The Three Weissmanns of Westport

by Cathleen Schine

  "Beautiful," he murmured now, meaning the wine, its legs, the word "legs," legs of all kinds, the room, the people in it drinking wine, and always, the view of the water, over which an enormous harvest moon rose in slow, round orange motion.

  Annie, seated on a low bench, also looked out at the moon and wondered what Frederick was doing.

  "Why is he always talking to me?" Mr. Shpuntov was saying in a loud angry voice. "Why does he bother me?"

  "He's your daughter," Cousin Lou yelled into his ear.

  Miranda, pacing nervously in front of the picture window, did not hear Mr. Shpuntov or Cousin Lou or Rosalyn's cry of "Good Gawd!" Kit was gone. Henry was gone. Her little pretend family had driven away in that miniature car and boarded a plane for Los Angeles. She clenched her hands and opened them, clenched them, opened them, unaware that she was doing so. We could still be a little pretend family, she told herself. Kit could return in a week, two weeks. It was a small part, he had said so. Of course, it could be a small part that popped up frequently. He might be there for months. Who would take care of Henry? It was outrageous. A form of child abuse, really. Poor Henry, locked in a hotel room with some undocumented babysitter yakking in a foreign language on her cell phone. He would never learn to speak properly at this crucial juncture in his development. She had been online for hours last night reading about the progress of a two-year-old's speech. She would have to call Kit and explain it all to him. She checked her watch. They would be on the plane now. She hoped Kit had taken Henry's car seat on the plane and strapped him in. It was so much safer.

  Miranda sat down with a small internal groan and began chewing on her thumbnail.

  Betty wished Miranda wouldn't bite her nails. It was unattractive, and she was such a beautiful girl.

  "That little Henry and his father were very taken with your sister," she said to Annie, who was slumped on a bench. "Are very taken, I should say. I wish they hadn't rushed off like that. It's lovely that Kit got some work, but Miranda seemed to be settling in to such a nice routine with them. Sit up straight, sweetheart."

  "Mmm," Annie said. Frederick's children were not very taken with her, she thought. Though they clearly revered him. Perhaps that was why they seemed so possessive. Or did it have to do with their mother? Annie never asked what had become of Mrs. Frederick Barrow, but she did wonder. Had she died recently? Or was she, like Betty, dumped and destitute? What had she been like? What had she looked like? Did they still see each other? Or did he carry flowers to her grave and lie on the grass beside it and whisper to her? It was difficult to picture any of it, as she knew nothing at all about the wife and not much more about Frederick, but she pictured the two of them anyway, blurry, indistinct, far away.

  It was therefore a shock when she saw her mother rushing enthusiastically away from her toward the door, through which walked a very real and sharply drawn Frederick, the very same Frederick Barrow she had been thinking about, who had just entered the room with the stern young woman Annie recognized as his daughter, Gwen, as well as a man who must have been her husband, and two little girls in matching velvet dresses.

  It is too hot for velvet was Annie's first irrelevant thought, remembering many sweaty holiday dinners from her childhood. Rosh Hashanah is always too hot for velvet.

  The night air swept in through the door with Frederick, Gwen, her husband, and the two pink little girls in cherry red velvet, the damp breath of the shore following them across the room like a ghost.

  "New blood," Rosalyn whispered hungrily as she hurried toward the newcomers. She frequently experienced a sense of world-weary ennui with her husband's guests. Like many a collector of pottery or butterflies or vintage handbags, Rosalyn cared far more for the act of acquisition than she did for the guests in her extensive collection. Lou provided her with an ever-expanding list of names to remember and occupations to place in her own mental hierarchy, for which she was grudgingly grateful. But this new acquisition was, uncharacteristically, all her own. She had found Gwendolyn Barrow herself at a dreary evening of incomprehensible art and clannish New Yorkers at which the two bored women had fallen into a friendly discussion of Pilates versus Gyrotonic, Rosalyn coming down heavily, if such a slight and narrow person could be said to be heavy in any way, on the side of Gyrotonic, a view to which Gwen revealed she was just coming around. The two women bonded, and Rosalyn rather recklessly invited her new friend to Lou's Rosh Hashanah.

  "Gwen!" she said. "Welcome to Westport! And who are these elegant young ladies you've brought with you? They cannot be Juliet and Ophelia?" Gwen and Rosalyn had met just the one time, and Rosalyn congratulated herself on remembering the names of the twins. Her father might be lazily indulging himself in senility, she thought, but she could still hold her head up. "It's not possible, they're so grown up . . ." she continued, her immense face tilting toward the girls.

  Juliet and Ophelia looked up at her with expressions that suggested they would rather have met the fates of their famous namesakes than be standing in Rosalyn's living room beneath the looming face of Rosalyn. Then Juliet and Ophelia began to cry, their little lips quivering a moment in unison before twisting into twin grimaces. They wailed in chorus, and their father squatted down and spoke earnestly to them, his face serious but deferential, as if they were tiny ambassadors from a tiny foreign land.

  From her post near the glass doors to the terrace, Annie saw the family's entrance, felt the damp air. Her heart beat faster, and the heat of emotion spread across her face. She concentrated on her glass of wine, the liquid black as a deep, round pond. She waited for Frederick's voice, and when it came, beside her, saying just her name, it sounded soft and rich and aromatic.

  "Your voice is like wine," she said, looking up and smiling. "It really is, Frederick."

  "Not demon gin?" he said. He took her hand and they stood for a moment, a very heady moment for Annie, her blood coursing through her, drowning out the sounds around her. But Frederick must have heard something, for he glanced quickly, self-consciously, at his daughter across the room, and the spell was broken.

  He dropped Annie's hand awkwardly, said, "What on earth are you doing here?" then looked around him as if he weren't sure what he was doing there, either. "What a wonderful surprise!"

  "Cousin Lou is my cousin," she said.

  "Cousin Lou is everybody's cousin, isn't he? Gwen heard all about him from his wife. They're great friends, I gather. After one meeting. Gwen is a terrible snob, but she's very taken with Rosalyn. Is Rosalyn a terrible snob? It's the only thing I can think of to explain this sudden friendship."

  Annie couldn't help laughing. "But Lou's really my cousin," she insisted. "Not by blood exactly, but he really is family."

  Frederick nodded enthusiastically. "Right! Just what Gwennie told me--everyone is 'like family.'"

  Annie gave up, adding only, "Anyway, I live here now."

  "Oh, I remember now . . . the cottage, your cousin . . . So Cousin Lou is your cousin and you live in his cottage."

  She wondered if he was thinking of her apartment, of her bedroom, of her bed. If he was remembering.

  "We live just down the hill."

  "By the beach, right? That's fantastic. My house is by the water." He looked suddenly uncomfortable. He tapped his mouth unconsciously with two fingers. "My house . . ."

  "Your house . . ." she said, the way you would to encourage a child who was trying to tell a story.

  "Hmm?"

  "Your house? The water?"

  "My house," he said again, more to himself than to Annie. "My house by the water. Dark and treacherous . . ."

  "Your house or the water?"

  ". . . Darker and more treacherous by the day . . ."

  "You sound like my sister!"

  "Yes, but she finds darkness and treachery beautiful."

  "And you?"

  "I find it dark and treacherous . . ." He trailed off, then said, suddenly, with a rather forced grin, "Well! Enough of that. So you're here because you live here,
and I'm here because Gwennie met Mrs. Cousin Lou at the Whitney. They're bosom buddies." He smiled, more pleasantly now. "That's an expression that doesn't really work anymore, does it? Pity. It conveys so much if you're a man's man of a previous century. I can't quite carry it off."

  Annie felt herself relax. She liked him, she just did. Whether Frederick wanted to remember what had happened between them or not, she did remember, and she would continue to remember--why not remember something so pleasurable? But that did not mean she would look back. At her age, she found that it was better to keep her eyes facing forward.

  "Isn't Westport where Peter DeVries lived?" Frederick asked. "I miss his presence. How does that happen, I wonder? His books still exist, they're still just as wonderful as ever, but he has no presence. Do you know what I mean?"

  Annie said she did know what he meant and wondered if what he really meant was: When will I have no presence? Frederick was sixty or thereabouts. Was he feeling that shift, too, the way she was? The cresting of the hill? Down, down, down we go from here . . .

  "Lucy lived in Westport," she said, shaking herself from what was threatening to become full-blown melancholy. "On TV after Little Ricky was born. The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit lived here, too."

  "And now you: Annie Weissmann."

  "An unbroken line of unrelated people."

  Annie began to enjoy herself. She described the nostalgia her mother and sister had expressed for the local lunatic asylum.

  "And my sister almost drowned in a kayak and was rescued by a young actor," she continued. They proceeded to discuss kayaks and boats in general for a while, the conversation then veering inexplicably to a shared appreciation for the actor James Mason, whom they both occasionally confused with Dirk Bogarde.

  "I was once thinking about that scene, that wonderful, ghastly scene in Death in Venice in which Gustav von Aschenbach's makeup begins to run," Frederick said. "Then, days later, I realized that the entire time I had been picturing the makeup running down James Mason's face."

  From across the room came a shout: "Dad!"

  It was Frederick's son-in-law. Annie felt a stab of pity for Frederick: his son-in-law called him "Dad."

  I often think about Gustav von Aschenbach when I put on my own makeup, she thought, though she might have said it aloud, for Frederick stared at her.

  "Dad! There you are," said Frederick's daughter, arriving beside them with her husband and little girls. "Oh, hello," Gwen added hastily to Annie. "You're the librarian, aren't you? Ann, is it? How nice to see you here of all places." Gwen was holding one daughter who chewed dreamily on a cracker.

  "Of all places," Annie repeated.

  "This is Ron, my son-in-law, and this small person," Frederick said, reaching for the child, "is Ophelia."

  Annie shook Ophelia's sticky hand. "Pretty dress," she said.

  "Hot," said Ophelia.

  Betty was watching the little group with interest. She was happy that Frederick had come to see Annie. Had Annie invited him? It was not like Annie to go out of her way in quite such a public manner, to show her hand. She must really like the novelist with the sparkly eyes and mellifluous voice. If my children can be happy, I will be happy, Betty thought, squaring her shoulders, though what she felt was the same simmering anger and confusion as always.

  "I heard about Joseph," a man next to her said.

  She tried to recover herself and remember who he was, gazing with fascinated revulsion at his meaty lips while the general conversation of the people standing around her washed over them.

  "Marty," Betty said, finally remembering the man with the liver-colored lips was Cousin Lou's accountant. "Hello."

  "I'm so sorry about what happened," he said.

  He was eating a piece of dark orange cheese. She noticed it left a narrow oily trail on his lip, like a snail.

  "You need a good lawyer, Betty. A shark. I'll give you a name."

  "Talk to Annie, Marty dear. I'm in mourning."

  "Yeah. They say that's one of the stages, right?"

  "I don't believe in stages," Betty said.

  "It's not a religion, Mom," her younger daughter said, coming up beside Betty. And because Marty looked a little hurt and her voice had accidentally emerged with a far too haughty timbre, Betty forced herself to smile at Marty and his odious snail-slimed lip.

  "Thank you," she said, taking his hand, administering a short shake and releasing it, as if she were in a receiving line. "Thank you for your kind words."

  "Shark," he said, repeating the kind word as he went away.

  "Dear God," Betty said.

  "Who was that?" Miranda asked.

  Roberts was a step or two behind her.

  "Lou's accountant. He said I needed a shark divorce lawyer."

  "A forensic accountant is more like it," Roberts said. "I'm sorry," he added when Betty did not reply. "None of my business." And he hurried off.

  Forensic accountant. As a recently converted and loyal member of the daytime television audience, Betty had seen numerous reruns of numerous crime shows and wondered if a forensic accountant was a CSI for divorces. A divorce was surely a kind of death: a murder, in fact. It was the memories, so stubbornly happy and lifeless and useless, stinking with decay, that lay in a putrid heap like a rotting corpse. If only the memories were a corpse, Betty thought, and could be buried under six feet of clotted dirt. But they never really died, did they? They wandered through her thoughts and her heart like scabby zombies. A forensic accountant could never find the murderer if he couldn't even discover the dead body. It was better on television. "I like the one with the bugs," she said out loud.

  "What?"

  "I don't like the one with the sunglasses."

  "What are you talking about, Mother?"

  "Television."

  "I have a migraine," Miranda said. She stared at Frederick Barrow's granddaughters and felt angry.

  Betty put the back of her hand on her daughter's forehead. "Do you have a fever? Do you want to go home? Do you have that medicine? The kind you roll onto your forehead? Maybe you'll feel better if you lie down."

  Miranda pulled away from her mother's hand.

  "Who is that young woman leading Frederick away from Annie?" Betty asked. "Is that his little doxy?"

  "That's his daughter, Mother."

  "Well, thank God for daughters," Betty said, giving Miranda's arm a squeeze. "But, I mean, really." And she departed, pulled open the sliding glass door, and stood in the dark, moist air to brood in peace about Joseph and his irreconcilable differences.

  At the same time that Betty retreated to the outdoors, Miranda saw Roberts coming toward her again. She gulped down the rest of her Scotch and headed for the bar to refill. Doddery old lawyer--was everyone here two years old or a hundred and one? Roberts wasn't really doddering, to be fair: he had a steady gait; he was tall and straight and had the pleasantly browned, pleasantly leathery skin of someone who spends a lot of time outdoors. He was rather distinguished-looking. A thin beakish nose, the kind that could be acquiline and English or acquiline and Italian or just Jewish. And he had a pretty mouth. Betty had pointed that out--how his mouth was soft and so different from the rest of his face. But Miranda was in no mood to appreciate his handsome mouth or relative good health. Her head was throbbing and her heart was breaking.

  Roberts stood beside her and refilled his wineglass. Seeing no escape, Miranda gave a wan smile.

  "Is everything all right?" he asked. "Your mother . . ."

  "She's in mourning. It's very tiring for her."

  "I like your mother. She's kind of indefatigable. But I suppose even she has to give in now and then. Age is exhausting sometimes, exhausting if you hold it at bay, more exhausting if you give in. My mother used to say you have to be brave to get old." He stopped, as if his flow of words surprised him as much as it did Miranda. "Not that your mother is old, of course," he added. "I was thinking more of myself."

  "Oh, you're as young as springtime," Miranda said poli
tely, though she was thinking he had to be seventy if he was a day. And how dreary of him to speak about aging, as if it were synonymous with living. The image of Kit, young and shining with curiosity and hope, his vibrant child at his side, shot into her thoughts almost painfully.

  Roberts laughed. "I've seen a few springtimes, anyway," he said. "You, on the other hand, look wonderful. I heard what happened that day you went out kayaking, and I admit I was worried about you. I feel a little responsible. I never should have let you go out on such a rough day."

  Miranda wondered if the semiretired lawyer had taken a wee drop too much. Never had she heard such a flow of words emanate from his, admittedly--give the devil his due, as Josie always said--lovely lips. "You're so sweet," she said, thinking, Go away, geezer, please. "But first of all, you couldn't have stopped me. No one can stop me, I'm an absolute nightmare. And, as it turned out, it was a lucky day after all. My kayaking adventure brought us a new friend--Kit Maybank. Have you met him? Kit rescued me from certain near-death. He's an actor. He was supposed to be here, but he just got a part in a film and had to leave. He's extremely talented." She found that once she mentioned Kit, she had a hard time leaving the subject. "He has a child, a beautiful little boy named Henry . . ."

  "Ah," Roberts said in his quiet voice.

  "Henry," Miranda repeated, almost belligerently, as if Roberts had snubbed the boy. "Henry looks just like his father."

  Roberts mumbled something inaudible and retreated into his customary silence.

  As they filed into the dining room, Frederick held one of his rosy granddaughters on his shoulders. The little girl began drumming on his head and singing in a high wail that carried surprisingly well across the large room, then was seated beside her sister, the two of them lolling in their chairs, their heads tilted back, their tongues hanging from their mouths.