Claudia Silver to the Rescue (9780547985602) (31 page)

“No. Two different people.” Claudia briefly considered displaying her affair with Paul Tate as a badge of womanhood, then rejected the idea just as quickly. “They know each other, though,” she allowed.

“Ah.” Edith, too, considered and rejected the idea of announcing her own new singleton status. She didn't want Claudia to think the end of Robbie Burns had anything remotely to do with her availability for a rapprochement.

“I have a new job,” Claudia ventured.

“Mazel tov,” said Edith. “May I ask?
”

Claudia hesitated.
I've just received the Cocksucking Chair in American Letters from Princeton,
she considered replying. “I'm going to be working on
Hope Valley,
” she replied instead. Then, before Edith could offer her guess as to what that was: “It's a soap opera.”

Despite it all, Edith frowned. “A soap opera,” she repeated.

Then, silence.

This is weird,
Claudia thought. This mother and child reunion was more of a
vacuum.
She decided, as an experiment, to hold her tongue. Having picked up the phone in the first place—or maybe it was the phone that picked her—she'd let Edith make the next move.

They sat. The fountain burbled. The greenish light lay over the room like linen. One tourist strolled off, to be replaced by a graying pair, appropriately foreign and clothed in loden. Claudia felt the pounding of her heart recede.

Finally, Edith spoke. “When we lived together,” she said, as though they, too, had been roommates, assigned to the dorm by the big Dean of Student Life in the sky, “I know you found fault with my housekeeping. Dismay is perhaps a better word.” She stared straight ahead.

What Edith said was true. “I . . . I'm sorry about that,” Claudia offered, unsure how to reply.

“The point is, when I was a child, my mother had a staff. And once we came here”—she indicated the marble walls with a sweep of a gloved hand, but Claudia assumed she meant New York City—“she no longer did, and she never learned. And neither, I suppose, did I. I don't expect you to understand, Claudia, but the wretchedness our lives became during the war, and after . . . it was also what held us together. My mother and I. It wasn't that I couldn't picture doing things differently, a different way of life. But doing any better than
she
had . . .”

Edith trailed off, and in the brief silence that followed, Claudia, for the first time in her life, did the math.

Claudia had never been good at math, and so she counted carefully.

She was twenty-four. And Edith, twenty-eight years old when she'd become a mother, had been born in 1942. The same year
they had left.

Claudia ran the numbers again, and suddenly realized.

Edith had never actually
lived
with her own mother's staff.

She'd been born, and then they'd gone.

What Edith had lived with, as a girl, was her own mother's
memories
of how things had been. These tenacious ghosts of the good old days were actually the ghosts of her
mother's
ghosts. Great-great-grand-ghosts. Thin and bound, like paper. Claudia glanced over her shoulder at Mr. Frick's preserved living room, the cold fireplace behind a velvet cordon.
You could hurl the book on the fire,
Claudia figured, but it would help to have a working fireplace.

Edith turned to face her. “Doing any better than my mother did,” she concluded, “felt like a
betrayal.
So when it came to housekeeping, and perhaps a few other areas, I suppose I never did.”

Only a few?
Claudia could have asked. But instead, she kept very still. Edith had never been one for information. But here, in marble captivity, the nervous bird had hopped its way into her palm.

Edith stared out at the fountain. “You're a child at home with your mother,” she said, “and then, quite suddenly, all that is over.” She removed a tortoiseshell hairpin, and plunged it back into her mane. “One is wrenched. Booted. From everything. That's how it was for me. And how it was for my mother. She had lived with her own parents into adulthood, and one day the war came, a war that hadn't had a thing to do with them until it did, and suddenly they were in cars, headed for Marseilles, for any ship that would get them out of there.” Edith looked at Claudia. “We are
booted,
Claudia. By
history.
And we find ourselves on ships.” Edith glanced across the courtyard. “Ah,” she said. “There she is.”

Claudia followed her mother's gaze. Phoebe had emerged from the dim corridor into the pale light. Moving slowly, Phoebe removed her hand from deep in her peacoat pocket and raised it in hesitant greeting.

Claudia looked at her tall, beautiful sister and imagined her mother as a girl of sixteen, in a shirtwaist dress straining at the placket, and pumps and ankle socks, stepping into an uptown hairdresser's to cut off her braids. Claudia imagined her mother starting from scratch. Making it up as she went along, gathering marmalade and teapots and bus routes and hairpins along the way. Gathering whatever she could and storing it all in the basement.

Claudia waved back at Phoebe.

 

By the time Monday morning rolled around, a pair of girls would tower over the corner of Broadway and Houston on a giant billboard. One tall, one short, one white, one black, one with glasses, one with a liar's gap, no dads, both scrawny, looking wise, a pair of scrappers, true-blue. Folks would stop and stare; Ricky Green would eat his heart out and suffer indigestion. It was an ad for
Moxy
magazine, and it would stick. It would say something that made people feel good about young people. About the young people they'd once been. About New York City.

Annie Tate would be en route to meet the realtor about new studio space on the Bowery. She had an idea in mind for a monumental sculpture. It would be an enormous welded-steel bobby pin, visible in all seasons from the New York State Thruway as it thrust up from the rolling lawns of Storm King sculpture park. She had no earthly idea how one welded steel, at least, not yet. But she knew what she would call it:
Je Sais.
Paul Tate would take a leave of absence from work. He would grow a beard, gain thirty pounds, let go of the lease on the Jane Street apartment, lose the weight with help from a bulky, streetwise personal trainer, the kind of guy around whom he would ordinarily have watched his wallet, and finally confess during a workout that it was
he
who wanted to design a new kitchen, with an island and a wine fridge, as the old one depressed him. Darleen Parker, not one to leave Brooklyn, would be neither bothered nor impressed by her sister's starring role on a poster and the sensation it was creating. But as soon as Ramona matriculated at the College of Veterinary Medicine on a full-tuition scholarship, a Cornell hoodie became her new uniform. Martha Tate would move to Northern California and place Married Michael on her annual holiday-card mailing list, cruelly forcing him, in his dotage, to face the image of her three golden children and venture capitalist husband. Bronwyn Tate would get a promotion and within the decade rule the mastheads of midtown; eventually, she'd marry at the Pierre, her father walking her down the aisle. Agnes Tate would register for philosophy classes at the New School (Myth and Politics and Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit) and wake up on time. Ruben Hyacinth, admiring himself in a dorm bathroom mirror on the morning of his fortieth birthday, would notice with alarm a new, turkey-wattle looseness to his throat and throw a cold look over his shoulder at the flushed and snoring NYU senior whose name he couldn't remember. Edith Mendelssohn would answer the door to Dave O'Malley, from Child Protective Services. She would assure him with all sincerity that things were better now. Appreciatively, she would scan his stout, muscular physique, that of a high school wrestler gone to seeded bagels, and offer him a cup of tea and a slice of banana bread. He would accept.

Claudia Silver wouldn't see the billboard until later that week, when she and Garth emerged from the subway, holding hands. But then her jaw would drop. To see Phoebe Goldberg and Ramona Parker towering over lower Manhattan, dignified and stunning, almost as tall as the Twin Towers behind them. The girls and the buildings, guarding the city as they reminded all who gazed upon them to look neither down, nor back, but
out.

Here at the Frick, Claudia watched Phoebe approach. She shoved over on the marble bench to make room. “Mother?” Claudia asked Edith.

“Yes?” Edith replied.

“Do you . . . want to have a relationship with me?”

Gently, Edith Mendelssohn placed her gloved hand on her older daughter's bare one. “I do,” she said.

Claudia was grateful for her mother's touch, and also for the glove that protected them both. She couldn't remember the last time they'd all been together. But as of now, all of that would simply have to be left behind, in the past.

I offer heartfelt thanks to my early readers for the generosity of their time, the wisdom of their comments, the practical assistance they provided, and their encouragement: Dede Gardner, Shade Grant, Ellie Hannibal, Chris Pavone, Karen J. Revis, and Elle Triedman.

To Lauren Graham, Julia Hirsch, Lili Krakowski, Liza Mills, Claudine Ohayon, and Fran Wasley, my deepest gratitude for unconditional and tireless support over many years.

My gratitude to Marian Ryan for her expert stewardship of the manuscript, and to Will Amato for the gorgeous website.

Gail Lerner and Molly Luetkemeyer deserve special recognition for devotion, encouragement, keen creative insight, and unshakable faith far beyond the call of duty.

Thank you, Adrienne Brodeur, for your editorial brilliance and advocacy, patient guidance, and for helping me to envision this book long before it was one.

To Betsy Lerner, for reaching out, holding on, digging in, and naming our baby, I owe this new chapter.

To my beloved John Crooks and Clyde Crooks, my love, admiration, and appreciation. You make me the luckiest gal in town.

 

K
ATHY
E
BEL
is a widely published essayist and poet and her screenwriting credits include
Cold Case
and
Law & Order: SVU.
A first-generation American and native New Yorker, Kathy studied literature and creative writing at Barnard College. She chronicles her quest for restored German citizenship in her blog: Fatherland: There's No Place Like Home, or, How and Why a Nice Jewish Girl Asked Germany to Take Her Back.
Claudia Silver to the Rescue
is her first novel. She lives in Los Angeles.