Saving Grace (15 page)

“Lots. Mostly reporters. And a few good friends calling to cancel engagements.”

The older woman clucked her tongue. “Here I got wall-to-wall reporters. They keep badgering me. I don’t know what to tell them.”

“Tell them nothing.”

“I’d like to tell them what I think of them, harassing a fine, honest man like Mr. Fleishman. It’s enough to make a body sick. Oh, Mrs. Fleishman,” she cried, “he should be here. Tell him he should be here.”

Poor old thing, Lily thought, he’s got you good. They say no man’s a hero to his secretary, but Jonathan’s always adored him. Maggie’s motherly brand of hero worship was harmless; the last girl had been a different matter. But it would not do, Lily told herself, to think about that now.

She told Maggie that Jonathan surely knew what he was doing, and promised he would call when he got in. She said, “It will be all right, you’ll see,” an assurance Maggie seemed to accept, though Lily herself didn’t believe a word of it. To her, the matter looked quite hopeless.

It wasn’t so much what had happened as how it had happened, falling upon them suddenly, with an air of inevitability. It wasn’t Barnaby’s story, but the way he had crept into their lives through the back door of Gracie’s anger, the way he snaked into the heart of the family, dividing them, setting one against the other. His wily treachery meshed with Lily’s secret dreams and premonitions: she saw with certainty and something close to resignation that their lives were undone, like a singular composition burning in a fireplace, a garden uprooted by a cyclone. And the strangest thing of all was her sense that it was happening
again.
Why again, when until now their lives had been graced by such good fortune?

And yet she was not surprised. Something in her knew that joy is stalked inexorably by sorrow, that good is ephemeral, but evil endures. This knowledge was transmitted through both her mother, who never slept, and her father, for whose message death was the medium. Potent messengers indeed, for had they not known this destruction in their own lives, and had it not come upon them similarly, without warning? Survivors of the Holocaust, they were called, but in reality they were its final victims, dead of seeing too much, too clearly. Innocence may be hazardous, but knowledge is deadly. This principle Lily had applied to her marriage, treading the narrow path between awareness and ignorance.

Now she was paying the price, learning a lesson she ought always to have known. Lily had been a blind woman wandering through a mine field as if it were a garden; now her eyes were open, but she saw no way out.

Sunlight glinted off the glistening bay and the white stucco walls of the house, baking the top of her head. Like her mother’s visitations, Lily’s agonizing headaches had grown more frequent. Sleepless nights she spent wandering through the dreaming house, touching her possessions, doing crosswords, resting on the chaise, counting shooting stars. Sometimes she dozed, only to waken with a start, as if someone had called her name.

Now, close beside her, a voice began to sing:

“Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,

Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.

All the king’s horses and all the king’s men

Couldn’t put Humpty together again.”

That was all. The voice, the presence, were gone as abruptly as they had come. She had no control, no power of subpoena. But lately she had realized that the songs seemed to comment on what was happening to her. Like Humpty Dumpty, her family had fallen and shattered. Not all the king’s horses or all the king’s men would put them back together again.

The commentary was not edifying. It was not charitable. It was even faintly mocking. But it was relevant: communication, not just memory.

* * *

I walk down the street, dressed in black, wearing a hat that hides my face. It’s early, just before dawn. The construction site is deserted. A homeless man sleeps in a cardboard box in front of his building. Silently I climb the stairs to the fifth floor. The green feather is on his door, where the name is meant to be. I knock. For a long time no answer comes, but I keep on banging.

Finally his voice says, “Get the hell out of here.”

I don’t speak. I knock again.

The bed creaks as he gets up. Bare feet patter across a wooden floor. The door opens. He stands before me, shirtless, in a pair of jeans.

“Jesus,” he says.

I step forward. He gives way.

“I’ve missed you, Gracie,” he says. “You don’t know how many times I wanted to call.”

The studio’s a mess. He clears a space on the sofa for me, sits opposite. Empty bottles, overflowing ashtrays, an open carton of congealed Chinese food on the computer.

“Forgive me,” he says. “I find I’m in love with you.”

I open my purse and take out the gun. His pupils dilate.

“Gracie?” he says.

I aim it at his heart and release the safety catch.

“Grace, please.” He holds out his hands. “Don’t!”
 

I pull the trigger.

I watch him die.

Gracie laid down her pen and reread the passage, sighing with pleasure. Then she frowned. It was only fiction. Fiction was easy. Writers put words in people’s mouths, manipulated events, started and ended things wherever they chose. In real life, the story would continue. The cops would come and arrest her. She’d be taken out of the house in handcuffs, photographers and film crews jostling for shots. She wouldn’t care. She would hold her head up high. But her family would suffer. She, who had already done so much harm, had no right to inflict more.

In any case, fictional revenge was no response to actual injury. Gracie knew Barnaby for the worst kind of evildoer, the kind that masquerades as good, and that knowledge carried with it the responsibility to act. There was a hollow, aching core where her self-esteem used to reside, and only vengeance would fill that vacuum.

She imagined Barnaby laughing after she left his apartment, mocking her later to his friends. Humiliating as the images were, they served as a barrier to others, more painful still. When her thoughts touched on her father, Gracie’s face would scrunch up, her knees would roll up to her stomach and her chin down to her chest, as if she would disappear into herself.

It was not his anger she feared, but rather the unbearable burden of guilt: the knowledge that she, unnatural child that she was, had destroyed her own father. For years she’d told herself she hated him. Only now that she’d forfeited his regard forever did Grace realize she’d never stopped loving him. The wrong her father did, he did not do to her; the betrayal was hers, not his.

The crunch of gravel announced the approach of a car. Moments later she heard her father’s voice, calling out for Lily, who did not reply. A moment later Grace heard him in the study, shouting into the phone.

She crept into the hallway and stood outside the room, listening.
 

“I don’t care how many times,” her father said. “How the hell did he get onto you, anyway?...It
is
simple. You don’t take his calls and you don’t return them. He’s just a goddamn reporter...Really. Tell me one thing, Solly. What are you worth today and what were you worth six years ago?... Hell, no, and neither would Michael…Why don’t you take a little vacation, get out of town for a while?... So what? It’s hotter here... Okay, buddy. Talk to you later.”

He hung up. Gracie heard a deep sigh, then silence. Before her courage could fail, she opened the door and stepped inside. Jonathan, seated at his desk, lifted his head from his hands. His gaze touched on her, then glanced off. She understood that he could not bear the sight of her.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I know it’s too late, but I’m sorry.”

“Go away, Gracie. I’m busy.”

She’d expected anger, not the cold disgust she heard in his voice. “I know how you must feel,” she said.

“You don’t. I hope you never do. You hurt me, daughter, more than I thought I could be hurt.”

“I never meant to. I never meant any of it. I thought he really…I was stupid. It’s all my fault.”

She was crying. Gracie never cried. Jonathan looked at her for a moment, then lowered his gaze to the papers on his desk. “Don’t flatter yourself. Barnaby was out to get me. You were just a bonus.”

“He betrayed my trust.”

“As you betrayed mine,” he said, “but I had more call on your loyalty.”

“I didn’t know.”
 

“How can you say that? I warned you myself.”

“I don’t expect you to forgive me. I don’t forgive myself.” She stood, head bowed like a convict awaiting sentencing. Sunlight spilled through the tall paned windows onto the bleached- wood floor and ash furniture, illuminating everything in its path except Grace. She had stopped crying. Her face was haggard and pale. Jonathan was torn between two impulses: to comfort her and to beat her.

“ You’re a fool, you know that? Not because Barnaby conned you. I could write that off to inexperience. But what you said, the way you made me look like a complete hypocrite.”

Now it was she who looked away. Her silence contained echoes of old arguments, and they enraged him. Jonathan struck his chest. “I
know
who I am. Who are you to judge me? Where were you when I marched in Birmingham? Where were you when I was beaten in Selma, jailed in Montgomery? Where were you when Martin Luther King Jr. called me brother? You didn’t exist; you weren’t even a thought.”

“You’ve changed,” she said, as if that were obvious.

“I’ve changed, yes. I’ll tell you how: I now have the power to do more good than ever before. And that power is well-placed and it was hard-won, and you have no right to judge me—you least of anyone. No one has ever called me a hypocrite.”

“Who would dare?”

He stared. “Have you come to ask forgiveness or to twist the knife?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m doing or saying. I only know I’m sorry I hurt you.”

Jonathan stood abruptly and walked to the window, hugging his arms to his chest. Outside, at the bottom of the drive, a black-and-white patrol car wove among the reporters’ vehicles, like a sheepdog herding its flock.

“Go away,” he said, weary to the bone. “I have nothing more to say to you. Where is your mother?”

“In the garden.”

“Naturally,” Jonathan said in a much-put-upon voice. “Perfect day for gardening.”

*
*
*

Clara had been baking earlier, and the kitchen was warm and fragrant with challah. She caught Jonathan on his way out to the garden, emerging from her room with the
Probe.

“Didn’t I tell you?” she demanded, wagging a stubby, ink-stained finger under his nose.

Jonathan let out a groan. “Yes, you told me. Whatever it is, you told me.”

“Be a lawyer, I said. Be a businessman. But stay out of politics. Politics and Jews don’t mix, I said.”

“You also said that in America a man can be anything he wants to be.”

“Can be, not should be,” she replied tartly. “Who needs it?”

“Not now, Mama.”

“But no, you wouldn’t listen. Too much like your father; you had to save the world. So what happens? You stick your neck out, the goyim cut it off. All my life I’ve seen it happen.”

He indicated the paper. “That particular goy’s a Jew.”

“No! With a name like Barnaby?”

“Howard Goldfarb, originally,” said Jonathan, who’d gone to some trouble to find out. “ He changed it.”

“ So Gracie was going with a Jew after all.” Suddenly her face crumbled. She covered her eyes with her hands and rocked on her heels.

Jonathan touched her arm. “Mama?”

Pushing his hand away angrily, she glimpsed her own blackened fingers. Her eyes, enlarged by thick glasses, turned liquid. “Such filth he writes, it sticks to the fingers. Jonathan, you got to make him take it back.”

“What’s said can’t be unsaid. The harm is done. I have to find Lily now, Mama.”

Clara grasped his arm with a grip that could crush a scrub brush. “So maybe I’m a stupid old woman, but I don’t understand what you did so wrong. You helped so many people. So you made a good living—suddenly in America it’s a crime to make money?”

“No. But you see, Mama, Barnaby thinks you can’t do good and do well at the same time, because he hasn’t managed it.”

She huffed. “Jealous.”

“Sure he’s jealous. You should see where he works. He lives in a dump, works in an ant farm—he’s a loser.”

Predictably, her face crinkled with disgust. The uncompromising materialism of Clara’s philosophy gave it the advantage of easy calibration: prosperity was the scale. Jonathan had grown up to the sound of her litany: “In America, you work hard, you do well.” The corollary, less frequently stated though always implied, was that anyone who didn’t do well in America was either lazy or stupid. Now he suffered a moment’s unease, a sense that he was not only playing to his mother’s value system but also buying into it.