Philip had been disappointed in Julia before, saddened that in her guilty indulgence she succumbed to Gwendolen’s rages. Gwen had been sent to a progressive school at which the delayed gratifications of discipline and academic success were sacrificed in favor of immediate comfort and coziness, and which placed primary emphasis on the value of imaginative self-expression, time that elsewhere might have been devoted to the studying of parts of speech or long division. Even so, Gwen had never been made to go to lessons, nor to do what little homework she had, nor to help her mother around the house. She had not been taught, or helped, to see her mother as a differentiated individual, for both Julia and Gwen found pleasure in the obsessive and intricate fulfilling of Gwen’s needs, and this shared interest bound them. She had never been told, “no.” Ever since Daniel’s final diagnosis, Julia had devoted her life to smoothing away tiny quotidian discomforts like the ultimate, inexhaustible celebrity fixer, toiling to compensate for that one, huge, unrelenting sorrow. But giving Gwen what she wanted did not mean it was what she needed. “Babies protest if one confiscates the steak knife they’ve grabbed,” Iris had observed, during one of their lengthy analyses, “it doesn’t mean one lets them play with weapons.” Philip agreed and had always agreed—Julia ought to have confiscated the knife long ago, and had the foresight and strength and conviction to withstand the howls. To parent well, sometimes one makes one’s children unhappy, yet Julia had never had any ambition for her daughter’s future besides a nonspecific “happiness.” She doesn’t have to be an astrophysicist; all I want is for her to be happy. She spoke of it as though such a state somehow precluded hard work, or discipline, or focus. He and Iris discussed it interminably. Weren’t there happy astrophysicists? But Philip had always dissuaded Iris when she announced her intentions of wading in, and for that he, too, now felt complicit. They should have spoken. He should have braved Julia’s unhappiness by speaking out—he himself was guilty of the same indulgence.
• • •
IT WAS PASSOVER and Passover was somehow unavoidable, even for so lax and assimilated a family. James’s suggestion that they “pass on Passover” this year was tempting but was as unrealistic as canceling Christmas. And so they were assembling at Iris’s house for the first time, aping normality, just a fortnight after the bombshell. Iris would almost be choked by the commands she wished to issue, by the speeches she longed to give, and Philip alone would hear them all, over and over on a loop inside his head. Julia had already warned them both—it’s not the place to attack her, if we want her to see sense, then ganging up will backfire; if this really has to happen, then let’s just have a nice family evening—but restraint was not Iris’s forte. She would need an outlet, and there was no such edict in place against attacking Philip.
“You can spare me the sanctimony,” Iris told him sharply when he arrived, though he hadn’t spoken. She signaled toward the kitchen with the paper-wrapped bunch of crimson tulips he’d presented. “Go through. If you hush me again, I shall go wild. I’ll be shtum; as instructed, just don’t repeat it. Don’t even think it.”
It would not help for him to say, “I didn’t say anything.” She had heard his thoughts. Together, they had exhausted every iteration of every argument. So much of their map was covered in this old terrain—familiar pitfalls and ravines into which they fell and then revolved together, uselessly. They were trapped in their old roles and their own selves.
Gwen appeared behind her grandmother holding a bowl of cashews, which she was posting into her mouth with the regular swipe of a metronome. Her lovely hazel eyes were blackened with too much makeup, her freckles partially erased with something powdery and pale. “Grandpa,” she said, smiling uncertainly from beneath her lashes, and wiped a salty hand on her jeans before coming forward to embrace him with her free arm. “Cashew?”
“Not just yet, thank you. How are you, maidele?”
“Fine. A bit . . . have to keep eating or I feel sick.” She colored.
Philip watched Iris drift upstairs without obvious purpose, repelled away from their granddaughter like a slow, elegant magnet. Keeping Iris silent would be impossible if Gwen kept referring to her pregnancy, even obliquely. Gwen barely seemed abashed. She seemed almost jaunty. He felt an urgent longing to go home.
In the kitchen he found James laying the table. As they exchanged greetings Philip held out his hand for a bunch of cutlery, to help.
“No, it’s almost done, thanks. How are you?”
Philip lowered himself into the chair he hoped Iris would permit him to occupy for the evening. She had strong ideas about seating plans and might well, though it was only family, have a configuration for this dinner scrawled on the back of a notecard. She was not above asking people to move, if they’d installed themselves somewhere that displeased her. “Fine, thank you. How have you all been?”
James gave Philip a long look. “Put it this way. Blood. Frogs. Pestilence. Cattle disease. Whatever. It all sounds better than twenty-four hours in our house. I must tell you, I’m ashamed. I feel I must apologize to you for my son’s part in all this. You and Iris must have been very shocked.”
“Yes,” said Philip, simply. “But you have no need to apologize.”
“Well, I’m deeply sorry nonetheless. And now we must set it all aside this evening to contemplate the Exodus, so I’m told. I’ve been deputized as bartender; can I get you something? I intend to drink heavily; I advise you to join me.”
“Nathan’s not here this evening?”
“No, we decided . . . He’s studying at his friend’s house for the night. I felt . . . Do you know where the corkscrew is? I just felt he needed . . .” James seemed unable to complete any of these sentences. It seemed likely that Nathan was avoiding Gwen, or all of them, and Philip found it hard to blame him. He, too, had dreaded this evening. He began the arduous process of standing from his seat and abandoned it with relief when James said, “Here it is. There’s only red, for the seder.”
“Red,” Philip said. “Thank you.”
Philip did know where Giles had kept the corkscrew, as well as the several other places between which it migrated in the time since Iris had reclaimed sole stewardship of this house, none of which were where he himself had filed it when he’d lived here, on the shelf beside the bottles. Giles and Iris had shared a distain for his regime and though it had been many years since Giles had moved to Provence, much of the disarray he’d introduced still remained.
Giles had died shortly after moving to France full time, and the two states—being dead and residing in a French farmhouse—had fused in the family lexicon so that between Philip, Daniel, and Julia, one had become a euphemism for the other. It was not kind. Philip had in fact been friends with Giles, and Daniel had also been on cordial terms with him, but the phrase had nonetheless evolved, and stuck. Philip could only hope that, as a man who’d loved the reassuring intimacy of a private joke, Giles would have been forgiving. Daniel had spoken of moving to France himself in the last months of his illness, and had studied his father’s countenance, insisting, with his eyes, upon a small returned smile. Cool, insouciant, hiding his fear to spare them. His brave boy. It’s an obscenity that he is gone and I’m still here. With effort, Philip recalled himself to the kitchen, and to James.
Philip liked James. James was likeable. He put Julia at ease and made her laugh. This year she had become beautiful again, recalling the fragile, striking girl she had been when he’d first known her, where for years she had begun to look—it was Iris’s uncharitable word, though he had had to admit a truth to it—slightly haggard. Now she looked young again, and luminous. James exuded a sort of Viking strength and vigor and, searching for a description, Philip found his first true use for the term “in rude health.” He understood, choosing to steer his thoughts firmly away from his own son’s swift waning and diminishing, why Julia would be drawn to such a man. Now, under extraordinary circumstances, James was proving himself over and over, tested in his kindness, his generosity, his understanding. He had found a clinic, he’d spoken to the psychologist in his department, he’d been the one to source online videos for Gwen to watch, to help her understand the realities of teenage motherhood. Not once, Julia said, had he raised his voice. He was kind to Gwen, and liked her. He understood that gentle steadiness was their only hope for persuasion. He was taking care of all of them. Still. Daniel.
“Pamela told me that she dispatched her travel agent to hunt you down. I’m sorry about that, she’s not very good at taking no for an answer. I don’t think the assembly will be for you, if that’s okay to say. It’s not for me, anyhow.”
“Yes, she sent along a great deal of unusual literature. I’m afraid Joan, the woman she sent, was rather misled to believe that I was simply a nervous traveler in need of a little coaxing so she was terribly embarrassed once she realized. I tried to reassure her that I was interested to hear the details nonetheless. Apparently”—he began to laugh—“Joan’s had terrible trouble finding a source of dairy-free croissants for the breakfasts. It’s made the hotel manager very cross.”
“I think hearing about any of it would make me mad, too. Julia’s just upstairs, by the way, fixing some sort of formatting issue on Iris’s laptop.” James set a glass down before Philip, but at that moment everyone came in together, Iris shooing Julia and Gwen before her and demanding, “Can we sit down now?” as if it had been someone else occupied upstairs for the last half an hour.
They sat, and raced through a perfunctory Haggadah reading led by Philip, prompted intermittently by Julia. Iris had forgotten the horseradish and they were forced to settle for the closest thing in the refrigerator, a squeezy bottle of yellow American mustard. It was then discovered that she did not have a shank bone either, but after scrabbling in the cupboard Iris presented Philip with an organic lamb-flavored stock cube, wrapped in shiny purple foil. She had not cooked, but instead had bought lime-marinated chicken wings and red quinoa studded with tart currants, premade, in the Selfridges Food Hall. Philip had two helpings of salad, which he did not prepare for himself at home, so felt duty bound to consume for its phytonutrients when it was served to him elsewhere (and for the same reason, he had taken a punishingly large piece of parsley during the Karpas). Work had seemed a neutral topic and he enjoyed a quiet discussion with James about a VBAC uterine rupture earlier in the day, called to a halt when Gwen, overhearing, said it was gross and could they stop, please, and he had then realized his own insensitivity. More than once he noticed James and Julia holding hands, beneath the table. By contrast, Julia and Gwen did not speak to one another directly, except for a brief, bitter exchange overheard as they were ladling out soup together. He sensed Iris’s mounting incredulity that Julia, while clearly seething, would not allow anyone to acknowledge the pregnant teenage elephant dominating the room. The evening had a hallucinatory edge—conversation was polite, brittle, utterly empty. Between Julia and Gwen hummed invisible electric wires of resentment, studiously ignored by everyone else. It was painfully, ludicrously English, and he wondered how James could stand it. James’s praise for everything on the table irritated Iris, he noticed, though she demanded this same excessive flattery from her own family. Later James helped to clear the plates, and Philip observed Iris’s disapproval of this, too, watching her dismiss it as both unseemly and overfamiliar. His son had compromised her granddaughter—he was implicated, and culpable, and entirely unwelcome at her dinner table. Philip wished sometimes to be liberated from his understanding of Iris—when they were in company together her feelings sometimes crowded his out; spoken in her rich and strident voice, they were frequently louder inside his head than his own mild thoughts and observations. He was tired.