THE NEXT TIME Katherine called, I let it go to voicemail. I was not ready to face her. After a few days I realized I had to make some excuse, so I waited till I knew she’d be at her weekly hair appointment to call and leave a message. “I forgot to tell you I’m staying with my daughter for a few days while her husband is out of town.”
I hid in my apartment, eating canned soup and sandwiches and past-the-expiration-date yogurt. My thoughts whirled around Katherine, her husband (I couldn’t bring myself to use his name, even in my mind), Iris, Bethany, this ridiculous circumstance.
How could this happen?
How could we have ended up in the same place?
I could not bear this knowledge alone. I opened my desk and took out an earlier letter to Ruthie I’d abandoned because it was so boring, a dumb recounting of meals and comments about health and updates about the weather out my window. Well, it wouldn’t be boring now.
Once I started, it poured out of me, my incredulity, my horror, my outrage. How, I wrote, How could she be married to him? How could I be a friend of a person who is married to someone so reprehensible?
I stared at my writing, noting that I’d answered my own questions. Except there wasn’t really an answer.
I guess people just kid themselves. History is full of criminals who are kind to their pets, war criminals who were loving husbands. How this can be, I have no idea, but it is true. We are able to be two things at once, I guess.
I had an inkling of what Ruthie would think when she read that: she’d say talking about war criminals was over the top. She’d say the situation was absurd enough, and I didn’t need to cloud my thinking with drama. But what the judge did was no small moral lapse. It was capital C corruption.
And the other thing I knew she was going to write back—because she had a generous heart and didn’t want me to be lonely now that Cal was gone and she was far away—was that Katherine probably didn’t know. She’d point out that women of her background were carefully trained to not see anything that unsettled the social order.
That’s what I thought too. At least, that is what I’d decided to think. But I paced to the window, my mind swamped by the bigger question, the familiar one at the root of all of it, which is, how could our Bethany have died?
I put the letter away. I wasn’t certain I was ready to share this yet, after all.
I hobbled from one end of my living room to the other, unable to distract myself. I shuffled through the books stacked on my table. I checked the television listings. I looked out the window. I could not settle into anything. But the pain of the past reminded me of my resolution to connect more with my living grandchildren, who I think sometimes get shunted aside because of my anger and grief.
I fished out my phone and called my grandson Danny. “Hi, sweetie. Do you think you could convince your mom or dad to let me take you out for ice cream?”
“I doubt it, Grandma …” He sighed. “They’ll say it’s a school night.
“Well, tell them …” I exhaled. Danny is eleven and just getting old enough to become a partner in my schemes. “Tell your dad it is a hot fudge emergency.”
He laughed. “Hang on.” Then I heard him yell, “Mom! Dad! Grandma needs hot fudge. She says it’s an emergency.” In the background I heard Pam groan and Charlie say, “An emergency, eh?”
Despite the tears still stinging my eyes, I smiled. Danny liked ice cream as much as anybody, but I’d never known Charlie to resist a hot fudge sundae. Once the seed was planted, I knew it would bear fruit. Or ice cream, to mix a metaphor. There were muffled voices, and Danny came back on the line. “We’ll see you in a few minutes.”
I put my papers back in the folder and stuffed them back in the drawer. Enough.
But it kept coming back. The horrible pull. Absurd as it was, I wanted to be near them. I wasn’t sure why. To understand? I felt captive to a force that I could not resist. All I knew was that there was darkness in it, a draw that felt deep and perilous. And impossible to deny.
It took me almost a week, but I finally managed to tame my churning stomach and go down to dinner. I loitered just off the dining room, leaning on my cane, pretending to read the bulletin board. Each time the elevator door opened, I felt a sickening lurch in my belly. After ten minutes of this anxiety, they finally emerged. I took a deep breath, squeezed the top of my cane till my knuckles went white, and managed what I hoped was an ingratiating smile.
Katherine returned it. “Well, hello. So nice to see you finally! How are you?”
She was as warm as ever. Why shouldn’t she be? Nothing had changed for her. She gave me a hug. “I’ve missed you,” she said, and after glancing quickly at her husband, she added, “Would you care to join us?”
The judge looked at his wife, startled. After a tiny pause he added, “Yes, do sit with us.”
I realized that at some level this was what I’d hoped for. I followed them to their usual table. The judge’s crisp linen shirt had probably fit him once, but now it hung loosely on his rounded shoulders. I saw he wore a ring that matched Katherine’s. Katherine was tastefully put together as always, with an expensive-looking gold pin at her collar.
I was never one to feel intimidated by trappings of wealth, partly because growing up as I did, I was so naive and unfamiliar with money I didn’t pick up on things like the expense of jewelry or the status of a car, and by the time I’d had enough experience of the world to understand their meaning, I was also secure enough not to care.
But tonight, these trappings further destabilized me. I was out of my depth, my various intentions bobbing chaotically around, like my psyche was a flooded basement and I was wading in the dark. I had no real idea why I wanted to eat with them, only that I had strong desire to watch them. Why I didn’t want to scream at the judge, to denounce him publicly, I don’t know, but to my great surprise, I had no desire to. Not then anyway. I knew it would simply make me look like a lunatic, especially in the face of his granite certainty and confidence.
I sat next to Katharine, and the judge was on her other side. There were other chairs available, but no one else sat down. I realized I had never seen anyone else dine with them other than a woman around Iris’s age. “Does your daughter join you for dinner?” I asked.
Nathaniel lifted his chin, “Do you know Lisa?”
“Um, well, no. I mean, Katherine mentioned what a lovely person she is,” I blathered. I cleared my throat and smiled at Katherine. “I just realized you never mentioned if she lived nearby.”
Katherine inclined her head. “Yes, she’s only a few miles away. She stops by often.”
“You and Nathaniel seem very proud of her.” Katherine’s eyes widened briefly, and she flashed a quick glance at her husband.
He cleared his throat. “I prefer to be called ‘Judge.’”
I should have known. “Oh.” I nodded. “I see. Well, I’m sure it is a title you worked hard for.”
He dipped his chin, glad I understood. It occurred to me to insist he call me “Nurse,” but I realized sarcasm might not be the best approach. The absurdity of his insisting on that title in the dining room of an assisted living complex brought the ludicrousness of the situation home to me. I felt suddenly woozy at the surreal nature of it all. I took a sip of water and steadied myself. Katherine asked, “Are you all right? You seem a thousand miles away.”
I couldn’t do it. “Oh yes. I’m just tired. In fact, I think I need to go put my feet up.” I reached for my purse. “But thank you. Will I see you tomorrow?”
And somehow I became a regular at their table. I couldn’t stay away, though I excoriated myself for it. It was like pressing on a bruise or rubbernecking at a fire. Shameful and potentially dangerous, but how could I not, at least … well, I didn’t know what. Try to understand? To intervene? Shame him? Certainly not forgive? Although Katherine, maybe …
Whatever it was, I could not resist the chance to observe them.
Every night I removed myself from myself. Some part of my consciousness perched on the ceiling like a gargoyle, observing, while the rest of me sat at the table and played the role of sidekick and friend to the wife, bearing witness as Nathaniel exposed his haughty nature. One evening when I entered, he was upbraiding Katherine because she’d given a check to a charity without clearing it with him first. “It’s not the money, my dear. It is that you didn’t tell me about it or ask me an appropriate amount.” He stopped and plastered on a dry smile when he saw me. I don’t think he liked me particularly, but he pretended. Katherine had signaled she wanted me there, and she was clearly the one in charge of organizing their social life. Despite his bluster he relied on her for almost everything, including—maybe even especially—interactions with other people.
It didn’t take long before I met Lisa. She was a tall, rangy woman with reddish curls that appeared to be hennaed. She also had piercings running along the entire outer ridge of one ear, and several more on the other. At our second meal together, I asked her about them. Nathaniel stiffened, but Lisa smiled broadly. “I wanted to do something interesting when I turned forty.” She tilted her head almost imperceptibly away from Nathaniel. “I figured they were less permanent than a tattoo, and if I ever needed to, I could hide them with my hair.”
I liked Lisa.
Sometimes Marta, the activities director, would also stop by the table to chat, and once in a while another jazz aficionado, thin and always wearing a hat, also dropped by. I think his name was Carson, but he and the judge spoke solely to each other, totally absorbed in discussing Biederbeck, Bird, and Monk and ignoring everyone else. I could tell it bothered Katherine, but I didn’t mind in the least. It spared me having to interact with Nathaniel. The judge observed social niceties as befitting his upbringing and background, but he did not make conversation easy. I sensed that even his daughter viewed him with more duty than affection. Without Katherine he would have been really alone.
I also saw how she had managed not to know anything about his professional life. She wafted above it all like some ethereal and benevolent presence in a well-appointed temple. How did the old saying go? A bird singing in a golden cage? I found myself wondering: If she had known what was funding her lifestyle, would those Junior League luncheons have been less palatable?
But then she would turn to me and ask me about my health, my observations of the deer in the preserve, my thinking, my work, my memories of Cal, and I’d be filled with affection. And guilt. Guilt for judging her. Guilt for liking her.
Nathaniel, however, did not improve with time. One evening I finally got him to talk about his work. He began to bloviate about how he believed in “the system” and how people might try to manipulate it, but it was really a shining example to the world, etcetera. I almost choked on my food—that is, until Katherine, with her reliably gracious manners, cut him off gently and steered the conversation toward me.
“I don’t think you’ve ever told Nathaniel about your career,” she encouraged. To her husband she added, “Frannie has an impressive résumé.”
“Well, I don’t know about that.” I set down my fork. “But I did love my job. I began as a nurse. Then I went to med school but had to leave when I got pregnant.”
Nathaniel interjected with certainty, “So you stayed home and dedicated yourself to your family.” It was a declaration, not a question.
I cleared my throat. “Not exactly. I went back to nursing and specialized in surgery.” I picked up my knife and delicately bisected a beet. “But of course medical knowledge helped when taking care of my kids.”
Katherine smiled. “Do you remember the day we met, Frannie? We walked to the library together.” She turned to Nathaniel. “My heart was acting up. Frannie noticed and made me sit. She even took my pulse.” She smiled at me like we were the oldest of friends. “Oh, I meant to tell you what my cardiologist said … ”
Her husband twisted in his seat and looked impatient. His gesture wasn’t lost on Katherine, and in a turn of events that couldn’t have been better had I planned it myself, she shifted the attention to her husband. “But I won’t go on about me. You have a cardiac issue too, don’t you, dear?”
He drew himself more upright and proceeded to tell me about the very special and unusual surgery that he’d needed. Apparently everything about Nathaniel, even his heart trouble, was exceptional.
“You’ve probably heard of my specialist. Dr. Max Kunstler? Max—he’s a friend now, we golfed together—is the best in the city, if not the state. We got to know each other because my case was so unusual. Because of some structural aspects of my ticker”—and here he pressed his chest—“and my rare blood chemistry. He was going to write it up for some peer-reviewed journals.” Katherine interrupted him, patting his arm. “Yes, dear. Thank goodness we got that taken care of.” To me she added, “As long as he remembers his pills, things are fine.”
I saw a flare of irritation in his eyes. Clearly he didn’t like being demoted from a once-in-a-lifetime patient, star of peer-reviewed journals and on a first-name basis with the best cardiologist in the state, to an old man who had to remember to take his pills.
A perverse desire to stoke his ego surged in me. “That sounds fascinating. I have worked with many cardiac surgeons.” I had to struggle to stop myself from asking, ‘How did you discover the fact that your heart was malformed, small and twisted?’ But I bit my tongue and rephrased, “How did you first discover your heart’s unusual structure?”
He sent a small triumphant glance at Katherine, and began to detail his conditions. As he went on, I found myself thinking, Yes, please. Tell me all about your heart. And your other ailments as well. About your medications, and when you take them. I want to know about all the ways and all the places you are weak and vulnerable.
That night I finished my note to Ruthie. I left my earlier expressions of fury and outrage, but I didn’t go into any more detail. I just couldn’t. I told myself I just didn’t want to seem to be trapped in the past, after promising her how I was going to be thinking about other things. But a strong instinct told me to hold back, that this was not something I should talk too much about.