— 19 —

“And honestly, did I really want to see my mother, dead by her own choice since 2003, over a Cobb salad or an omelet? No, I did not.”

MARGARET HEILBRUN (DAUGHTER) AND CAROLYN HEILBRUN AND HER PSEUDONYM, AMANDA CROSS

My mother, Carolyn Heilbrun, always liked to sleep well into the mornings and never met anyone for lunch. I didn’t even consider suggesting that she and I have lunch together, so well were my mother’s absolute ways of living familiar to me.

True, she was now dead. Would she, in death, prove more amenable to lunch? It seemed to me unlikely. And, honestly, did I really want to see my mother, dead by her own choice since 2003, over a Cobb salad or an omelet? No I did not.

Over hard liquor was how we used to meet each other in her latter days. At a bar near my parents’ Upper West Side apartment. I used to work nearby, and she and I would meet just after 5:00 p.m., when no one else was in this particular dive. She’d order a gin martini with olives, and I’d get a whiskey sour, a kind of drinking that neither of us indulged in at home.

But I didn’t really want to meet my dead mother for drinks either, truth be told.

On the other hand, her pseudonym, Amanda Cross, author of fourteen mystery novels involving Professor Kate Fansler, was in many ways my mother’s foil. No, Amanda Cross was more than that. She was the manifestation—and creator—of what Carolyn yearned to be: a WASP author writing about an elegant, slim, decidedly childless WASP academic who was an amateur detective, contentedly married, after some persuasion, to a partner whose name and ring she did not accept.

It followed, then, that Amanda Cross would agree to come to lunch with me. She did.

She suggested that we meet on the Upper West Side and that I should pick the place. I proposed lunch at the Utopia, a coffee shop near the Seventy-Second Street IRT, one of the rare holdouts from my childhood in the area. I was in the mood for eggs over medium with a buttered English muffin. Fried eggs are never as satisfying when I make them at home, perhaps because of the prospect of having to clean the frying pan.

On its Amsterdam Avenue frontage, the Utopia now declared itself a “Restaurant” but it had changed little inside. Although I was early, Amanda Cross was already there, in a booth along the edge. She saw me and raised a hand in greeting, an odd gesture with no flexion in the wrist. Rather like the queen, I thought. Carolyn was the same age as the queen and, until she grew out her curly hair and pinned it back—and grew herself out a bit as well—they had looked somewhat alike and had carried the same kind of purse.

Amanda Cross stood up, and we offered each other a peremptory hug, our kisses glancing off each other’s cheeks—her skin was as soft as my mother’s. Settling down in the booth, we both spoke at once—“You’re looking well”; “It’s very nice of you to come.”

Service is on the mark at the Utopia. Amanda Cross ordered a BLT on white toast and an iced tea, while I ordered my eggs, English muffin, and coffee. It’s funny how one can grow nostalgic about lousy coffee with free refills.

Let me interject here that, as you may have noted, I find it necessary to refer to Amanda Cross by her full name. My mother—she of the absolutes—had told me when I was in fifth grade and obliged to read Tom Sawyer, long before I knew of Amanda Cross, that “you cannot refer to Mark Twain as ‘Twain’!” I took this as an admonition about all pseudonyms.

For years, I took all my mother’s declarations as gospel. They carried such conviction. It was decades before it dawned on me that they should at the very least be run through a filtering process, if not disregarded entirely. (I also took the words of my father, Jim Heilbrun, to heart, but he was less prone to declarations and admonitions. Our morning, evening, and weekend caregiver when we three children were young, he once stated emphatically, as he and I read from Minute Sketches of Great Composers, that he disliked Mahler’s music. So I abjured Mahler, admittedly not a tricky task. Years later I found him preparing to record a live Mahler program on WQXR. My father had changed his mind but had forgotten to tell me.)

Our lunch arrived. Some coffee shops don’t manage “over medium,” preferring the efficiency of sunny-side up or the routine of over easy, but the Utopia’s over mediums were delicious.

“How have you been?” I asked Amanda Cross as she negotiated her BLT. She was backlit by sun from the front window, so it was hard to make out her face too closely.

“You know how I’ve been,” she said. “Shall we call it limbo? And by the way, you don’t type nearly as fast as Carolyn did.”

So Amanda Cross knew that I’d been trying to write a book by her. I’d wondered about that. It’s hard to tell with pseudonyms. Perhaps she’d read that New York magazine article, published some weeks after Carolyn’s death, in which I told the journalist that Carolyn had agreed to embark on a coauthored Amanda Cross with me.

It was when Carolyn and I were at that dive bar. “I’ve come to the end of my writing life,” she said after we’d taken a few swallows of our cocktails and had agreed that the weather was far too humid. I wanted to think it simply another of her declarations that I could now, with acquired facility, set aside. Yet it had the ring of consequence, of defeat, about it. She had pulled out her compact and was blotting her face, damp from her walk to our rendezvous.

Now I looked up from my eggs. “It’s funny. The scent of her face powder lingered in her study for months after she died.”

“You sound like a James M. Cain novel,” said Amanda Cross.

“Really, though. Whenever I found myself in her study afterward, I could still smell the face powder. It stayed for weeks and weeks. Then one day it simply wasn’t there.”

“How’s the Amanda Cross coming?”

“Slow progress.”

That last time at the bar. Carolyn, having declared the end of her writing life, was fiddling with her martini olives, stabbed together on a cocktail pick. The bartender, a sweet woman who remembered us from visit to visit, had not bothered to cue up any music yet. The place was empty, save for my mother and me. A long and narrow aquarium, which served as a divider between the bar and the haphazard upholstered seating where we were, bubbled away. An artfully broken Bacardi bottle was nestled on the graveled bottom, with a little aerating deep-sea diver anchored nearby, ceaselessly ready to explore it. A small, whiskered gray fish suctioned algae off the glass.

“Of course it’s not over,” I insisted. “Think of all the things there are to write about!”

“I proposed a book to my editor and she turned it down,” said Carolyn. She had sounded more emotional about the weather. She munched an olive.

“Well, let’s write an Amanda Cross together!”

“Okay.”

Her ready acquiescence to my whiskey-soaked suggestion astonished me.

My eggs and muffin devoured, I looked up at Amanda Cross. “I guess she knew she was going to kill herself in a few weeks. She wasn’t really committing to any other project.” The waiter came by to refill my coffee.

“Who knows, Marg.”

Only my parents and one gym teacher had ever called me Marg, such an unimaginative nickname.

Amanda Cross was looking at me, a solemn stare from the shadows that I found unsettling. I was not up to the task of matching her gaze, so I resorted to my iPhone, faceup on the table next to me. With sidelong glances and one roving finger, I idly checked the time, texts, Facebook, Twitter, and the status of an Amazon order.

“Explain Twitter to me.”

“Well, you share anything you want. It used to be limited to a hundred and forty characters of text, but now it’s double that.”

“What on earth does one say? I suppose it’s like a postcard.”

“Then everyone who follows you—”

“Like lemmings?”

“—can see it.”

“ ‘Having wonderful trip. Wish you were here. Weather fine.’’’

“Well, not really like postcards . . .”

“P.S. I love you.” She quietly half-sang the line from Johnny Mercer’s song.

“ ‘The journey is over. Love to all. Carolyn.’ ” I said the words of my mother’s suicide note as if reading from a list. “That fits really easily on Twitter. I’ve seen it there. Also in Spanish: ‘El viage ha terminado. Amor para todos.’ ”

With a red plastic straw, Amanda Cross was shifting the diminishing ice in her glass. Rattle, rattle, rattle.

I persisted. “She could have gone on a bit longer, don’t you think?”

“Sure. Two hundred and eighty characters, you say?”

“I mean in the note itself. On her letterhead. Left on the bureau in the foyer. I thought maybe there’d be a follow-up letter from her in the mail. One to each of us—her kids; Jim, who was out of town when she killed herself—but there wasn’t.”

“Well, you never know with the post office. It may yet arrive.”

That made us both chuckle. I leaned back with actual delight, and the booth creaked. A memory caught hold of me.

“Remember the laundromat that summer in Oxford?”

“St. Bernard’s Road, 1973.”

“We’d taken our laundry to a place on Walton Street—remember?—and we were on a bench inside near the front waiting for the dryer to finish—”

“We leaned back against the wall—”

“—and it leaned back with us—”

“Into the liquor store next door!”

“Wine and Spirits!” I briefly clutched her wrist across the table and felt it stiffen.

“Remember how the proprietor glanced up?”

“Unfazed! I don’t think we were the first to come through that wall.”

“Then we sat back up, into the laundromat.”

“—where nobody noticed what had happened!”

We were both laughing now.

The waiter placed the check between my mother and me on the table.

I grinned and stretched in my seat. The booth creaked again, and we both laughed again. Carolyn took off her glasses and wiped them on a napkin. “I remember how we used to get lost on highways—”

Funny, our urge to turn a solitary memory into a pattern of recurring moments. “Yes! That time in Connecticut! Where were we going?” I was actually scratching my head, trying to recall.

“I can’t remember. You were supposed to be navigating, but then you collapsed in giggles with the map. That set me off, too, and I had to pull over.”

“On a breakdown lane outside of Torrington. Or was it Waterbury?”

“Well, I must go.”

“To Connecticut?”

She smiled indulgently. “You know what I mean, Marg. It’s been fun.”

“I’ll get this,” I said, standing up with her and surveying the bill to do the math for the tip. “Shall we?”

She was gone.

I left a twenty on the table and meant to move the coffee mug to hold the check and money in place, but I moved a small, flat circular hinged case instead. I opened it. The face powder was entirely rubbed away from the center, but there was a nice rim of it all around the edge. It smelled like heaven.

Margaret Heilbrun has been an archivist, curator of manuscripts, library director, and magazine and freelance editor in New York City. She has curated exhibits as well as published on topics relating to the city’s history. She now lives in a former railroad passenger depot in western Massachusetts.