Claudia Silver to the Rescue (9780547985602) (30 page)

Silence. Footsteps. The lace curtain. The police lock.

“Phoebe,” said Edith, as she opened the door. She looked more exhausted than usual, but a current of gentle relief enlivened her features.

“Mother,” Phoebe replied. Edith's invitation was silent. She offered it by opening the door wider. Phoebe jammed her hands more deeply into her peacoat pockets. “Is Robbie here?”

“No,” Edith replied. “He's not.”

Phoebe stepped into Edith's chilly foyer. The door to Edith's apartment was ajar, and Phoebe glimpsed the exposed brick wall, empty of the poster that had hung there for six years. “Where's John Lennon?” she asked.

“He's headed off to Goodwill,” Edith replied, as Phoebe followed her into the living room. Edith nodded at a pile stacked in the seat of the shredded wing chair. Lynyrd Skynyrd albums, most of a carton of Pall Malls, a large lighter shaped like a skull, a pair of barely worn Rockports, and a variety of mismatched sweats. A pair of bulging Met Foods shopping bags flanked the chair. “As soon as I can find Benny Crackers to help me schlep.”

Phoebe's heart had begun to pound. She didn't want to come in any further. She didn't want to sit, and when Edith inevitably offered her tea, she planned to say no. She took a shallow breath and felt the words about to tumble. “When I was over here the other day,” she found herself saying, “I asked you to sign my working papers and you freaked.”

Edith's jaw momentarily tensed. “Would you like a cup of tea?” she asked.

Phoebe shook her head emphatically, and continued. “There's only one reason I'm back today,” she said quietly. “And that's because you need to do it. You need to do it because it's not right for you not to.” Phoebe's heart galloped wildly in her ribs, but her voice managed to stay astride. “It's not right for you to let fucked-up shit happen on the one hand, but then also keep me from getting a job where I could make my own money and maybe do some cool things.” She took another breath. “And, you know. Start my life.”

“Your life,” Edith recounted, “started in the year of Our Lord nineteen-hundred-and-seventy-seven. I know. I was there. With no drugs.”

“That's not what I mean.” Phoebe looked her mother directly in the eye. “What I mean is start my life without
you.
”

“Exactly what variety of fucked-up shit, as you call it,” Edith scoffed, so as to defend her fear, “have I let happen?”

Phoebe took a step closer, allowing herself to loom over her mother, in the manner of her memory. “Do you really have no idea what his deal is?”

Edith backed away another step and dropped to the edge of the futon sofa. Phoebe lowered her voice further. “At night,” she said, “he comes downstairs to tuck me in, like he did when I was a kid. While you are right upstairs. And . . . he sits at the edge of the bed.” Her voice had begun to shake, but she let it. “And do you know what he tells me?” Edith's face contorted. Phoebe did not look away. “He tells me I'm driving him crazy, because I'm teasing him, and . . . and . . . he wants to fuck me. He tells me that one day, he's going to do it, too. And it's not going to be his fault. And then he puts his hand right here.”

Phoebe thrust her outstretched palm toward her mother, and placed it high on Edith's chest, pushing her back against the futon. Phoebe looked down at the terrain of her mother's frightened face. The pale olive complexion, barely lined. The bare lips with their waxy, plain–Chap Stick sheen. The new gray in her arched brows. “He held me down, Mother,” she said. Phoebe spread her fingers, so that the tips reached the base of Edith's throat, and she pressed. “He held me down like this.” Phoebe's breath had steadied. She could easily encircle Edith's slender throat with her hands. Edith blinked, wildly. “And then he kissed me, Mother,” Phoebe said. “Not just one time.”

There,
thought Phoebe. She pressed her hand against Edith's chest one more time, hard, for emphasis, and stood up. Edith remained frozen. Joyful shouts sped past outside on stolen bikes. The kitchen clock ticked.

For a long time Phoebe had figured that not saying anything about Robbie meant she wouldn't think about it, so maybe it wasn't happening. But saying something, as it turned out, wasn't as impossible as she'd thought. In fact, she'd already done it, which meant it was over. Dust motes danced along the Saturday-morning sunbeams that had found their way into Edith's living room. Phoebe saw her story as it hung in the air between her mother and herself. There was a difference between what had happened and who she was.

“He's gone,” Edith announced quietly. She was looking down at her feet in their boiled-wool clogs.

Phoebe hesitated. She looked around the apartment and landed at the pile on the chair.

“Robert,” Edith said, as though it were necessary to clarify. “I . . . called Davy Locksmith—” But her breath now ran out in a sob. Edith closed her eyes. She reached her hand out for Phoebe, but it simply hung there as Phoebe stared, and so she dropped it. “I may not have known the details,” Edith said finally, opening her eyes. In a slow, pained motion, she stood. “But I came to understand he's very bad news.”

“You did?” Phoebe asked. “How?”

Edith crossed to the fireplace and, from the mantel, plucked a small paper bag from Hector's Hardware. She reached inside. “It was brought to my attention,” she replied softly. She handed Phoebe an old tooled-leather key chain shaped like a strawberry, from which a freshly cut key now dangled.

 

Claudia Silver awoke that same morning in her futon bed to the shriek of the buzzer.

She was alone.

She pulled a pillow into a full-body embrace, and let herself remember what it had felt like, last night, to be in Garth's arms. Standing in the kitchen. At first, not moving. Half-dead. Both halves. Then, feeling the return of her breath. And Garth's breathing, moving against hers, until they were breathing together. The realization that even after humping them both on a five-mile, mostly uphill bike ride, he smelled good up close. Piney. That the phrase
in Garth's arms
didn't cause an equal and opposite reaction.

That she had changed her mind.

Changed her mind about changing her mind.

Garth hadn't stayed, and Claudia hadn't asked him to.

“I'd rather come back too soon than stay too long,” he'd said, having kissed her exactly once, tenderly, with his plump red lips.

When the buzzer shrieked again, Claudia sat up.

A white guy with dreads and his burly Dominican sidekick stood at the top of the stoop, wearing canvas coveralls and winter hats. Behind them, a large truck puffed at the curb.
NICE JEWISH BOY MOVERS
. It was freezing out, and the breath of the men and the truck rose visibly into the air.

“What's up?” Claudia asked, shivering in her bare feet and pulling the hood of her sweatshirt over her head. She was glad she'd pulled it on over her long johns.

“Yeah, good morning,” said White Guy. “We're moving Brenda Tate.”

“Bronwyn?” Claudia asked.

“Her, too.”

“Damn,” said Claudia, stepping aside to let Dominican Sidekick bounce a hand truck into the foyer.

“What kind of name is that?” White Guy asked.

Claudia shrugged. “Money,” she said, as they followed her into the apartment.

“She got a lot of stuff?”

“You tell me,” said Claudia, gesturing to the contents of the living room. The sofa and the coffee table, the rocking chair and the Mexican throw, the Murano glass paperweights and the heavy ashtray, the beautiful books and the bargello throw pillows. “None of this shit is mine,” she acknowledged. It was then that she saw, in the corner of the brick-and-plank étagère, a blinking red eye.

“Excuse me for a sec, gentlemen,” Claudia said, approaching the answering machine. “Actually”—she turned and crossed her arms, eager to don a bra—could you give me maybe five minutes so I can get dressed?”

“Yeah, of course.” White Guy gave a chivalrous tip of his hat as Dominican Sidekick blew his nose extravagantly into a bandanna. “We'll start with the boxes.”

“Cool, thanks,” said Claudia. She turned, and she pressed
PLAY
.

“Claudia Silver?”
said the nasal voice, far less bored than the last time she'd heard it.
“This is your old friend from
Hope Valley,
and I think you may recall that I promised you if you got the job, I'd tell you my name. Well, it's Josh. Josh Spinelli. And I'm calling on behalf of Shelly Gerson, who I am quite happy to say is your new boss. That is, if you can start here on Monday. Give us a call back right away. And welcome to the family. Oh—and make sure to practice exemplary dental hygiene. Because we're sharing an office.”

Claudia stood, and she stared at the answering machine, which also belonged to Bronwyn, along with the portable phone, the microwave, and every dish in the place. She hit
PLAY
again.

Soon thereafter, Claudia dressed, and stepped outside into the bright January morning, leaving Nice Jewish Boy Movers to do their thing. On the corner of Seventh Avenue and Seventh Street, she stepped into the phone booth. It was a bustling Saturday morning on the avenue, and it was just a phone booth. She dropped a quarter into the slot and dialed from memory. The phone rang and rang before it was answered. Claudia's voice found itself speaking.

“Mother?” she said. “This is Claudia.”

 

Two hours and thirty-six minutes later, Claudia arrived at the sprawling marble palace she'd visited often as a child, and took the stairs easily, without deference. She knew, somehow,
exactly
how one would live in the Frick Collection. Not in a
From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler
way, but
actually.
She had always known.
How
she would awaken upstairs. The first, early morning view of her pale-blue ceiling, from the middle of a bed so high she leapt slightly, each night, to claim it.
How
she would watch Cook prepare the farina, and
how
Cook would scold her for dumping in too much sugar, and later on,
how
she would dress for lessons, then later, tennis. What was this knowledge doing in her muscle memory, and who had put it there?

Her grandmother.

Who had brought her here when she'd visited from Europe. They would stand before the big, gentle Renoir depicting three darling, fuzzy blonds, a mother and her two matching children, with muff and doll, strolling the Tuileries. “It is you and Phoebe and Mother,” Grandmother teased. But it was a wistful tease. As though they
had
been this trio of little princesses. As though, by universal law, having been princesses
then
meant they would never get to be JAPs
now.

But the big blond in the Renoir, Claudia now realized as, for the first time, she read its plaque, wasn't the mother, after all.

She was the
governess.

The mother was somewhere else entirely.

So there was that.

Claudia knew the pale entrance to the Garden Court was just a few feet away, at the end of a dim hall. She knew the central pool, and its quiet fountain, would cast the space in a cool, greenish light. A grand, human terrarium, with Claudia and her long-lost mother as tough little turtles, outlasting time—

Goddamn.
Claudia was frightened to see her mother now.

If, in fact, Edith Mendelssohn would show.

The feet, in their black cowboy boots, didn't walk themselves.

Claudia pushed them, one after the other.

At the center of the Garden Court, a lone tourist, strung with a heavy camera, formed a breathing statue near the fountain. Claudia scanned the marble benches for Edith, then spotted, tucked into the alcove window that offered a clear view to the living room, the burgundy velvet hem of her mother's best coat, with its curlicue brocade and gray acrylic trim, and the legs sticking out below, in bulky mukluks, with ankles crossed. It occurred to Claudia now that Edith was probably as nervous as she was. That Mr. Frick's house had been chosen as their meeting place to avoid a public scene, while at the same time, choreographing a tasteful one.

We're all just people,
Claudia told herself, several times, as she approached her mother.

“Hello,” she said, upon her arrival.

“Claudia.” It had been more than two years.

So much had happened in that time, but at the moment Claudia wasn't sure exactly what. She made herself look at her mother for clues. Edith's hair was piled higher and more precariously than ever before, so it must have been longer, and there were a few bright threads of white among the rich brown. But also, she looked the same. There was something about Edith that never got older. She had kept her gloves on.

“It was good of you to call,” Edith said.

“Thanks,” Claudia replied.

“How have you been?”

“Okay.”

“Would you like to sit down?” Edith inquired, gesturing to the space next to her. Claudia wasn't sure, but she sat next to her mother on the bench and unzipped her bomber jacket a few inches. The slice of neon orange lining comforted her. Reminded her of Ruben Hyacinth. Of her very own trail of wreckage, awaiting its monogram. “Anything new to report?” Edith asked.

Claudia leaned back against Mr. Frick's living room window, as though she were
in
it, back from her tour of the Continent, and making a formal presentation, before a roaring fire, with sherry and savories arranged on a low, inlaid table, to a distant mother, who, as a rule, farmed out the messy details to others. “I, um, just broke up with somebody,” she said. “And my roommate moved out.
Is
moving out. As we speak.”

“And these individuals are one and the same?”