Saving Grace (2 page)

“Of course she’s getting at us,” Lily said serenely. “That’s the whole point.” She sat at her dressing table, watching Jonathan in the mirror.

“What the hell are we being punished for? For giving her a beautiful home,
two
beautiful homes? The finest education, travel, the best of every goddamn thing?” As he spoke, Jonathan paced up and down. Spacious as their bedroom was, it offered little scope for his rage. “What awful thing did we do to her, that she should treat me with such contempt?”

“God knows,” sighed Lily, who also had some idea, but wouldn’t think of voicing it. They had tacitly agreed to treat Grade’s attitude as normal adolescent rebellion, carried to her usual extremes; Jonathan’s question was rhetorical. Catching his eye in the mirror, she said soothingly, “Not contempt.”

“She’s arrogant and hypercritical. Sometimes I think that girl lives to thwart me.”

“She loves you, Jonathan.”

“She’s got a hell of a way of showing it. Thank God we have one normal child.”

“Don’t call him normal in that condescending tone!” cried Lily, Paul’s constant protector.

“I didn’t mean it like that,” Jonathan said, but he had. Though he had long since schooled himself against comparisons, the immutable fact remained that Grace was the child of his heart: She shared his nature; she was, even in strife, undeniably his. Whereas Paul, a good boy, polite, grateful for what he was given, ambitious for more, a kid who knew how to use his advantages, seemed to Jonathan a separate entity, a satellite supported by but unattached to his base.

Paul was a good student who had to work for every
A
he got. Gracie was different, cursed or blessed with both passion and a driving intelligence that had manifested itself almost from infancy. She was a difficult baby, a tempestuous toddler, prone to tantrums when ability fell short of desire, a self-taught reader from the age of four, a politician from the day she started school. In kindergarten she negotiated with the teacher for more free play for the class, and got it. In fourth grade she fought a successful campaign to ban Styrofoam in the lunchroom. In class she was outspoken, attentive and negligent by turns, impatient with superficial explanations, a human litmus test for good teachers. Jonathan had delighted in her conversation, her prodigious vocabulary. Gracie, in turn, adored him. She saved all his clippings and speeches and pasted them into a scrap- book. A photograph of Jonathan with Martin Luther King Jr. took pride of place on her desk.

Jonathan loved his son, but in his life he’d had no greater pleasure than watching young Gracie unfold her wings. Remembering those days before his daughter walled herself off from him saddened Jonathan. He could no longer reach her.

* * *

Alone in her room, Gracie wrote in her diary, which in brevity if not in matter appeared less like a teenager’s journal than a captain’s log.

If he’s after you, Dad said, he’s got a motive. As if I hadn’t thought of that. As if I didn’t know I’ve got nothing to attract a man like Barnaby.

Naturally Dad hates him. Like Jonathan, Barnaby has principles. Unlike Jonathan, he lives by his.

* * *

Jonathan walked through the garden, which was beginning to bloom after a cold April. The rush of city traffic, diffuse and muffled, wafted in on the breeze, but within the terra-cotta walls of Lily’s bower the air was fragrant with a warm earthy smell. He sat on a cast-iron bench beside a small reflecting pond. The water cast up an image of a successful, well-tended man in early middle age, a face still lean but softened by comfort, black hair streaked with gray, weathered skin, watchful gray eyes that absorbed more than they revealed: a handsome, even distinguished face, but not the one he thought of as his. In this, Jonathan was rather like an actor who has played one role for so long that his character’s features have melded inseparably with his own.

He tossed a pebble into the pool, and the image fractured. There was a knot in his gut, compliments of his daughter, tough little Gracie. When she was young and adoring, Jonathan used to brag about that toughness. Now that she had turned it against him, the trait was less endearing.

A stupid misunderstanding had started it all, a molehill she’d made into a mountain. Six years ago, they had quarreled; since that time, Gracie had hardened her heart against him. Her eyes, once full of admiration, regarded him with suspicion. His every word was subject to willful misconstruction. She would not see him as he was.

As a child she used to sit at his feet and beg for stories of the time he and Michael Kavin traversed the country as troubleshooting civil-rights lawyers, Have-Writ-Will-Travel adventurers. Since their quarrel, however, when he told those stories Grade’s eyes would glaze over and she would soon find an excuse to leave the room. All her cleverness and ingenuity, once allied to his, she turned to goading him. And Gracie knew how to goad.

The last fight before the Barnaby affair had been the worst of all. In the middle of a festive family dinner celebrating her acceptance to Harvard, Gracie announced her decision not to go to college.

Jonathan’s head had clanged like a construction site; he could scarcely hear his own voice for the ringing in his ears. “You don’t know what you’re throwing away,” he told her. “For the rest of your life people will talk differently, listen differently, think differently of you because you went to Harvard.”

“There are more important things in life than going to Harvard.”

“Not many. And you wouldn’t know them if they up and bit you on the nose.”

Gracie gave him a look of horror. “How can you say that?”

Jonathan wondered himself, wondered too at the perversity of the fate that caused him to say to his daughter just the sort of that had driven him wild as a kid. Perhaps it wasn’t fate, but some perverse quality in Gracie. Jonathan often had imaginary talks with his daughter in which he calmly, rationally explained his life and values. But even in imagination she was unruly: she answered back impertinently, turned his own words against him, goaded him to anger. His actual conversations with the girl rode the crest of the imaginary ones, so that even before she opened her mouth, he was angry and defensive.

And when she did open her mouth, it was worse. With Jonathan’s inanities about Harvard echoing in the room, Gracie had stared into his face and begun whistling a tune. He’d taught her to whistle, and she was good. The tune was “Blowing in the Wind.” His generation’s anthem, not hers.

Now he sat in the garden and tossed stones at his reflection in the pool. He thought about that damn Dylan song and Gracie’s gift for fracturing continuity. Jonathan was and had ever been a man of his times. By sabotaging the transitional years, she made a mockery of what he had become.

He closed his eyes and inhaled the sharp, clean scent of fallow earth. I know who I am, he thought. I haven’t changed. And if he was a proud man, he had reason to be; for he had faithfully adhered to his principles without sacrificing his family. He had done well and done right, and how many men could say that?

The screen door creaked and he opened his eyes. Gracie was coming into the garden. As soon as she saw Jonathan, she turned and went back inside the house.

* * *

That evening, she stood before Barnaby’s door, panting slightly from the stairs. Apartment 503 had no name on the bell, but a jaunty green feather was stuck under the apartment number. She put her ear to the door and listened for a long time. There was noise from the street and adjacent apartments, but none from inside. He’s not home, Gracie thought. He forgot. The invitation had been vague, tossed off as they parted. “Sunday evening at Maxie’s, a bunch of writers and other lowlife. Come along if you like.” A favor carelessly bestowed. Convinced he hadn’t meant it, feeling like a fool, Gracie knocked once for the hell of it and turned to go.

Suddenly the door opened and he stood in the entrance, a tall, loose-jointed man with a beard and mustache and shaggy brown hair. He had enormous, capable farmer’s hands, an easy grin, and warm brown eyes bracketed by laugh lines. Gracie thought of a benevolent Jesse James.

“Hello, Grace,” he said, smiling down at her.

“I thought you’d gone already,” she blurted.

“Now, why would I do that?” He threw open the door and stepped back. “ ‘Come into my parlor,’ said the spider to the fly.”

She laughed and followed him in.

Barnaby’s apartment was about the size of her parents’ bedroom, a large uncluttered studio with bare arched windows that faced onto a blank factory wall across the street. A covered mattress lay atop a sleeping platform on the far end of the room; a small sofa, two chairs, and a desk with a computer furnished the living section. She sat on the sofa. Barnaby disappeared behind a red beaded curtain and returned with two glasses and a bottle of wine.

“Not up to your father’s standards, but it ain’t Ripple, either. Care for a glass before we go?”

She nodded. He sat beside her and poured. When he handed her the glass, their hands touched. A spark flew between.
 

“I wasn’t sure you’d come,” Barnaby said.

“I said I would.”

“I thought you’d have second thoughts.”

“Why?”

“Have you thought about how inappropriate our friendship is? You’re eighteen. I could be your father.”

“One father’s enough for me, thanks.”

“I meant I’m old enough to be.”

“Want me to leave?” she asked, knowing he didn’t.

* * *

The next morning, Barnaby arrived at the
Probe
to find Ronnie Neidelman loitering outside his cubicle. She followed him inside, perching on his desk with a short-skirted show of leg. “Dating jail- bait now, I hear.”

“She’s not jailbait,” he growled.

“Who is she?”

He knew for a fact that if he didn’t tell her, she’d find out for herself. “Jonathan Fleishman’s daughter.”

Ronnie raised her long nose and sniffed the air.

“What? I got work to do.”

“I smell trouble.”

“Give me a break. She’s just a kid. A sweet, confused kid.”

“He said, licking his chops.”

“Lay off, Ronnie. I prefer mature women, as you know.”

She stood up, offended. Ronnie was thirty-six and gaunt, her biological clock a ticking bomb. They’d been lovers, she and Barnaby, off and on for three years. It was a relationship adapted to the peculiar ecology of New York City: committed on her part, wide open on his.

Barnaby had nothing against Ronnie. She was a damn good reporter, easily the best of his protégés, and when she wasn’t on the warpath, she was funny as hell. If she were a man they’d have been friends. But as a woman, with her sharp tongue, freckled face, and that lamentable nose, she was no great catch.

You had to look at it logically. The way Barnaby saw it, marriage was the single greatest investment a man made in his lifetime. So why settle for a Ronnie Neidelman when he knew damn well he could do better?

The affair had dragged on too long already. Ronnie was getting ideas above her station. Lately she’d been making noises about wanting a baby. Personally, Barnaby could think of no prospect more revolting than a child of theirs. He pictured it as a fat, bespectacled kid with a magnifying glass in its hand, collecting evidence for an exposé of waste and mismanagement in the nursery.

Now she curled her lip at him. “And I suppose your interest in her is strictly avuncular.”

“No,” Barnaby said tightly. “Strictly professional.”

“I see. Does she know what you’re working on?”

“What do you think?”

“Did you get anything?”

“Not yet.”

“You’re a real sweetheart, aren’t you? What happens when the sweet, confused kid lets something slip?”

He scowled. “What do you think, I cover my ears and hum?”

“A prince,” she said.

“Darlin’, I’m just doing my job,” Barnaby said.

2

WITH THE ONSET OF SUMMER THE Fleishmans, like urban birds of paradise, migrated eastward to the Hamptons, where five years earlier Jonathan had converted an embarrassment of riches into a waterfront house and a forty-eight-foot ketch. Part of the deal had been consummated in cash, relieving him of the unwieldy surplus; the rest was a tax deduction.

Although Lily had been deputized to find the house, she knew nothing of its financing, nor did she ask. That was Jonathan’s bailiwick. Strange how life and age had brought them from an undifferentiated sharing to a system of airtight departments, he with his, she with hers; stranger still how their original, equal partnership had imperceptibly become a corporation, with Jonathan as CEO— for despite Lily’s autonomy, there was no doubt as to who reported to whom.

But it was a good life, she told herself, strolling barefoot across the lawn toward the dock. Indeed, it was generally agreed that in all of New York City there were few women more fortunate than Lily Fleishman. She had health, wealth, two beautiful homes, a brace of clever children, and a successful husband who honored her and was faithful in all the ways that are supposed to matter. She had social position and the respect of her peers, and, in addition to their two houses, she and her husband owned other real estate, as well as stocks and bonds and ample life insurance.