "We have a washer and a dryer. It's about the only thing that works in this house, so we might as well use it and not waste money."

  She was, therefore, responsible for the napkins herself. They had acquired a few yellow stains, she noticed, and she certainly was not going to stand around for hours watching soap operas and ironing them the way Jocasta had. She placed the rumpled stained cloths beside her mother's good china. The napkins looked disgruntled, rebellious, like a crowd of disheveled revolutionaries. Maybe they should use paper towels, after all.

  "Wash your hands before dinner, girls," Betty said.

  Girls again. Could you re-create your childhood in a new place at an advanced age and without one of the key players? Annie wondered. For better or for worse, that's what they seemed to be doing. Oh, Josie, what were you thinking, leaving us here to play house, three place settings instead of four? "The Odd Trio" Miranda had dubbed them, but it was clear from the outset that they were, all three, the fussy one, each pursing her lips in disapproval of the other two, each missing the man who was not there.

  "I can't imagine what all the neighbors think we're doing here, three old broads in this ramshackle house," Annie said as she watched a woman walk a big galloping black dog down the street.

  "Oh, they think we're Russian
s," Betty said.

  "Why?"

  "Because that's what I told them."

  Annie pressed her forehead against the window. Russians?

  "Refugees!" Miranda said, delighted. "Cousin Lou must like that."

  "Yes. I said we had all lost our poor husbands."

  "How?" Annie asked.

  "KGB, dear. How else?"

  Those first few weeks of the Weissmanns' sojourn in Westport had about them both a reassuring and a festive air. The weather was holiday weather--unusually cool for late August, the blue of the sky clear and deep, a few bright clouds rolling by. There were ferocious showers in the afternoons now and then, as if they were in the tropics. Then the rain would pass, leaving the air fresher than ever, the light golden, clean, and rich. In addition, Betty was a wonderful cook in a traditional way that Annie and Miranda both associated with holidays, and it was Betty who did most of the cooking on the old stove. None of them was sure how this had happened--it had never been discussed or formalized in any way. But somehow, Betty was cooking for her children as she had done so many years before. The only exceptions came when the three women were commandeered for dinner at Cousin Lou's. Betty said it was cruel to deny him their company, particularly when he was being so kind about the cottage. She did not say that she was seventy-five years old and sometimes cooking dinner was tiring. Nor did anyone ask.