Claudia Silver to the Rescue (9780547985602) (26 page)

“Your father.”

Bronwyn raised her hand to the waiter. The palm should have stopped in midair, causing the world to halt and slowly reverse, but it continued to float until it landed on the young man's aproned gut. She turned her widened eyes up to him. “Go away,” she said, raggedly. And then: “Please.” The waiter disappeared. Bronwyn pressed her palms against the table and had it bear her weight as she stood up. The wonky table swayed, and her chair fell back with a clatter. People looked.

“Wait,” said Claudia, rising in slow motion. “It's over.”

“Pig,” Bronwyn spat, and turned on her heels.

Suddenly, the bar erupted in cacophony. Forks and knives shrieked hideously against plates, greasy lips parted, hinged on gaping jaws—

Bronwyn was gone.

Claudia pushed through the pressing crowd, out to the cold street.

Bronwyn had grown. Her anger had made her a giant. Her long legs ate the blocks, one after the other. She would cross the NYU campus and Washington Square Park in a single stride—

Claudia ran after her. She wanted her slap. Her gut punch. A pummel. She would stand there and take it. At least a good-bye. “Bronwyn, wait!” she cried. “Please!”

Bronwyn turned, her face contorted. The girls stood there, mutually breathless. There was a rustle in a doorway, and Claudia could sense a human form shifting among piled sleeping bags and cardboard.
That might be me one day,
Claudia reasoned, and sooner rather than later. “You don't have a father,” Bronwyn said in a low register, “so you think you can help yourself to
mine?
”

“I said it's over. He . . . he broke up with me.” Bronwyn's complexion had soured, and she looked ready to hurl. “Bronwyn. I'm sorry.”

“No, you're not,” said Bronwyn. “You're glad. You
want
to make my family as disgusting as yours.”

“That's fair.”

“No. It's not fair, and you're not sorry.” Bronwyn's tears and snot mingled on her cheeks and reflected the wet light of Spring Street. “And if somewhere in yourself you're thinking,
No problem. This sucks right now, but she's emotional, she's angry, maybe, in a sick way, she's even a little jealous, but she'll get over it and it will be okay
? I promise you, from the bottom of my heart. This will never, and I mean
never, ever
be okay.”

“Okay,” Claudia said. A passing stranger hurried discreetly into the shadows, leaving them in relative privacy. The homeless person in his cardboard yurt was silent.

“What were you
thinking?
That my father would leave my mother? They've been married for almost thirty years!”

“I—”

“No!” Bronwyn cried. “Don't you see? I don't
care.
I don't
care
what you thought.” Bronwyn wiped her sleeve across her messy face and shuddered. “The thing is,” she said quietly, growing composed and distant, “some people are liars and thieves, but on the inside they're good people. You're the opposite. You're a sad, pitiful person who only seems on the outside like she's good. On the inside, you're sick. You're broken.”

It would be useless to point out that Paul was a liar and a thief, too.

“There've been so many times that I've looked at you and wondered what's going to become of you,” Bronwyn continued. “But now I know. It's not going to be pretty. You want a happy ending? This is it, right here. Left on the sidewalk like the stray dog you are.”

“But . . . we're roommates,” Claudia croaked.

“Not anymore,” Bronwyn determined. “I never,
ever
want to see you again.”

Bronwyn turned, and she was gone.

Claudia stood.

After a while, the little street came back to life. A wide window rolled up to let cocktail party guests perch loudly on its sill. A Vespa bounced along.

Soon, Bronwyn Tate would be tucked into a taxi on Houston.

Soon, Phoebe Goldberg would arrive on time at an unfamiliar restaurant, not caring what she was wearing. Not having to care. She would look around for Bronwyn and Bronwyn's mother, and not spotting them, would wonder briefly if this was the wrong Café des Artistes.

Let me just stand here for one more minute,
Claudia told herself, as a bright, festive Friday night in SoHo unfolded all around her.

What will become of you?
Bronwyn's question, which had formed in a cloud of icy breath, was still hanging low over Claudia's head. It might stay there forever. In spring, it would form a dark cloud, and in summer it would rain.

Let me just stand here for one more minute until I figure out what will become of me.

 

Annie Tate bought the boots.

Extravagant, tooled Spanish leather to the knee, and a Belgian designer with an unpronounceable name. The ones she'd imagined just hours before as she'd barreled uptown far below Barneys. She'd let Edith Mendelssohn pour her one for the road—a deep one—and had made her way to the Fourteenth Street stop of the 2 train. She'd flapped to Barneys in her old leather sandals, and washed her feet in a ladies' room sink, and torn the label off a pair of cashmere kneesocks as a worried stock boy with his name,
TODD
, on a discreet black badge, scuttled over. As it turned out, her sweatpants
did
blouse over the top of the boots like cossacks' trousers, just as she'd imagined. She'd refused the black shopping bag and slipped her sandals into the pockets of her old duffle coat.

Now, as she entered the lobby of the Anselmo, the boots struck the marble floors with a satisfying clop. And here was Mr. Pettijohn, of the Lipizzaner posture and Shetland proportions, prancing from his podium. It was Friday night, so the doorman wore his dapper burgundy uniform with the gold brocade, as per the co-op board's request. The jacket vent strained slightly over his ass, an ass constructed high and round. An ass that, in the recent past, Annie Tate would never have admitted to having
noticed.
An ass that before all of this she would have called a
backside.

“Good evenin', Mrs. Tate,” Mr. Pettijohn greeted her, his appreciative little frown alighting instantly on her new purchase. “Now
those
boots are made for walkin'!” And then: “You got Agnes upstairs, and I got a message for you from Martha.” It was their ritual of the last two-plus decades, this lobby report. Over the decades Annie had come to rely on Mr. Pettijohn for what to expect. Annie stood there, in the lobby that had once been the gleaming harbor through which, blown by a sigh of relief, she would steer herself home. She neither wanted to go upstairs to whatever fresh hell lay there, nor back out to the street where she could wander forever or possibly run into someone. “Mrs. Tate,” Mr. Pettijohn asked, taking a step closer—how beautifully shot through with silver his hair had become over the years, how neatly he kept it, how curious its texture, beckoning Annie's hand—“you feeling all right, m'dear?”

My dear.

She
was
dear to him, wasn't she? Annie smiled to herself. And how
aware
he was, not just of her, but of all the Anselmo families—their comings, their goings, their thick, bound tension on the way out to a lifetime of loaded dinners, and later on, their eager dash past him, when the night had somehow righted itself and the promise of monthly lovemaking was heralded by the elevator's gleaming arrival—

“I'm absolutely
fine,
Mr. Pettijohn,” Annie insisted. Still, just to
see,
just as a
foray,
she placed her hand on his shoulder.

“Mrs. Tate . . . ,” Mr. Pettijohn began. The lobby had become exceptionally quiet. Even the trace hum of Central Park West traffic, able to penetrate the limestone fortress as a constant vibration, had vanished. “I got to tell you.”

“Yes?” Annie asked, leaning in closer, observing his poreless complexion, his hazel eyes—truly an extraordinary color. Might Mr. Pettijohn have had a grandmother who was white? Or perhaps full Cherokee?

Mr. Pettijohn considered. He had a business to run, his own business, and it was a tricky one, in that it had so much to do with other people's.

“Martha,” he said.

“Martha?”
Inside her new boots, Annie rocked slightly, but it was wonderful how they held her erect.

“She ran out of here. Looked to me like she may be, you know.” He lowered his voice further. Annie watched his lips move.
“Upset about somethin'.”

“
Martha
is upset?” Annie, whose hand was still on Mr. Pettijohn's shoulder, now applied pressure. These days, Martha called before she came over to pick up her check. “Do you have any idea
why?”
Annie asked, wondering how quickly the news of Paul's infraction had traveled, and who else on the island of Manhattan was in tears as a result. If Martha was upset because somehow she'd heard about Paul and Claudia Silver, then Annie would intercept Paul before he could snatch up the disaster and polish it, for the children's benefit, to reflect a more flattering image of himself.

Mr. Pettijohn shook his head. “She wanted me to tell you she'd be at dinner like you planned.”

Annie dropped her hand from his shoulder, remembering the dinner that Paul had arranged at his favorite restaurant, in celebration of their youngest daughter's new job. She marveled that Paul's plans for dinner might still include her. The first thing Annie would do was throw away Paul's ridiculous shoe boxes filled with Grateful Dead cassette tapes. Then sell the apartment. Then move, to . . . to—

“Café des Artistes,” Mr. Pettijohn reminded. “Eight o'clock.”

 

Edith Mendelssohn placed two small dinner rolls on a dented sterling tray. She draped a snowy damask napkin over them. The rolls, their clefts dusted in flour, came, surprisingly, from a Plexiglas bakery shelf at Met Foods. The heavy napkin and the good silver from her mother's trousseau. The dents from history. When her daughters lived at home, she'd choose a fat challah from a remote Flatbush bakery and drive west with it in the passenger seat of her Karmann Ghia, a bread so full of spirit that she was tempted to secure it with a seat belt. These days, and tonight especially, Edith made Shabbat alone.

The sun had already set, and the apartment was dark, except for a splotch of brightness dumped on a useless corner of the crooked kitchenette by a clamp-on light. Edith poured a jigger of Kedem grape juice into her father's silver kiddush cup and lit the candles as her glass of whiskey melted away at her elbow. She encircled the flames with her arms, and placed her hands over her eyes. The voodoo gesture, straight from central casting, and before that, from Hester Street, and before that, from a drafty shack at the edge of a Polish shtetl, certainly had nothing whatever to do with the Shabbat dinners her mother and her mother's staff had once prepared in Berlin. Edith had learned the ritual—the waving over the candles, the closing of the eyes—from the women she'd met when Claudia was a little girl. This was back when she was trying to be good about meeting other women, Jewish American women from the Baruch faculty, women who, as tan, busty girls in white blouses, had summered with their well-fed families at ghastly Catskills hotels, eager women with recipes for kasha
varnishkes,
whatever those were, and with husbands. Edith had gamely auditioned their ultimately disappointing synagogues so that Claudia could meet a family or two. The idea had been for Claudia to get to see what it was like when there was a father, and for Edith to have someone to call when she needed help, as her own mother had left Edith behind, and visited rarely, and died.

The Sabbath ritual had true meaning for Edith. It connected her to the dead life her family once had, as mourning was the primary responsibility of survivors everywhere, while offering a hopeful glimpse of the world's creation. Week after week, the match scratched the box, the flame erupted in its penetrating whiff of sulfur to lick, then devour, the wick. Week after week, Edith closed her eyes. There, in the brief, fathomless darkness behind her lids, she pictured her mother's Shabbat table, set for eight, for twelve, for sixteen, in the sprawling Tiergarten apartment. The tasteful gold rim of the china, the cranberry tint of the beveled water goblets, the heavy sterling serving utensils in formation. Rika, the sturdy cook, entering proudly with a porcelain soup tureen leaking tendrils of savory vapor. As the Shabbats of her New York childhood came tumbling in—the little table Edith's mother had made in their dingy hotel suite, their pained, dutiful pilgrimages to the Riverside cousins, whose parents had had the foresight to leave Europe a half-generation before, how her mother had toggled between haughty pride and the anxious, driving hope of a handout—Edith would banish them with whispered prayer.
“Baruch a'tah adonai, elohanu melech ha'olam . 
.
 .”
Edith opened her eyes to confront what she herself had wrought—the clear, simple points of flame—and allowed herself to be heartened.
“V'tzivanu l'hadlik nair, shel Shabbat.”
God had commanded her to light these Sabbath candles, and that was something she could
do,
goddamnit. She herself could make something, week after week, that wasn't a mess.

Edith had just begun the blessing over the wine when she heard, floating in on the winter air, a lone jangle, followed by another, then another. She'd cracked the parlor window, just an inch, wide enough to allow a warning. The familiar metallic chords that had once made her fix her hair and open a top button now quickened the pace of her heart with fear. She squeezed her eyes shut, filling the darkness with prayer.
“Boray pree ha'gafen.” God, who has given us the fruit of the vine.
She reached for her glass, filled several times since Annie Tate's departure, with only ice cubes left. Outside, on the other side of the metal door, the lock of which Davy Locksmith had replaced only an hour before, and at considerable expense, the jangle intensified as Robbie Burns made his way through his collection of keys. How long would it take for Robbie to realize that not a single one of them would work?