The Chapel (14 page)

I nodded and ate another piece of pizza. My history with our president was a little more complicated. Mitchell had been an early Obama enthusiast, and during the primary season he was initially amused and then offended that I nullified every check he wrote with a check of my own to Hillary Clinton's campaign. It hadn't been easy living in Cambridge, surrounded by liberals congratulating themselves for finding a candidate whose very existence made it noble and righteous and imperative not to vote for a woman.

When the check came, I insisted on paying. Shelby offered to split it, but I persisted, and she thanked me. To my surprise, Anna didn't object. She seemed pleased, as if the offer was an acknowledgment of something she'd been waiting for me to admit. “Even if it's not a lot of money, it means a lot to me,” Anna said. “You've been very kind.” I think she really believed I was a dowager with a debit card perpetually refilled from Harvard's $30 billion endowment.

Instead of the waiter, it was the bald man who brought me my credit-card slip to sign. While I was digging for my eyeglasses, he tipped the plastic pair off his head and offered them to me. They worked.

While I signed the receipt, Anna said, “Do you know him?”

The bald man said, “
Si, si, si,
we are old friends.”

I looked up at him. I expected him to look pleased with himself, but his smile was tentative and hopeful, and it undid me, or undid a button somewhere inside me, somewhere near enough my heart to make me feel grateful—and a little nervous. I slid the glasses to end of my nose. I said, “
Grazie
.”

He said, “
Prego.
”

I said, “Really.”

He said, “I know.” He narrowed his gaze and his smile faded, and then, very softly, he said, “
Permesso,
” and, with both of his hands, he lifted his glasses from my face. He bowed and went to tend to the indoor customers.

Anna said, “Thank you again for dinner,” and slid her chair back from the table.

Shelby leaned toward me and said, “The bald man—you two were having a moment.”

“Oh, Shelby,” I said, and then I surprised us both by kissing her on both cheeks. “I am going to miss you.”

She stood up, nodded toward Anna, and whispered, “Are you regretting your decision?”

“No,” I said and stood up. The sun had disappeared, and in the endless twilight of that early June evening, the crowded piazza was streaked with crenellated shadows shot through with pale, flickering flames. It was thrumming with life. I turned back to say something to Shelby, but she had moved away to guide Anna through the maze of tables.

I wanted to shout to Shelby. I wanted to call T. and Ed. I wanted to rush into the little restaurant and beg the bald man to join us. I wanted us all to run to the west, catch the sun where it was, and hold it up. I didn't want anything to happen next.

V

I
woke too early on Tuesday. The morning sky was slate gray, and I vaguely remembered a pounding rainstorm in the middle of the night. Something had washed away my good mood. From the window in my room, I saw evidence of the downpour puddled around the ductwork on the black roof below. I briefly lay down on the bed again. I looked around the room. For the umpteenth time, I noted that the red desk chair and the red chair by the door were not an exact pair. I got up and stared at myself in the bathroom mirror, a mistake, and then sat at the desk. There was a black metal safe under the desk, attached to a fiberboard shelf with two bolts I could've loosened with a pair of nail clippers. I returned to the window, put my hand on the white vinyl lever, and thought the better of it. Whenever I twisted that lever, I couldn't tell if the window was going to swing out on its gate latch or flip up from the sill like a tropical shutter.

All of this, and the surprising puffiness of the pillows (good), the mysterious way the overhead light switched off (annoying), my resolve not to turn on the TV (harder than yoga), and I still had a hundred inane thoughts to think.

I probably would not have repeated any of these inconsequential observations to Mitchell, but while he was alive I almost always imagined him at the other end of such thoughts, as if our marriage was like the green patch of lawn beneath the maple tree in our front yard, the place where leaves fell, swirled around, and finally piled up so high and dry that we knew it was time to grab our old bamboo rakes and make big piles to burn, the thick smoke sweet with the harvest of fleeting colors, the incense of another year.

I sat at the desk and pasted the photo of Ed's biscotti palace and cracker chapels into my book. It was not quite six-thirty, and T.'s invitation to a late breakfast was working on me like a prison sentence. I checked my phone, and beneath a coupon for a used-book website and an offer of cheap drugs from a Canadian pharmacy, I found an email from Sam with a photograph attached.

O Captain! My Captain!

I hope the sailing is smooth. And while you are in foreign lands, I thought you might enjoy this little slice of Americana—courtesy of you. Susie and I think of it as the Colonial Corner in our Cobble Hill sublet—and we always think of you and Dad when we're sitting in there.

The camelback sofa had long lived in Mitchell's study, but when I had a hospital bed installed for him, something had to go. That was the weekend Sam hung the flat-screen TV in the living room, so I offered the sofa to him. Mitchell didn't like the idea of it leaving the house. Maybe he still believed he would recover, or maybe he wanted me to pretend I believed he would. I know he didn't like Sam's readiness to supplement his teaching salary with hand-me-downs and handouts.

From the living room windows, Mitchell watched Sam tie the sofa to the roof of the BMW. When Sam came back into the house, triumphant, Mitchell said, “If you found a summer job, you could afford a new sofa.”

Sam said, “I'll think of you whenever I am sitting down, Dad.”

Before he left, I pulled Sam aside and told him to take some of the towels and sheets I'd stashed in the closet of his old bedroom.

He asked if I could spare any blankets.

I nodded and asked him to send his father a picture of the sofa once it was in place.

Sam said, “Wouldn't that be rubbing it in?”

I said, “He knows he is never going to see where you and Susie live. And so do you. You've got the sofa, and his new car. Does he get a thank-you yet? Send him the picture.”

“There's an old wooden chair upstairs in the attic.”

“Take it,” I said. I knew if he stayed five more minutes, he'd ask if I could spare the refrigerator. And if he stayed ten more minutes, Mitchell would present him with a bill for the food he'd consumed since his arrival. They were always disappointed with each other, and time together made them both ravenous for compensation.

Until the belated arrival of the picture, I hadn't known that the chair Sam had found upstairs was the Shaker gathering chair my brother had sent me as a wedding gift, the one authentic piece of furniture in the house. Plus, one of the blankets Sam had chosen was a
patchwork quilt made for me by Cambridge middle-school kids who'd successfully completed the Reading Rainbow program. The photograph of Sam and Susie's sublet was an unnerving glimpse into the future, the museum of Mom and Dad. And now Sam was shopping for a permanent home for his collection.

Susie and I spent the weekend walking around Williamsburg, poking our heads into open houses. There are a lot of new (tiny) loft spaces for sale in the old brick buildings, and we have to be out of here by December, so time to shop, right? I know you said there was more money (how much?) coming my way (when?), and if that's true maybe when you get back to Cambridge we can square away how and when I should expect it? No rush. Not trying to build Rome in a day. Love from the New World.

Mitchell was dead, but for Sam the story would never end. I understood now that he would always want more from his father. And in the sad light cast by this insight, I also saw how often I had indulged Sam because I knew the feeling.

I'd urged Mitchell to settle the inheritance issue before he died. Almost weekly, Mitchell had proposed a new scheme for managing the transfer of money to Rachel and Sam. Many of his plans were wise, most of them were designed to prevent Sam from doing what Sam would surely do with unrestricted access to a pot of money, and ultimately Mitchell left all of that money in trust. He made me the sole trustee and entrusted me with an elaborate binder of handwritten notes about investment strategies he preferred, as well as the percentage of annual interest he anticipated, and his preferred maximum whole-dollar distributions to each child, which effectively created a part-time job for me as a funnel for his largesse.

I took a shower, and every thought I had about the money, and
the kids, and the trust was swept right down the drain along with the fleeting pleasure of the puffy pillows and the other dust stirred up by my solitary existence. I didn't towel off the steam on the big bathroom mirror. If Mitchell had been a better Jew, or if I had been a better wife, I would have covered all of the mirrors in my home after he died, and I would have understood sooner what I understood when I repeatedly looked for my reflection, which wasn't there. From now on, wherever I was, I would always be alone with these thoughts. I was a sentimental warehouse stuffed with old sofas, a matching pair of ancient bamboo rakes, and ironies and indignities and intimacies no one else could understand. It was a relief to know I would be at home by Wednesday evening, where I could lie still, let this stuff drift around and pile up until I was buried.

I put on the hotel bathrobe and wrapped my hair in a towel. I sat at the desk and dialed into my online investment accounts. Maybe it was the amount of money Mitchell had amassed for the two kids, not to mention how much he'd left for me, or maybe it was the soft white hotel robe, or maybe I'd tied the towel too tight around my head, but I felt momentarily like an heiress. I called down to the front desk.

“
Pronto.
”

I thought I recognized the voice. “Ricardo?”

“
Signora Berman. Come la posso aiutare?
”

I was already lost. “Breakfast? Room service? Is that possible?”

This occasioned a long, muffled pause. Eventually, a much younger man said, “
Pronto.
How may I help you?”

“Coffee? Is it possible to get some sent up to my room?”

“No. We have no room serving,
signora.
We have—. Oh, okay. Only if you did have room serving, coffee is what you prefer to enjoy?”

I said, “Yes,” hypothetically speaking. I got the clear sense Ricardo was orchestrating the young man's responses.

“Which is the preferred favorite?”

“Coffee?”

“
Si, signora
.”

“Latte?”

“
Perfetto. Prego
—oh. Okay. If room serving
con succo,
which one should arrive?”

Did he mean,
with sugar
? Unclear. This indulgence was turning into a trial. “Lovely,” I said.

“Lovely?”

“
Con succo
,” I said, hoping I wasn't ordering a whole pineapple. “
Perfetto
.”

He said, “
Prego, prego,
” and hung up.