Saving Grace (3 page)

Their house in East Hampton was built on water. A landfill had created the spit over which their house presided, protected on three sides by seawalls. The shallowness of the topsoil did not impede the growth of her garden, but rather lent it an air of hectic gaiety, a kind of here-today, gone-tomorrow exuberance, like the bloom in the cheeks of a tubercular. Lily was a loving but rather wistful gardener, always surprised when she reaped what she had sown.

A breath of wind brought the fragrance of her sea-spray roses, and she turned aside to visit them. These wild shrubs were the pride of her garden, hardy plants that thrived on briny air and exuded, not the insipid sweetness of overbred domestic roses, but a heady, dangerous scent, a siren’s call, a glimpse of foreign ports and lost dreams.

But she had no time now to linger in the garden. She was meeting with her friend Margo, an interior designer married to a fashionable architect. Lily drove over and they lunched outdoors, beside the pool. Margo asked, “How’s Jonathan?”

“Fine,” Lily said. “Overworked as usual.”

“Is he coming out this weekend?”

Something peculiar in her voice drew Lily’s eyes. “No, he’s in Albany, giving a speech.”

“And you’re not by his side? Tsk, tsk, darling.”

“No need. It’s not as if he’s running for office.”

“Thank God. I can just see Jonathan kissing babies. Or you!”

“The benefits of nonelective office.”

“So everything’s all right?” Margo asked.

Again that odd tone. Lily hugged herself. “Why ever not?” They’re not having an affair, she thought. Margo wouldn’t do that to me.

“Just checking,” Margo said, and went into the kitchen to get dessert.

Afterward, they went shopping.

In the boutiques of Bridgehampton, the shopkeepers greeted them by name, rejoicing at the sight of them. Lily bought a dozen bars of French soap and a packet of scented drawer liners in the dry-goods store. Next door, in the boutique, she found a silk camisole in a lovely shade of peach. Margo bought a T-shirt for their friend Christina, whose birthday was approaching. Christina was divorced and shopping around. The T-shirt read, “How Do I Love Thee? Let Me Count Thy Money.”

Then they took a few dresses from a rack of cotton prints and went into adjoining fitting rooms to try them on. Margo said, “Robert was out yesterday.”

Margo’s brother was something in the New York City Department of Investigations. They weren’t close and he rarely came out to the Hamptons. “Oh?”

Margo came into Lily’s fitting room, wearing a halter dress. She studied her reflection. “The way they cut these things, if you’re five pounds overweight, forget it. I like that, darling! Definitely take it.”

Lily looked at herself without enthusiasm. She dressed herself as she decorated her houses, diligently, with taste and style but no particular pleasure. As a girl she had scorned fancy clothes, and she got through the sixties on three pairs of jeans and half a dozen T- shirts. When Jonathan entered city politics, he took to wearing suits and ties, which he called camouflage; without actually saying anything, he conveyed his expectation that Lily would follow his lead. By now she didn’t even think about it. Summering each year in a place where clothes make the woman, one adapts.

Lily said, “What did Robert want?”

Margo took out a lipstick and leaned closer to the mirror. “He asked questions about you and Jonathan, especially Jonathan.”

“What kind of questions?”

“Money questions. What is their house worth, and how much do they entertain, and does Lily have her own money?”

Lily sank down onto a stool. “Why?”

“He wouldn’t say. He
ordered
me not to tell you. I said, ‘Darling, do you think you are talking to one of your nasty little paid informants? Lily happens to be my dearest friend.’ “

“Why is he doing this?”

“I thought you might know.”

“I have no idea.”

“Forget about it.” Margo shrugged. “Probably just some political nonsense. Or a routine check; they do that, don’t they?” She put away her lipstick and turned. Her expression changed. “What is it, darling?”

“Nothing.”

“Damn. I should have kept my big mouth shut. It’s just he made such a point of my not telling, I thought I’d better.”

“I’m glad you did,” Lily said. “But I’m sure it’s nothing.”

* * *

She got home late that night, after dinner with friends and a gallery opening. Clara sat in the living room, crocheting yet another sweater for Gracie that Gracie would never wear.

“Still up, Mother? I thought you’d be asleep by now.” She perched on the edge of an armchair, longing for her bed.

“I napped in the afternoon,” Clara said, peering at her work. “The house was quiet.”

Correctly interpreting this remark, Lily said, “You should have come. Margo was disappointed.”

“You don’t need an old lady. What did she serve?”

Lily cast her mind back but found it wouldn’t go. This frightened her. She had sat over lunch for two hours and could not recall a single dish. Clara peered up at her. “Spinach salad with avocado,” she invented hastily, “quiche, lovely fresh raspberries for dessert.”

“What’s the matter,
tochter?”

“I’m exhausted,” she said. “I’m tired of smiling.”

“You worried about Gracie?”

“That’s a chronic condition.”

“Believe me, Jonathan was worse at her age. A holy terror: long hair, beard, wild talk. Big revolutionary. Went out with
shiksas,
even”—she dropped her voice—
”shvartzas.
He got over it, she’ll get over it.”

“I hate to see her hurt. And I
hate,”
Lily said, with more animation than she’d yet shown, “the thought of that bum touching my little girl.”

Clara leaned forward. “You know?”

“I presume. She’s obviously crazy about him.”

“So maybe it wouldn’t hurt her to get hurt for once.”

“I hope you’re right, because it’s in the cards.” Lily got up, stretched and yawned delicately.

“Jonathan called.”

Lily did not reply.

Clara peered over her glasses. “He wants you should call him back.”

“Good night, Mother.”

In her room Lily donned the old nightgown she wore when Jonathan was away. The hotel number was written in Clara’s scratchy hand beside the telephone. She ought to call, to tell him about Robert. Her hand reached for the phone, then fell back. It was all so insubstantial; talking about it would make it seem more than it was. Better leave it alone. She got into bed and pulled the covers up to her eyes, as she had when she was small and frightened of monsters. She would cry out for her mother, who always came at once, as if she had lain awake waiting. Only then, safe within the magic circle of her mother’s arms, would Lily sleep.

Her mother was long gone, though, and of her father, not even memory remained. And one could not call Clara. Lily smiled at the thought of Clara clumping in in her orthopedic shoes, wiping her hands on her apron, saying in her earth-inflected voice, “Monsters?
Vus is dus?
It must be the quiche.” If only it were the quiche, something substantial instead of the vague, nameless fear that haunted her.

A sense of vulnerability is as endemic to wealth as hopelessness is to poverty. If Lily’s anxiety had more specific causes, they were nothing she felt compelled to examine. But during those late nights when Jonathan was attending some function, or in the early-morning hours when she awoke and could not sleep again, images came to her, she saw her good life as a field full of seeded dandelions, vulnerable to every puff of wind, given to dispersion. In the morning, when the shadows receded and she could see her house and possessions arrayed about her, solid and wind-resistant, Lily’s fears dissolved into grateful acceptance.

Lately, though, she had taken to dreaming of death. Jonathan, Gracie, Paul, her parents (resurrected for the occasion), or someone she barely knew; everyone and anyone except herself.

Lily closed her eyes, willed her mind to stillness. She sought the secret place, her haven. In her recurrent dream, Lily traveled alone through Europe, wandering without destination until she reached a familiar place, a city whose name, waking, she could never recall. Through its center ran a wide green canal, where she walked with light steps along a dream-lit bank, moist earth crumbling gently beneath her bare feet. Breathing in the soft, fragrant air, watching the water flow, she felt an air of ease and tranquillity that, waking, she had never known.

Once she told Jonathan about her dream. “The meaning is obvious,” he said. “Canal equals birth canal: classic back-to-the- womb stuff, no mystery there, love.”

He was wrong. He didn’t understand that there are two kinds of places, the ones you go to and the ones that come to you; and Lily’s was of the latter sort. No act of will could summon her dream city, which came when it would and bore with it, like an exile’s memory of home, the power to restore and comfort. Nonetheless, her city was real, it existed somewhere. She knew this because each time she dreamed of it, she awoke with a deep, intractable sense of loss.

It’s perfectly possible to feel nostalgia for a place one has never been. It’s not even unusual. Assimilated Jews long for Jerusalem, Armenians dream of Ararat, Palestinians pine for the hills of Galilee.

* * *

Clara, too, lay sleepless. What was the use of sleeping when her bladder was shot? The incessant surge of water against the bulkheads, whose sound pervaded the house, exacerbated the problem. If she dropped off, she would only wake up in an hour, ready to burst. Or, the thing she really dreaded, wake too late.

Long past midnight, Clara heard the front door open. She fumbled for her teeth, put them in, got up heavily, and trudged to the door. “Gracie?”

“What is it, Grandma?”

“Come, sit a minute.”

The girl sat huddled in the armchair beside the bed, arms crossed, silent.

“Where was you so late?”

“In the city.”

“With that man?”

“Yes.”

“You’re wasting your time.”

Gracie got that look in her eye. “No,” she said. “I’m afraid he’s wasting his.”

“A girl like you can do better.”

“You don’t even know him.”

“I know enough. Where does he live?”

“On the Lower East Side.”

“He rents?”

“A studio “

Clara sniffed. “A grown man, hardly makes a living.”

“He makes a living. Besides, money isn’t everything.”

“Of course money isn’t everything, but without it you got nothing. Your poor father works himself to the bone so you can throw yourself away on some
nebbish?”
She raised her eyes to the ceiling. “Everything she has; nothing she wants.
You
don’t know nothing;
I
know nothing. I grew up with nothing.”

Nothing
was a presence, not an absence, in Clara’s life.
Nothing
looked you in the eye and said: You’re worthless; you live in dirt and you’ll die in dirt; your name will be erased.
Nothing
was banished from her life but forever lurked outside the door, waiting.

Gracie drew herself up. “You have no right to call him names, just because he’s not rich. He’s a man of integrity, a political watchdog—God knows the system needs them.”

“What watchdog? He’s a mutt.” The old woman cackled till she choked, and Gracie had to pound her on the back.

“So,
maidele,”
Clara said, wiping her eyes, “you think you’re in love.”

“I never said that.”

“Libeh iz vi puter, s’iz gut mit broit.”

“Speak English.”

“Love is like butter, it’s good with bread.”

Gracie stood. “It’s no use talking to you.”

“Sit, Gracie. At night,” Clara said, “I can’t sleep, I walk around the house, I hear you crying.”

“I won’t be spied on!”

“A man makes you miserable, that’s not love.”

“You’re the expert, right? You really know what love is.”

“I know. Love is helping, not hurting. Love is you do for him and he does for you. All I want is you should be happy.”

“You want me to be happy? Get off my case, I’ll be happy.”

Then she ran out, and Clara removed her teeth and shuffled in her mules to the bathroom, where she relieved herself. After that she took some seltzer from the small refrigerator Jonathan had installed in her room. Though she’d berated him at the time—”What’s the matter, I’m too feeble to walk to the kitchen, I want a little something?”—the icebox had proved useful. Getting old was not so great.

Her hands were shaking. Razor-tongued Gracie had struck again, like that swordsman on the old TV show
Zorro.
She was a foolish, ungrateful child, but Clara was the last one to expect loyalty from a girl. She knew girls; she had had a daughter once, and lost her, lost her husband too. People assumed Clara was a widow, and she let them, but in fact her husband and daughter, Jonathan’s sister, were alive and well in Israel.