The Three Weissmanns of Westport

by Cathleen Schine

  "Well, it's better that he's marrying a girl than a boy, isn't it?"

  "No, don't you see, they're going to have one. She's pregnant, or so she claims. I don't believe a word of it. She's not showing at all. Of course, how could you tell, she's always going to some gym. I told him to demand a paternity test. Gwen is beside herself. Think how she feels! After all she's done for that girl. And me! I let her live here!"

  Joseph held the glass of Scotch to his lips. He could see Betty on the couch in her crumpled bathrobe, a fury. The glass had hurtled through the air. The perfume of the Scotch had hung around him like a cloud. The apartment had been a battleground. Now it was just an apartment. Felicity shuffled ahead of him, draped in terry cloth. He would have to tell her soon, he knew.

  "And Frederick!" she said, her words drifting back to him, muffled by the towel around her head. "How he could do that to his own daughter. Is he from Alaska? That's where they'll move, no doubt. That's what they'll tell us next. And don't even ask about Evan--he's beside himself. He's furious. It's so humiliating for the family. I mean, Frederick is a public figure. Everyone will know. I'm so upset, I walked home. But when it rains it pours, and it poured, and I'm soaked. Thank you," she added, turning into the kitchen, rubbing her hair with the towel. "That little golddigger."

  "Where is she, anyway?" Joseph said, glad to be able to postpone his own news. "She didn't come home with you?"

  "Oh, she'll never set her scheming little foot in this apartment again."

  He put the kettle on and poured some whiskey and sugar in a mug. "Sit down," he said gently. He took a lemon out of the refrigerator, cut it, squeezed it in the mug. When the water boiled, he poured it into the mug and handed the concoction to Felicity.

  She breathed in the fumes. "Just what the doctor ordered. We'll have to change all the locks."

  "Yes," Joseph said. "We will definitely need to do that. Or someone will."

  At his tone, Felicity stopped sipping from the mug. "What?"

  "I just got the final word from the lawyers."

  Felicity stood up, very straight within her nun's habit of towels. "Yes?"

  "The apartment is Betty's."

  Felicity took a moment, then said, "Fine."

  She sat back down, drank a little more of her toddy.

  This was the part of her Joseph loved, he realized. The hard part. The unyielding part. Felicity was strong. She was not always entirely human, he had discovered. But she was always strong.

  "I've always wanted to live downtown anyway," she said. "The West Side is so over."

  In the Museum of Natural History, beneath the dinosaur, where she and Crystal had taken refuge from the rain, Amber held her cell phone in one hand. With the other she pinched her sister's arm as punctuation to every other word. "It's all her fault, Frederick. Everything was going so well," she said into the phone, administering three pinches.

  "Ow . . . It just slipped out, Amber . . . Ow . . ."

  The day before the rainstorm, Betty had gone to the doctor with a bad cough. She hadn't wanted to, but when Annie got home from work and heard her, she had called the doctor and made the appointment without even asking Betty, treating her like a child, and Betty did not have the energy to argue.

  "I don't like the way you sound," the doctor had said.

  I don't like the way you sound, thought Betty. He was a young man and condescending. But at least he didn't call her dear and talk very slowly and loudly the way some of them did.

  "But she just has a cold," Miranda said when the doctor insisted on putting Betty back in the hospital. No need to make a big deal out of it. And everyone knew that people got sicker in hospitals. Especially older people.

  "Don't get sundowner's syndrome," she said that night when she and Annie left Betty to the ministrations of the harried nursing staff. "Wash your hands a lot."

  "I already have a staph infection, darling."

  "See?"

  Betty had sent them off with a thrown kiss, a coughing fit, and a wave.

  "American Idol," she'd gasped urgently, pointing at the TV.

  They looked back at her when they reached the door. She was small and pale and wracked with coughs. Tubes ran into and out of her. She fished her wallet out of the bedside drawer. She dialed the phone, glancing up at the 800 number flashing on the television screen to get it right.

  "Oh God, not again," Annie said.

  A young man on the TV commercial mopped up a puddle of cola with a miraculously absorbent cloth. "Wowsham!" he said.

  The next day, the day of the rainstorm, Betty was still in the hospital. Miranda had spent most of the day there, then taken a break to pull up weeds and breathe the uncontaminated air blowing off the Sound.

  Now, as Roberts and Leanne enacted their unhappy pantomime behind the window, Miranda picked Annie up at the station and drove straight to the hospital. She said nothing about what she had seen in the rain. They spoke only of Betty.

  "She was fine this morning," Miranda said. She heard how lame this sounded. "She ate some toast and applesauce."

  When they arrived in Betty's hospital room, they hung up their wet coats, and their mother waved them closer, one on each side of the bed. "Sit here, and you here," she said. Then she held them close.

  "I love you," she said softly, tears welling up. "I love you both so much."

  Annie and Miranda caught each other's eye across their mother's back.

  "We love you, too," they both murmured. But, what the hell is going on? said their tone.

  "It's over," Betty said at last, after a considerable embrace and hushed sniffling. "It's over."

  "What?" Annie asked, standing suddenly. "What's wrong? What did the doctor say?"

  "The divorce. The divorce is over," Betty reassured her.

  "You're not getting divorced?" Miranda asked, a stupid smile spreading across her face.

  "Oh, darling, of course we're getting divorced. That's the point. Josie has to give me a divorce now. The forensic accountant figured everything out."

  "What forensic accountant?" Annie asked. "What are you talking about?"

  "His name is Mr. Mole. Isn't that perfect? I knew he'd help the minute Roberts told me his name."

  "Roberts?"

  "Roberts and Mr. Mole arranged everything. Josie has to give me our apartment. He has to give me some of our assets, he has to behave like a mensch. It's all settled. I knew he was a mensch. He always said so, after all. "

  Annie sank back onto the bed. "Jesus," she said, letting out a sigh of relief. Then: "Some mensch. What Yiddish dictionary do you use?"

  "We won!" Miranda said. "Finally. We really won?"

  "I'm supposed to go into town tomorrow to sign the papers. But . . ."

  "They'll let you come home tonight, and we can drive you in," Annie said.

  Betty laughed. "You practically pronounced me dead, and now you want me to hop out of bed and go to meetings? Anyway, they will not let me out tonight . . ."

  "But . . ."

  Betty coughed, then pointed to her chest. ". . . Pneumonia or some such thing . . ."

  Annie rushed out of the room in search of the doctor, who was nowhere to be found, of course. Pneumonia or some such thing? She had saved that minor piece of information for a parenthesis? Her mother was infuriating. Annie wanted to shake her and her pneumonia. She wanted to shake someone, anyway. The doctor would do. She listened to the page: Dr. Franken, Dr. Franken, please call in . . . Dr. Franken, Dr. Franken . . ." Her mother called him Dr. Frankenstein. He was not much older than Annie's son Charlie. Dr. Franken, Dr. Franken. Hospital pages always sounded so ominous. The blood was pounding in Annie's ears.

  "You have power of attorney," her mother was saying when she went back into the room to wait for the doctor. "I want both of you to go in and sign the papers for me."

  "Oh, Mom, that can wait. Let's worry about your health now . . ."

  "You can worry about two things at once, Annie," Betty said, smiling. "I've seen it firsthand.
I want you to go in." She paused. She reached out and held Annie's hand in her own left hand, Miranda's in her right. "I want you to go," she said.

  Dr. Franken, Dr. Franken, said the page.

  "I want that rotten, selfish, dirty bastard to face you," Betty said. Her eyes were fierce. "Both of you."

  Miranda and Annie stared at their mother.

  "He owes you that," Betty said. "Rest his soul," she added gently.

  The doctor appeared eventually, a youngster in a white coat. Betty's staph infection had gotten worse, he said. Pneumonia . . . intravenous antibiotics . . . couldn't possibly go home . . . at her age . . . lucky to have survived the meningitis . . . at her age . . . at her age . . . at her age . . .

  Annie had mechanically taken notes. When she tried to decipher them when she got home, she said, "Just words. A bunch of meaningless words. All I really heard was at her age. She's not even that old. That little punk doctor."

  She lay down on Betty's chaise.

  "Don't worry, Annie," Miranda said in a worried voice. "She'll be okay."

  It was the first time Annie could remember Miranda comforting her. It terrified her. Things must be very bad indeed.

  Miranda called Leanne, who promised to call the hospital and see, doctor to doctor, what was really going on.

  "She'll go in and see her in the afternoon, too, when Henry's napping. Hilda can keep an eye on him."

  Miranda seemed so proud, Annie thought, as if Leanne's generous behavior reflected on her somehow. "That's great," she said, and Miranda beamed.

  Then Annie called Cousin Lou's house to see if Rosalyn could go to the hospital in the morning.

  "Oh, she can't possibly, she'll drive your poor mother crazy. No, God, no. I'll go, though. I'm more soothing, aren't I? I cheer people up. I'll go. Rosalyn is much too nervous right now. This business has been a terrible strain on her."

  "What business? Mom in the hospital?" Leave it to Rosalyn to turn this into her own malady.

  "No, no. Those two girls from Palm Springs. It's gotten all topsy-turvy."

  Annie almost moaned. She did not care about Amber and her antics right now. She did not even care about Frederick. What was done was done. She cared only about her mother.

  "One of them seems to have run off with that Barrow fellow," Cousin Lou was saying. "Gweneth is mad as a wet hen . . ."

  Where did her cousin ever come up with that colloquial American expression? Annie wondered irrelevantly.

  "Rosalyn has been on the phone with hysterical women all day. She's devastated. And with a baby coming . . ."

  Annie said, "Cousin Lou, I'm sorry Rosalyn is in such a state, but can you go to the hospital tomorrow morning or not? I kind of have to know."

  "What am I? Family? Or family? First thing in the morning."

  20

  The meeting took place in an office with a view of the Hudson River. Miranda stared out at a motionless barge roosting in the river's fawn-colored water.

  "Garbage scow," she said. "Poor old garbage scow."

  Josie's lawyer looked up irritably from his papers. Josie laughed.

  "Only you would feel sorry for a garbage scow," he said gently.

  "Don't patronize me."

  Josie looked genuinely shocked. "Miranda . . ."

  The door opened and the forensic accountant, Mr. Mole, entered, a fat man who looked as if he should have been named Mr. Toad of Toad Hall. Behind him, to Miranda's surprise, loped Roberts, a briefcase in his hand.

  "You turn up in the oddest places," Annie said, but for once Roberts, with his lanky formality, seemed a perfect fit. He slid into a chair at the head of the table, folded his long fingers together, and gazed out comfortably over his pale blue bow tie.

  "Shall we begin?" he said.

  "Semiretired," Miranda said half to herself.

  They signed the papers in silence, the ballpoint pens scratching.

  "Now," Josie said, smiling, "I told you girls I would be generous!"

  Annie looked at the man who had been until very recently her father, and she knew that sometime in the future he would be her father again. Not because she forgave him. It was not her place to forgive him, really, he hadn't divorced her, and anyway, she didn't forgive him, her place or not, and she never would. It was not that she would forget, either, although she supposed she might, one so often did, with years and years to fade the colors of memory. But it was for neither of those reasons that Josie would somehow leech back into her heart. It was because she loved him.

  She just did not love him right now.

  "Oh, Josie," she said sadly, and she stood up to give him a lingering embrace, taking in the feel of his fatherly cheek, his fatherly soapy smell. "You really have been a complete shmuck."

  "Lunch?" he said rather pathetically, turning from Annie to Miranda and back again.

  "We have to get back to our ailing mother," Miranda said, "who will now at last have a decent roof over her head."

  Joseph nodded. "Thank God," he said. "Thank God we finally worked out the details."

  "Thank forensic accountancy," Miranda said, giving him her most defiant glare, a narrowed-eyed face he knew so well from her growing up.

  How could they understand how relieved he was to have Betty properly cared for? But look at them, so fierce, so loyal to their mother, so strong.

  "You're good girls," he said.

  Silence.

  "Your mother deserves this," he added. "She's a remarkable woman. A fine human being."

  Miranda burst into tears, threw herself into Josie's arms, then snarled, "I hate you," and ran out the room.

  "Well, bye," Annie said, following her sister, and the meeting was over.

  They shook hands with Mr. Mole and thanked him.

  "Oh, don't thank me," he said. "I would do anything for my old friend Roberts."

  Roberts offered to drive them home, and as they walked to the car, Miranda stepped into a deli to get a bottle of water.

  "Thank you," Annie said. "I don't know how to thank you for what you've done."

  She took his hand and, without thinking, kissed it.

  His face creased into a huge smile. Then, noticing his hand lingering by Annie's lips after she had let it go, he coughed, retracted it, straightened his tie, said it was all Mr. Mole, all thanks to the magical Mr. Mole.

  "Mole is pretty much the best forensic accountant in the country," he continued as they pulled into the traffic of the West Side Highway.

  "Well, he must have done a great job if he got Josie to change his mind," said Miranda.

  "Oh, he didn't have do anything at all. It was just the possibility. Just the thought of having Mole go over your books--it gets people to reevaluate their positions, shall we say."

  "Thank you again," Annie said. "Thank you for Mr. Mole."

  Roberts colored a little. Annie could see the back of his neck grow pink.

  "Thank you," Miranda repeated. "Thank you with all our family heart."

  They rode in silence for a while. The sun was behind them. The trees glowed with the clear spring light and tender spring leaves.

  "I guess we won't be neighbors anymore," Annie said after a while. "It's back to the city for the Weissmanns."

  She saw both Roberts and Miranda start.

  "Let's get Mom out of the hospital first," Miranda said after a while.

  "Well, whenever this exodus occurs," Roberts said, "I will definitely miss you."

  Annie caught his eye in the rearview mirror. She looked away.

  "Yes," he said. "Yes, I will."

  A few weeks earlier, Annie had found herself wondering idly what Roberts's first name was and had consulted a Westport- Weston phone book from 1993 that sat on a shelf in the kitchen. She had leafed through the thin gray pages until she reached the Rs. About halfway down the second page, she found it.

  Mr. and Mrs. Phineas Roberts, the phone book entry read. She had smiled at the first name. No wonder. Mr. and Mrs. Phineas Roberts. Mr. and Mrs. A couple, an entity.
She had not been able to get that listing out of her mind for days. She wondered if he ever had.

  After visiting Betty in the hospital and telling her about the meeting, about Josie's bubble of self-regard, about Mr. Mole, who looked like Toad of Toad Hall, and then hearing from their mother, between coughs, about the way Roberts had quietly, quickly, and entirely on his own come up with and executed the plan of frightening Josie with Mr. Mole's prowess, Miranda dropped Annie off at home and drove to Charlotte Maybank's great pile on Beachside Avenue.

  "Miranda!" said Leanne, when the maid led her into the living room. "I'm so happy to see you."

  She didn't look happy at all, curled in the embrace of the sofa, a half-empty bottle of Johnnie Walker on the table beside her, a glass in her hand.

  "How is your mother? She was asleep the whole time I was there. Henry's asleep, too, you know. I know that's why you're here--to see Henry. But he's asleep. Aunt Charlotte is asleep, too. I'm not asleep, though. So you're stuck with me, I guess."

  She held her glass out.

  Miranda could not tell if Leanne wanted her to take a sip from the glass or to pour more into it. She took it from her friend's hand and gently set it down beside the bottle. "I came to talk to you, Leanne, not Henry."

  "Me? Poor me. That's nice that you came to talk to poor me. Did you know I am poor? Poor me is poor? I was always poor, but now I'm broke, you see, and so is Aunt Charlotte, who was always going to leave everything to me, so I never really worried too, too much about being poor, because I'm a doctor and I can always earn a living, so how poor is that, but going to Africa to study epidemiology, that doesn't bring in a lot of money, although it does make you realize that when you're poor here, you would be rich there, but Aunt Charlotte has never been to Africa, so she can hardly be expected to understand that . . ."

  As Leanne rambled on, Miranda paced up and down the room. She knew she should be trying to comfort her. This was a financial tragedy of major proportions, she gathered. She should sit down beside Leanne and say soothing things. Instead, she walked to the windows, then back to the door, then to the windows again, and said absolutely nothing.

  "Poor Aunt Charlotte is finally poor now, just as she always thought she would be, and now we really will have to auction the portraits and the chairs and the silver spoons, but she thought it would be death duties, that's what she calls them, total affectation, and now the death duties will come while she's still alive, crazy old thing. Well, at least she'll be able to see her fantasy come true, that's one way to look at it . . ."