Isabel, who had been inside a slaughterhouse, privately agreed, but she wanted to see what her cousin would say. “But weren’t those cows only bred—only lived at all—because there are slaughterhouses? Without the beef industry, there wouldn’t be so many cows.”
“Maybe,” Soren said. “But if people ate less beef, they would eat more cheese. We have some great local cheeses in California.” He addressed this last remark to Tina, who was picking her way carefully just behind them, in her high-heeled sling-backs.
“I love California,” Tina said. “I always thought I’d like to move there someday.”
“I thought you wanted to move to Santa Fe,” Isabel said.
“No. It’s gotten so trendy.”
Now they had reached the stream. Dr. Rubin said, “I have no idea what the water quality is, but it looks very clean.”
“Probably it’s full of fertilizer runoff,” Judge Rubin said.
They stood in their good shoes in the dried mud and looked. The stream gurgled and splashed over the rocks. Sunlight filtered down through the trees. It was very peaceful.
Suddenly, Soren, who had been looking intently at Anthony, exclaimed, “I know you! Or rather, I know who you are. You probably don’t remember, but we met in San Francisco two or three years ago. In John Cotter’s office.”
At the mention of the name, Anthony went very still, like a frog that had just become aware of a hawk.
“Amazing!” Dr. Rubin said. “What a coincidence! I always say if you’re talking about German Jews, you’re talking about no more than two degrees of separation. If everyone would like to go back to the house, I’ll make some more coffee.”
“Who’s John Cotter?” Tina asked loudly.
Of course it had to be Tina, Isabel thought later. If she hadn’t spoken, perhaps the conversation would have lurched forward, the frog would have leaped out of the way of the hawk. And would that have been better or worse, in the long run? Would it have made any difference at all?
“The lawyer who handled my divorce,” Soren said. “Both my divorces, actually.” Everyone’s eyes were on him now. “Don’t you remember? You and John were having dinner at the Blue Oyster on Russian Hill, and I came over to the table to say hello. He introduced us, and he was very talkative—I think you’d both had a lot to drink—and he said it was the second time for both of us, and we should make sure we came to him for number three!” Soren laughed.
“You must have made a mistake,” Dr. Rubin said. “Anthony has only been divorced once. Isn’t that right, Anthony?”
“Oh dear. Have I let a cat out of a bag?” Soren said.
Anthony’s laugh was a gurgle in his throat. He opened his mouth and closed it again and looked at Alice. “I was going to tell you,” he said. “I meant to tell you. But things happened so fast.”
Alice was still regal—although cold now in her pallor, as though she had turned into a queen of ice. She looked at Anthony steadily with her pure blue eyes.
“The past is the past,” he said with a sad smile. “As far as I’m concerned, I left all that behind when I left California!” He looked old suddenly, closer to the end of life than the beginning of it. Isabel almost felt sorry for him, wanting one more chance at the young man’s game of love. She waited to see how Alice would dismiss him.
“And a child, I think, as well,” Soren went on.
“Two, actually,” Anthony said bravely. “A boy and a girl.”
“Two children!” Dr. Rubin exclaimed. “Back in California!”
Judge Rubin put a hand on his wife’s shoulder, which had begun to quiver, and turned to Soren. “Do you have children as well?” he asked with an air of getting all the facts on the table.
“Five,” Soren answered with pride. “All boys.” He stood in the middle of the knot of people whom he had reduced to anxious confusion, like a large dog that had shaken itself dry in the middle of a cocktail party.
Alice held her head high. “Yes, the past is the past, I agree completely!” She took Anthony’s hand and held it in her own for everyone to see.
Isabel felt sick. She recognized Alice’s expression of righteous stubbornness, as though any position became admirable because of the purity with which she clung to it. She had found a new cause, and she would fight for it as she always did, with unassailable, impassioned loyalty.
“But Alice, two marriages,” Dr. Rubin said. “Two children!”
“Two, six, ten—what difference does it make?” Alice said, and, having made her choice, she turned and led the way back to the house.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
At Dr. Rubin’s insistence—and nobody wanted to contradict her just then if they could help it—the men stayed outside on the patio while the women went in to clean up. Dr. Rubin trembled as she banged the china onto the counter and went back to the dining room for more.
“Alice,” she said as she returned with the oily fish platter, “this is a very serious situation!”
Alice stood at the sink wearing yellow rubber gloves, loading the dishwasher. “The situation is none of your business,” she said. She looked taller, the way she always did when she got angry, her shoulders squared.
“Alice!” Dr. Rubin repeated. “You’re my daughter, and I love you. That makes it my business! I know you had your heart set on this man, but he’s not who you thought he was. It’s not your fault. You took him at his word. So did I—my God! I’m as much to blame as anybody.”
“This is not about you,” Alice said icily, rinsing each plate nearly clean before placing it in the rack. “It’s my life, and I know what I’m doing.”
“You think you know,” Doc said. “But stepchildren, Alice! Two stepchildren you haven’t even met—two strangers! Who will be a part of your life forever. Who knows how they’ll feel about you, and part of Anthony’s loyalty will have to be to them. It’s only natural!”
“Anthony doesn’t see his children much,” Alice said. “They live with their mother in Santa Barbara.”
“You knew about the children?” Dr. Rubin asked.
“Yes.” Alice’s face grew pink, and she lifted her chin a little higher. “And don’t ask me why I didn’t tell you. I think the answer is self-evident.”
“What does it say about him that he doesn’t see them much? I don’t care where they live! Not to mention having been divorced twice.” Prince was sniffing his way across the floor, looking for crumbs, and Dr. Rubin picked him up and held him in her arms.
“You make everything into such a big deal!” Tina exclaimed before Alice could answer. “I agree with Alice. The past doesn’t matter.” She had agreed with Alice about everything since she had been old enough to talk.
Isabel, who found herself in the novel situation of agreeing with her mother, wiped down the counters and kept her mouth shut.
“Children are not the past,” Dr. Rubin said. “They are very much the present. And the future, too.”
“Maybe,” Tina said. “But three thousand miles is three thousand miles.”
“He lied to you!” Dr. Rubin said to Alice.
“He didn’t lie,” Alice said. “He neglected to tell me something, and then he apologized for it.”
“Being divorced twice is not a small omission.”
“He told me he was divorced,” Alice said. “You said yourself that a man who had a made a mistake would be more likely to know what he wanted!”
“One divorce is a mistake,” Dr. Rubin said. “Two divorces is a pattern.”
“One, two, who cares?” Alice cried. “Remarriage is legal in this country as far as I know!”
“Oh, don’t start with your legalities! You sound like your father, attaching yourself to some abstract principle and not letting go for love or money. Surely you can see that a man who has been married twice and abandoned two children at the far end of the continent is not to be trusted? If he takes his prior commitments so lightly, why should the future be any different?”
“Because he loves me!” Alice
said, and for a moment everyone was silent.
Dr. Rubin’s face sagged as she stood in the middle of the kitchen floor in her neat blue shirtwaist dress, her strong hands with their short, blunt-cut nails clutching the dog. Hands that had delivered a thousand babies, that had wielded scalpels and suture needles, that had touched death. Hands that had braided her daughters’ hair when they were little, sewn on buttons, unpicked shoelace knots—callused now and thickly veined. An old woman’s hands. “Alice,” she said, “you’re a beautiful, smart, lovely woman, and yet you just can’t seem to find someone who sticks! I ask myself if your father and I did anything wrong. We always had such a strong marriage. Did we set expectations too high?”
“Doc, are you listening?” Alice cried in exasperation. “I’m getting married!”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
For a week Dr. Rubin went around in a state of agitation, trying her best not to pour out her anxiety to everyone she met. It was particularly difficult at work, where she avoided Anthony as much as possible. In exchange for a promise from Alice to consider, at least, the issues she had raised, Dr. Rubin had agreed not to confront Anthony about what she called his duplicity. She felt terrible for Alice, as well as angry at her for being so stubborn, but she also couldn’t help feeling that she herself had been used and betrayed by Anthony almost as much as Alice had.
One evening she stopped at Quince Street on her way home from the hospital to beg Isabel to talk to her sister. She slumped on the sofa with her cardigan drooping from her shoulders and her voluminous handbag, so closely resembling a doctor’s black bag, resting on the carpet by her shoes. “Of course it’s hard for her,” she said. “She’s almost forty, and now another door is closing in her face! Maybe she’ll listen to you.”
Isabel had tried talking to her sister, but Alice had stopped listening the moment she understood Isabel wasn’t taking her side. “Now you’re going to tell me what to do?” she had said coldly.
“No, she won’t,” Isabel told her mother. “She’s like an ice storm.”
“She’s like her father,” Dr. Rubin said. “I thought my children would be warm like me, not a set of glaciers. I know Theo isn’t perfect, but at least you don’t have to worry about him running off and leaving you alone with a bunch of babies.”
“That hardly seems to be a problem,” Isabel said.
“I know you girls think I overreact to things like this. But I really don’t think I am in this case.”
“I never said you were,” Isabel said. She looked at her mother’s shoes, the same ugly, respectable, rubber-soled navy flats Doc had been wearing for years. It was impossible to find fault with them, yet the sight of them depressed Isabel. They made her feel as though nothing in the world could ever change.
“I know it’s not easy to get through to her,” Dr. Rubin said. “But if she’ll listen to anyone, she’ll listen to you, Isabel.” She leaned forward and fixed her gaze on her daughter, who felt the intensity of her mother’s will coming through it, powerful and electric. She had heard how, when women were struggling in the delivery room, Doc looked them straight in the eye and said, “You can do this.”
“All right,” Isabel said. “I’ll go see her.”
Dr. Rubin’s eyes filled with a gratitude so palpable, Isabel had to look away.
Alice lived only a few minutes away by car but as they approached Washington Avenue, window boxes and freshly painted shutters gave way to sagging porches and sidewalks strewn with plastic bags. Sometimes there were needles, too, early in the mornings, but there were also families and dogs and the smells of cooking. “I don’t know how Alice can stand to live here,” Dr. Rubin said as they drove down 10th Street. “It’s so dingy. And it’s not safe.”
“Alice has lived here for seven years and nothing has ever happened to her.”
“Touch wood.” Dr. Rubin pressed her fingers to the car’s veneer paneling and sighed. It was one thing for a young woman to live in a one-bedroom apartment in a colorful part of town, but it was another altogether once you had passed forty. Forty wasn’t as old as it had once been, but it wasn’t as young as people pretended, either. “I’ll just go up for a minute and say hello,” she said. “Then I’ll head home. Your father will be waiting for me.”
They buzzed in and climbed the narrow stairs to the second floor, knocking on the battered door that Alice had painted turquoise. Tina answered, wearing a black miniskirt, a black V-neck T-shirt, tight and low cut, and black platform shoes. “Alice is changing. We went shopping,” she said, and smiled. “You’ll never guess what we bought!”
Dr. Rubin sat on the sagging sofa, trying not to look at the cracks in the plaster, the cramped corner that served as a dining room with its wobbly table decorated with candles, at the pass-through to the awful kitchenette. “You girls certainly don’t get your interest in shopping from me,” she said. “I don’t think I’ve bought a single item of clothing in two years.”
“I don’t think Isabel has, either,” Tina said, looking at her sister’s old jeans and faded blouse.
“There’s nothing wrong with my clothes,” Isabel said, eyeing Tina’s outfit. “At least I can move in them.”
“I can move,” Tina said. “This body is made for moving.”
Alice came through the bedroom door. She was wearing a wedding gown, and her eyes were bright with excitement.
“Oh!” Dr. Rubin cried. “Oh, Alice!”
The dress was an elaborate confection of lace and tulle and satin, the low-cut bodice decorated with seed pearls, the sleeves puffed like little clouds over Alice’s thin shoulders. The fitted skirt accentuated her slender waist, then fell away into a train as flounced and gathered and trimmed as any piece of material could dream of being. Diaphanous gloves began at the knuckle and stretched to the elbow, revealing only an inch or two of freckled arm below the sleeve, and a white veil fell from a beaded circlet covering her hair. Alice glowed palely amid the billows of white, barely visible, like a moon in daytime.
“Oh,” Dr. Rubin said again. “You look like a dream!” She blinked. She had waited so long to see a daughter of hers in a real wedding gown.
Tina beamed. “You belong on the cover of American Bride.”
“What do you think, Isabel?” Alice asked.
Isabel smiled uneasily from the sofa. She hardly recognized Alice under all the fabric. “It’s very—frothy,” she said.
“It’s not frothy, it’s elegant!” Tina said. “Not everyone would choose to be married in a—” For a moment Isabel thought Tina was going to say “shmatte,” but she came up with “sundress” instead, which was what Isabel had worn when she married Theo.
“It’s beautiful,” Isabel said. “Only I didn’t think you were quite at the—dress-buying stage yet.”
“We didn’t start out shopping for wedding dresses,” Alice said. “Only we passed this store and we thought we’d just peek inside. Didn’t we, Tina?”
Dr. Rubin stared at her eldest daughter. If she lowered her eyes, she could begin to remember that Alice was rushing into a bad situation that was likely to bring her grief. But again and again her gaze was drawn up to the shining, pearly, luminous mass of bridal lace, and the sight dazzled her. And after all, Anthony seemed to love Alice. He would rescue her from these sordid rooms, the sirens at night. Roaches. She could not speak.
“The thing is, Alice,” Isabel said, “everything has happened so fast. What’s the big hurry?” She knew she needed to be more eloquent than this, but Alice intimidated her. It was as though she were still twelve and Alice fifteen, unimaginably smart and grown up.
“I’m thirty-eight years old,” Alice said with a hint of exasperation. “I wouldn’t say I’ve been in a particular hurry.”
“You’re too reasonable to do something just because other people are against it,” Isabel said, wishing it were true. “And what kind of man is on his third marriage at his age?” Our age, she thought. She remembered Theo’s doubts about Anthony. How clear-sighted they h
ad turned out to be.
“I can’t believe you’re taking Doc’s side,” Alice said.
“Doc has a point,” Isabel said.
“It’s infuriating as well as humiliating,” Alice said, “to have the whole family discussing something that isn’t anyone’s business! We all make mistakes. Even you, Isabel.” She gave her sister a sharp look. “I wish you would trust me to decide what imperfections I’m willing to forgive in the man I love! I love Anthony, and he loves me, and it’s the first time in my life I can say that.”
Dr. Rubin couldn’t stand it anymore. She broke in, “That’s not what Isabel meant. Is it, Isabel?”
Isabel stared at her mother.
“I think we all need to accept things and do our best to enjoy Alice’s happiness,” Dr. Rubin said. “God knows she’s waited long enough for it! And you know I like Anthony.”
“Doc!” Isabel said.
“Oh, Isabel,” Dr. Rubin said unhappily. “I never said I was absolutely against it.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Early in July, Isabel invited Alice and Anthony to dinner. “Be nice to him,” she told Theo.
“Why wouldn’t I be nice to him?” Theo said.
“I don’t want Alice to think we don’t like him.”
“Alice always thinks exactly what she wants to think.”
“I’m just saying. You can be abrasive. Or you can be charming. I’m asking you to be charming.”
“I feel maligned,” Theo said.
When their guests arrived, however, Theo greeted them warmly at the door. He made a show of embracing Alice, shook Anthony’s hand heartily, then proceeded to congratulate them until Isabel sent him to the kitchen for drinks. “You should have bought champagne,” he called to Isabel from the kitchen. “How can we toast an engagement without champagne? Or, since Anthony’s from California, some sparkling California wine. You make some good sparkling wine out there, don’t you, Anthony? Of course they’re not allowed to call it ‘champagne.’ What do they call it? ‘Sonoma’?”
Anthony laughed good-naturedly. “They have some good sparkling wines, but nothing like real French champagne. Of course, California cabernets are very good.”
This Side of Married Page 9