Senator Susan Waterman leans on the back of the pew in front of me. She looks sophisticated in a checked Chanel suit, with her hair smoothed back into a classy French twist. Power hair. “How do you know about the money?” she asks.
“I found the checkbook. How do you know about the money?”
“You’re wondering where he got it.” She doesn’t answer my question, but I’m not the one in control of this meeting even though I asked for it.
“Yes, I’m wondering where he got it.”
“He got it from me.”
“Why?”
“For the child.” She glances at her preppy aide, the laconic Michael Robb of Bath, Maine, who’s discreetly guarding the courtroom door. “His child with Eletha. Did you know he fathered a child?”
“You know about Malcolm?”
“Of course.”
“Eletha thinks you don’t know.”
“I know that. Armen agreed not to tell me, and he never did. My campaign manager found out before I ran for office, during my vetting. He’s the one who told me. I kept it from Eletha—even from Sarah.”
“But not Armen.”
“Of course not.”
“Were you hurt?” She seems so cool, I can’t help but ask.
“No. It was before we met, how could I be? He always wanted children and I didn’t, so I couldn’t begrudge him.”
Eminently reasonable. “Why did you give him the money?”
“For the child’s education.”
“How much did you give him?”
She checks her new Rolex. “Six hundred thousand. The rest he saved.”
“Six hundred thousand dollars? That much?”
“He needed it for the child. I’ll make sure Malcolm gets it when the estate is settled.” She claps her hands together to end the meeting; I notice that her funky silver bangles have been replaced by a thick gold bracelet. Power jewelry.
“You gave him six hundred thousand dollars for the education of a child he had with another woman?”
“Yes.”
“I find that hard to believe.”
“That’s your problem.”
“Come on, Susan, let’s talk. It’s just us girls. What did Armen have that you wanted, that you paid him for?”
She checks her watch again. “I don’t have time for this.”
Which is when I finally figure it out. Remind me not to quit my day job. “That’s it, isn’t it? Time.”
“What?”
“Armen gave you a year. You wanted him to stay with you through the campaign, and you knew he needed money for Malcolm. So you paid him. You bought him for a year.”
“I needed him,” she says, and I see a glimmer of the lethal ambition that drove Ben.
It scares me. I say exactly what I’m thinking, unfiltered. “What did Armen see in you?”
“I’m an idealist and so was he.”
“An idealist? What are your ideals?”
“I am a liberal, freely admitted. I’m working for child care—”
She doesn’t want children.
“For the poor—”
That jacket is double my rent.
“I’m working for the American family.”
“You can’t buy a family.”
The courtroom door opens and the preppy aide lets Sarah slip through, but Susan doesn’t seem to notice. “You resent me,” Susan says.
I get up to go. “No. Mostly, I don’t understand you.”
“Do you know how important it is for women to get into government? Do you realize the effect we have, the role models we provide?”
“I think I do.”
Sarah comes over, looking vaguely senatorial herself. “Grace, how are you?”
I give her a warm hug. “Get out while you still can, Sar.”
She looks at me, puzzled, as I head for the swinging doors.
“Good-bye, Michael,” I say brightly, on the way out.
“Good-bye, Grace,” he says. “And have a nice day.”
I do a double-take.
* * *
His gaze is direct; eyes clear and intelligent, with a hint of crow’s feet at each corner. His mouth, now that I can see it without the underbrush, looks full, even sweet. His brown hair is trimmed, with longish sideburns. He’s not hard to look at as he sits at the conference table, next to the FBI bureau chief, the U.S. Attorney, Senator Susan Waterman, my favorite mayor, and the acting chief judge of the Third Circuit, Judge Morris Townsend, awake for the occasion.
“That’s Shake and Bake?” Sarah says, crossing her legs.
“Isn’t he awesome?” Artie says, with an admiring grin. “You oughta see him play. As fine as Earl the Pearl.”
“He does look…different,” Miss Waxman says.
Eletha cracks up. “Real different.”
Susan gets up and makes a speech, blah blah blah; the U.S. Attorney and the others all make speeches, blah blah blah. God knows what they say, and who cares. It all sounds the same, each one taking full credit for an investigation in which I heard it was Winn who ended up strapped to a body mike, pretending to be Nick the Fish. On a tip by a secretary who trains toy poodles.
Please.
The FBI bureau chief takes the podium again and a thousand flash units go off, motor drives whining like locusts. He sips his water and says, “I would like to introduce Special Agent Thaddeus Colwin, who has been investigating this matter in an undercover capacity. You’ll understand that we can’t give you the details, because every secret we divulge is one less weapon in our arsenal against crime. Suffice it to say that we are extremely pleased with the results of the investigation. Special Agent Colwin?”
Winn gets up, and the courtroom bursts into applause. He smooths down a pair of wool pants uncomfortably, and by the time he reaches the podium he’s blushing. “There’s something I have to say before you start shootin’.”
The crowd laughs.
Sarah recrosses her legs.
“I’m happy that this investigation turned out so well, but I can’t take the credit for it. The real credit should go to two other people.”
I feel nervous; they promised to keep me out of it. The FBI chief looks as worried as I am; Winn is supposed to hand the credit up, not down.
“One of these persons chooses to remain anonymous, and I keep promises to my confidential sources. However, I have made no such agreement with the other person, and she is one of the kindest and bravest ladies I ever met. She testified yesterday at the government’s probable cause hearing, so now her identity can be divulged. Her name, friends, is Miss Gilda Waxman.”
I look over at Miss Waxman. Her hands fly to her cheeks; her eyes brim with astonished tears.
“Please stand up, Miss Waxman,” Winn says. He claps for her, and so does everybody else.
“Oh, my. Oh. Oh,” she says, from her seat. The woman has never had a moment in the spotlight in her entire life. She looks as if she’s about to have a heart attack.
“Stand up, Miss Waxman!” I say, half rising to grab her soft arm and pull her to her feet.
“No, I couldn’t. Really.” She tries to sit back down, but Artie covers the seat cushion with his large hand, palm up.
“Come on, good-lookin’, sit down,” he says, wiggling his fingers. “I dare you.”
She swallows hard, then faces the courtroom and her fans. She looks uncertain for a minute, then breaks into a shy smile.
34
I turn the Magic Eight Ball over in my hands and read the bottom.
Yes, definitely, it says. Its white letters float eerily to the black surface. I’ll try again. There are only twenty possible answers; it shouldn’t take that long to get the answer I want, and I am a patient woman. I shake the ball and look at the bottom.
It is certain.
Where are all the negative answers? Must be defective. I listen to the stone silence coming from Maddie’s room. She’s boycotting me because I won’t let her invite her grandfather to her class play. Should I invite him
? I shake the ball and turn it over.
Most likely.
Hmmm. I’ll rephrase the question; I didn’t go to law school for nothing. Should we never see Maddie’s grandfather again? I shake the ball harder, then rotate it.
My reply is no.
“Damn!” I say aloud, and Bernice raises her head. “Why don’t we take him, Bernice? He and Grandma could duke it out in the auditorium. You bring the camcorder. We’ll be on Funniest Home Videos.”
I set down the Eight Ball next to the card my father sent Maddie today, which started this whole thing. A short hello, then a list of Italian words, with their meaning. Girl: ragazza. Dog: cane. Cat: gatto. Seems that Emedio “Mimmy” Rossi and his grandaughter got to talking about languages at recess that day. Now Maddie is convinced she wants to learn Italian.
Love: amore. I have to admit, it’s a pretty language.
“Mom?” Maddie calls faintly from upstairs. Bernice looks toward the stairway at the sound.
“What?”
“Can you come up?”
“Sure.” I put down the card, and since Bernice is still cane non grata outside the kitchen, I climb over the gate. It catches me neatly in the crotch. Either Bernice goes free or I get taller.
I head up the stairs to Maddie’s door, which is plastered with stickers of butterflies, frogs, porcupines, and metallic spiders. Here and there is a much-valued “oily,” the goopy stickers that are all the rage with the younger set. Me, I had crayons, eight in all. “Did you want me, Mads?”
“You can come in,” she says grudgingly.
“Good.” I turn the knob, but the door doesn’t move much.
“Maddie, is something blocking the door?”
“Wait a minute.” I hear her dragging things around inside. She must have barricaded the door again with her Little Tikes chairs; they never show that particular use in the catalog. “Okay,” she says. “You can come in now.”
I open the door and it shoves aside the clutter behind it, including a chair, a white stuffed gorilla, and about three hundred multicolored wooden blocks. “So, how are we doing up here?”
She holds out her palm. “Look.”
In the center of her hand is an ivory nugget. I pick it up in wonder. The front edge is the bevel I recognize and the other end is a fragile circle tinged with blood. “Wow! Your first tooth, Maddie.”
“It didn’t even hurt.”
“How’d it come out?”
“I pulled it out.”
I recoil. “Really?”
She nods.
“Let me see your mouth. Smile.”
She snarls in compliance, and sure enough, there’s an arched window where her front tooth used to be. Then she snaps her mouth shut like a baby alligator. “I’m still mad, you know. This isn’t a make-up.”
“I understand. Let’s get the tooth ready for the Tooth Fairy.”
“I’ll take care of it. It’s mine. Give it back.” She holds out her hand.
“Don’t be fresh.” I put the tooth in her palm.
“Thank you,” she says, and walks over to her play table. It’s covered with play lipsticks, plastic jewelry, art supplies, and old scarves I’ve given her for dress-up. She plucks a blue paisley scarf from the pile and wraps the tooth up in it. Then she writes with a crayon on a scrap of pink construction paper.
“What are you doing, honey?”
“I have to write a note.”
“No, you don’t. You put the tooth under your pillow, and the Tooth Fairy leaves you some money.”
“I wasn’t talking to you.”
So cute. My daughter’s first tooth and we’re not on speaking terms. “That’s quite enough, miss. Would you like a time-out?”
“Well, I wasn’t talking to you. I was talking to myself.”
“Fine, but you may not be rude.”
She turns around in her bare feet and thrusts the paper at me. It says, in wobbly red letters: I DON WAN $. T R T G RD. THAN YU. “I don’t do lower case.”
“It’s very nice. What’s this part say?”
“It says, I don’t want money.” She points to the end. “Thank you.”
“Why don’t you want money?”
“I want her to bring my grandfather to the play.”
I sigh in the martyred way my mother taught me. “Why, Maddie? Why does it matter so much?”
“Because everybody else will have a daddy there and I won’t. Everybody else will have a grandpop there and I won’t. Everybody else has sisters and brothers and I don’t.” Her lower lip trembles. “All I have is stupid old red hair and freckles that everybody makes fun of.”
I look down at her blue eyes, on the verge of welling up. There’s nothing in the book about this.
Suddenly, I hear a rustling down in the kitchen, then the click-clack of nails on the stairs. I turn around just in time to catch Bernice before she plows into Maddie. She must have jumped the gate.
“She’s out!” Maddie screams, backing up against her play table.
“I got her. So you busted out, huh, Bernice?”
“Put her back in the kitchen!”
I hold Bernice by her new ten-dollar collar with its gold electroplate heart: G. ROSSI, it says. The dog wriggles with joy at her liberation from the kitchen. Her tail wags so hard that her hindquarters go with it, a living example of the tail wagging the dog.
“Aw, Maddie, let’s leave her out a little. She’s sick of the kitchen. She wants to be with us.”
The dog swings her head from me to Maddie. It may be my imagination, but Bernice’s expression is as close to hopeful as a draft horse can get.
“She’s staring at me again,” Maddie says. “Why does she have to stare?”
“She wants you to be her friend.”
“I can see her teeth.”
“So she has teeth, Maddie. You have teeth, she has teeth. Dogs lose baby teeth too. Did you know that? Just like you.”
“So what?”
A tough nut. “Why don’t you ask her to sit, like Miss Waxman taught her?”
“She won’t do it for me.”
“How do you know? You never tried. Give her a chance.”
Maddie looks at me, then at Bernice. “Now you sit!” she shouts.
Miraculously, Bernice sits. Right on the spot. Her tail goes thump thump thump on the hardwood floor.
“She did it!” Maddie says.
“She’s a good girl. Ask her to do something else. What else did Miss Waxman teach her, do you remember?”
Maddie locks eyes with an excited Bernice. “Roll over!”
Bernice drops heavily to the floor and rolls over an array of wooden blocks; she finishes lying flat on her belly and begging for more.
“Look at that!” I say. “Now tell her she’s good.”
“Good dog!” Maddie says sternly.
“Now see if she’ll give you her paw.”
“What do I say?”
“Say, ‘Give me your paw, Bernice.’”
“What a stupid name,” she says, but even her pseudo-cool can’t hide her excitement at Bernice’s response. “Bernice, give me your paw.”
Bernice looks blank but scrambles to a sitting position, panting. Her eyes remain on Maddie, rapt.
I rack my brain. What did Miss Waxman say? “Try ‘Shake.’”
Maddie straightens up like a toy soldier. “Shake! Now!”
I begin to wonder about the dark side of my little angel, but Bernice doesn’t seem to mind. On cue, the dog lifts a furry foreleg and paws at the air between her and Maddie.
Maddie’s eyes grow panicky. “What’s she doing?”
“She wants you to take her paw.”
Bernice puts down her paw, then raises it again.
Maddie looks at me, then back at Bernice. “Will she bite me?”
“Of course not. Come on, Maddie, just touch it. She won’t bite you. I promise.”
Bernice puts down her paw and raises it again in the air.
Maddie reaches out tentat
ively with her fingers, her child’s hand just inches from Bernice’s soft white paw. I flash on Michelangelo’s depiction of God creating Adam, which doesn’t seem half as significant for western civilization.
“Just touch her, Maddie. She wants to be your friend.”
Maddie bites her lip and reaches closer to Bernice’s paw.
Bernice whimpers and rakes at the air.
“Go ahead. Touch her, Maddie.”
“Can I?” she says worriedly.
“Yes, go ahead.”
And finally, she does.
35
We sit uncomfortably in the darkness, on the carpeted steps that serve as seats in the elementary school auditorium. To the left is my mother, her face carved from a solid stratum of granite, like the dead presidents hewn into Mount Rushmore. Her hair has been sculpted into curls and is as rigid as her gaze, which does not waver from the stage, much less look at me. I figure that we will speak again in the year 3000 or when she quits smoking, whichever comes first.
Making a cameo appearance to her left is Tyrannosaurus Ex, Sam, in a Burberry suit with a stiff white collar. I told him I would picket his law firm if he didn’t come today. He gives me a billable smile when I look over.
Next to him is Ricki, looking entirely entertained, and not only by the class play. She has brought along her three sons so the requisite brothers will be present, and has even offered me half price on the therapy I will need to recover from today. That’s what friends are for, she said with a smile. And she forgives me for lying to her, and even for returning the blue Laura Ashley dress.
To my right, of course, is a man who looks like Robert Goulet and smells like the perfume counter at Thrift Drug: my father. He’s the only one having fun at this thing. He guffaws at all the punch lines and claps heartily after all the songs. He nudges me in the ribs four times, whenever Maddie enters in her costume, knocking the camcorder into the back of the man in front of me. When I finally ask him to stop, he says out loud: “Wadja say, doll?”
So I don’t ask again. I put the rubber rectangle of the camcorder to my eye and watch my daughter take center stage. Dressed as a carrot, naturally, she joins hands with her new friend, Gretchen the tomato, and they take the hands of a bunch of broccoli and several tulips to sing about the things that sprout up in the spring, tall and proud in the warm sun.
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