The Great Man (23 page)

“How is everything, boys?” she asked with a cheer she didn’t feel.

“He’s in a good mood today,” said Marcus, who always seemed to be able to divine things going on in Ethan that even his mother couldn’t. Marcus was a large, sweet black man who had told Abigail he had eight children at home. He seemed much too young to her to have any, but she knew that the older she got, the younger everyone else seemed. Marcus’s head was large and round, and his face gleamed with sweat and goodwill. He didn’t seem entirely human.

“Glad to hear it,” said Abigail. She backed out of Ethan’s room and went to her quiet, dark bedroom to lie down for a little while. Her bed was broad and comfortable; she lay on top of the bedspread with her shoes on. She intended to lie there for five minutes, then get up and make lunch, but when she awoke, her pillow was soaked with sweat, her hair was damp, and her mouth was dry. She sat up, befuddled. The clock said it was nearly noon. She had been asleep for two hours. She leapt up and, patting her head to smooth her hair, rushed to the kitchen. She stood there blinking for a moment, trying to orient herself, then sat down in the breakfast nook and pored over the recipes, trying to get her mind around how she would do all those things in time for Samantha’s arrival in half an hour. Picturing herself from an aerial perspective, she had an image of herself as a rumpled old woman in a dull apartment with a weird son, mussed hair, and nothing good to eat. Meanwhile, Samantha’s mother cooked exciting food, always looked glamorous, and lived in an interesting house; Abigail had always suspected this. She started to weep with self-pity. This was extremely unlike her. She shook herself, dried her eyes on a napkin. Of course this was just silly, irrational anxiety. She was nervous. That was all. There was nothing to be afraid of: This was Oscar’s daughter, after all, Oscar, whom Abigail had known as well as she knew herself.

When the doorman called to say that Samantha was on her way up, Abigail had managed to cut the cantaloupe in half and get the scrubbed potatoes in some simmering water. She wiped her brow with the back of her hand and went to the door.

“Hello,” she said, opening it, squinting at the figures in the brightly lit hallway. “I’m Abigail Feldman. Please come in!”

“Thank you,” came a woman’s voice. “Come on, Buster, let’s go.”

Abigail led them back to the kitchen and gestured to the breakfast nook. “Please sit down,” she said. “Oh, shoot! What do I have to offer your kids to drink?”

“Oh, I brought stuff for the kids, don’t worry,” said Samantha. She stood in the center of the room, a tall, rather ungainly young woman with flyaway dark hair and a baby riding on her hip, a little boy clinging possessively to her legs. She looked like a less remarkable, more pragmatic version of Teddy. She was painfully thin and seemed harried and tense.

“It’s really so nice to meet you finally,” said Abigail, oddly at ease now that she saw who Samantha was.

“Oh,” said Samantha, “thanks for inviting us. We can’t stay too long, don’t worry.”

“I was just in the middle of cooking lunch,” said Abigail. “Sit down. Would you like…” She regarded her, thought for an instant. “A beer? I think I have one or two bottles in the icebox.”

“Would I like a beer,” said Samantha with a longing little laugh. “God, would I. But I’m breast-feeding, so I better not.”

“I’ve read on-line that a little beer is good for breast milk,” Abigail said, feeling protective toward this gaunt, unhappy creature. “It’s got B vitamins or something.”

“My husband would kill me.” Samantha sat on the breakfast-nook bench, settled the little boy next to her, rummaged around in her enormous bag, and produced a small box of apple juice with a miniature straw protruding from it, which he began sucking on aggressively. “Can I help you cook?” she asked then, looking up at Abigail, suddenly bright-eyed.

Abigail handed her the cold bottle of Tecate she’d opened. “Oh gosh,” she said. “I don’t know. I was going to make an elaborate feast, but I…fell asleep.”

Samantha laughed. “I do that all the time. Big plans, then I conk out the minute these two go down.”

“I have no such excuse,” said Abigail.

The little boy squealed and slapped his baby sister, who smiled and blinked. He gave a wild-eyed grin to no one in particular. He looked like an evil little elf. He was about three years old, pale and thin, with bluish circles under his eyes and a fragile neck, but Abigail could see the potential for explosiveness in the manic corners of his mouth, his eyes darting to adults’ faces to gauge their reaction to him, the kinetic restlessness of his limbs. His baby sister was, by way of contrast, fat, placid, and unassuming.

“Buster, no,” said Samantha. “That’s uncalled for.”

Buster laughed at his mother, his whole face perverse and gleeful.

“Hey, Buster,” Abigail said, “I bet you can’t count backward from ten.”

He looked up at her. “Yeah I can.”

Abigail sat at the other end of the bench. “Come here and sit in my lap and prove it to me.”

Buster climbed into Abigail’s lap. “Ten nine seven,” he shouted, nestling against her. “Five three four one.”

“That is very good!” Abigail said, smiling at Samantha, who didn’t smile back. “I think you might have missed a few, though. Want to try one more time?”

He leapt off her lap and went over to the refrigerator, where he began making smeary palm prints on the shiny whiteness.

Abigail produced her two recipes. “I was going to make these. I got as far as boiling the potatoes.”

Samantha took them from her and looked them over. “Oh, how nice. But so much trouble! We could just have boiled potatoes and sliced cantaloupe.”

“You could use a good meal, looks like,” Abigail blurted. “Oh, gosh, I’m sorry.”

Samantha looked at Abigail. Then she took a slug of beer. “I’m too thin,” she said.

“Well, compared to me, anyone would be,” said Abigail.

“Since the kids were born, I just run around all the time.”

“Drink your beer. Put your feet up. I’m going to make this salad. Maxine was talking about tuna fish this morning and she got me craving it. What’s your little girl’s name?”

“Josephine,” said Samantha. “We named her after my husband’s grandmother. My husband is Ivan Sandusky. He’s a research scientist. He’s the smart one. I used to be a painter, but I gave it up when I had kids. I was into watercolor still lifes. Nothing like my father’s work at all. I was never going to set the art world on fire, so it’s no great loss, but I do miss it sometimes.”

“You should take it up again,” said Abigail.

“Maybe someday,” said Samantha. “For now, I want to concentrate on the kids. They grow up and leave before you know it. I don’t want to miss out.”

“
Some
of them grow up and leave,” said Abigail, smiling.

“Oh!” said Samantha.

“Gallows humor,” said Abigail. She got up and rinsed the green beans in a colander. Then she sat down again and began to snap their noses and tails off.

“Oh, I can do that,” said Samantha with beery enthusiasm. She took the colander of beans from Abigail and began snapping them.

Abigail got up and pulled things from the shopping bag. “Let’s see,” she said, peering at the recipe. “A simple vinaigrette with shallots. Shouldn’t be too hard.”

“Want me to chop the shallots?” Samantha asked. “I wear contact lenses. I don’t cry when I cut oniony things; I think the lenses protect me.”

Abigail handed her the shallots, a knife, and a cutting board. She had been silently taking the measure of this daughter of her husband, assessing her. She was slightly nonplussed by how daughterly she was, how easily she had fallen into the role of younger, subservient, agreeable girl with a strange older woman; her affable chattiness didn’t match her drawn face. No wonder she was under so much stress; it must have taken a great deal of energy and work to constantly have to manufacture such an impenetrable shield.

“Are you close to your mother?” Abigail asked, whisking olive oil and vinegar together.

“This is weird, isn’t it?” said Samantha. “I mean, given the relationship between you and my mother, it’s weird that I’m sitting here. I asked Ruby to come with me, but she didn’t want to.”

“Ah,” said Abigail. “I can imagine she must feel loyal to your mother.”

“Actually, it’s our father she’s loyal to,” said Samantha. “She’s probably jealous of you, for seeing so much of him.”

“I didn’t see much more of him than you did,” said Abigail. She tasted the dressing and whisked in the shallots Samantha had minced. Cooking was easy once you got into the swing of it; it was just getting up the nerve to start something she’d always had trouble with.

“To answer your question, yes, I am close to my mother,” said Samantha. “I got the parent who was there all the time; Ruby got the parent who almost never was. So she’s freer than I am, in a way. Sometimes I resent her for it. So paradoxical. Because I couldn’t be happier with the way my own life has turned out, and I really don’t envy her at all, being single, with no kids, and having to work every day.”

Abigail began to assemble the salad, without the green beans, which Samantha had taken proprietary charge of and which Abigail had relinquished to her with some internal amusement; the heap of beans sat at Samantha’s elbow now, forgotten.

“Of course,” Samantha went on—Abigail noticed that her beer was nearly gone already—“I know that not every mother has the luxury of choosing to stay home with her children. But for all I always loved and respected my mother, I worked very hard not to end up like her. I chose a good provider for a mate. I chose to be a wife and mother, and not to work at all, not even to paint. I pour all my energy into my family. Ivan works just as hard to support us, and he comes home for dinner almost every night and puts the kids to bed. He couldn’t be less like my father. I don’t regret my choice: I saw how my mother worried about money, how hard it was for her to raise us alone. I always sensed my mother’s struggles through all her independent bravado, and although I was always extremely close to her, I swore never to turn into her. I have a feeling, although we have never talked about this, that Ruby did the same thing, but in the opposite direction, for a different reason.”

“Ah,” said Abigail, running cold water over the hot potatoes and hard-boiled eggs.

“Rube and I were so close when we were younger. And maybe we still would be if she were married now and had a baby or two. We would have so much to talk about. Also, if she had kids, Ruby might have learned to be more sensitive to others. She’s always stepping on people’s toes, hurting their feelings, my mother’s most of all. And all she seems interested in are things I, quite frankly, had hoped she would have outgrown by now. Boyfriends, drinking, traveling. Writing
poetry.
”

“Some people write poetry well into their nineties,” said Abigail. “And travel and drink, for that matter. As for boyfriends…”

“We’re almost forty, for God’s sake. Ruby is stuck in her late twenties. She dresses like she’s in graduate school. She says she’s happy, but how can she be, really? And whenever I try to talk to her about my own life, my children and marriage, she acts bored, superior even, in a way I find galling and ignorant. She has no idea how motherhood makes you a different, really a better, person—more selfless, more giving, more mature. You know what I mean?”

“I’m not sure how mature it made me,” said Abigail, dumping the canned Italian tuna on the salad platter.

“And the love you feel for your children is so deep, really so soulful and gut-wrenching, how could you choose to miss out on that? And having children aside! Marriage itself is…well, a ‘people-growing machine,’ as one of the self-help books calls it. You can’t be in a good, strong marriage and be immature or selfish. The two are totally incompatible.”

Abigail turned to her and said, “To be honest, I wonder about my own choices sometimes, which I suppose were in many ways like yours. I gave myself to my husband and son instead of finding my own place independently of anyone else. There’s so much I never learned about myself. Not to mention the world. I would guess that Ruby knows things you don’t, just as you know things she doesn’t.”

Samantha looked surprised, as if she’d anticipated an ally and found an adversary instead. “Maybe,” she said. “Don’t get me wrong—as kids, we were inseparable. We thought it was the best luck, having a twin sister for a best friend. But something changed between us after I married Ivan. I think Ruby got jealous. She thinks Ivan is overly possessive and controlling of me and I’m an overly involved mother, both of which are completely ridiculous notions. That’s marriage! That’s motherhood! I belong to other people now, and Ruby can’t come first with me anymore. If that hurts her feelings, well, too bad. This is just the way things go when you grow up.”

Abigail set the table with plates, silverware, napkins. The little boy, Buster, or Peter, whatever his name was, had nestled against his mother on the bench and fallen asleep, his lips parted. Asleep, he looked angelic. Abigail, with unconscious yearning, remembered the recent warm heft of him in her lap, the whiff of yeasty crackers on his breath, his hot, clammy hand alighting briefly on her clavicle.

“I have thought, through the years, in my more charitable moments, about how hard it must have been for your mother,” Abigail said. “I know Oscar never supported you. I am sorry for that. He and I never discussed you girls directly, so I never took steps to ensure you were properly cared for financially by him. That was my own pettiness. Of course it was because I resented you, but that was childish of me.”

“How amazing of you to say that,” said Samantha.

“And I know you hardly ever saw your father,” Abigail went on.

“Right,” said Samantha. “And when we did, he and my mother demanded each other’s full attention.”

“Yes,” said Abigail. She drizzled the vinaigrette over the salad and looked at it for a moment. She had forgotten all about the cantaloupe soup. Impressing this girl no longer mattered to her, and anyway, Samantha clearly wouldn’t have cared if she had served a pile of shredded Kleenex; food was obviously not among her passions.